Flock first look

I downloaded Flock last night, about 12 minutes after the public beta was released, and I’ve been playing with it on and off since then. Some good stuff, some things that seem good but aren’t so useful for me. Flock is based on the same code base as Firefox, so there’s lots of similarities and it can even import everything from Firefox in its initial setup, including saved web form data.

Some unique Flock features and how well they work for me:

  • Flickr or Photobucket integration right along the top edge, allowing photos to be dragged onto that area to upload it to the photo service. I’m not using Flickr much; I still create photo galleries using JAlbum and publish them for various websites, so this feature isn’t as useful for me as it would be for a dedicated Flickr fan. I’m sure that will change as soon as I buy a pocket-sized digital camera and start snapping photos every day.
  • RSS feed functionality built in. This is a non-starter for me, since I need a subset of my RSS subscriptions to drive my blog roll directly, which is what Bloglines does for me.
  • Integration from the Favorites directly to del.icio.us. This is another non-starter for me, since it doesn’t put me far enough into the del.icio.us environment to show me my del.icio.us tags, so I end up accidentally creating a bunch of new tags and have to clean them up later. However, the “add to del.icio.us” bookmarklet that I had in Firefox works just fine.
  • Built-in blog posting tool. I’m using this now, and have even figured out how to post to both Movable Type (for this blog) and Blogger (for my wine club blog) although errors are occuring on the MT posting that I haven’t resolved yet. It keeps the blog post window on top of all other Flock windows, which is a bit inconvenient since I often flip back and forth to the browser window during blogging to look things up. There’s no obvious hot key to pop up the links window, which is annoying. It generates some extra tags in the source, and I’m a sucker for clean source. Otherwise, I like it.

Overall, the experience is quite a bit like Firefox, only slower since I suspect that there’s some amount of test/debug code in here still. Given that the only extra that I might use is the offline blogging tool, there may not be enough to keep me here if it proves annoyingly slower than Firefox.

SaaS: Mean time to fix security holes

I hadn’t looked at the news feed from Information Week for a few days, so when I checked it today there was a really interesting story told by way of headlines:

Yahoo Mail Worm Harvesting Addresses: The “Yamanner” worm exploits a JavaScript vulnerability in Yahoo’s Web mail client. Users should watch out for messages with a “From” address of [email protected] and the subject line, “New Graphic Site.” Posted on: Mon, Jun 12 2006 11:41 AM

Yahoo Quashes Mail Bug: Yahoo says it has patched a bug that was letting attackers hijack systems through a flaw in the portal’s free Web-based e-mail service. Posted on: Tue, Jun 13 2006 1:23 PM

Yahoo Mail Worm May Be First Of Many As Ajax Proliferates: The Yamanner worm that hit Yahoo Mail shows how increasingly popular techniques like Ajax and Javascript that make Web-based software perform well also could make it vulnerable. Posted on: Tue, Jun 13 2006 4:00 PM

As alarming as this might sound, think about the timeline for a minute. Late Monday morning, the problem hits the news. Early Tuesday afternoon, the security hole is fixed; because there’s no software installed on any desktops, the fix is effectively distributed everywhere instantaneously. By late Tuesday afternoon, they’re already into the post-game analysis since there’s nothing else to talk about.

Quite different from applications that run on your desktop or your servers: this is the reality of web-based SaaS.

Start page heaven

For years, I’ve been using My Yahoo! as my start page. It has lots of great modules available, I use a free Yahoo! account as my “web form” address (instead of Hotmail), and I use Yahoo! groups, all of which has made it pretty functional. When they added the ability to add any RSS feed instead of just their own modules, I was convinced that I’d never switch.

Today, I tried out Netvibes, and I’ve already switched my start page over. There’s a few things that I’m missing (such as the movie times for my local theatre), but there other things that I find to be useful enough to make the switch.

  • First of all, a to do list. That sounds like a small thing, and there are a ton of other apps that will do that for me, but to have it integrated into my start page so that it stares me in the face every time I open my browser is a big help.
  • Secondly, and more significant, is access into my POP mail account so that the last 5 (number configurable) email subject lines are displayed. It doesn’t provide click-through access to my email, but gives me a heads-up about anything that might need my attention. Since I have a bookmarks module containing a link to my webmail immediately below that, I effectively have one-click access to my email anyway, which is one click less than it takes to access it via MyYahoo. I spend almost my entire day with multiple tabs open in Firefox, but without Outlook open because it can be a real resource hog, so I sometimes just handle email directly through the webmail client. The really ironic part is that Yahoo! hosts my email (my real paid account as well as my free one), yet I can’t do this with MyYahoo: it will only provide a count of the number of messages in my free Yahoo! account on the MyYahoo page, and nothing related to my real account.
  • Third is the interface: sleek, easy to use, and advertising-free (for now). I suppose that they’ll have to monetize this through advertising at some point, but right now it’s beautifully unadorned.
  • Last, I just figured out how to add an iCal feed from my upcoming.org calendar – cool! And there are a ton of independently-created add-ins, such as the Google maps module which provides the functionality that is missing natively.

Just to summarize, here’s what I have on my NetVibes start page:

  • Left column: Upcoming.org (viewable as agenda/week/month); BBC news headlines; CBC news headlines
  • Centre column: POP mail (last 6 email senders/subjects); bookmarks (imported from my Firefox bookmarks, organized in folders)
  • Right column: To do list (with “done” checkboxes); Toronto weather; Google map search form; Mountain View weather (I’m headed there soon for Mashup Camp; also shows the current date/time there)

Weekend of not blogging

Heads down on a couple of client projects, plus a home project to completely disassemble a Compaq Armada M700 in order to resolder the power connector, which is conveniently located on the underside of the motherboard where you can’t get at it without at least 45 minutes of disassembly. This is just one of the reasons that I keep an electrical engineer around the house — my degree in systems design engineering qualifies me to correctly identify a soldering gun, but not actually do anything with it. However, since I’m the software guru of the household, I’ll be installing SQL Server later this week as payback.

I also went out yesterday for my first sail of the season with my friend Ingrid, who owns a 25′ C&C and is completely tolerant of my inability to learn much about sailing except how not to fall off the boat. She started a blog several months ago on my urging, and is now at the “so what now?” stage of business blogging. We talked about a number of issues with regards to getting customers — especially somewhat technology-challenged ones — to read her blog, and it’s given me some great ideas for topics for BlogHerNorth when we get it kicked off.

Back to work…

Social networking surprises

Sometimes the whole social networking phenomena still manages to surprise me. Last week was DemoCamp6, put on by my friend and neighbour David Crow. I missed it due to a bad head cold, but emailed him on Saturday to get some information and he sent the info with the comment “Sorry I missed you at DemoCamp, I had a bad day (a very bad day).” I figured that his “bad day” was just logistics problems with DemoCamp, but found out differently when I read his blog yesterday about how he had a heart attack while setting up for DemoCamp. I immediately emailed him to say that reading about it in his blog was weird (to say the least), and he responded “Welcome to web 2.0… it seemed like a perfectly useful way to diseminate the information.” My best wishes are with Dave, and I’ll pop upstairs to see him as soon as my cold is gone, but I have to admit that reading about it in his blog makes me laugh — he even has shots of his angiogram on Flickr.

On a separate social networking note, thanks to all of you who left comments for my 83-year-old blogging mom on her birthday last week. Some friends and family, but lots of complete strangers who just read about it here and decide to make her day. She declared it “amazing”. It’s not too late to go over there and leave a happy birthday comment if you’re so inclined.

My last surprise came from Assaf of co.mments, a free conversation-tracking service that I mentioned last week. He added a comment to my post thanking me for the link, and I commented back that I had found that the service didn’t work with https URLs. Less than eight hours later, he responded that he could do that, and an hour after that, tracking of https URLs became part of co.mments. Now that’s Web 2.0!

Creating a website using a blogging tool: WordPress or Movable Type?

My corporate website is pretty minimalist, since I’m a one-person consulting shop and most of my good stuff is here on my blog. However, I’d like to redesign the site to be a bit more dynamic, and I’m thinking of using a blogging tool to do the entire site, although I intend to leave my blog here on ebizQ where I’m part of an integration community.

My site is hosted with Yahoo! small business services, which offers me WordPress or Movable Type preinstalled, and I’m looking for any advice on which makes a better website creation tool. Any comments?

I have a bit more experience with Movable Type since I ended up rewriting most of the templates when I moved my blog over to ebizQ; I’ve used WordPress for blogging but never had to change templates or any other administrative tasks. However, as an old coder, I don’t think that I’m going to have a problem learning enough about either one to do something interesting.

SaaS versus shared services

Lots of interesting things swirling around about SaaS lately, including the relationship to shared services within an organization. James Governer posted about the convergence of shared services and business process outsourcing, but I have a bit of a problem with comparing an internal mandated service with an external service about which you have a choice. As I said in my comment on James’ post, the problem with equating shared services within an organization and a true outsourced SaaS is that an enterprise is usually captive to its shared services, whereas they have a choice with an external SaaS.

Then Richard Veryard posted about “Open Sauce”, which completely cracked me up, referring to an earlier Seth Godin post about Tabasco, and making a SaaS analogy:

Imagine there was a delivery mechanism that allowed people to buy a single shot of Tabasco on-demand. Imagine there was a social mechanism that allowed people to share bottles of Tabasco (and many other flavours) with their neighbours.

Having seen these three posts in succession, I started thinking about the shared services analogy: similar to Veryard’s SaaS one, except that your older brother owns all the bottles of hot sauce, and your mom makes you buy from him rather than the kid in the next block. If your brother’s taste is the same as yours, that’s great for you; if it’s not, then he comes off like a bit of a tyrant. If you don’t like his taste and choose not to have hot sauce, then he still justifies his existence because he’s still the household standard, there’s just less hot sauce used and your life is duller because of it.

Tracking comments with co.mments

I’ve been doing a lot of commenting on other people’s blogs lately, and using co.mments to track the conversations. It’s easy, just setup an account, install the bookmarklet in your browser, then when you’re on a page where you want to track the changes, just click on the bookmarklet and co.mments will pop up to tell you that it is tracking the conversation. Works even if the blog doesn’t have a comments feed, and also works even if you forget until after you’ve posted your comment (which was a problem with CoComment). In fact, you can go back to the post at any time and invoke co.mments. You can, of course, get the results as an RSS feed too.

Easy enough for Mom

There’s been a bit of a backlash lately about saying that some new technology is “easy enough for my mom to use” as if it denigrates women. However, when I use that phrase, I mean it quite literally: my mom turned 83 today, and for the past 15 years or so, I’ve been introducing her (and my dad) to more technology than they ever imagined possible, to the point where email and the internet are a daily part of their lives. At Christmas, she overheard me talking about my blog, and she asked what a blog was. I sent her a link to Steve Garfield‘s 80-year-old mother’s blog as an example, and two weeks later she sent me the inevitable email:

As you know my computer skills are not too good but thought that learning how to blog might be fun. Can you send something about how to do this?

Today, she blogged about turning 83, the problems with their local hospital’s IVR system, and a variety of other topics. If you have a minute, pop over there and add a “Happy Birthday” comment; just say that you know me and heard that it was her birthday, so that she’s not wondering why strangers are sending her email — her comments are auto-emailed to her, and she’s still a bit confused about that particular piece of the technology.

Update: tell her where you’re commenting from, she still can’t believe that anyone outside her neighbourhood reads her blog.