Gerd's Blog

I am one of the luck people who has an Google wave account for some time now. At the moment, as nearly none of my friends has an account on the sandbox. Currently I am playing around with the system and following the developer discussions. It is really interesting how much work is already done by developers to extend the system.

I am really impressed by the functionality the system provides and how you can extend it. At the beginning I focused on the integration of third party systems like the publishing of photos and content to your blog and the communication back of the comments into your wave. I thought this may be also useful for our current issues with Social Networks to aggregate the content in one place but I have to admit that this may not be the best way to see wave and aggregate Social Networks.

When Google presented the system on the Google I/O conference they introduced it as “The new mail system” which was a really good teaser to get people excited about it, but it is not what I think wave really is. I wouldn’t see it as a protocol that finally supports the collaboration on content between people over organization and provider boarders. For Google, who treats mail with GMail and the Google Docs integration already as some kind of collaboration platform it may make sense to call it is as the new mail system but for others it may not. Wiki systems (e.g. Confluence) already tried to provide such platforms but the protocol to exchange the content between organizations to share just certain stuff and bring in information from other systems was still missing. This may really be a revolution within this area but may not be as easy as the introduction of SMTP back in the days of RFC’s because there are hundreds of companies and thousands of people who have their own products and opinions that need to come together to agree on such a new collaboration protocol as a standard for the industry.

I am really excited about the wave system and hope that I can play around with some of my friends in the near future to try out how this real time experience changes the way we collaborate in the future.

This weekend i finally decided to move one of my domains (saurers.com) to Google Apps. The main reason for doing this was that several of my family members have used different mail services and i didn’t want to maintain them any more. I was playing around with Google Apps some time ago but my ISP didn’t have the possibility to configure the MX records within the web interface therefor it was hard to move. Of course i would had the possibility to change the domain to an other ISP but i host several domains there and didn’t want to add another provider to maintain. For some time now the ISP allows to configure the settings within their web interface and this weekend i finally started to move.

One of the main questions for me was how the Google Apps and my current Google Account interact or work together. I couldn’t really find good explenations about that on the net therefor I asked a friend who already ported a domain to the service. The way google is handling the stuff is still a little bit confusing to me but i will try to explain it.

1. You will have two Accounts that are complete independent from each other
2. Both of them can have a mailbox, a calender, a docs, chat and a sites account (maybe more in the future)
3. Google Apps services are independent from all other services of the same kind
4. You may configure your current Google account to log in with your Google Apps credentials (may be useful as described later

This are some major points you should consider if you want to use Google Apps. Now lets start the process.

1. Sign up for a new Google Apps Account @ http://www.google.com/a
2. Go to you ISP and add the specific domains for your services and configure the MX entries as described within the help
   Special the MX records will take a little bit longer to be active (my took more than one day)
3. Create your accounts for the domain (several possibilities you can even upload a config file for creating several accounts at once)

With thees steps (all are explained in detail in the help pages) the domain is configured but your not integrated with your old account and you have now at leas two mailboxes. If you want to hold them seperated this is ok but i wanted to integrate them therefor there are some more things to do.

1. Google Accounts allow you to collect mails from different other Accounts via pop3 download and you will even be able to send other addresses (e.g. your old @gmail.com) through the new account. You can set up them at the settings of your new mail account.
2. I wanted to move my calendar to the Apps account that special my family can see my appointments. Using SyncMyCal for several time now i just switched the sync settings from one of my clients to the new account. All Stuff was synchronized correct. On all other Clients i had to remove all entries befor updating the configuration to the new account otherwise it would have added all appointments several times. You can also export the calendar on you old account and import it on the new one if you don’t use synchronisation.
3. If you want to be able to log in with the new App accounts to all other services you are using from Google (e.g. Reader) you have to add the new app account to your google profile. The profile can be configured under https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount

I took me nearly have of a day to configure all the accouts for my family correct, but now i have just one point to maintain and it is much easier to help because all are using the same interface.

Just a view days ago, i didn’t know that I will go ther, but right now I am sitting in the “Forum am Schlosspark” in Ludwigsburg. I will stay for two days at this conference. Let’s see what it will bring. As I am going through the speakers list i can finde some interresting Talks. I will post about them within the next thwo days. Take a look at the webpage to get more information about the event and what is happening here.

Last week the IRF organized the yearly Symposium. The Organization is pretty new and was initiated by Matrixware. The goal is to bring Information Retrieval scientists and Intellectual Property professionals together in one place that they can speak about their experiences and needs. The symposium was really a huge success for the IRF but also for the people attending.

As I was there for two days i got some impressions too and had the chance to speak to IR (Information Retrieval) but also IP (Intellectual Property). I am still astonished how far the two groups are away from each other. If you are interested in that area pleas take a look at the website containing the presentations.

For the next year of the IRF I would recommend to the IR people to prepare their presentations in a way that also normal people can understand them. I know the area an the solutions are sophisticated and can be very complex, but there is always a way. The IP people i would recommend to focus on ideas and what they really need.

There was one sentence in the Wrap-up session that really impressed me (Stephen Adams):

We have to run just to stand still within the IP Industry.

Dear readers, I have not written within this bolg for a long time now. As some of you might know I have changed from Senactive to a new company working an an totally different field called Matrixware. The company is working in the area of Information Retrieval (IR). In the future I will hopefully have more time to inform you about our visions, products and work we are doing. For now I just want to say that I have already learnd a lot in the few months working there.

I just fond the photo form 1921 in one of my news feeds and thought about some other pictures I saw about demonstrations in the past. Don’t get me wrong I don’t want to say that everything was better in the past.

Demonstration 1921:

Demonstration 2007:

© Timo Vogt / www.randbild.de

I wonder what has changed?

I was posting about the JAOO 2007 several time ago and would like to share an other experience i had there. On Monday I had lunch with Wayne Fenton from ebay where he explained their deployment strategy to me.

The concept they use is very easy but if you take a closer look it fits perfect into an agile website world. The whole strategy is based on the concept of trains. Trains are going every two weeks to the website and have only a couple of seats left. Think about seats in the manner of complexity which makes sense to reduce the complexity of the deployment to a oversee able amount. Every team can decide which train they would like to catch. If they have decided to take one, they have to ensure that every required QA is done until departure. If they can’t finish their work – there will be an other train in two weeks. After the train started it’s way to the website there is an other QA done before the deployment goes life to the portal.
Deployment is done in three Phases. First of all the Databases are updated if they need to. The second phase deploys the new version on the application servers. important here is that no new feature is enabled while the deployment. After all servers have the new version the system starts to enable the new features. It is important that for every deployment step there must be the possibility to role back to the old state.
With this strategy one server farm after the other is switched to the new version. Internationalized versions of their platform role out the new versions normally about one to two months later. In the end this results in nearly 24/7 deployment in the production environment. For me this strategy is really impressive and I would like to see such a deployment in real.

Yesterday I was out with two friends and we talked a lot about the computer industry. Of course on of the topics we discussed was the social web we are living at the moment. I mentioned that we have to maintain several profiles on the different social sites and that it would be nice to have just one centralized profile where you can decide which information goes to which channel. Of course Google did some step in this direction about two months ago when they introduced Open Social but for me the ’standard’ they introduced is far away form what we need. After some discussion we identified two main fields we need to have in the future to be able to maintain just one profile and distribute the information.

1. Authentication
   There need to be a mechanism for Single Sign on to different Social Sites. I mentioned OpenId some posts ago which would provide such functionality
2. Centralized Data Management
   At the moment User don’t care that there information is distributed over several Sites and Content providers but if you have to maintain more than one profile (e.g. you change your job or your hometown) things become difficult. First of all you don’t remember all the sites you signed up for but believe me some of your friends will and will complain that the couldn’t find the information that you have changed your job. On the other hand maintaining your profile is fare to much work (in my opinion).

An other important point for centralized data is that you can’t trust ever provider to take care of your data. And some have build up amazing profiles on websites they don’t want to loose. The amusing part here is that I read about this issues we discussed yesterday in an posting from Robert Scoble about ‘Facebook disabled my account‘. Of course they just disabled the account and he will get his profile back, I’m sure about it, but in the end there can be situations where you will not. The nice thing about it is that he point’s in his post to DataPortability.org an community that tries to use protocols and ’standards’ out there to give user the possibility to use an system I described above.

Let’s see what the future will bring, I am just tired to maintain my profiles:

Blog, Website, Xing, Google Profile, Facebook, StudiVZ, …..

I was reading the last blog entry form the Official Google Blog and was a little bit supprised what google is plaing now. They are trying to provide some knowledge base where user can contribute content and discuss it. I think this concept is not new and nearly eveyone knows a site wikipedia that tries to solfe this problem alrady and does it very well in my oppinion.
Google was growing very fast in the last decade and where they invest there is nearly no space for any competitor. Take Google Analytics as an example. Until now Google alway says don’t be evil and as far as we can see it they aren’t. Never the less this situation can change easily in the future. Exactly this situation is discussed very loudly in the community. Going into a direct competition with wikipedia isn’t a very good idea in my oppinion. Several people believe in the project and i would say love it. Just evil person try to “destroy” someone you love.

I was a big fan of google and it’s projects/services never the less I’m also sceptical about using some services. For example I never used Gmail as my primary mail system or Checkout the not so much known payment system they offer. I think they should not know everything about me. On the other hand i use the search history, analytics and several other services.

As I mentioned in one of my last posting titled Location != Language, I do not like the idea Google chooses the language to present it’s website to us. At least the web search was using the default US – site until last week. Since then I always got the localized search results which are not appropriate for me special if I am searching for computer science stuff. I needed some solution to fix this so after searching a little bit I step over an interesting posting. In the end there was a solution for my problem: “Meanwhile, if you want to use the standard version of Google, click on “Google.com in English” at the bottom of any Google homepage or type google.com/ncr in your address bar. Google’s cookie will save your preference, so the next time you go to google.com you won’t be redirected to the local version.“

I tried it and it works perfect. Just enter “google.com/ncr” once and the cookie will do the rest for you. Hopefully this help some of you to get better search results in the future. I have not found a solution for the other Google services e.g. Bloggers but maybe there will be one in the future.