Simultech.net

Google Buzz has been getting a lot of attention over the last 48 hours, “its a twitter killer”, “its a disqus killer” “its a facebook killer” “its a wave killer” etc etc etc etc

Heres a few reasons why I won’t think it will succeed, at least in killing other services out there.  Please note these things are immediate first impressions, not prolonged use:

1. Its not a Twitter killer – Twitter succeeds because its deals with signal vs. noise in a unique way.  By forcing tweets to be less than 140 characters, only the important information is included.  Buzz doesn’t have this limit, imagine all the people you follow on Twitter into Buzz.  The amount of content produced and shown (especially since the current UI shows comments by default) will be astronomical.  Buzz has yet to show how it is going to deal with signal v noise.
2. Its not a Facebook killer – Buzz is all about publishing with sharing tacked on, Facebook is about sharing with publishing tacked on.  The walled garden of Facebook for better or for worse puts users into a sense of security.  Buzz is public by default, Facebook is private by default (despite Facebooks stupid privacy changes), this alone changes how people use it.
3. Google sucks at social and content generation – Don’t get me wrong, I love Google and their idiosyncrasies.  But it has to be said, Google sucks at social, and anything Google has done with regards to content generation sucks (rather than aggregation of other media which it is great at).
4. It’s not a Wave killer – People are under the misconception that Wave is the awful interface that was meant to replace email.  It’s not.  Wave is an underlying server structure that deals with a lot of current issues with synchronous communication and data breakdowns.  Buzz may actually be built on top of Wave, but again probably not, as Buzz (at least at this stage) doesn’t have functionality that needs OT and federation support.
5. No API – The “API” for Buzz at the moment is nothing more than a nested RSS feed (each profile has an RSS feed, and each story has an RSS feed of comments).  Nothing new here.  Twitter succeeded by having a rich API that people could applications that made sense out of the stream of data.  Any application could have Twitter as an output, whether for notifications, awareness, or another medium to publish on.  Any service like this: you need multiple ways to get data in and get data out.
6. Its stuck in Gmail – I love gmail, I use it everyday…from the comfort of Mail.app.  As far as I’m concerned there are 2 people that use the web interface for Gmail (apart from everyone using it from a public machine such as in a netcafe) – people who are web browsers fanatics, and people who don’t know how to hook their Gmail up to something like Outlook or Mail.  Web fanatics are those who already have a Blog, already using Twitter every 30 seconds, already running Disqus and already using Tumblr.  These people aren’t going to abandon an existing infrastructure that already have critical mass for something that only a limited amount of people will see.  For those using Gmail because they don’t know any better, chances are they aren’t going to post much because they aren’t going to grok it.

If anything, Buzz is much more likely to kill news sites such as Engadget, Blogger, and anything where there is rich content generation.  Buzz is essentially just a decentralised Blog recentralised inside Gmail.

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The screen sharing infinite loop

An interesting issue that I encountered when working on 2 macs at the same time. Stupidly I didn’t close 1 set of screen sharing before I opened the other. Unfortunately I couldn’t take a screenshot, as the computer was having a hard time keeping up with the infinite redraws.

The coolest thing was that a growl notification popped up as it was happening, so the notification went down the tunnel in a really really nice animation. I wish I had a phone which would take movies! *curses iPhone*

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Just a quick one, I was having a problem where Mail on Leopard was running very very slow. For instance, when typing an email, the text would show up 5 seconds after I had typed it. Anyways, to fix this issue:

http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/03/01/a-faster-way-to-speed-up-mailapp/

My mail sql db only went down a few meg, but the speed is phenomenal, running as fast as when it was first installed.

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Disable Gmail Spam Filtering

If you are a regular user of both Gmail and a desktop email client, then no doubt you have run (even if you have not realised) into the issue of Gmail catching legitimate email as spam.  While this isn’t such a big deal if you are using the web interface, it is a nightmare for users of email clients such as Mail or Outlook – where your junk folder is not normally visible.  With the release of Google Apps for businesses, this can become a very very bad thing, when suddenly you start missing critical emails.  Whats worse, is that Google doesn’t provide an option to disable spam filtering, even for Google Apps.  However, there is a work-around, and while quite silly, its easy as to implement.

• Log into the web interface on Gmail / Google Apps Email
• Click settings in the top right hand corner
• Click the Filters tab in the settings
• Create a new filter
• In the “Has the words” field, enter “is:spam” (without quotations) and click next step
• Ignore the ridiculous and untrue popup message
• Check “Never send to spam”
• You should now see that in your filters if a message is tagged with “is:spam”, then it is never sent to the junk folder

And its done – completely silly, but it works.  Now you will never miss an email again (even those hundreds of Viagra ads, so be warned).  The only big pain with this is if you are hosting a lot of Google Apps users, you need each user to manually do this, rather than having it system wide.

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Apple iPhone * 4?

Jason at ZDNet has just released a rumor discussing the possibility of the next iPhone containing a 4 core processor.  While he does talk about pure processing power, there real benefit would be the much better ability to perform and support multitasking .  Essentially, this would mean developers (including Apple themselves) would have much more power to perform functions apart from the application running at the time.  Essentially, this implementation would greatly improve the chances of getting copy/paste, quick switching, and most importantly services/applications/notifications running in the background.  Initially it would seem to be purely about processing power, but it would allow the architecture to better support features iPhone fan-boys have been ranting about since its first release.

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Another Macworld, and another disappointment.  But while the keynote did not deliver (wheres my Mac Mini?), and another year of the iLife/iWork Apple tax, there were a few things announced that deserve some recognition, including a Mac Tablet, iPhone organisation for professionals, and TV streaming direct to your iPhone.  Here are some breakdowns of the devices:

(continue reading…)

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Welcome to Simultech.net again. This is my first post since Wordpress decided that I no longer needed my blog content. However, looking at the glass half full, its a good chance to start some serious blogging, so I’m insistant this time that I will stick with blogging and keep up to date.  I have also installed a plugin to integrate the blog with Twitter, so anyone following me on Twitter may prepare for spam.

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