Posts tagged technology

Google Dashboard shows you how you are using various Google products.  For a geek like me that likes stats like these, this is a wonderful surprise to have offered by Google.

Some interesting numbers from my Dashboard:

• I have 170 Contacts.
• I have created 66 Google Docs.
• There are over 10,000 messages in my Gmail “All Mail” box.
• I have 608 shared photos on Picasa Web.
• On Google Voice, I have received 41 voice mails, 287 calls and sent/received 188 texts.

Check out your Dashboard and see how much you’re utilizing Google.

I’ve been fortunate enough to get a Google Wave invite and I just signed up yesterday. Now what? I think I a lot of early adopters are asking themselves this question. The concept of Google Wave is intriguing and I think we make up wild ideas of how we’d use the service but then we’re at a loss once we get it. What exactly will I use this for? Who will I use this with? What makes this any better than a threaded Gmail conversation or a collaborative Google Doc? I don’t have answers to those questions yet.

What sort of situation can I see using Wave? Well, maybe to setup some travel plans with a friend so that we can keep all our wishes and wants together. Or, maybe to plan a party with a group of people where all the details will be visible, etc. I’m not 100% sure how I could use it in my personal life.

What about my professional life? While sitting at work today I have come up with a few examples where having Google Wave in the enterprise environment would be great. For me, I am always opening tickets to get implementations completed or fixes in place for previous implementations. It would be great if the entire history of an implementation was available to anyone who wanted to view it. Right now, I have to search through thousands of tickets and hope I can find the one that has the specific request for the change I’m researching. To have this all in one collaborative location would be great. Another way I can see it benefiting my work would be in our billing guidelines that we have to create for every customer. It would be so great to have the history of how the requirements have changed for a customer over the months and years. When someone leaves the company, they wouldn’t take the billing knowledge with them. Do I think I’ll ever see something like this where I work? No, not unless such technology can be housed inside of the corporate firewall. These days, companies are too paranoid about information to allow such collaboration to take place outside of their firewalls. In the mean time, I can dream… can’t I?

Question: Do you have Google Wave? If so, what do you use it for?

This is strange.  For some reason, Google Voice appends the person’s name to the front of SMS messages that are coming from other user’s Google Voice numbers.  I’m not sure why this is occurring.  From what I can tell on the Google Voice site, any messages sent between Google Voice numbers should not have appends on the front of them.  I wonder if it’s because these people are responding through their cell phones vs. the Google Voice system?  Anyway, I’ve attached a photo to show how it appended a name and then took it away for a subsequent text.  Very strange behavior indeed!

Okay, so I was reading an article the other day that was asking people if they really care about their actual start dates with specific technologies (e.g. Netflix) and I realized that I am someone who does care!  Maybe it’s strange but I get satisfaction by knowing that I’ve had an account with a specific service for a long time.  Anyway, I decided I would pull some dates and share them with you here on my blog!

Netflix:

Gmail:

I’ve had an ICQ number since 1997 but there’s no way to show that from a screen print (it’s 8 digits long).

Anyone have dates earlier than me?

I recieved this interesting piece of spam in my inbox today.  I love the use of the English language.