New York Times: “WI-FI service is quickly becoming the air-conditioning of the Internet age, enticing customers into restaurants and other public spaces in the same way that cold ‘advertising air’ deliberately blasted out the open doors of air-conditioned theaters in the early 20th century to help sell tickets.”
Since I’m on a Google kick these last few days, let me ask a question I’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time: When are we going to get an API for our Gmail contacts?
Like scads of other people, I use Gmail as my primary mail “client” these days, and that means I want things like email autocomplete to work, which means Gmail has to know about my contacts (or at least their email addresses).
Gmail actually has a really slick interface to contact management that I’d happily use as my main address book. Trouble is, it’s not synchronized with anything, most importantly my cell phone, where I also want that address book to be available. So, for now, I have to maintain two address books—one in Gmail (with just the email addresses), and one in my phone (with everything else). Invariably, it takes effort to keep them “synchronized”, and I’m not always successful at doing so.
I was hopeful that the new “APIs to integrate with existing infrastructure” introduced in Google Apps Premier would finally address this shortcoming—after all, integration with corporate directories would seem to be a feature high on the “must have” list for any enterprise looking at Google. Alas, the APIs appear to only deal with single sign on and account provisioning, and do not appear to do any sort of deeper directory integration.
With an API, Plaxo could presumably synchronize contacts between Gmail and phones (and Outlook etc.), or even better, someone could do over the air synchronization. There have certainly been a wave of interesting products doing similar things using the Google Calendar API. I’ve thought about doing a synchronizer with libgmail, by I’m not sure what would happen (e.g., would I somehow trip the “lockdown in sector 4” alarm, which given my reliance on Gmail, would be pretty darned disruptive).
Thoughts? Anyone else in a similar situation?
Another recent Google discovery: In Google Reader’s mobile interface, there’s now a link at the bottom of each page: “mark these items as read”. Previously, the mobile interface had been more or less unusable because there was no way to mark items read short of actually reading each and every one. Now, if only there were a mobile client a la Gmail for Mobile that would allow me to scroll through my feeds like I do in my browser, only with the Blackberry scroll wheel rather than the mouse scroll wheel, I’d be in information junkie nirvana.
Just stumbled across the button “Check guest and resource availability” when adding a new appointment in Google Calendar. Sure enough, when clicked, a nice little window pops up that allows you to find slots of free time in common across invitees. Not sure if this is available across all of Google Calendar or if this is a Google Apps Premium feature (I’ve had imurdock.com in GAFYD for a while now and upgraded over the weekend). One problem is immediately apparent though: It only appears to be checking the main calendar (I actually have several calendars—work, home, travel, etc.). This is a problem with the SMS interface too, which only appears to operate on the main calendar.
Yochai Benkler: “I find myself talking to all sorts of weird hackers one day and chief economists of major corporations the next day, and they’re all interested in similar things.”
Phil Wainewright: “So here is a selection of news stories culled from the past few months that allow us to objectively evaluate what happens when users ‘have total control over things like privacy and security’… […] Would any of those laptop thefts made the headlines had the data been stored in Google Apps? No, of course not, because the data would have remained inaccessible on Google’s servers.”
Great points. A little closer to home, how many times have you taken a call from an anguished family member who has just lost their data but who hasn’t heeded your advice to back up said data periodically? While we’re at it, how many times have you not heeded your own advice on the same subject? Could the SaaS providers possibly do any worse than we’ve been doing here? Granted, there needs to be a culture change, one that needs to happen on both sides of the transaction, to make this work. But it will eventually happen, because it Just Makes Sense.
internetnews.com: “In fiscal 2006, $25 million in hardware sales in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) were directly related to HP’s Debian support.”
Henry Blodget: “Google’s current offerings–Gmail, Docs & Spreadsheets, etc.–bear all the markings of a classic disruptive technology. As Harvard professor Clayton Christensen observed, disruption begins when a dominant market leader has built so much functionality into its core products that it has begun to over-serve its core customers. Some of these customers, realizing that a simpler, cheaper product will do, abandon the old technology. At first, this does not concern the incumbent, as it maintains a chokehold on the highest margin business–the high-end customers who need most of that complicated functionality and support. But, gradually, as the lower end product gets better, and the incumbent is forced to migrate to even more complex and expensive solutions, more of the overall customer base defects. And, then, voila, one day the incumbent wakes up and discovers that it is DEC, Sears, or AOL…and by then it’s far too late to do anything about it.”
