Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

For some reason I am hearing these words said by Ted from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure… “All we are, are links in the wind, dude.”

When a recent random IM came up, I answered it with my usual jerk attitude that I save for random Africans with a pre-loaded scam trying to pull the trigger.

As the conversation toiled further and further down the road of idiocy, and it’s very usual for me to even entertain it to that point, a blog occurred to me and here I am.

“I link, therefore I am.”

I remember the early days of the Internet, really before the “web” because the only browsing was Mosaic and the only pages were all listed in this handy “Internet Phone Book” you picked up at the book store because search didn’t really exist either.

So in those archaic days, when Internet tools had names like IRC, Gopher, Archie, Telnet and FTP, the only chatting was done in a desktop application (or a command line if you were a Unix/Linux geek) and if you wanted a photo, it was either DCC sent, or emailed.

You could also usually expect NOT to get one because digital cameras cost $600+ and almost no-one had one. There was the still expensive flat bed scanner and the ever popular Logitech hand scanner, but most people didn’t have those either.

Back to the story….

So this person asked if I had a photo and I responded that she/he/it (who knows) must not have looked too closely at my profile because besides there being a photo there, there were also several links to MySpace, Flickr, etc.

This is when the ray of light came from just beneath the catalectic converter and I was presented with my own proverbial gloves. (I’ll send a Google Laptop Sleeve to the first person who gets that reference in a comment!)

The days of sending things are really over. I don’t care what your media of choice is…video, photos, audio, even entire libraries of personal information. It’s just a link these days. I am lucky enough to have philoking almost everywhere, so I can send a simple link via IM or email and share almost anything with anyone.

So the question in all of this is, will a link be like a phone number some day? Some alias that is your IM, your email, your voice, photos, videos, audio….. a handle like philoking that covers everything I could want to share? Will Myspace or Facebook be the first one to figure this out?

Give me Facebook, Skype, Flickr, Gmail and Meebo in one UI, and I will give you my soul. Ok, maybe not my soul, but mad web props yo!

After answering an email to a family member about a virus warning email she had received, and giving her pretty close to the same advice, I decided to dig up this treasure again for the world to see and love, because if anything is true, it’s this.

The Email Facts of Life

1. Big companies don’t do business via chain letter. Bill Gates is not giving you $1,000, and Disney is not giving you a free vacation. There is no baby food company issuing class-action checks. You can relax; there is no need to pass it on “just in case it’s true.” Furthermore, just because someone said in the message, four generations back, that “we checked it out and it’s legit,” that does not actually make it true.
2. There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans. No one is waking up in a bathtub full of ice, even if a friend of a friend swears it happened to their cousin. If you are hell-bent on believing the kidney-theft ring stories, please see: urbanlegends.tqn.com/library/weekly/aa062997.htm. And I quote: “The National Kidney Foundation has repeatedly issued requests for actual victims of organ thieves to come forward and tell their stories. None have.” That’s “none” as in “zero.” Not even your friend’s cousin.
3. Neiman Marcus doesn’t really sell a $200 cookie recipe. And even if they do, we all have it. And even if you don’t, you can get a copy at www.bl.net/forwards/cookie.html. Then, if you make the recipe and decide that the cookies are that awesome, feel free to pass the recipe on.
4. We all know 500 ways to drive roommates crazy, irritate co-workers and creep out people on an elevator. We also know exactly how many engineers, college students, Usenet posters and people from each and every world ethnicity it takes to change a lightbulb.
5. EVEN IF THE latest NASA rocket disaster(s) DID contain plutonium that went particulate over the Eastern seaboard, do you REALLY think this information would reach the public via an AOL chain letter?
6. There is no “Good Times” virus. In fact, you should never, ever, ever forward any e-mail containing any virus warning unless you first confirm it at an actual site of an actual company that actually deals with virii. Try www.norton.com. And even then, don’t forward it. We don’t care.
7. If your CC: list is regularly longer than the actual content of your message, you’re probably going to hell.
8. If you’re using Outlook, IE or Netscape to write e-mail, turn off the “HTML encoding.” Those of us on UNIX shells can’t read it and don’t care enough to save the attachment and then view it with a Web browser, since you’re probably forwarding us a copy of the goddamned Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe anyway.
9. IF YOU STILL absolutely must forward that 10th-generation message from a friend, at least have the decency to trim the eight miles of headers showing everyone else who’s received it over the last six months. It sure wouldn’t hurt to get rid of all the “)” that begin each line. Besides, if it has gone around that many times — I’ve probably already seen it.
10. Craig Shergold in England is not dying of cancer or anything else at this time and would like everyone to stop sending him their business cards. He apparently is also no longer a “little boy” either.

My Thoughts on the Topic

These are unsubstantiated opinions, I’d love to get the research and have hard numbers behind them.

• Forwarded cats, puppies, religious themes, chain letters and jokes are second only to spam (and in my opinion they are spam) in what wastes Internet bandwidth.
• More viruses have been spread via email forwards than any other method.
• Forwards are exponential. Every forwarder you get added to, finds your name on their friends, and their friends……
• Forwards can get people fired (ask my Dad if you don’t believe me)
• I hate forwards
• I hate forwards more than I hate people who kill puppies
• I hate forwards more than I hate people who club baby seals
• I hate forwards more than I hate getting kicked in the nuts
• Did I mention I really really really hate forwards?

Have a nice day!

I would have to say that Microsoft SharePoint could be considered the foundation of the product I work on at Microsoft, PerformancePoint Server 2007.

That being the case, I try to keep myself very aware of what’s going on in that space. Last night I got an email from Google advertising a new service that was available to me as a Google Apps customer. The Announcement read…

Greetings admins!

Today, we’re excited to announce the introduction of Google Sites as part of Google Apps.

Google Sites makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. You can quickly gather a variety of information in one place — including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and gadgets — and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, your entire organization, or the world.
As of today, Google Sites is enabled for philoking.com, which means your users can get started immediately. To help you announce this new offering to your users, we’ve included a template message below that you’re welcome to use.

It didn’t take long to realize that sounded a whole lot like SharePoint. Now Google has already been trying to take on Microsoft Office with cloud services like Google Docs, and to be honest it’s a pretty impressive product given the complexity of having an entirely web based spreadsheet solution.

So what does this new service offer exactly? Well I took some time to play with it and some of the highlights are as follows…

Google has 5 page types for your sites:

• Web Page allows you to create basic static content, you can format it with the basic Bold, Italic, Underline, Font Color options, define tables, insert links, images, Google Docs, Picasa slideshows, Gadgets, video and more.
• Dashboard allows you to create something similar to iGoogle on a page within the site, useful for a landing page, news, etc.
• Announcements duplicates the formatting function of Web Page, but adds in the ability to date thread them so you can use it like a calendar of sorts. Oddly enough I see no integration with Google Calendar which seems like a common sense fusion.
• File Cabinet is a file repository complete with subscription capability and commenting. I looked through the help and could find no documentation on file size limitations, for uploading or total storage.
• List is very much like SharePoint. You have 3 standard templates for Action Items, Issues and Unit Status, as well as attachments and comments, and a free form “Create Your Own” list feature which allows you to create a totally custom layout. Missing from this seems to be any raw url to access the list or any API to expose it as a data source of any kind.

The site itself is quite customizable, and in cases of cross geo teams who need to collaborate, even with actual Office documents, I can see it as a real competitor. The place it falls short, which is the majority of SharePoint installs in my opinion, is extensability.

There appears to be no actual API, no way to access web services to extend it with additional functionality and most importantly no way to use it as a data source for any other tools or products. I am sure that this is clearly on the Radar as this is only a beta and will probably continue to grow.

I did see a few performance issues and when testing it with Google Docs integration I saw some problems with formatting spreadsheets, especially with charts into your pages.

The bottom line is that this is one impressive piece of web coding. Cross browser it’s beautiful, the feature set is incredibly rich for a free product. The question I ask is:

How many are going to trust Google and “the cloud” with their data 100%. If you place your life in a site and it dies, the service is discontinued or whatever disaster you can dream up, having no access to the data and no traditional way to back it up or export it to another tool, that’s a pretty scary proposition.

If you would like to view my test site, you can access it here http://sites.google.com/a/philoking.com/testsite/lkists

If you would like to play with it, send me your Google ID and I will set you up access to modify it.

My co-worker found a scary little footnote:

Content you create with Google Sites may, if you choose, be read, copied, used and redistributed by people you know or, again if you choose, by people you do not know. Use care when including sensitive personal information in content you share, such as social security numbers, financial account information, home addresses or phone numbers.

I could not agree with this article more…

Caroline’s comments about the Digg town hall really hit the mark. I have been a fan of the site for a long time but in the last year I submit nothing and hardly visit the site itself. I view the main feed, but the non-existent democracy of the site itself really is quite the opposite of the site’s intention.

Caroline says:

All in all, the session highlighted quite a few of Digg’s strengths as well as troubles going forward–and additionally reflected a few common criticisms about the site as a whole. But in the process, the questions were inward-focused, dealing with the demands of an active but demanding user base. Very few dealt with Digg’s place in the Web’s landscape or new media industry as a whole.

That’s just a snippet, I highly recommend you read the entire article and participate in the comment thread on her site, it would be nice for Jay and Kevin to get the consensus of it’s largest number of users who are mostly inactive users because of the site’s clickish nature.

By the way, Caroline’s blog is great, I recommend you add the feed.