Rackspace Reseller Conference
Just a heads up, my business partners and I are heading to Atlanta for the next three days to attend the Rackspace Reseller Conference. I will likely be in sessions for the biggest part of the next three days but will be checking email and voicemail whenever possible. If you are going to be in Atlanta for the conference be sure to send me a tweet, @cottonr and let me know. Maybe we can meetup between sessions.
Also, I will likely be blogging some things that I pickup during the conference, so stay tuned.
Just an Update, and Thanks.
This past week turned out to be one of the toughest weeks of our life. Not only did we go in for a routine ultrasound and find that our baby’s heart had stopped beating but we also had to endure a D&C procedure two days later so that Donna’s body could start the healing and recovery process. For the past week we have just shut our doors and fell off the radar, that’s pretty much how we handled things the first time too. We just spend a lot of time w/ one another watching movies, talking, and being lazy.
For the most part Donna and I are both doing well, we still think about it, I caught myself glancing at baby strollers the other day in Target while I was waiting on a prescription to be filled and yesterday while we were in Wal-Mart I caught Donna looking at children’s clothing, Yesterday afternoon we both decided it was time to get out of the house and enjoy some fresh air. She and I both are huge fans of Hibachi style food so we decided to drive to Little Rock for some KOBE. We had an awesome dinner, even managed to laugh a little bit. I think it was somewhere on the drive home that I realized we were going to be just fine (and believed it this time).
Donna and I appreciate your thoughts and comments on Facebook and Tweets more than you can imagine, sorry if we didn’t respond in person but there was simply too many of you, please accept my apologies. See, the entire week we were hermits by choice, just wanting to be left alone to sort things out. Occasionally we would pull up those tweets, comments, and emails and read them, sometimes aloud to one another. Your words of comfort have helped us get through this whole thing. In addition to that some of you sent flowers and food, completely out of the blue, one particular floral arrangement almost brought me to tears, it was from my #RefreshCA friends. Needless to say, our living room looks like a florist and I have gained 20 pounds by now. You have no idea how much this all has meant to us and I could literally sit here all day and try to express our gratitude and how much you guys mean to us in words but still come up short so I will just say this, we love you guys and will never forget your thoughtfulness.
If you are a client, I apologize if I am running a few days behind on your projects right now, I promise I will get caught up this weekend. If you need me for anything, just holler, my phone is no longer going straight to voicemail. I even shaved off that Grizzly Adams looking beard thing that I had going on last night before we went to dinner, I know that Donna had to appreciate that. I’m not saying I am back to 100% just yet, but it won’t be long…
No Heartbeat on Ultrasound. Devastated.
I am still in a state of shock, so this is going to be short and to the point. We went in today for a routine ultrasound, hoping to see a good strong heartbeat and a healthy, developing baby and that simply was not the case. For those of you that are close to us you know that this is our second miscarriage. We were so hopeful this time was going to be perfect but that wasn’t in the cards, but for right now Donna is doing as well as expected. The doctors have scheduled surgery for Wednesday morning here at Conway Regional…
Donna and I both have a lot of faith, and we are holding onto that. For the next few days we are just going to cling closely to one another and work our way through this. We do request your prayers right now and understanding if we drop from the radar for a few days.
#RefreshCA – GeoSocial Showdown (Feb. 23rd)
Be sure to join the Central Arkansas Refresh on February 23rd for our GeoSocial Showdown to discuss several of today’s top applications. After a lot of discussion we have decided to have a little bit different format for this month’s meeting. As opposed to having one speaker offer a presentation and then have group questions, we are going to have a moderator and 5 representatives from within the group to represent the top 5 services. Each presenter will give a short overview of the app they represent (approximately 3 minutes long) and then the group will be invited to interact with the panel and ask questions. It should be an awesome time. The volunteer representatives and applications represented will be:
- BrightKite – Anthony Valley
- Foursquare – Amy Bradley Hole
- Loopt – Bryan Jones
- Gowalla – Khara Cavaness
- Waze – Keith Crawford
If you have never attended one of our meetings, we invite you to attend this one. Our meetings are held in the basement of The Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock at 6:00pm on the last Tuesday of each month. For additional information please join our Facebook Group and follow @RefreshCA on Twitter. Our meetings are open to the public and free! Below you will find a map to The Flying Saucer…
Ms. Woman w/ an Attitude & Wordpress 101
Okay, so the other day I got a phone call from a lady inquiring about a website. My partners and I have a long-standing policy that if in the first five minutes of a phone conversation if we don’t get a good vibe from the client, meaning that we think we can have a good working relationship w/ the client, we simply don’t follow up. At the end of the day it saves both us and the prospective client a lot of time. One thing that I have learned over the years is that if I can’t have a good working relationship w/ a client, I can’t do them any good.
Ms. Woman w/ an Attitude…
Well, this phone call was one of those situations. Honestly I don’t even remember this ladies name, not that I would point her out or anything, that’s not what this post is about. Here’s how our conversation went. For the first 2 minutes of the conversation she told me that she was shopping around for a development and hosting company to work on her companies website. She then went on for the next 3 minutes and told me how she was “appointed” the overseer for the project, and then she went on to tell me that she was over 15+ people in her department. So far, 5 minutes into the conversation and we hadn’t even discussed the project. I sat there patiently and finally was able to get a word in edgewise to ask her what the project consisted of. She then gave me about a 3 minute overview of the project, finally parking on the fact that she needed to have the ability to update content internally. This got us on the topic of content management.
Usually content management discussions w/ Pleth either go one of two directions once we get a good idea as to what the clients needs are. We predominately build upon MODx and WordPress for our client projects. Occasionally we will bring in other CMS solutions if it’s a good fit, but 90% of the time our client builds go into one of those two solutions. Well, while I was asking some discovery questions about what her content management needs were going to be and what kind of data she was going to be posting, she completely did a 360 and started telling me about her qualifications. She had a bachelors degree in something like business management, a minor in computer science, or vise versa. She then went on to say that she had her doctorate in something else and had been certified as a project manager in the last 12 months. She even went as far as to say that “my skillset is well above average”. It was like she was giving me her information for a job interview, or she might have simply wanted to hear me say “wow”, but honestly that sort of thing just doesn’t impress me.
I asked her if she had ever managed a website before and her response was that she managed a department with 15+ people and headed up two committees or departments in her organization. So, I asked again. If you are a web developer you are going to get a kick out of this one… She finally got around to answering my question with a resounding, “not really”, I mean I used to do our sorority newsletter in FrontPage. LOL.
I then asked her if she had heard of Wordpress, she said that she had but didn’t have any experience working with it. Before she could remind me of her extensive educational pedigree I stopped her and asked her if she would like to look around in the backend of a site running wordpress to get an idea as to how it all worked. She agreed so I pointed her in the direction of my sandbox machine and got her logged into it. You would have thought I showed her the schematics to an atomic bomb. It was one of those moments where the other person on the line is completely discombobulated. I could tell by some of her extremely elementary questions like, what are pages?, that it simply wasn’t going to work out. She just didn’t get the idea that she was able to add pages and posts from inside a control panel. I could tell that she was deflated at this point but she spoke up one more time and mentioned her background in Computer Science or something along those lines and quipped about her “above average skillset” one more time before I had enough and told her that there was no way I could get her up and running over the phone.
The Skillset of My Chihuahua…
Then, at this point I was a little frustrated that I had been robbed of 30 minutes of my busy day w/ a lady who was so hung up on herself that she couldn’t listen and learn, that I just informed her that she basically, with all of her degrees and certifications, had the website management skillset of my Chihuahua and that if we did decide to take on her project that there was going to have to be some time allocated in our proposal for training before we could turn her loose on the site.
Upon detecting that I was getting frustrated and was genuinely unimpressed by her, her demeanor changed completely. She said that she didn’t think that based on her qualifications that her board of directors were going to want to spend any money toward training her to do anything. I wished her the best of luck and told her that I had to head to a meeting. I gave her our corporate office phone number and told her if she had anymore questions just to give us a call. Knowing that my partners might have a better shot of working w/ her than me.
Right after that phone call, I felt the need to vent on Twitter about what had just happened. Here’s my post if you are interested, it actually got retweeted a few times too…
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem in the world training clients who have zero experience to run content management systems but in order for me to be a good trainer, the client has to be receptive to suggestions, and willing to learn. When this chick started on and on about herself, it quickly became a situation that I wanted to get out of as quickly as possible.
Okay, I told you that story to pose a question…
Why Don’t Colleges Require Business Majors to, at the very least, learn Wordpress?
When a student graduates from college w/ a 4 or 6 year degree and enters the workforce, just like this lady did some years ago, what good is their diploma if they can’t even manage their corporate or small business website? I am sure that someone majoring in Business will pick up a lot of valuable knowledge and tools that will assist them in running their own business or in a management position for some corporation that hires them, but at the end of the day, they can’t even operate Wordpress, the most simple, widely used, content management solution on the planet?
It just seems to me that educational institutions across the country should at least offer CMS 101, or Wordpress 101, to get their students up to speed with managing web content. I am not saying that this needs to be some highly involved technical curriculum or anything like that, but it would be nice if they at least knew the difference between a page and a post??? Mind-boggling.
There you have it, I have spoken my mind. Thanks for enduring my rant. Again, please don’t get the impression that I am opposed to working w/ clients that have no computer skills whatsoever, that’s simply not the case. In a way, I welcome those opportunities because at the end of the day it gives me a sense of accomplishment to see my clients become comfortable w/ their abilities.
As an aside…
Just a few days after this conversation took place I was contacted by the University of Central Arkansas here in Conway to provide them w/ a basic wordpress installation as well as managed hosting for one of their departments. The project that I am referring to has launched a website that will be entirely managed by students who while they are learning to become journalists, they are also learning some valuable skills in terms of content management by working with Wordpress.
Breaking News: We are having a Baby!
After 4+ years of fertility treatments, medical procedures, injections, and one miscarriage, Donna and I are finally ready to announce to the world that we are pregnant. We are somewhere between 8-10 weeks pregnant according to the nurse who gave us our labs the other day, and yesterday we had our first appointment w/ our OBGYN, Dr. Andrew Cole.
During our appointment yesterday Dr. Cole told us that based on everything he was seeing everything looked perfect to him and he didn’t see any cause for alarm. Our HCG levels were about 45,000 the other day, and are much higher than that now. We even got to see everything starting to develop on the ultrasound, pictures are attached below. Since our first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at around the 5-6 week period, Donna and I both decided to wait until we knew that this time around was going to be a viable pregnancy before we shared the news with anyone. I am actually writing this blog post in advance of us telling our church friends tonight at The Church Alive because she wanted to tell everyone in person that had been praying for us before they saw it on Facebook & Twitter, my wife knows me well.
Last week we shared the news w/ Donna’s parents and then told my parents this past weekend while we were in town for my cousins engagement party. Words cannot describe how ecstatic I am right now, and honestly there are moments when it has even sank in yet that we are having a baby. It’s hard to describe, but during our first pregnancy, I was nervous about every little thing that Donna did, I was very protective and didn’t want her driving or even getting out of the house to run errands, but this time around I have had a peace about everything that I know can only come from this being God’s will. I didn’t even say a word yesterday when she came home with a new pair of high heel shoes (you would just have to know my wife).
As I mentioned earlier, we have been trying to have a baby for 4+ years now. Just getting to this point there have been moments that I have had to sit and hold her while she cried, as well as moments where she has had to grab me and tell me to chill out because everything is going to be okay. Any of you that have dealt with infertility issues know exactly where I am coming from, if the feeling of hopelessness doesn’t drive you crazy first it will definitely bring you closer together. We are both so excited to be at this point.
If you have ever, or are currently facing issues w/ infertility, I want to provide some words of encouragement as well as give you something to think about based on our journey. A few months back while we were still trying fertility treatments Donna kept having complications and I could tell that she was absolutely miserable, and as her husband I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to sit back and watch her go through all of this anymore so we stopped our visits to the fertility clinic altogether and just turned it over to God.
We started looking into adoption, which is also a great thing to investigate by the way, but once we got our mind off of getting pregnant, we finally got pregnant. Of course, that pregnancy wasn’t meant to be but we saw it as encouragement from God to keep our heads up and to keep trying. By God allowing us to get pregnant that first time I think both of us found ourselves at ease over our situation and didn’t see it as hopeless anymore. We continued to pray each morning together, that’s how we start our day, that God would give us a baby. Fast forward to the present and I just saw my precious baby yesterday on the ultrasound.
So my advice to anyone going through a similar situation is this, relax. Put things in God’s hands, he is the best OBGYN / Endocrinologist in the business because he is also the inventor.
EP:006 – The Cotton Club Podcast
In this Episode…
My co-host Keith Crawford and I discussed a very popular topic this evening, and that’s the rollout of Google Buzz. In this episode we both give our first impressions of this new social network / aggregator based on our initial 3 or 4 days of testing. Keith has been an authority on FriendFeed for some time now so given the similarities between what Google is trying to accomplish with Buzz and what FriendFeed already does, he provided some excellent commentary.
Also, anytime Keith and I get together for a show we always like to close out w/ a few iPhone application recommendations. This week we discussed Siri™, Waze, SleepCycle, and My6Sense. Keith also discussed Appolicious, which is a resource that no iPhone app junkie is going to want to live without. I also mentioned a story I saw today on CNN where several companies like AT&T and Verizon are getting together to open a competing APP store, you can find that CNN story here…
Since Keith and I are both avid NASCAR fans we dedicated a few minutes at the end of our show to discussing Jamie McMurray’s victory at the Daytona 500. Stay tuned for another post on this blog dedicated to the race.
Win Dinner for 2 on Cotton & Keith’s ‘Name That Podcast Promotion’!
As some of you might already be aware, Keith and I are looking for a new name for our podcast that we host together. We are looking for something unique and innovative that best describes our show. If you are unfamiliar w/ our show, be sure to listen to this weeks episode by clicking on the play button below to get an idea. We typically discuss social media, web services, and iPhone applications. You can enter our ‘Name that Podcast’ promotion by leaving a comment below w/ your suggestions or by posting your suggestion on twitter to @tsudo and @cottonr using the #NameThatPodcast hash tag. Keith and I will go over each entry and select the one that we like the best. If we chose the name you suggested, you will win dinner for two at The Market Place grill here in Conway, Arkansas. You can enter as many times as you like.
Listen to This Episode / Subscribe to The Cotton Club…
Click on the play button below to play this episode on your computer, or you may subscribe to The Cotton Club in iTunes or using Microsoft Zune. For step-by-step instructions for subscribing to this podcast, click here…
Online PHP Training w/ Edward Tanguay
I haven’t posted any recommendations for products on this blog in a long time but I wanted to be sure to mention an online PHP Training course that I was shown today by Edward Tanguay.
I was first introduced to Edward Tanguay by his brother, Pete Tanguay, CEO of Rock-Pond Solutions. In addition to being good friends, Pete and I have several things going on together and whenever we get together to discuss these projects, the topic of web development always comes up.
Pete is always telling me about new and interesting projects that his brother is working on in Germany so when I discovered Edward on Twitter, I decided to follow him, his twitter name is @edward_tanguay. This evening Pete sent me a link to some online training videos that Edward had released that I want to recommend to my web developer readers. Here’s some info:
PHP 5.3: Advanced Web Application Programming
Learn the nuts and bolts of advanced web application programming! Join Edward Tanguay as he dives into PHP programming. In his workshop, you will learn that it only takes a few minutes to get an Apache web server, a MySQL database, PHP 5.3, and the Eclipse editor up and running using the free XAMPP installation tool. Edward will then cover the PHP syntax, such as operators, loops and variables, before moving on to make you a PHP expert, tackling object orientation, databases, XML parsing, web services, security and much more. The training also includes important new features of PHP 5.3, such as namespaces, lambdas, and late static binding. Once you complete this video training, you will have the skills you need to build next-generation dynamic websites.
If you are interested in purchasing this online training video for $39.95, you may do so by visiting: http://www.video2brain.com/en/products-17.htm#/content?t=2. There are also some preview chapters to the series available at this link. As a programmer I can appreciate the clarity and thought that went into putting together these videos. Here’s a little bit of information about Edward if you are interested:
Edward Tanguay: Website & Software Developer, Instructor
Edward Tanguay grew up in Colorado, U.S.A., where he wrote his first computer program on an Apple II Plus in 1983. Shortly after that, he and his brother founded a software startup, where Edward programmed in dBase II and Clipper for clients in the hospital and investment bank industries. When their successful company was acquired by a consulting firm, Edward decided to pursue his passions and dreams, i.e. study philosophy, learn foreign languages, and live and work in Europe!
Thanks to the excitement of the World Wide Web, Edward got back into programming in the 1990s, this time focusing on database-driven web applications based on CGI/Perl, HTML and JavaScript. Just as the dot-com boom got underway, he began working for startup companies in Berlin, where he improved and adapted his programming skills to the web: PHP/MySQL, ASP/Access and later XML/XSLT. At the same time, he held IT workshops at the Berlin-based Humboldt University, Free University and Technical University and wrote online articles on upcoming technology for webdevelopersjournal.com.
In 2002, he worked as a consultant for Microsoft Germany and gained experience working in large teams on enterprise projects, where he acquired knowledge of the .NET platform, C#, SQL Server as well as the intricacies of object-oriented programming and design.
He is currently working as a .NET Developer in Berlin and juggling numerous PHP projects, including his own open-source PHP framework named Datapod. http://www.tanguay.info
Thoughts on the Daytona 500
This past weekend I was so excited about the Daytona 500 and the start of the 2010 NASCAR season that I didn’t know what to do w/ myself. The fact that Mark Martin, my favorite driver, who is also a client, qualified on the pole for the race didn’t help the matter any either. By the time the pre-race coverage was winding down on Speed and it was time to flip over to Fox to watch the race I was literally chomping at the bit, whatever that means I was doing it.
New Rule Changes for 2010
For the most part I enjoyed the race. The rule changes implemented by NASCAR giving us more opportunities to see Green-White-Checker finishes this year as well as the promise to let drivers be more expressive with their emotions are going to make for a fun season this year. Some other changes this year was the re-introduction of the tail-wing on the COT’s and larger holes in the restrictor plates for the superspeedways. I think these two changes to the cars were responsible for a lot of the close racing we witnessed this weekend.
We Have Bigger Potholes than that on I-40…
Honestly the only thing that bothered me about the race this weekend was probably the same thing that aggravated every other racing fan out there, we got to sit there for over 2 hours at 2 different points of the race and literally watch bondo dry on the asphalt while repair crews repaired a pothole in one of the turns. David Reutiman brought up a good point during one of the long red flags, dirt track racers aren’t strangers to holes on the track, you just remember where these holes are and go around them. I think NASCAR should have at least inspected the track before hand and noticed this place prior to the race. It’s hard for me to believe that these cars knocked this hole in the asphalt during the Cup Series race, it had to have at least been started earlier in the week, and somewhat evident during the 24 hour race a few days earlier.
Congratulations to Jamie McMurray…
All complaining aside, the ending of the race was well worth the wait, even though Mark Martin didn’t win. The sentimental winner of the race was Jamie McMurray. Here’s a guy who at the end of last season was released by Roush-Fenway Racing due to the limitations mandated by NASCAR as to how many teams an owner could have under one organization, not even sure if he would have a ride or not for 2010, finally secures a position w/ Ganassi-Sabates-Earnhardt Racing on their team, ironically the team that brought him into the series as a rookie, and low and behold he repays them by bringing home the most coveted trophy in NASCAR.
Emotions Running High in Victory Circle…
When Jamie pulled into the winners circle I knew it was going to be an emotional thing, just given the history of Jamie McMurray. A lot of people, myself included, had more or less written him off after his less than stellar performance at Roush-Fenway. When Jamie got out of the car he was greeted by his dad and then interviewed standing in winners circle. About 30 seconds into the interview he just breaks down and starts balling, a few moments later his wife shows up behind him and they embrace for a few minutes before Jamie returns to the interview. He was so emotional that even I got choked up watching, and that rarely happens. This was the type of show that NASCAR needed to put on to kick off the season in my opinion.
It’s Perfectly Acceptable for a Dude to Cry When He Has Just Won the Daytona 500…
Now, regarding how emotional Jamie was in winners circle, I know that there are a lot of people out there that probably were turned off by that. I can see where you are coming from. Back when we all watched Tim Tebow sit on the sideline while Florida was defeated by Alabama, I told a lot of my Twitter friends that there was only two acceptable times for a football player to cry on the field, one was when you can see your own bone sticking through your leg, and the other time is when you are holding the championship trophy up over your head and the season is over. Well, in that same vein, there’s not a lot of room in NASCAR for men who cry on national television, but given Jamie McMurray’s story I am going to give him a pass on that. In fact, a few of my tweeps and I had a discussion following the race on Twitter and decided to make an amendment to our man code to also make it acceptable to cry when you are in victory lane at The Daytona 500 too.
Did you see Dale Jr.?
One other thing that I think is worth of mentioning about the last lap of the race, Dale Earnhardt Jr., the guy that everyone likes to speculate and worry about, came from 10th place to finish in 2nd place. Let’s all hope that the chemistry is right this season for Dale Jr. to have a competitive season.
What did you think of the race?
I would love to hear your thoughts, be sure to leave comments below…
Be sure to follow @cottonr_nascar on Twitter so we can talk racing…
Quick Thoughts on Google Buzz
Okay so when Google started pushing Google Profiles the other day I knew that they were laying the foundation for something social, and it wasn’t going to be Orkut on steroids, insert sarcastic giggle here. I went ahead and setup my profile a few weeks ago, you can find my profile here…
Turns out my assumption was correct, Google launched Buzz this past week inside of Gmail, which I thought was a little odd of a way to launch at first, but after giving it some thought, it was probably a pretty stealth way to roll the product out. I know a few people that didn’t even notice the link on the sidebar until I showed them, and one person totally missed it and didn’t know about Buzz until they hit the internal landing page that slapped them in the face once they had logged into their Gmail account.
Turns out Google had all of their ducks in a row in one regard prior to releasing Buzz onto the mainstream, they even have a wireless version of Buzz that they are promoting. Setting up Buzz was pretty easy for the most part w/ one huge exception that might have only affected me, but it was annoying nonetheless…
The Problem Connecting Sites to My Buzz:
When I went in to setup my sites w/ my Google Buzz I first thought that surely they would just bring over the sites that were connected to my Google Profile page that I had created a while back, but that wasn’t the deal at all. I had a list of sites that I could connect initially, like my Blogspot, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Digg, and YouTube just to name a few. I set these accounts up, although I haven’t used Blogger in forever. Underneath these sites I had 5 or 6 more sites that I could “connect”, none of these sites were my blog? I found this odd and sat here scratching my head for a few minutes trying to figure out how they got the list of “suggested sites” that were my options. These websites were actually sites that I had built for clients, and I had them listed and verified inside of my Webmaster Tools account, where I record their sitemap links, etc.
I thought to myself for a moment that if maybe there was some way to delete these suggested sites that I would eventually work my way through the list of 800+ sites that I have in Webmaster tools until I got to my blog and I could do it that way. Well, that wouldn’t work because I wasn’t able to do anything but add a site, couldn’t remove it from the “suggested” group of sites.
I went into my Webmaster tools account and went ahead and verified my blog (surprised I hadn’t done this a long time ago). Once I did the verification process I went back into Google Buzz and clicked on selected sites again and noticed that my site was now in the list so I added it that way.
What a headache! I think it would have been much more efficient if users Buzz feed was originated by the sites that are connected to their Google profiles. I am sure that Google had a reason for doing this but for the life of me I can’t think of why they would do it that way.
Now, here’s another dilemma I encountered. While I was able to add Friendfeed as one of my connected sites, I got to thinking, if I connect all of these other sites to my Buzz, why would I need FriendFeed connected to my Buzz? Wouldn’t that be overlap and duplicate content in my feed? I opted to disconnect my FriendFeed from Buzz. I still haven’t been able to get my Delicious links connected to my Buzz either. Kind of makes me wonder if Google even wants third parties involved w/ their Buzz stream… Has anyone else encountered the same issues that I have? What am I missing??
Do We Need Another Social Network? And from Google??
It’s no secret that Google has attempted to get into the social networking business before, their Orkut product never really got wings for some reason, and I honestly think Google has known this for a while, which is why they never gave it a big push. If you are unfamiliar w/ Orkut, here’s my profile you can checkout…
While Google Buzz is being labeled a Social Network, I don’t really see it as a “social network” like Facebook or Twitter. In fact, I see it being more of an aggregator, sort of like what FriendFeed is. I think eventually Google wants to be the place where you can plug in all of our “social properties” and content feeds. If I was Google, that’s exactly the direction I would be looking as well, but I think they are going to have to package it a lot differently.
One component of Google Buzz that I did notice was that you can add friends more or less by “Following” people. This component gives it the “social networkish-ness” but that’s honestly about all I have seen in that regard. Friends can comment on other friends posts, etc. I guess it’s sort of like Facebook w/out all of the Farmtown…
In Conclusion…
I don’t want to sound like I am down on Google Buzz, because as I mentioned earlier, I think that they have the right idea. I just found the initial setup phase of joining to be somewhat frustrating and still don’t have my account setup w/ all of the sites that I want to connect but will live with things the way they are for now.
The bottom line, I think eventually if Google is persistent, they can grow Buzz into something cool that will rob other networks like Facebook and Twitter of face time, but it’s going to take some work. I am advising my clients if they have the time to get their profiles setup and to start adding their sites to Buzz but not pushing it as something they need to do urgently…
Stay Tuned…
I think that the next edition of The Cotton Club might include some discussion regarding Google Buzz so be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss it.
In case you are unfamiliar w/ Google Buzz, here’s some info I found on the Google Blog:
We’ve blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we’ve taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you’re up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today’s world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it’s increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations.
Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google’s experience in organizing information can help solve. We’ve recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.
Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.We’re rolling out Buzz to all Gmail accounts over the next few days, so if you don’t see it in your account yet, check back soon. We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.
On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question "where were you when you shared this?" can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more info about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.We’ve relied on other services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.
We really hope you enjoy the experiences we’ve built within Gmail and for mobile phones. If you want to learn more, visit buzz.google.com. We look forward to continuing to evolve and improve Google Buzz based on your feedback.
If you are already using Google Buzz, I would love to hear your comments about the product.
I have only had 48hrs with the product and I will admit that there might be a lot about the product that I am totally missing.
