OK, this may be a bit of a stretch, but I really think the newly released themes for Gmail do more than appeal to our senses. They actually have a very practical application: differentiating between multiple Gmail accounts.
I have branded (Google Apps, using my own domain) accounts for business and personal use, and a few generic @gmail.com types for subscriptions, lists, online purchases. It’s all neatly tied together by Gmail Manager, the excellent Firefox extension. Even then I sometimes find myself typing an email in the wrong account window. Here’s the solution: give all your Gmail accounts its own distinctive theme.
I don’t really care for the fancy themes, but at least the top row are all subtle, minimalist styles. Pick one for each of your accounts, you’ll get used to the colors fast and never mix up your accounts again.
Well.. almost. As usual, Google rolled out this new feature to the generic, @gmail.com accounts only. Google Apps users will have to wait – lets’ hope not too long.
This is the third app in my Living in the Clouds series. After Gmail and Google Calendar, it is time to shift the focus towards a To-Do List manager. Whether you are an ardent follower of David Allen’s GTD or, like me, you have your own system of getting things done, Remember The Milk (RTM) should be part of your toolkit.
The basic version of RTM is free of cost. There is a Pro version available but it doesn’t add much value as such and you can get everything you need in the free version itself. You can add tasks, tag them, share them or publish them on the web. The Ajax based UI is pretty intuitive and straight forward without any unnecessary bells and whistles. Adding tasks has certain level of natural language support and one can easily add tasks from anywhere using a wide variety of tools. RTM also offers a pretty flexible options to sort and categorize. RTM also supports iCal, iCal (Events) and Atom feeds. Overall, it is a powerful but simple app to manage your tasks.
As it is customary in this series, I will list the pros and cons of RTM. I want to once again emphasize that this list of pros and cons is not exhaustive and they are the ones I find important. If you have any other pros and cons to share, feel free to add it in the comments section.
Pros:
Cons:
Next week, I will talk about Google Address book and then I will finish off Personal Information Manager set of applications with a post about how I integrate them in my workflow. If you have any comments or tips on RTM, feel free to share in the comments section.
As a part of my Living in the Cloud series, I wrote about Gmail last week. This week, I am planning to write about Google Calendar and I will write about Remember The Milk, a todo application, next week. Google Calendar has been a boon for me both in my personal as well as professional life. Even though it may not be the best calendaring application, it takes care of my need to be organized in my life.
After giving up on Yahoo Calendar, which finally had some improvements recently, I was desperately looking for an online calendaring app and Google offered a tool that could serve as an unified calendaring application with many powerful features. In this post, I will offer a brief overview of how I use Google Calendar and then, as I did in my previous post on Gmail, discuss the pros and cons of Google Calendar. I have a personal account in Google. My company uses Google Apps for domains and we also have a Google Apps for our family domain. Through my Google Calendar interface, I could access all my calendars in one place making it extremely easy for me to keep tabs on both my professional and personal lives.
The greatest advantage of cloud computing is the possibility to pull my data from anywhere using a vast array of devices. We can access Google Calendar using the web browser or desktop mail clients such as MS Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. or mobile phones, etc.. It is also possible to publish our calendars to free/busy servers, blogs, wikis and other websites. This flexibility offered by Google Calendar, in particular, and Cloud Computing Apps, in general, makes it easy to organize my life in a much more efficient way.
Let us now discuss the pros and cons of Google Calendar. As I did in my previous post on Gmail, I am only going to discuss those pros and cons I consider as very important. There may be others I have left out due to various considerations and I strongly encourage the readers to add their take on Google Calendar in the comments section below.
Pros:
Cons:
Image by Chance Gardener via Flickr
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The little disclaimer out of the way, I am going to talk about Project Management 2.0 . Let me quickly state that I don’t really know what the consensus definition of PM 2.0 is, I just had a lot of personal experience in what’s wrong with 1.0.
In the 90’s I worked on a number of fairly large scale SAP Projects in a variety of roles, including Project Manager, and supervisor of several other projects. The standard tool was Microsoft Project. It was used for:
What’s missing from the above? Well, how about using it to help the actual daily work of project team members?
Project team members did not even have access to MS Project, it only existed in a few copies on the PM and Team Lead’s computers. Information-flow was one-way: feed the beast to be able to occasionally print charts that look impressive (scary) enough that Steering Committee members won’t question it.
Ok, I am admittedly sarcastic, but the point is: PM 1.0 was all about planning, reporting and it served Management but did not help actual Project Execution.
My expectation of PM 2.0 would be that it helps all team members involved who can share information, collaborate on it and actually get clues from the system on where they are, where they should be, what their next step is, instead of just feeding the beast.
At the recent Office 2.0 Conference I moderated a panel where several Project Management luminaries discussed these issues:
Here’s the entire session, courtesy of Veodia:
We are going to continue this discussion here @CloudAve. I’ve invited some of the speakers from the Panel – next one in our PM theme is Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike, who will discuss his views of PM 2.0 in a few days.
Finally, talk is cheap – let’s see products. We will cover several On-Demand Project Management systems here. The reviews will lead into a new type of collaborative experience – more on it later.
In the meantime if you are a project management aficionado, you’re comments are always welcome – even better, contact me if you’d like to write a guest post @CloudAve.
Related posts:
Image via CrunchBase
This is the first app I will be discussing in the series titled “Living in the Clouds”. What better way to start this series than starting off with Gmail. Yes, there was email much before Gmail. I am not denying that. However, Gmail changed the way we use email as a part of our productivity apps. I use Gmail (both the standalone version and Google Apps for domain) exclusively for both my professional and personal needs. With the release of Imap protocol for Gmail, Google has narrowed the gap that was preventing the Microsoft Exchange users from migrating to Gmail (Gmail still cannot completely replace Exchange but it solves the problem that existed for the majority of past Exchange users). In this post, I will discuss the pros and cons of Gmail as a part of my life inside the clouds. There are so many pros and cons I can discuss with respect to Gmail (and also the other web apps I will be discussing in the future) but I will be limiting myself to handful of them I consider as very important.
Pros:
Cons:
There are many more pros and cons I can discuss here. For the sake of
brevity, I will stop here. But I encourage readers to list the pros and cons,
from their point of view, in the comments section. I will use the same approach
in this post to discuss another app from the clouds next week. Have a great
weekend and feel free to share your thoughts on Gmail.
Update: From the next app onwards, I will use a slideshow to list the pros and cons of the app. I feel it will be a good medium to use for the format I use in this series titled "Living in the Clouds".
Image via CrunchBase
From yesterday, Comcast has started implementing a 250 GB bandwidth cap on users browsing the net with their service. They argue that this will stop power users from hijacking the pipe in a neighborhood. This is pretty insane and it has evoked lots of criticism from the blogosphere including the “Metering will limit Innovation” post at GigaOm. Comcast is not the only company that is unleashing this approach on the users. Time Warner Cable has been testing out an insanely limiting offering at Beaumont, TX. Their plans start from 30 bucks for a slow (768 Kbps) service with a 5 GB cap and goes all the way up to a faster (15 Mbps) service with a 40 GB cap. Compared to this, Comcast’s cap is definitely more liberal but, in my opinion, such caps on broadband usage severely limits the user’s web experience.
The blogosphere is filled with posts about how such capping is going to
affect the web experience of users with an emphasis on how it will destroy the web
video (Is this the reason cable companies, whose primary business interests are in
television, are resorting to such regressive measures? 
), including high
definition videos. There are also arguments that talk about the impact of such cap on the proliferation of VOIP. I am not going to repeat these arguments again. I am going to look at it from a totally different perspective and
analyze the impact of such bandwidth capping measures on the cloud computing.
As we move from the traditional desktop era to the new cloud computing era, we assume the ubiquitous and unmetered availability of broadband internet. This becomes one of the most important requirements for the success of cloud computing. Broadband acts as a bridge between the consumers and the cloud and plays a vital role in the user experience with respect to cloud computing. The high speed internet is one of the major factors in users getting desktop like reliable experience when using SaaS applications. The high speed internet is also the single most important link between the users and their data in the clouds. By imposing limits on the broadband connectivity, cable companies are severely limiting the cloud computing experience of their customers.
I live in the clouds and this limitation is going to affect the way I use cloud computing. This is true for every other user of cloud computing. I have backed up all my data (approximately 200 GB), including my music, photos, videos, documents, etc., in the clouds. I use SaaS based applications for all my productivity needs. My video consumption is from the clouds. I stream the music I have stored in the clouds to my Laptop and other audio systems in my house. However, I am not one of those power users running torrent sites or a busy webserver from my home. I am just a regular user who lives in the clouds enjoying the latest innovations offered by this new technology. I will be totally crippled by the limits imposed by Time Warner and I will feel suffocated by the limits imposed by Comcast. Such limits will eventually kill my life in the computing clouds and make these innovative technologies completely useless for me. This is true for all the users of cloud computing technologies.
One of the hottest trends today is the emergence of netbooks, the light weight notebooks with flash memory that relies completely on the cloud computing to take care of users’ computing needs. The netbook users will consume more bandwidth than the regular laptop and desktop users because none of their data is stored locally and it has to be retrieved from the web every time the user wants a document, photo, video or music. This cable company imposed bandwidth capping means that we cannot rely on netbooks for our daily computing needs any more. These limiting tactics are not just innovation killers but, rather, they are productivity killers and lifestyle destroyers. There is a real danger of cutting down the lifeline of many users, especially the new breed of knowledge workers called web workers, who are increasing in numbers every day and rely on clouds extensively.
In short, the bandwidth capping is a short sighted vision of cable companies that could potentially derail the very proliferation of cloud computing. It is time for these companies to do a rethinking on their strategy for the benefit of all the users. I know of many grandmas and grandpas who use the broadband to check email once a day and check their bank accounts on web once a week. Cable companies are not paying back the money they charge these light users. They don’t offer free months to these light users because their internet use is almost negligible in comparison to the whole network traffic. Under such circumstances, putting such bandwidth limiting tactics on “heavy” users and banning the users who overshoot this limit is just naive and anti-capitalistic.
I am an avid Google Alerts user, who is greatly underwhelmed but the lack of setup choices, the inflexibility of delivery options, search combinations, and mostly the erratic (occasional?) delivery.
So when TechCrunch calls a new service “Google Alerts on Steroids”, I do pay attention, and check it out (I guess that makes me part of the 53,651, or 1M by now.)
Unfortunately my enthusiasm about Yotify, a new personal web-scout
did not last long. I gave up just as soon as I started setting up my alerts – or
Scouts in Yoti-speak. Here’s why:
Do you see what I see? You have to select sources one by one. No
Ctrl-click… no way to pick all the sources I would use the same search argument
one. That’s it’, I’m outta here. 
Seriously, Yotify
aims to be a timesaver, but this omission alone would condemn me to spend half a
day on setup. Who has time for this?
Btw, the list of default sources is quite short, but that’s expected from a beta service. It’s nice that you can add your own source URL or Feed as a Shortcut, but why not let me upload an entire OPML file? Despite a nice UI, I have the same fundamental problem that I’ve found with Google Alerts: it’s a fragmented world of single searches, there’s no way to combine them or execute the same search against a list of sources.
On the upside, Yotify offers a lot of nice features, e.g. it allows to track price changes, auctions, events, your social network, LinkedIn profile changes…etc. It could help with shopping, travel, recruiting – obviously it is an ambitious tool, worth keeping an eye on – but until I can easily set it up without major time investment, it’s a no-go for me.
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