This reality pushed me back to ask myself a question.

When will DevOps and IT developers be comfortable with a 100% Web based (or Cloud hosted)  UIs?

What does this mean? One of three things:

• No more Rich Clients i.e. the world shifts to all HTML v5 UIs
• You remote desktop in for rich clients
• You use application virtualization for rich clients

In order to answer this question, you have to think about the requirements. For the sake of simplicity I am going to boil it down into two requirements:

• Always On
• Rich dev environment

Does Always On require Universal Connectivity?

Always on really means that no matter where you go, you can access your development environment and be productive. Wasting 15 minutes rebooting the computer or the router or both won’t fly. It has to be seamless. I turn my computer on, it connects to the internet. The iPhone has set the precedence. GPRS is the connection. You have data all day as long as you paid your cell bill and are within a service coverage area.

The sad reality is, the promise of Universal Connectivity has simply not happened. The only country I know of that has leveraged the power of ‘Free’ universal access is Singapore. And I dare say, they will have a competitive edge in the world as a result.

The CTO of the US, Steven Van Roekel, just told me that “Free and universal access will likely be driven by the FCC, the marketplace, and anchor institutions.”  As a part of the marketplace, perhaps Google is the only company interested in free internet. The recently announced they are offering free Wifi in NY City. The question is, will Google only do this for hubs where it has offices e.g. they already built a network in Mountain View, or will they grow the free network?  More connectivity, means more googling. The economics may be there… Meanwhile, the same week, AT&T announced more pay for Wifi hotspots.  Unfortunately , the larger marketplace will generally want to profit from access, and the anchor institutions – whoever they may be –  may not understand the potential positive boom for our economy and education acceleration with universal access.  But I digress…

It seems in 2013 we will continue  to see a proliferation of WiFi cells and Wimax networks by Telcos and ISPs.

In general, this means more networks will exist; however, it won’t be universal, and there won’t be single sign-on. So the tedious nature of connecting will continue to exist.

But… most developers are not mobile. Most developers are in an office ideally with reliable high speed networks or at home. So are their requirements for Always on are met?

This leads to the second requirement…

A Rich Dev Environment

Developers use a plethora of tools from the most basic command lines (DOS Shell, KSH, BASH, etc.) to some of the most complicated UIs that exist e.g. Eclipse, Visual Studio, XCode. Then there are tools that are more in the middle like VCenter Orchestrator.

HTML 5 has changed the Web based UI landscape considerably making a very rich web based UI experience. Adobe is busy working on HW acceleration technologies to keep Flash relevant. And even Microsoft has acknowledged that HTML 5 is the future when they announced their change of strategy related to Silverlight aka Silverlight is dead.

Even with all the excitement and focus on HTML 5, we see that it has some limitations.

But HTML 5 isn’t the only option for a Cloud dev environments. For those that want to stream their RichClients to any terminal… Application Virtualization hasn’t really hit mainstream. And there is always remote desktop to a cloud server. But some developers would complain about the speed.  And developers like flexibility and control. They don’t really like giving things up unless it really means less administration overhead.  App Virtualization hasn’t really hit the level of robustness that would meet a Developers expectaction levels.

It’s clear that the world is shifting to the cloud. But I still question if developers can/will tolerate a UI that is 100% web based today?  But if not today, when? What mountains have to be crossed to make developers happy coding in the cloud?

What are your thoughts on this?  Different types of UIs matter too.

Then, last week, I attended Amazon’s first user’s conference for developers of Amazon Web Services, #ReInvent.  It seems that Jeff Bezos and Werner Vogels were mind melding with our CMO.  While the conference was clearly about the Cloud, my #1 takeaway from the conference was the need for Big Data analytics will drive the need for the Cloud in the Enterprise.

Don’t get me wrong here; the cloud has farther reaching architectural implications and overall business benefits such as:

• Elastic computing resources enables business scale.
• The need to design for failure brings greater resiliency.
• The Cloud’s reach enables companies to have immediate global reach.
• Elimination of hardware infrastructure lowers OPEX costs and speeds innovation agility.
• The ability to immediately measure operational costs encourages developers to design for cost.

These are just some of the most important implications and well understood drivers for the cloud.

And, as most know, Amazon and its competitors such as Rackspace have had great successes with startups because they enable a zero foot-print to get up and running with new innovations. So sure, these items were mentioned and at the show, and for those that have been doing SaaS for some time, this is old hat, we get it. The word Cloud often draws yawns for ‘those in the know’.  But what startups have been doing for years is still new to many Enterprise customers.

So why is Big Data so important when changing the conversation with the Enterprise and how is it going to be a key driver for Enterprise Adoption of the Cloud?

Well first off, let’s start with what has been holding enterprises back from adopting the Cloud – Data!!!  Regulatory compliance related to Data access, where it is hosted, how it is secured, and how it is analyzed has limited Enterprise adoption. In Europe for example, US regulations around Homeland Security dramatically limits Cloud adoption. Talk to any European enterprise and they will tell you that it is not ok to put data in a datacenter that the US has jurisdiction over. On Werner’s blog he said he has been visiting with the European Commission. Clearly behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft, and HP will to find ways to solve this problem.

In the US, Amazon has already launched a government cloud to ensure that they meet the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements and they now have numerous government agencies live in AWS. And now NASDAQ has partnered with Amazon to act as a Managed Service Provider for AWS offerings in FinSrv. They launched a platform called FinQloud designed to address the regulatory compliance needs of the Financial Services world.

So it seems the compliance issues when hosting Data will no longer be the barrier to entry for the Enterprise.

Now that the primary objection is being addressed, what will be the compelling need? Why will Enterprises be hard pressed to solve their Big Data challenges within the bounds of their existing Datacenters?

We already know that data is growing exponentially and the Enterprise cannot ignore the need for analysis of that data to optimize user experience. Read the Wave of Big Data to learn more about this.

The Enterprise is already spending upwards of 30K a month to support their Data warehouses. Imagine what an exponential growth in Data will mean to the Enterprise from an infrastructure standpoint. They won’t be able to bring up new servers in time to support this type of growth either. Nor will they be able to deal with the Bandwidth constraints that this type of data will result in. And most importantly, they won’t be able to compete with the security and resiliency qualities of service that a Cloud offering like Amazon’s can provide.

In addition, imagine how expensive it will be to retrain staff to learn the new technologies required for this type of analysis. While the likes of eBay, Netflix, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter will benefit from some of the leading development resources in this space, other click and mortar business may not be able to attract the right engineering talent required to understand how to evaluate, setup and manage next generation solutions for Big Data. And assuming they do have the right resources to play with these technologies, they will need playgrounds to quickly evaluate and play with these technologies.

Thus… Enterprises will turn to the Cloud.

And it is clear that things are trending the direction of the Cloud.  Werner said that in the last 12 months they have created 2 million Hadoop Clusters in their AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) offering for customers. Wow!  But that number is actually quite small as compared to some numbers our customers at UC4 have told us. A large online retailer by itself went from 0 jobs 2 years ago to 900K Hadoop a month. That is just one of our Enterprise customers.

Obama is our new Big Data president and he clearly recognizes the shift. Not only is it widely agreed that he won the 2012 election based on his campaign’s use of Big Data analytics, but his administration put $200 Million into technical Innovations around Big Data (reference the press release). $10 Million of that was granted to U.C. Berkeley’s AMPLab. The AMPLab team demonstrated what their funding has produced last week with their Spark and Shark technologies. They did a demo over 50GB of Wikipedia data showing how Shark can result in over 400x performance gains for in-memory queries based on Hive and Hadoop within AWS. When speaking to folks that have been playing with this new technology it seems clear that there are some kinks that need to be ironed out when it comes to larger datasets, but the intent is there and it is impressive.

Engineering minded companies have already adopted Hadoop because they gain the power of Map Reduce on commodity hardware. The Enterprises that do not have these skills will pay big money with the likes of SAP, Oracle, and IBM. In dialogs with the Hanna folks at the conference, they are driving some of the requirements in the AWS cloud and claim they now have 1000 customers running Hanna in the Cloud.

The primary new investments announced last week at AWS were all centered around Big Data in the Cloud starting with Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) price reduction by ~25% across the board to lower the barrier to entry on moving data to the cloud.

Werner Vogels announced Amazon’s new Petabyte data warehouse, Redshift. The goal of Redshift is to democratize access to and storage of Big Data. “You can get started with a single 2TB Amazon Redshift node for $0.85/hour On-Demand and pay by the hour with no long-term commitments or upfront costs. This works out to $3,723 per terabyte per year.” Amazon claims up to 11 9s of durability for their new data warehouse and EMR solutions.  Werner also announced two new instance types:

• A 240 GB Ram instance – Clearly for In Memory DB’s like Hana
• A 48 TB on disk instance – Clearly to support their Redshift announcement

Finally Amazon announced their new AWS Data Pipeline Web service. I spoke to a few beta testers of this solution and it isn’t really production quality at this juncture. But the intention here is to help in the orchestration of Data. We think customers will turn to UC4 for this part of their solution J

Congratulations Amazon on your first user conference, you did an excellent job. My only complaint… really a $5 gift card in my bag— where was my new Paperwhite Kindle?  Didn’t you get the memo? All user conferences require that you hand out your latest and greatest mobile device for free.

Many sources of new information are causing exponential growth in data.  The data is primarily a by-product of mobile computing and the plethora of embedded devices e.g. vehicles and TVs. However, there is more than just the data that originates from the devices; there is also exponential growth in data produced by the IT Infrastructure to support new applications targeted at the connected new world.

Meanwhile a diversity of applications results in numerous different data contexts and structures.  For example, many companies are moving to next generation NoSQL stores. Netflix uses Apache Cassandra for their storage. Craigslist uses MongoDB. Companies that host in the Amazon cloud often use DynamoDB. When thinking of Social networking, companies rely on Graph based stores. Meanwhile the majority of the world is still running their ERP and CRM systems in traditional, transactional Relational databases like MS SQL Server and Oracle RDBMs.  But the key here is, is that different types of data are ideally suited for different types of data stores. And generally, when building applications, you optimize for the application’s purpose. It is often when companies bridge into the world of analysis that they run into their Big Data challenges; likewise, when they have accumulated years of data over time within a Data warehouse.

The sheer volume of Data and numerous data structures places a dramatic demand and complexity on analytics.

Can the Enterprise choose to ignore Big Data? No. Companies that choose to ignore this wave will be crushed by innovators that learn to ride it well.

The fact is… expectations of the consumer and business partners have changed. We all choose brands that use predictive analytics to understand what we want and to optimize for our experiences.

Jim Blomo of Yelp does an excellent job describing Big Data challenges. First off, he claims, “If you can’t process your data on one node, then you have a big data problem.” He talks about the concepts behind a Yelply Insight. My version of his story telling…  As a consumer, when I type in Organic on Yelp, it knows that I am not looking for fertilizers but rather restaurants or grocery stores. It knows because I live in King County, WA and our population on the whole here more often than not tends to eat “Farm to Table” and it is not gardening season. On Google, when I type in “Do churros have egg in them” it knows before I finish typing that I am trying to address an allergy question.  We are used to systems predicting our needs, and as a result, our expectations have grown.  We expect companies to answer their most crucial Bid Data questions.

Big Data isn’t just a problem for the pure play internet technology player. Big Data is a problem for click and mortar as well. And in fact, they probably have years and years of data to review. Here are some scenarios I have discussed with UC4 customers:

• Movie theater company: What candy to stock for a given movie.
• Large pet store: How to keep millions of fish alive.
• Large retailer: How to keep their Supply Chain aligned with demand.
• Media and advertising company: How to not annoy the people they advertise to.
• Oil and Gas companies: Seismic analysis to prevent disasters and disaster recovery analysis.
• Food manufacturer: Wants to determine what food is more commonly purchased in a recession.

In each of these scenarios, pieces of data may sit in different silos, a different database, and a different data structure type. Big Data is about pulling together data and handling enormous amounts of unstructured data from different silos for the purpose of analysis.

My team at UC4 is already helping our customers to orchestrate their data for analytics. We help manage the resources to make sure the right data is in the right place at the right time. We are currently The Enterprise Scheduler for Hadoop Map Reduce and numerous large Enterprise companies in both click and mortar.  I am on a mission to learn more so we can help our customers be positioned to catch the wave rather than be caught in the churn.

Every time you do options trading you use our software. When you use your Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, etc., we are likely involved in the payment processing. You probably wouldn’t know that the leading eCommerce, Social Networking, and Media streaming sites such as eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Netflix rely on us to make you a happy consumer.  We are also crucial part of the process that makes sure your favorite retail stores are stocked with the right goods. We help make sure you get home loans.

So what exactly do we do?  We provide solutions for Process Automation.  In a nutshell, we help IT optimize both Business and IT Processes.  The more services you rely on on your cell phones, tablets, and other devices that use the applications in the cloud; the larger the burden on data centers become. We make IT capable of handling that ever increasing demand and complexity. We do important things like move big data.  We schedule resources. We horizontally scale more than any other workload automation and orchestration platform and provide governance and control systems to make sure the right information and services are available to the right people at the right time. We enable disaster recovery between massive data centers. Think of us like the nervous system that empowers IT Operations to deliver messages from the hands to the brain.

Our systems are intelligent. Very intelligent. We help make IT a strategic business partner in any organization.

So here is to a new era of blogging.

I will start to highlight some of the current industry challenges and how UC4 solves those customer challenges.

I have never had a tattoo, but if did, it would be:

What this means is, your life is the sum of all happiness you accumulate over the course of your lifetime. For some, they would need to replace Death with the Time you are Forgotten.

I used this equation to teach my 12 year old nephew calculus. I love this equation, because I believe that everyone has a different definition for happiness. E.g.

Happiness = (Joy shared with friends & family) ^2 + Life accomplishments + Time spent travelling

What is your definition of happiness?

1. Choose what you would like to wear for the next 3 weeks, but make sure it fits in a paper grocery bag.

2. One week before the trip, have a yard of sand delivered to your house. Sprinkle liberally in your dresser drawers, and on the kitchen counter, and fill your salt shaker,sugar bowl and cereal boxes.

3. Pour sand on garbage can lid. Place in front of a fan. Set on high.

4. Rent a projection TV and illuminate the walls and ceiling of your bedroom with old Dracula movies, especially the snake, lizard, scorpion rodent and bat infested scenes.

5. Each day at 9 am and 5pm, have your friends form a long line. Then pass the entire contents of
your home out the front door, around the side, and into the back door of your house.

6. Wash all your dishes by hand using only gross, chunky dish water.

7. Sit on the hood of your car while riding through the car wash. Make sure you stay wet for a few hours in a breeze, or in front of the fan–the one thats blowing sand.

8. Set up horseshoe stakes in the back yard. Then practice kicking it with your bare toe every night.

9. Line your sandals with sandpaper and spend two hours a day on a StairMaster.

10. Drape the contents of your brown grocery bag on the bushes and rocks in your back yard. Twice a day practice changing clothes while your neighbors  watch.

11. With 16 friends standing in the shallow end of a swimming pool, practice looking nonchalant as you carry on a conversation and pee simultaneously.

12. Go to the bathroom in your upstairs waste basket and then, with your pants still around your ankles, run downstairs and pee in the tub.

International System for Rating Rapids

Class I  Easy. Fast moving water with riffles and small waves. Swimming is pleasant, shore easily reached. A nice break from paddling. Almost all gear and equipment is recovered. Boat is just slightly scratched.

Class II, Novice. Straightforward rapids with wide, clear channels which are evident without scouting. Swimming to eddies requires moderate effort.  Climbing out of river may involve slippery
rocks and shrub-induced lacerations. Paddle travels great distance downstream requiring lengthy
walk. Something unimportant is missing. Boat hits submerged rock leaving visible dent on frame or new gash in plastic.

Class III, Intermediate. Rapids with moderate, irregular waves which may be difficult to avoid. Water is swallowed. Legs are ground repeatedly against sharp, pointy rocks. Several eddies are missed while swimming. Difficult decision to stay with boat results in moment of terror when swimmer realizes they are downstream of boat. Paddle is recirculated in small hole way upstream. All personal possessions are removed from boat and floated in different directions. Paddling partners run along river bank shouting helpful instructions. Boat is munched against large boulder hard enough to leave series of deep gouges. Sunglasses fall off.

Class IV, Advanced. Water is generally a lot colder than Class III. Intense, powerful but predictable rapids requiring precise swimming in turbulent water. Swimming may require `must’ moves above dangerous hazards. Must make moves are downgraded to `strongly recommended’ after they are missed. Sensation of disbelief experienced while about to swim large drops. Frantic swimming towards shore is alternated with frantic swimming away from shore to avoid strainers. Rocks are clung to with death grip. Paddle is completely forgotten. One shoe is removed.  Hydraulic pressure permanently removes waterproof box with all the really important stuff. Paddle partners running along stream look genuinely concerned while lofting throw ropes 20 feet
behind swimmer. Paddle partners stare slack-jawed and point in amazement at boat which is finally pinned by major feature. Climbing up river bank involves inverted tree. One of those spring loaded pins that attaches watch to wristband is missing. Contact lenses are moved to rear of eyeballs.

Class V, Expert. The water in this rapid is usually under 42 degrees F. Most gear is destroyed on rocks within minutes if not seconds. If the boat survives, it is need of about three days of repair. There is no swimming, only frantic movements to keep from becoming one with the rocks and to get a breath from time to time.

Terror and panic set in as you realize your paddle partners don’t have a chance in heck of reaching you. You come to a true understanding of the terms maytagging and pinballing. That hole that looked like nothing when scouted, has a hydraulic that holds you under the water
until your lungs are close to bursting. You come out only to realize you still have 75% of the rapid left to swim. Swim to the eddy? What #%^&*#* eddy!? This rapid usually lasts a mile or more. Hydraulic pressure within the first few seconds removes everything that can come off your body. This includes gloves, shoes, neoprene socks, sunglasses, hats, and clothing. The rocks take care
of your fingers, toes, and ears. That $900.00 dry suit, well it might hold up to the rocks. Your paddle is trash. If there is a strainer, well, just hope it is old and rotten so it breaks. Paddle partners on shore are frantically trying to run and keep up with you. Their horror is reflected in their faces as they stare at how you are being tossed around!

They are hoping to remember how to do CPR. They also really hope the cooler with the beer is still intact. They are going to need a cold one by the time you get out! Climbing out of
this happens after the rapid is over. You will probably need the help of a backboard, cervical collar and Z-rig. Even though you have broken bones, lacerations, puncture wounds, missing digits &
ears, and a concussion, you won’t feel much pain because you will have severe hypothermia. Enjoy your stay in the hospital: with the time you take recovering, you won’t get another vacation for 3 years.

Work Crew

And finally, a note on work crew structuring I have a 10 point system that works very well for me, but no one else seems to like it. I don’t know why.

1) Arrive at camp well after all the boats carrying the camp and kitchen gear. This assures that
the work is already done.

2) Have a stash of cold beer in your own well-disguised cooler that you do not allow anyone else to even know about. Keep other beer in a drag bag and always fail to actually drag it by absent-mindedly leaving it in the rowing compartment. This insures that the beer you offer to others will be warm, and they’ll stop asking you for beer.

3) If you happen to be asked to set up the groover, set it up near the kitchen in full view of everyone. Then, when someone asks about ”privacy”, tell them there really is no need for privacy
on a river trip, instead it is a good time to lose your silly hang ups. This insures that you will not be asked to set up the groover again.

4) If asked to take down the groover, do it at first light. Set it in front of the boat that carries it (hopefully not your own). Then when someone complains about breaking down the groover too early, point at it. This insures that you will not have to take down the groover again.

5) If you actually get stuck on some cook team, politely explain that you are a poor cook and
will gladly do all the dishes in exchange for not cooking. Then drink way too much during dinner prep so that you pass out shortly  after eating, rendering you unable to wash dishes. This not only
insures that you will not be allowed to wash dishes again, but will also relieve you of cooking duties as you will be kicked off the team.

6) If some wise guy thinks its going to rain and insists on putting up a tarp, file your objection with the TL vociferously and in such a manner as to discourage anyone from helping the paranoid
lout with the tarp. Then put up your one person tent in the best family tent spot you can find, quickly, before it rains, which it’s obviously going to do very soon. This insures that no one will find out you have an advanced degree in tarpology.

7) When rigging, always be certain to complain loudly about the amount of gear you
have to carry and how having such a heavy boat is why you are always last to camp, and does anyone have any ibuprofen please, because you used all yours already taking care of your aching joints. To do this well, always carry a dozen or so various sized dry bags stuffed with crumpled newspapers. They don’t weigh much, but it sure looks like you’re carrying a lot of stuff.

8) Never volunteer for anything. I learned that in the Army, which of course I volunteered for.

9) Make sure everyone knows exactly how many Grand trips, Selway trips, Middle Fork trips, overseas and South American trips, huge class VI drops and first descents you have done. On about day 3 this will help support your explanation of not doing much of the work, because when your rescue skills and vastly superior whitewater reading and running skills are needed, you will be fresh and not worn out from the daily river trip grind. It doesn’t matter that this is Deso. Anything can happen anywhere, anytime.

10) Enjoy solo trips. You’re going to be doing lots of them.

-anonymous

In this post I cover

• Who uses it, who doesn’t?
• Why it is exceptional
• Areas for improvement
• Summary of recommendations to the G+ team

Who uses it, who doesn’t?

Today I use Twitter as a compliment to Techmeme.com to keep track of conversations on current tech events, Facebook for my personal life, and LinkedIn for my professional. I see the opportunity for G+ to be the perfect marriage of what I love about FB and twitter; but like most people, I am on social networking overload. I only have a finite amount of time and if I were to really engage on a new site, I would have to abandon another one. I don’t believe in feeding one stream to another and I block people who stream their twitter feed to Facebook.  If my community came to G+, I could save some time. However, when I tried to use a tool to automatically add my twitter contacts to G+, only 14% of the people I follow mapped their twitter aliases to their G+ feeds. I haven’t tried doing the same with Facebook yet. So if my friends aren’t on it, who is?

Well, Tech folks are generally the first to adopt new tools and with G+, it is no different. Power users who have a dedicated following have had the most success switching. If I were driving conversations like Jason Calcanis or  stirring up the pot like Tom Anderson, I could see the value in switching over completely from Twitter. A good way to start using G+ is to follow tech journalists. Robert Scoble has a nice list  here. For a big picture view of who is on G+ today, check out the infographic from Bime Analytics showing the demographics today:

source: Bime Analytics

Why it is exceptional

Despite the fact that my larger community is not on G+ today. I still believe the technology is exceptional. Here are the highlights:

• Hangouts take social engagement to a new level – chat, share Youtube videos, and more in public or private groups
• Tracking likes – I can see all my +1′s across the net
• Discussion threads are superior to Twitter
• I can edit my posts – I hate typos lingering
• Picasa photo viewing – I can stream my photos to my TV as a slideshow
• Public profiles and Nearby encourage people to meet
• Circles – I love that I can have my family in one circle, work colleagues, and friends in others
• No hashtags – they have their time and place, but mostly they’re annoying
• From Andy Ihnatko ”Twitter: I shouldn’t have to click four times to block someone and report them for spam. Not when spam comes so damned often.” – Invite only solves this problem, for now.
• I own my content, I can download my posts, pictures, comments, etc. (In settings — Data Liberation)
• No noise from companies asking you to like their Shredded Wheat
• No annoying game status announcements unless you are actively competing with someone

Areas for improvement

So why hasn’t my community hopped on to Google+? Beyond simple inertia on Facebook and Twitter, what could make Google+ compelling enough?

Natalie Villalobos of Google asks for feedback on this post. Here is mine.

Disclaimer: Before I publish this post, I know it will be obsolete. Why? Because the Google engineering team is moving at lightening speed. Shortly after highlighting the fact that discussions were not easily shared, they fixed it. They’re adding new features and fixes all the time. Also, these are my opinions and reflects only minor research with other users.

I love Gmail and have been a user since the early days. Everyone I know fell in love with Gmail for it’s simplicity. After years of using Gmail I still like the look and feel. In fact, I don’t understand why Google+ uses a different, more gloomy white on black top level navigation. It is as if I feel I am leaving a seamlessly integrated environment. Perhaps Google wants to sufficiently differentiate G+ integration and not have another Buzz kill repeat. By that I mean, before Buzz was released, GChat status was a thing. It was widely used to bait your friends, share amusing and distracting links, laugh, and even flirt without the expectation of anyone leaving comments. It was a way to engage your friends into a private dialog in chat or email. Buzz ruined this. Now the GChat status messages are mostly stagnant and Buzz sits there unused. Sure you can turn off Buzz in your settings if you want to, but most people don’t know that. Most accidentally drop into Buzz trying to click on their inbox. Instead of unread messages, they are bombarded by people using Buzz as yet another distribution channel for their twitter or RSS feeds. Why do you need Buzz if you have Google Reader?

Oddly enough, I recently turned Buzz back on when I realized it was the only way to highlight my Tweets on my G+ profile page.  I would rather just have direct Twitter and RSS Feed integration on the G+ pages and put Buzz to rest. It is misleading to see Buzz on my profile page when really what I am trying to highlight is my twitter feed. People will go back to using GChat status for its purpose, a short sweet one way status message.

An annoying little tidbit: why send me emails notifying me of updates in G+ by default?  My inbox is for work and private messages, not social networking. Don’t clutter my inbox! Google knows I already looked at my social notifications, which is why there is a 0 in my notifications box. Don’t make me delete twenty emails on the topic or remember to change my G+ notification settings.

Now take a look at my G+ stream. If I click on rebecca.dias@gmail.com, I would expect to go back to my email. Instead it is equivalent to clicking on my profile image on the menu bar which pulls up a summary of my G+ profile.

+Rebecca isn’t grouped with the other G+ menu items on the top level nav, but I still get that it is G+ related. If I click on it I would expect to go to my G+ profile page. Instead it takes me to my circles stream like the Google+ image and the icon with the list with a roof on it. I need to click on my name without the + sign or my larger profile image to go to my profile.

If I click on Photos on the top level nav, I go to my photos in Picasa. If I click on the Photos stream, I see everyone’s photos on G+. But the experience feels disconnected. It feels like Picasa versus G+.

Chat looks different on this page from my gmail account, buy not really.  What is truly different here? It is critical that chat does not become as noisy and annoying as facebook. I don’t want to be bothered by anyone in all of my circles at all hours of the day. I would prefer to keep my close friends and work colleagues separated from my larger social graph. There needs to be a fine balance here… don’t ruin Gchat by making it too noisy as my circles grow. Don’t Buzz kill my GChat!

All of the images of people in my circles on my stream screen are empty, but if I click on my profile page, the images show up. Bug?

The #1 problem with G+ today is lack of Peeps and the amount of activity on their feeds. Naturally, I want to get my close friends on the site first. There is a list of suggested users, that I assume must already be on G+. What a minute, I can’t see Michael ever using a social networking site, why is he being suggested to me? And Brandy at school is just a dead email address. If I add a suggested user to a circle, what happens, do they get an invite?  Hmmm, I wish I could just import my current social graph, like my Facebook contacts?

On my profile view, why are there three ways to get to my photos? How will uploading a photo to Picasa or to G+ change my experience? Which leads me to my #1 beef with G+: the photos integration. From the Picasa support page:  ”Google+ provides unlimited storage for photos, which are automatically resized to 2048 pixels. Videos up to 15 minutes in length are also free.”  But, there is a 1 Gigabyte limit if you’re going through Picasa directly. Ugh! I have 1647 photos on Facebook from my world travels. An easy way to migrate over my community would be to begin tagging people in photos and sharing them. I was elated when I found the plugin from Amiworks to migrate my Facebook photos to G+. It failed shortly after the migration, why? Because the plugin uses the Picasa APIs, which makes the free limit of 1GB storage kick in. Am I going to pay Picasa money so I can move off of Facebook and onto G+. Nope! Fix this problem or the site is dead in the water. Tagging is the critical piece of gold that will get my community to at least log in and see what photos I have posted.

Summary of recommendations to the G+ team

In summary, I have the following recommendations:

• Make it easier to mention people not in your circles in posts i.e. if I go to your page, have mention there
• Kill buzz – keep my email focused on productivity, invest in G+ and Reader instead.
• Provide robust twitter integration into G+ or Google Reader or both (embrace the competition) – consider hosting comments to a twitter status like Facebook did with importing blog posts to notes.
• Allow email notifications as an opt-in on a per post basis, or with other general settings.
• Align all key Google properties with a common look and feel. Stay true to simplicity and tight, seamless integration. Clean up the menu bar, make it more intuitive and consistent across all properties.
• Have a consistent top level nav regardless of the property. Consider grouping +<username> with the rest of the G+ dashboard. Make the link to the profile page be more intuitive.
• I know my email address, put that in the drop down for the quick profile view.
• Rethink Suggestions. Show people on the G+ network that you are not yet connected to. Have Send invitations integrate into your address book or more importantly, your twitter and Facebook accounts (Provide dev APIs for plugins for this if not native).
• Monetize some way other than storage on Picasa.
• Invest in TV and tablet viewing experience of photos and videos.
• Fix bugs in +1 links.
• Prioritize comments based on likes akin to Quora and other discussion forums.

In general, focus on getting some key social people on G+ and make them love the platform. As they tag their friends in pictures & posts, the people will come with time. I have 547 friends on Facebook. If I could easily start tagging them in posts, their curiosity would bring them over.

That’s all for now. Now I am signing off of social networking sites so I can get some work done.

Note: I didn’t try to tackle the names issue on Google+, but here is a great post on it.

You can now “+1″ and “Like” my pages. Also, this brings together all of my personal and professional interests. If you like what I write about in Tech, subscribe to the tech category of my blog. If you think tech is mumbo jumbo but you love whitewater, subscribe to my kayaking blog.

Sadly, most of my comments, tweets, and likes were lost in the migration of my older sites (formerly http://68bomber.blogspot.com and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rdias/). A small price to pay to consolidate and rebrand.

Gain a greater understanding of what Vesselhead is all about. Also learn more about my personal thoughts on business and life. If you have any recommendations, please Contact Me, chat with me on Twitter / Google+, or leave a comment.

Why did I make the change?  What technology am I using now?

Many moons ago I had my first blog, I don’t even know the url now. Those thoughts are lost in the Internet ether. Then when I joined Microsoft, I created a blog on MSDN to work within the bounds of that community. In hindsight, this was the right thing to do, but you pay a price when you don’t have your own domain.  When you move on, you leave your followers behind.

For a spell I was maintaining a blogger site. Then one day I was inspired to create a new web-site after meeting David Rusenko of Weebly, an awesome developer and good friend of my nephew. I was impressed by what he was doing with Weebly and it inspired me to create the v1 of Vesselhead. Sadly, I ran into some stumbling blocks and found I was spending more time managing Weebly than I was my site. I decided to re-evaluate my options.  I wish the Weebly team a lot of luck moving forward and believe if you want to build an online store, it’s a powerful and simple way to do it.

Over the past year, I have evaluated sites like Tumblr (too closed – i want to own my content), SquareSpace (lockin), and many others. In the end, WordPress won out. Why? The design and developer community around it. It just made my life easier without compromising the power that I want. It is established and I don’t see the tech going away anytime soon. I can count on plugins that will support new device architectures like the iPad. Let’s see if it lives up to my expectations.

In a search to learn more about the Digital Wanderer, I have been  interviewing people on their habits and practices with mobile devices. This is one interview that I spent some time turning into a video. Below, I summarize the key takeaways which aides in watching the movie.
Gearld is a 34 yr old Boutique Hairstylist serving the Seattle Hipster scene. Watch this video if you are building solutions that target this demographic.

My Favorite Quotes

“I have a finite amount of energy, I put a lot more weight on actual interactions and actual reputation.” (In reference to social networking)
“I consider an iPad in the realm of an object of lust.”

Subtitled Text that Paraphrases Interview and Captures Key Points

• His first computer was an iBook G4. It is now relegated to his studio as an MP3 player using an external terabyte hard-drive
• He has never owned a Windows PC
• He is technology aware and relies on the Cloud for his small business
• He went from buying 5 to 1 apps per month after the novelty of the app store wore off
• He learns about apps by word of mouth & articles he reads
• He uses his MacBook for a bigger display and heavier processing for apps like GarageBand, Adobe, and Business CardReader
• He has become price sensitive and is less likely to buy a new app for his MacBook Air. $60 seems like a lot for an app
• Gerald does not use self scheduling apps, he uses texting for both his and his customer’s convenience.
• Important Apps are on his home screen: Text, Mail, Calengoo, One Bus Away, Pandora, Skype
• The rest is organized by folders or gets lost in the clutter. He deletes apps he deems as clutter before buying new ones
• He saves money when he uses the iPhone for Guitar apps: tabs, tuning, metronome, chordBook, and emulation amp Kit
• Gerald doesn’t use Twitter or Facebook outside of Pages
• A loyal, close network takes time to build and obtain
• As one person, social media takes too much time
• As his business grows he plans to outsource the social engagement
• He is wary of the viagra social media brings
• Clients that come through systems like Yelp have different expectations that cause him more work
• Gerald would buy a PC if he built a recording studio
• While he plays with new technology and his ex had a Droid he can’t imagine switching unless Apple really screws up. It’s too much to learn
• He doesn’t tether anymore – he doesn’t like losing his game scores.
• But he feels tethering should be a part of his unlimited data
• He doesn’t believe in paying for internet twice
• He would move away from AT&T and Comcast if he could. Comcast’s 4G wireless device is broken & he can’t get support
• Gerald prioritizes his discretionary spending between technology and guitars
• He believe the iPad offers a solution that is right in between what his iPhone and MacBook provide
• He’ll buy an iPad when the utility adds up to more than what he can get with his Air or iPhone
• or after buying his bass guitar to keep up with the jones
• He feels that iPad 3G contract is a rip off for him. He doesn’t want to pay for Internet three times

Note: Since completing this Interview, Gerald has finally fallen from the pressure and filled out his Facebook profile.

I summarize the current state of affairs here:

• RIM (now reporting drop in units sold instead of just lost share)
• Nokia (in a state of civil war with MeeGo vs. Win Phone 7 partnership)
• Microsoft (retailers sabotaging sales in US) are in trouble.
• Meanwhile Apple is rumored to have gone back to the drawing board to get the iPhone 5/September release out.
• Is it possible that the Carriers could challenge Apple and make them remove their virtual SIM technology? Apple is also rumored to be releasing an emerging market phone.
• Meanwhile, Android keeps plodding along to achieve world dominance with HTC and Samsung leading the device sales.
• Does HP have a future in licensing Web OS?