One of the projects that I am currently working with is the integration of communication between all of the sites that I work with to get our message out. I have integrated several application so that I don’t have to publish to quite as many site individually but it is still a chore to easily get all of the things that I am working on out there to the different places that people are following us are using.

Why do I care? If you are taking the time to publish and you think that the information you are publishing is something that your public wants to read and follow than you want to make sure that you make it as easy for them to do so as possible. By publishing to many different communications systems, whether it is your primary blog or something as simple as Twitter you want to try to drive people back to you. Google’s product hints at being able to do this easily and even take it a step further and make the communications more interactive as well as making them as public or secure as you desire. Any tool that can give you these capabilities is well worth a second look.

A new communication tool that Google is developing to use on your computer systems and mobile devices. It is not  expected to be available to the public for several months but has been put into the hands of developers now to see what they can do with it before it's public release. A very nice overview is available on YouTube and can be accessed from cnet news Webware site.

Supports standard email functions as well as instant messaging. It treats the communication as an object so that it can be real time as well as providing standard email type access. It allows easy drag and drop capability to add people to the communication flow and to bring people in on the conversation at any point. You can easily put threads into the message, share the communication on a blog by adding the blog as a member of the conversation and withhold access to parts of the communication thread by making them private and assign the members to just that portion of the conversation thread. Also if you are added after the conversation thread had started you have the ability to replay the conversation as it progressed, piece by  piece.

They discussed how using this product you can use the editing function to collaborate on document creation. It again allows you to show the changes, but the most interesting thing is that it allows you to view the comments, and playback the order in which the document was worked on. It makes editing and revision control very well controlled. It promises “to become a very powerful document creation tool!”

A Linking function allows you to connect multiple Wave Conversations into lists. This allows you to bring together multiple conversations threads in groups to categorize them and make them easier to access as a group. They describe it as “very Wiki Like.” You group these conversation links by dragging them onto a new Wave Conversation and creating a Wave Conversation about previous Wave Conversations.

You have the ability to use search criteria to search your conversations for information very quickly and in real time as documents and messages are being created.

It is using a very strong context sensitive spell checker that they are providing API’s so that other developers can use them in their applications. The entire application lends itself to having developers create add-ins or gadget tools that create a richer set of functions to the application. Wave allows the developer to use extensions to connect to other communications applications as well. They demonstrated the interface with Twitter which connects your Twitter account with your Wave account and allows for instantaneous communication between the two product applications. They showed some other integration capabilities with an issue tracker application that allows you work within Wave and to have the updates automatically update in the issue tracker program as well.

Because Google and the Wave Project are providing the Wave product as an open API other companies can build their own Wave Systems and host their own Wave Servers that can interact with Google’s and other systems. Each of these Private Wave servers remain private and only the shared communications traverse between the two applications. Because of this you could implement your own internal Wave Server and host it on your equipment and have a private installation being used within your company and still have it have the ability to communicate with external systems as well.

Last but not least they showed an online translation robot that allows you communicate very easily in languages that you don’t know and be able to do so effectively.

I don’t mean by the title that it is coming soon but that I plan blogging on this subject matter over the next couple of weeks. The term Cloud Computing has become a much tossed around term to describe almost anything that you use that is hosted on the web. It can be anything from a social network to desktop applications for word processing, spreadsheets, to-do lists, calendaring and more.  I am constantly amazed at the total volume of applications that are available. Over the next couple of weeks I plan on testing and writing evaluations on several that I have begun to find useful. I will also be documenting my experiences in trying to tie in some of the different social networking/communication sites to make the more interactive. I hate having to post the same info on multiple sites. Such a waste of time.

A couple months ago I restarted my Netflix Subscription because of the ability to acquire instant availability of published TV shows and movies on my Xbox game system.  Unlike a lot of people the only use I have for my Xbox machine is the ability to deliver media from Home Network to our family room TV set.  Now with cable on-demand, cable DVR, DVD movies I also have the ability watch my Media Center video, music and TV recordings I'm adding what can be called Netflix on-demand as well.

To show you just how much Netflix is taking over the market share of the video industry there are so many ways of getting streaming video from Netflix you almost have no excuse not to subscribe to even their most basic subscription plan.  For $8.99 you get all you can eat streaming video plus single DVD Rental each month.  If they're a lot of old shows that you haven't watched you would like to RE watch this is a great vehicle that will allow you to accomplish this task.  So now I have Netflix available to me as a movie rental, which satisfies my need to watch newly released movies, and, instant streaming movies and TV shows instantly from my ex box to my TV or on my computer or from within by media center console.  Now all I need are more hours in the day.  Hey Netflix can you fix that also!

The Netflix Media Center interface has quite a few choices build into it.  Not only do you have Instant Queue, you can also you can add to your DVD Queue, take a look at what you have recently watched, view newly arrived movies and select them for either instant view if that's available or to be placed in your DVD queue, and they have categories that you can browse through and make selections as well. The search function works for movie and TV show titles only, this is something I would like to see changed to also allow you to search by actor and director as well.  I'm sure they'll get there.

So if you have Vista Home Premium or Ultimate this is another great addition to your Media Center application. Enjoy!

If you don’t toot your own horn who will?

The new issue of the Laurel Mountain Post is out this week and this issue’s primary theme is on golfing. See my article on golf gadgets on page 26. There are few things listed that aren’t too expensive but the one that caught my eye was the Shadow Caddy. Not too many places where it is available here in the US, it was first introduced in Australia. I can see it having a big splash over here as well.

See the new issue at: http://laurelmountainpost.com/Archives/LMP-May-June-2009.pdf

Hope you enjoy!

If you are interested in trying out Windows 7 and just happen to have a Netbook laying around here is an article showing you the step by step procedure for doing so. I found this posting originally through Veronica Belmont’s Friendsfeed page this morning when I began playing with the site.

http://gizmodo.com/5257386/how-to-install-windows-7-on-almost-any-netbook

Bob

Social Networking has become the WORD for a lot of us lately and I am as susceptible to trying out a new service as any other. While  listening to a recent TWIT podcast they discussed their use of this site for their sharing of information rather than using a site like Twitter. I must say this is much cleaner than Twitter and has the ability to allow more in depth commenting and sharing. And isn’t sharing information what it is all about? Anyway, I have setup my site at http://friendfeed.com/bappleby and if you want to subscribe you can find me there. Some of the benefits of this site is the ability to place your contact subscriptions into groups to make it easier to sort out the comment flow. You can make as many different categories as you like to make this useable. It comes populated with Favorites, Personal and Professional to get you started but after you have played around for awhile I am sure you can come up with many different groups.

I have posted a picture of my startup page to give you an idea of just how simple the interface is. You can add a favorites link to your browser that allows you to post a site and/or photos to your comments easily. This is what you see in this photo.

You can use this site as an aggregator for all of your blogs, Facebook, photo galleries (Flickr and Picasa), Gmail/Google Talk, Yelp, YouTube and others. So if you are around a lot of  sites with your postings this may make it easier to share the information around without reposting.

Bob

We have been making a lot of additions to the product cart site. 

Take a look at the new Product Catalog Section that we just added. You can do quick lookups for product that you search for and request a quote on pricing. This product catalog is drawing information from 6 of our distribution sources and will help us to quickly return the information that you are looking for.

Give it a try and let us know how you like it.

Bob