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Google Apps - Sneaking up on MS Office?

I'm a big fan of Google Apps. If you check my browser history you'll see a lot of action around docs.google.com. I think Google Apps is sneaking up on the flank side of MS Office for the sneak attack - but I'm an early adopter and smart enough to realize that I don't represent the masses. MS Office still owns the lion's share of the office productivity market. Bernard Lunn, a self described "later early adopter," writes today on "Why Google Apps is a Serious Threat to Microsoft Office."

This is the perspective of a “skeptical, later early adopter”; the sort of person who Microsoft needs to retain and should have been able to retain easily. I don’t spend time on productivity tools that may at some date make me more productive, but which today are just a frustrating time sink. That describes the majority of people. MS Office can be annoying, but it does work. So any serious alternative has to offer a significant advantage and at the same time make adoption a total breeze. [continue reading]

In his post, Bernard does an excellent job of summarizing some of the key reasons more and more people are logging into docs.google.com. Collaboration, and mobile access are two of the key reasons.

Microsoft managers, patting themselves on the back for cooking-up a nice marketshare pie chart, need to keep one thing in mind - a lot of current Office users are dabbling in docs.google.com - at some point, the tipping point, they'll stop adding Office to the cart when they're configuring a new machine because docs.google.com is good enough. I have Office on both of my machines at the office and I spend more time in docs.google.com than I do Office.

What's "Open Social" All About

If you haven't heard about Google's Open Social yet - you will shortly, it's launching tomorrow. Mark Andreesen's post today does a great job of summarizing what Open Social is all about. His social network company, Ning, is one of the participating "containers" so he's a biased but I think his post benefits from his "insider" perspective. I'm interested to see how Facebook reacts. Will Open Social strengthen or weaken your Friendverse?

-------------- 

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

• "Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and...
• "Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.
  
  Source - BLOG.PMARCA.COM

--------------

Dare Obasango: OpenSocial: Google Proposes Widget & RESTful API Standards for Social Networking Sites "This is a brilliant move. - Dare Obasango"

Giga Om: OpenSocial, Google’s Open Answer to Facebook "OpenSocial attacks Facebook where it is the weakest (and the strongest): its quintessential closed nature. - Om Malik"

Anil Dash: Blackbird, Rainman, Facebook and the Watery Web "Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do. - Anil Dash"

TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/google/ 

palmit.commentary post: Friendverse Weakens

Updated 11/01/07

Mark Andreesen is back with another Open Social post today and this one includes an excellent screencast summarzing Open Social and what it's going to do for social networks by providing a real-world example. Additionally, Google announced today that MySpace and Six Apart are joing the growing Open Social network.

Screencast:

http://networkcreators.ning.com/video/video/show?id=492224%3AVideo%3A93279

Google Calendar Directory Released

Google Gears

Google Trends

Google buys Feedburner for $100M

Google Reader - Just "Slick"

I spend a lot of time In Google Reader, probably too much, and I've got to tell you - it's just plain slick. You can't define "slick" software but you know when you're sitting in front of it. It feels slick. A specific feature addition motivated me to type this up.

Google Reader (as far as I can remember) has always supported an Email feature that lets you e-mail a feed item. Until recently however, it wasn't slick. Clicking Email below a feed item would pop-up a new window that just didn't feel right. It worked and did what it was supposed to do but it wasn't the best user experience. Recently, the Google Reader team improved the Email feature. They didn't add new functionality - they just improved the user experience. Now, clicking Email below a feed item (the link is still in the same place) drops a nice little frame in below the feed item and before the next feed item. It's simple, it features fields for your recipients, a subject, a short note to go along with the item, a send button, and a cancel button. And more importantly, it feels slick.

Google Reader is "slick" because the team spends time working on the finer points of usability. They didn't have to improve the Email feature, it worked fine before, but they did and in the long-run it pays off. Google Reader is quickly becoming the preferred web-based feed reader.

Some other "slick" Google Reader features include:

• Short-cut ? displays excellent Keyboard Short-cut overlay
• When you Email a feed item to someone a copy is put in your Gmail "Sent Items" folder
• The "To" field is connected to Gmail so "auto-complete" functionality works

(screen grab: clicking Email below a feed item drops a nice little frame in below the feed item and before the next feed item)

My 2007 Tech Predictions

• Windows Vista will be hugely popular.
• Apple's growth in the personal computer space will slow as a result of Vista's success and the next generation hardware that will support it.
• RIA apps., powered by WPF/WPFE and similar technologies, will start to get traction as the line between client-side software and web-based software continues to soften.
• Yahoo! will continue to loose momentum as Google and nimble Web X.0 companies continue to eat away at it.
• Wi-fi everywhere and geo-based advertising will start to catch hold and Google's early efforts in this space will pay off - securing their dominance in the ad space for the near future.
• Microsoft will establish multi-media beach-heads in more American living rooms this year using the xBox 360 platform - re-configuring the gaming system into a Media Center replacement via free updates as unsuspecting users sleep.
• Apples's cell phone will change the way we think about cell phones and cell service forever.

Read what everybody else is predicting for 2007.

NOTE: I reserve the right to add to this list for the remainder of this week ; )

Google Reaching Crtical Mass Tipping Point

Google, for me, just reached a critcal mass tipping point. A tipping point - say what? I'm now using enough of Google's kung-fu on a daily basis that I'm more likely to look to Google to fill a need than to say Microsoft or Yahoo! I want to consolidate a lot of what I do on-line and I want to consolidate with somebody I trust or more importantly somebody with a lot to loose if they don't take security and backup seriously.

Take a look at this list Google kung-fu that I currently use. I tried to order the list by frequency of use - I use the kung-fu near the top of the list the most.

• google.com Personalized Home Page (replaced Yahoo! Home page)
  
• calendar.google.com (recently, completely replaced Outlook)
  
• reader.google.com (recently, replaced Bloglines - long-time Bloglines user)
  
• desktop.google.com (recent addition, replaced Yahoo! widgets)
  
• mail.google.com (long-time user, personal use)
  
• checkout.google.com (established, use rarely)
  
• docs.google.com (long-time Writely user)
  

Google Goo

Google Is Killing the Economics of Content by Scott Karp, interesting on its own, turned me on to a great post by Seth Jayson (The Motley Fool) titled How Google is Killing the Internet that's a must read for anybody interested in splogs, link farms, and scraper sites. Is Google killing the Internet?

Comment I left on Scott's site >> go, join the conversation 

Microsoft Monitor - Google My Spreadsheet

Joe Wilcox (Microsoft Monitor) posted an excellent write-up on Google's spreadsheet and how it might impact Microsoft. I like the way Joe thinks about Google, more specifically, the way they compete (or don't) and the method to their madness. Microsoft Monitor: Google My Spreadsheet

Everbody is talking aboug Google's spreadsheet.
Scoble, TechCrunch, GigaOM, David Card (Jupiter)

Personally, I think Google Spreadsheet and the other on-line spreadsheets are weak - I don't fit the use case. On the other hand, I'm excited to see the 1.0 generation emerging - imagine what it will be like when we get to the 2.0 and 3.0 generations. Better, less expensive, and more accessible software is coming our way.

Micrsoft vs. Google - A Question of Relevance

Google Calendar

calendar.google.com  | Tour | Keyboard Shortcuts | Screen Shots |

TECH-RECIPES: importing

Add my birthday to your Google Calendar


Reading:
TechCrunch: Google Calendar is Live

Google China

Google and their role in China took the stage this week. IMO - the Chinese are better off with limited access to Google than no access to Google. Keep letting them lick the surface of freedom and eventually they'll demand a meal. More leaks in the Great Firewall.

Recommended reading:

Google will face Congressional hearings over China
Google: China decision painful but right
Google founder defends China portal
[Image] Google search results for "Tienanmien" on Google France (left) vs Google China (right)

Google Analytics

Google launched Google Analytics today - a web-based stats program for slicing and dicing the traffic that visits your website. I registered palmit.com with the service and added the appropriate scripts to my pages to get a 1st hand look at the service in action. I've been using Awstats, and it meets my fairly limited needs for this website, but the Google Analytics U.I. looks more user-friendly. Based on technology Google Purchased - specifically, Urchin Web Analytics.

Related:
BusinessWeekOnline - great summary
TechCrunch - Google Analytics Swings at MeasureMap
GoogleNews

Sucks to be:
MeasureMap and other Web Analytics companies

Google Speculation and My Two Cents

Lot's of speculation in the blogosphere about what Google's next move will be. See below.

Om Malic - Tis a Season to Copy

Jeremy Zawodny - Google is Building Yahoo 2.0

Tristan Louis - Reading the Google Tea Leaves

I.M.H.O. (I'm sure I'm not alone in this) it's all about the Ad Network - at least for Google vision. Everything they do is about driving traffic through their Ad Network - cool technology happens along the way. Google's next big move - Wi-fi everywhere and Geo-based advertising. They'll start with the blue states and make their way into the red states when it's safe.

Treo 670 - Windows Mobile?

Google Mashups

HotOrNot - HotOrNot + Google Maps = Hot People by Zip Code. HotOrNot is a great example of a social computing application of the technology.

GMap Pedometer - record your running or walking distance. Not what I'd call a social computing application of the technology - but still cool.

Google Maps Mania - An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, ideas and tools being influenced by Google Maps.

Google Personal Homepage & Star Wars!

Wow, this is my week - Star Wars Episode III and I get my very own personalized Google Homepage. Cool!

Google Blogger Fired

Mark Jen - the guy that Google fired for not being able to keep his mouth shut - lasted about three weeks on the job. It isn't worth talking about too much but I thought I'd post a few links on the matter for those of you that want to know more about this story. It's old news at this point but interesting for the curious.

Story 1

Story 2

Marks's Blog

Google Video Search Launched

Google Video Search - how cool is that.

Desktop Search

New resolution - more frequent blogging ; )

I thought it would be interesting to test Google's objectivity by sending it this query on the hot phrase for 2005 "desktop search." Suprisingly Google returned a pretty intereresting result. Here's the top-five results.

#1 - Google Desktop Search
#2 - About Google Desktop Search
#3 - Copernic: Software to search, find, and manage information
#4 - MSN Toolbar Suite Beta with MSN Desktop Search
#5 - Slashdot | Yahoo Release Desktop Search Tool Beta

Can't blame them for #1 and #2, they're obligated to their shareholders. #3 was nice to see becase right now the Copernic solution is my favorite - although I haven't tried the MSN or Yahoo! options yet. The MSN search tool is next on my list to try and frankly I don't think I'll ever get around to trying Yahoo's implementation - after all, they didn't even really make it onto Google's short-list ; )

Google Scholar

Wow, Google just keeps picking up their pace. The new Google Scholar search is one of their latest releases - in BETA and launched yesterday. The audience - scholars and the scientific community. I just love this company.