The Great Google Experiment

This whole thing started when I changed over to a Google Apps domain.  I began consolidating all of the email accounts that I’ve had and streamlining work-flows to allow more time to those things not requiring seat time behind a computer.  Now, with that said….I’m not sure that I’ve actually accomplished anything at all other than to eliminate some email accounts.  But, I push onward to develop my own perfect little world where I know whats going on at any given time.

2009 has been an interesting year in terms of weeding out technological things I feel I need and things I don’t.  I’ve done a tremendous amount of experimentation with regards to content management, blogs, PC’s, laptops, smart-phones, media players and social networking sites.  Some things I really liked and others…not so much.  In the end, I still like to sit in front of my ridiculously overpowered PC and play games at night with my buddies or surf in style on my 25″ monitor.  However, what is also true is that I’m becoming equally at home doing many of these things from the comfort of my cell phone or on a laptop that I may have access to elsewhere…maybe even my PS3.  Its becoming clear that these “other” devices are converging and making it easy to access the information I want from damn near anywhere.  This is great!  A good friend of mine told me a couple years ago that he was enjoying all the technology he had in place because it made him feel plugged in…you know connected to the world around him.  While I probably said “cool” and nodded my head in agreement, it wasn’t until this year that I could share that feeling.  I’ve found that I’m able to produce what I want, manage it the way I want and present it in nearly limitless ways.  I really do feel plugged in and part of something that I’m not sure I fully understand yet.  It is “cool” and I’m glad to be able to experience it.

So, what made the cut?  Well, I’ve found a number of services and apps that have made my life much easier…MOSTLY FREE.  I’ve also found that the trend seems to be towards enabling universal access to sites and services based on a single or consolidated credentials.  This has been both semi-complicated and easy depending on the provider.  The positive news is that this trend is gaining traction and its getting easier and easier to pull information from one service to another.  The open source community has been stellar in this regard and is in my opinion the driver of this movement.

Google Apps has been the driver behind my 2009 quest to become plugged in.  This year I had a horrible experience where I had a system component fail before I had a chance to fully back up my system.  I lost most all of my mail and several contacts.  Not only was this very upsetting to me, it just plain sucked.  Every time I wanted to rebuild my PC I had to go through this whole ordeal of backing up mail and contacts and taking it on faith and past experiences that I could retrieve it when the time was right.  It worked but at the same time it was a lot of effort.  Google Apps was my answer.  Well at least Gmail was anyway….  When I started taking a serious look at Google for my document management and communication I was a bit worried that I’d be giving up some of my ease of use niceties that I had become accustom to.  I was right.  Despite the fact that I’m out here writing about how well all this stuff works, it has not been easy and you will compromise to a degree in some areas.  Still, I accomplished my goal.  By using Gmail as my primary email application, I do not have to worry about backing my email or contacts up any longer.

With a successful implementation of Gmail under my belt, I began to look at what else I could do with Google Apps.  I found out that you could actually take an existing domain (ie. TheVanRaes.com) and convert it to a Google Apps Domain.  SWEET!  Regardless, I pushed ahead and without too much contemplation converted.  In my mind, I was not only helping myself but I’d be able to help my family as well.  Specifically, if it was good for me then it was certainly better for them right?  I even wrote about it back in July on this blog and was very excited to Google-ize the rest of my family.  Well, what seemed a no brainer to me was a difficult pill to swallow for everyone else.  I could have pushed it but I didn’t feel it’d be worth it.  I didn’t really want to fight with my family over something so self serving.  In the end, my other family members did not want to part with their long-standing email addresses and client side software that they’d been using for years.  Ok, I understand….I’ll have the last laugh though when they call me one of these days because they lost all their email (evil grin).  A win for me but in truth a failure for my self proclaimed movement.

My next foray was with my cell phone.  I wanted a smart-phone and a bunch of guys at work were using the famously applauded and well liked Apple iPhone.  I considered getting one briefly until I started researching AT&T’s network and discovered that things weren’t always so lovely there.  Not only were there issues I found with AT&T’s network but a transitioning to AT&T would have been problematic when nearly all of my friends, my family and my employer all used Verizon.  So, stuck with the realization that Verizon was really my only option, I took a look at what was available at Verizon in terms of a “smart phone”.  The Blackberry Storm, recently released and much hyped, was what I had my eye on since it was an all touch screen device like the iPhone.  Still, I read many negative reviews on this phone and was a little worried that I might have yet another disappointment on my hands.  That was until I talked to one of my friends who, at the time, was successfully and happily using a Blackberry Storm and gave me a reliable review to base my decision on.  I decided to take the plunge and went with the Storm.  To my delight…well after a firmware update anyway, the phone turned out to be a positive experience.  It didn’t have all the glitz of the iPhone and hardly any apps but it did what I needed it to do and did it pretty well.  The light came on in my mind when I realized that it could aggregate all of my email, contacts and calendars into a single in-box.  It also allowed me to make Twitter updates and Facebook posts as easily as if I was in front of my computer.  This was HUGE!  The fact that it integrated “well” with Google was a huge bonus and I figured I’d just stumbled onto the greatest leap forward in communication since the cordless phone was invented! I was even able to convince my wife to trade in her beloved Palm Centro for a new Blackberry Tour.  All was well in the universe, the planets had aligned and I was very happy indeed.  I should have known that it was only a matter of time before my whole world would come crashing down.

In October of this year, the Motorola Droid was introduced as the next great thing in smart-phone technology.  Indeed, it was quite remarkable sporting a fast processor, a huge high resolution screen and a second generation operating system from none other than my savior….GOOGLE.  Android version 2.0 was about to debut on the Droid and I was beside myself to get my hands on this device.  In my mind it was the last piece of the puzzle of the total and complete stratification of my digital life!…well that and one of my close friends bought one and I couldn’t be denied.  I mean c’mon.  So I bought a Droid and it has changed pretty much everything in terms of what I now feel I need from a “cell phone”.  It doesn’t just integrate with Google, it is Google so there is no converting, translating or manipulating to do.  It just works.  And, given its Linux roots, it is what I consider to be the first nail in the coffin for the ever so popular Net-book.  The Droid is basically just that…oh and you can make phone calls on it too.

Now, I’ve been an on again off again member of Facebook for a little over a year but lately I’ve been using it more and more especially since the acquisition of the Storm which had a cool little app built in that allowed me to update on the go (the Droid has this, as well as most smart-phones actually).  Twitter on the other hand hadn’t been very useful to me until lately when I finally had a friend to follow and it quickly became very clear what the appeal is.  There is just something about getting those little status updates or location information that makes you feel a part of something that you actually are not.  Its Voyeurism squared!  I also spend quite a bit of time on YouTube watching things that peak my interest especially in terms of technology.  Why do I mention this?  Well, frankly the fact that I’d become a frequent poster on both Facebook and Twitter as well as use YouTube regularly shed light on another problem that I hadn’t given much thought to.  Usernames and Passwords!  I mean it really gets to the point where you have so many digital identities on the web that it becomes nearly unmanageable.  In an ideal world you’d have credentials that you use over and over again across multiple sites be it a forum or social networking site or your bank for that matter.  The problem is, at least it has been my experience, that the username you want to use is frequently taken or doesn’t meet some criteria that the website in question requires.  Same goes for passwords.  So what do you do?  You create a new slightly different set of credentials that you think you’ll remember but you don’t.  Sheesh!  Pretty soon you start creating spreadsheets and what not all in attempt to “control” what you cannot.  As luck would have it though, Google has come to save me yet again from the rapid expansion and proliferation of modern security within the World Wide Web.  Brilliant!  Now, its not nearly done yet and perhaps Google’s idea wont remain in Google’s hands forever but it has gotten me to consider the implications of a single sign on across multiple applications and web services.  After all, in my days in I.T. one of the projects we spent a great deal of time and energy on was single sign on across all corporate OS’s and Applications.  Why not extend this home where it really matters?!  It started with YouTube and continued to Facebook and has moved in on Twitter.  The three applications I’ve grown to love all have the ability to be digitally transparent to one another and allows me access to each service without having to remember 3 separate sets of credentials.  These are just a few examples but I think its clear what the benefit could be eventually.  A ubiquitous environment where you seamlessly traverse your applications, services and media.  Cloud computing aside, it is my opinion that we will continue to see more and more of this as we march forward into the future of web based applications.  I’m ready for it and welcome it as I continue to realign the way I communicate with those around me and especially those I’m close to.

Then there is this thing…this blog…this website…whatever.  Its been both the bane of my existence and something I guard wholeheartedly.  I bought the domain name a few years ago with a simple goal of creating a “family” website where I could send my family and friends for updates on what we were doing, post pictures etc.  I never imagined what a challenge that would be and believe me it was.  I think for the record, I should point out that I’m not a programmer or a web developer in any way and most of my expertise is on the networking and server side hardware when it comes to I.T.  That said, I still have this closet desire to create, to have a space that is mine on the web where I control everything and say whatever I want to.  My lack of knowledge in this space would have been much harder to overcome if not for tools and apps such as the one I use currently, WordPress.  I played with Drupal and Joomla and anything else that said “Content Management” in the title.  What I learned though is that even with a good set of tools that help you manage a site, they still take an inordinate amount of time to manage and provide content to.  In terms of what was my initial goal in the “Family Website” turned into a God awful display of things I thought looked cool versus something that anyone might find useful.  It just didn’t work.  Then the unthinkable happened, my site got hacked and I just gave up.  The site lay dead for many months while I tried to bury the pain of my failure.  When I learned about the whole “Google Apps” integration my interest in creating a website was again nudged to the front of my brain.  This time though, I would concentrate on putting something together for me, only me and especially me.  I would post content when I felt like it and not be so discouraged when nobody visited my site.  The main point would be to put a face on the front of my deliciously clever domain name (that was a joke) which now held all my precious email addresses while simultaneously being backended by Google.  SWEET!  The revelation here lately has been though that while I was trying to get this site back in shape I discovered that even my own website could seamlessly (well mostly anyway)  post content across sites such as Twitter and Facebook with very little effort.  It became so easy in fact that I had to change many of my settings to control when things posted and to which sites.  Regardless, its been a pretty cool experience learning how to move information from one place to another from a single interface.  I don’t know yet how practical this all is but the fact that I can do it makes me very excited about what could be down the road.  Now, I realize that this isn’t my doing and for those of you snickering right now saying to yourselves this is old news….well it may be, but when someone such as me can access it and feel confident that lesser people than I could do this as well, that’s something to behold.

More to the point and to be fair, Google is not the end all be all for everyone and I’m still not sure if it is for me.  I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone rush out and get Googled or go through what I went through.  But, what I can tell you is that Google coupled with some patience and a little faith has yielded a fairly satisfying sense of omniscience among my digital friends and family.  If nothing else, I’ve become quite a bit more educated in ways I can stay in touch with those I care about.  I still do some things the old fashioned way but I continually look for easier and faster ways to do things online that I enjoy.  This website and my blog have become the center of my digital universe by allowing my ideas and notions to be proliferated among multiple apps simultaneously with the click of a mouse.  Its incredible to me as I’ve been for years in search of a satisfying way to communicate outside my comfortable circle of friends while maintaining a little control.  I remember , “Back in the Day”, spending hours and hours just trying to get a website up and online that didn’t look like crap only to realize that anytime I wanted to add more content I was taking a huge risk and potentially undoing everything I’d worked so hard for.  Today, its all automatic and anyone can put up a beautiful website whose content is fully managed in an easy to use backend while at the same time aggregating the information you put there among a multitude of different applications.  You want to add a photo gallery…a blog…a storefront? Bam! Done! Just that easy.  Imagine the state of affairs 10 years from now….how will my digital life be altered the next time?  Maybe I can give my fingers a break and I can just think my blog into existence?  Who knows….but I will tell you this…it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

(In a future post I will list all the software and web based applications that I’ve experimented with recently and give some feedback.)