These are the blogs you won’t see on the Techmeme Leaderboard, Technorati’s Top 100 blogs, or the CruchBase BloggerBoard … at least not yet. They include VCs, entrepreneurs, coders, experts, and observers, and they bring a delicious mix of insight, experience, and passion to their blogs. While they may not have the right amount of link love, they need to be on your radar screens.
I’m really-really humbled. Last time I felt like this was when the Economist’s Business Intelligence Unit included me in their Thought Leadership list. Frankly, I had no idea what I was doing in such esteemed company, and I feel the same way now.
Writing “good” blog content is a tricky task. My favorite posts, which I consider more thoughtful, analytical often get quoted, but generally don’t attract a lot of readers. Then I have some of the quickies, like the Gmail import guide which become all time hits - at least in terms of traffic. I also have ‘accidental’ traffic, like two days ago the tragic earthquake in China sent me over 10k readers - unfortunately, as they really did not find what they came for. (more on this later).
Anyway, the part I really enjoy are the longer analytical pieces - which I don’t often have the time to afford. But back to The Industry Standard list: thanks, guys, again, I am very-very humbled, and appreciate it. And as a bonus, I am especially pleased to be featured together with fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani.
Wow, again… all I can say, I’ll try to keep up with the The Standard.
There’s nothing new or unexpected in this Technorati Monster screen:
In fact I see it so often, it feels like a standard Technorati feature. Perhaps it’s time to remove “right now” from the title. Technorati is borked. (period)
My favorite Twitter app, Twhirl died on me two days ago. Actually, it’ snot Twhirl itself, the error message clearly identifies Adobe Air, stating the installation is damaged.
Fixing it should be easy: just reinstall Air. Except… I can’t. Adobe installer says: This version of Adobe Air is already installed on your system. Yeah, thank you, I know, but it’s corrupted.
Oh, well, next step is uninstalling Air, then installing it again. Except… I can’t do that, either. A quick search shows I am not alone: several users report that in Vista Adobe Air does not show as an installed application, hence you can’t uninstall it, either.
Catch-22. I hope Adobe proves otherwise.
Update (5/16): I found a forum tip: run the Adobe Air installer from a command prompt with the -uninstall parameter. It worked, I got Air off the system, then installed it again. Guess what: Twhirl still reports damaged Air file. Next I thought I would uninstall Twhirl - I can’t. Unlike Air, this one is listed in the Control Panel, you can click on Uninstall - nothing happened.
I’ve been off twitter for several days now, have seen evidence of users reporting this issue but received no response whatsoever from either Twhirl or Adobe yet. This s*cks, big time.
Update (5/16): Adobe Support came through, the recommended the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. It helped, although not in a straightforward way. Steps involved:
Install Windows Installer Cleanup Util
Cleanup Adobe Air and Twhirl
Now Adobe Air shows up in Control Panel, so I click Uninstall. Error: This app requires a version of Adobe Air which is no longer supported. Oh, well, on to the next steps…
Install current Air version
Try Twhir: still shows Air error, the installation of the application is damaged.
But there is hope, at least now I can uninstall Air from the Control Panel.
Install Air again (same installer I just did minutes before)
Try twhirl again: still shows “damaged” message.
Try uninstalling twhirl from control panel - can’t. Air error again.
Try re-installing twhirl again. Can’t: already exist in current location… but that’s a good clue.
Installed Twhirl in new directory, and voila! it works now. To bad i have leftover crap from previous install.
In the end, after several days and many hoops, I am back on twitter (twhirl) again. Still like twhirl as a product, but their support sucks. Non-existent - at least on the very media they live and die for: twitter. 5 calls for help over 5 days left unanswered. I received better support from Comcast on Twitter.
I often need to share a document with a few reviewers / contributors, and I hate sending attachments. Attachments are redundant, wasteful, and if you start marking up different copies of the same document, then emailing them around, you’re in for a major version-control nightmare.
The clean solution: share an online document. But which platform to use? I use Zoho applications, widely recognized to be the best. But until today, there’s been one obstacle to unlimited, open collaboration: users had to create a Zoho account first. Not that it was complicated (30 seconds?), but some people will stay away from apps requiring account registration as a principle.
The solution? Well, if you have any sort of online presence, chances are you already have an account either with Yahoo or Google. From now on you can use these credentials - yes, your Google / Yahoo account - to log in to Zoho applications. No more worrying whether the other party can access your shared documents.
The Zoho team points to a poll ran by Lifehacker last year. Obviously there are more Google than Zoho users. But look at the reason: most already have a Google account, and refuse to create another one for Zoho. Those who actually tried both system prefer Zoho by a 3:1 margin. So it clearly made sense for Zoho to remove the bottleneck and open up to their systems.
But I suspect this is just the beginning. TechCrunch France Editor Ouriel Ohayon and ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett raised the issue of mass importing one’s Google documents to Zoho. I think it would make sense, although I don’t necessarily like importing - it’s a one-time shot.
Why not just make all documents available to online users, no matter where they were created? You should be able to list your Google and Zoho documents, open them, edit them, and save to whichever format (and storage) you want to.
Either way I’m sure we’ll see more open access and collaboration coming soon.
OK, OK, so SAP’ s annual conference was supposed to set everything on fire - but did they have to take it literally? We barely made it home and now Florida is burning. Oh, and one lucky person owns a miracle home: everything is charred except his house and lawn.
Do you think it’s Photoshopped? That’s what I thought, too, but Orlando Sentinel photographer Joe Burbank says he took the shot from a helicopter tour of the area.
Update: I did not think the photos would need explanation. Presumably everyone recognizes HP CEO Mark Hurd, but no, the guy on the right does not work for EDS. For younger readers: there was (is) a Very Blue, Very Big Corporation, that once made the transition from hardware to a services company, and the guy on the right is the turnaround CEO.
OK, that was the fun part, for real analysis read these other articles:
Cambrian House, the poster-boys of Crowdsourcing are essentially dead - assets being sold in a garage sale for a fraction of what investors put in. TechCrunch and Mark Evans speculate the House collapsed due to poor execution.
Of course.. in fact they were doomed to fail, and it was obvious ever since the 1000 pizzas episode. This is what I wrote back then:
They are not afraid of unusual publicity stunts, although frankly Feeding Google was more about noise than being smart: followed by cameras, completely unannounced, they descended on the Google campus with 1000 pizzas at 3pm. Did you get that? Google, as in Google the company famous for it’s free gourmet food, at 3pm, as in just after lunch, before dinner - no wonder they were soon escorted off campus.
Cambrian guys, I have a free idea for you: next time set up camp with your 1000 pizzaz at Stanford, you’ll be heroes and won’t leave without 100’s of new ideas…and I don’t even want 75 points, just invite me for the pizza-fest.
OK, I admit I am being sarcastic. And I liked the concept, too bad it did not work.
I haven’t posted for over ten days - and my feed readership is going up. Is that a message about my blogging, or what?
I had a few fun and hectic days @ SAP’s annual conference, SAPPHIRE - am still stuck here, got airplane ears on the flight here, which turned into a full-blown ear infection (hey, I even gave up my Eric Clapton ticket), and now the doc ordered me not to fly, to avoid risk of permanent damage. Yikes!
But this is all temporary inconvenience, nothing compared to what others have to go through. Yesterday an old family friend passed away. He was originally my Dad’s best friend, I remember seeing him around when I was a kid. Later he taught me how to drive a car. (He had his car tuned like a rocket - manual shift, mind you - and I think he got the fighter pilot and driver roles confused. I only got to the driver level…). Even later I played with his little daughter, was something of a “big uncle” to her - she is now a Mom herself. A three-decade, multi-generational friendship, passed from my Dad to me - cut off so abruptly. Just two months ago I was in Hungary and met him - energetic, dynamic, good-humored as always. Hospitalized a week later, diagnosed with leukemia another 2 weeks later. And now gone, forever. This is just crazy. We’re all so vulnerable.
All this put a bit of a damper on my blogging - but I’m coming back soon. And to all those new readers - not sure what brought you here, but thanks!
OK, OK, I admit, the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek… but real. Sophisticated Excel users have long complained that none of the online spreadsheets support Macros or Pivot Tables. The answer has so far been sorry, no can do…
Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.
EditGrid’s David Lee also suggested Pivot Table are too difficult to do online. Well, maybe, but here they are both, in Zoho Sheet. Not that it comes a real surprise, in fact ever since the launch of Zoho DB pivot tables were just a matter of time, and Zoho has promised macros for some time, too.
I admit I probably don’t appreciate the importance of these two features, as I’ve said before, the level of my spreadsheet competency is probably stuck somewhere at Lotus 1-2-3. . But even I used very limited Excel macros in the past, although typically be recording and editing afterward, rather than writing them in Visual Basic. Now Zoho Sheet can interpret VB directly, without using Microsoft’s back-end, and that means you can import your Excel spreadsheet, the macros no longer die. No other spreadsheet (other than Excel itself) supports VB macros.
I got lost about two thirds of the way in to this post from Steve Gillmor but the first third was a great read. Actually the whole thing was but I just got a bit lost as I think some of the things going on in Steve’s fast thinking brain didn’t quite make it through to the keyboard so you’re left having to assume some things. I’m assuming he likes Mesh though. I think he does.
Commenters on TechCrunch were ruthless, I won’t even begin quoting them. But don’t get me wrong: this is a good article, which would have been a great fit for ReadWriteWeb, but the TC crowd expects short, to-the-point, fairly descriptive posts. In the words of TC owner Mike Arrington:
Steve is an acquired taste. his writing isn’t efficiently packaged into bite sized chunks like a lot of people have come to expect. but if you decide to give it the attention it needs, you may find that you come away a little bit smarter after you’re finished.
Yes. And perhaps Mike is trying to redefine TC’s style himself. But you have to know your readers, Mike - perhaps a a new tab for Essays would be appropriate - or if you want Gillmor’s writing part of the main flow, a graphical “grab a coffee this is a long one” icon would help.
Now, on to the bigger question, why Live Mesh is just Barely Live. (And yes, this will be a long post, too, but due to the screenprints.)
The first leaked news declared this a solution to “sync everything with everything”. Then came Amit Mital, Live Mesh General Manager with a visionary video and announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, adding towards the end: initially it will sync only Windows PC’s, adding more platforms and devices over time. Ahh! So it’s a … Foldershare for now.
Minutes after the presentation I was chatting with a startup CEO who reminded me he had seen a similar video from Microsoft years ago: kid playing, Mom capturing video on cell-phone, family watching it almost real-time on various devices, executive-type Dad watching video on his laptop at an airport feeling “almost at home”. Great video, and yes, it was conceptually familiar, but what has materialized of it?
Live Mesh will be great when it really happens, but for now it’s largely waporware: pre-announcement, typical Microsoft-style. And now, if you’re still here, why don’t you follow me through the hoops of trying to sign up for (Barely) Live Mesh.
Google Search and several Microsoft blogs point to http://mesh.com so that’s where we start:
Hm… I could never figure out why I so often get signed out of Live Network (good old passport style), and if that’s the case why can I not sign back here. But that’s OK, we just take a detour to live.com, sign in and come back to mesh.com:
I though I had just signed in, but fine, let’s do it again. Oops:
The sign-in button changes to sign up - as in sign up for a waiting list. Not fun.. but let’s do it anyway. Btw, before the wait-list screen there was another screen where I had to agree to some terms - sort of usual for actually using a service, but for getting on a waiting list?
Now we’re in something called Microsoft Connect. Is this the same thing? Who knows…let’s click Register (but why, after sign-up, sign-in, agree, now register? WTF?)
I’m starting to really not like this. So far I’ve been presented with a maze of registration, confirmation, you-name-it screens, and I don’t know where the hell I am. Let’s backtrack a bit.
Oh, several screens above, at the waiting list signup, it stated on the next screen I should click Connection Directory, a small option on the top, not the main Register for Connect link… but who reads small prints, all screens should offer enough navigational clues to not get me lost. OK, redoing, now…
This jungle is the Connection Directory. No sign of Live Mesh, at least not on the first page. Text search to the rescue: there we are… somewhere towards the bottom (scroll way down) there is Live Mesh Tech Preview! Voila! (or not). The button to click is Apply Now! As if I hadn’t done it a zillion times already…
Hm.. I can do this now with my eyes closed… click.. click..click.
Geez, this looks like a plain old BS signup form again. I’ve had it. Done. I let others experiment with Microsoft’s Windows Dead Mesh. Let me know when it’s Live. For real.
I hope Adobe proves otherwise.
Non-existent - at least on the very media they live and die for: twitter. 5 calls for help over 5 days left unanswered. I received better support from Comcast on Twitter.
The solution? Well, if you have any sort of online presence, chances are you already have an account either with Yahoo or Google. 
Cambrian House, the poster-boys of Crowdsourcing are essentially dead - assets being sold in a garage sale for a fraction of what investors put in. 
Zoli Erdos
