I have long found Outlook a pain-in-the-butt to use and a few years ago switched back to Thunderbird (I had been a user of the Netscape Mail client in a former life…).

I find Thunderbird is much lighter and quicker at filtering mail than Outlook. There are better clients but all seem to have their own quirks which have kept me from adopting them.

The main difficulty with replacing Outlook with Thunderbird is that it lacked a good calendaring option. Incompatibility with the other Outlook stalwarts in my office meant I was forever having to ‘View Source’ on email bodies to see when a meeting was to be held so I could go and manually enter it into Google Calendar (my primary calendar which I share with my team). Fortunately I found the Lightning plugin to add a calendar to Thunderbird but I was still manually updating meetings in Google Calendar.

Now I have just come across this excellent tutorial on setting up what might be the holy-grail of calendar setups and want to share it with all Thunderbird users and frustrated Outlook users. Here is the short version of the tutorial for experienced Thunderbird users :

1. Install Thunderbird 2, RC1
2. Install the Lightning plugin so Thunderbird can read Outlook meeting requests and place a calendar in the Thunderbird interface.
3. Install the Google Calendar provider to allow Lightning to add two-way synching with Google Calendar.
4. Add the XML address for your primary Google Calendar (Found under “Calendar Settings >> Calendar Address”).

And you are done – test it by setting a meeting in the calendar within Thunderbird. You should see the meeting appear in your Google Calendar shortly (I had to manually refresh). More information at each the sites I have linked to.

Following on from my previous post on the fast-food like properties of web-content I thought I would look at the service which embodies the latest acceleration in content consumption, Twitter.

For the uninitiated, a ‘tweet’ (as referred to in this post’s title) is a single message sent via the Twitter service. Twitter is a short-message system which can be accessed by numerous applications and devices; primarily, but not restricted to, web, IM and mobile. Messages are by default public and therefore you could think of it as ‘mini-blogging’ where messages can be posted as easily as sending an SMS or IM.

The rise of Twitter in the early adopting set (lets face it, it hasn’t hit mass market yet) has seen the introduction of a new, even more throw-away type of content. The plethora of states, moods and emotions punctuated by links to sometimes vaguely interesting content really leaves a faint impression. The experience lacks cohesion and any real filter determining significance or relevance of a particular content item. This gives it a sort of fun lightness and I guess the beauty of it is in the aggregate of the impressions you get from someone’s Tweets you follow.

There has been plenty of discussion on blogs about Twitter – all discussing what amounts to the same thing – does this medium have future? Not to be silent on the subject I do think it is a service which will be a place alongside other internet-mediums like blogs and IM. I think it will be in a form evolved from the one we know today – one of the reasons being that many currently heavy users of Twitter in this experimental adoption phase will stop or at least severely par back their usage of the service as they realise its capacity to cause constant distraction, fragmenting their thinking and to generally get in the way of Getting Things Done. I’ll touch more on this in a subsequent post.

Something I haven’t heard much in the current conversations about Twitter and that I think is important is that one of the key strategic strengths of the service is infrastructural – the link between IM and mobile network messaging and the web is a useful one which many applications will build upon. I think one of the players in the industry, whether Twitter or Jaiku or a new player to come (and regardless, likely to be acquired by one of the big companies) will benefit from owning a reliable set of gateways maintaining these links.

The direction the presence products will expand will be in their ability to filter and summarize the content they deliver – experimentation with Twitter and Pipes will be interesting as the service will need to overcome its procrastinatory qualities. With the internet already being the procrastinators achilies heel the last thing we need (and I am assuming I might be representative of at least some of us in this) is a stream of random information flashing on GTalk or our mobile phones constantly to distract us from what we are actually doing.

Where Twitter-like applications could come into their own is if they can combine the users current geo-location, mood or other information to tailor very relevant alerts to them. Currently however its like trying to work with firehose to the side of your face.

I just read over at Joseph Scott’s blog that Google Trends appears to be dead. Some further investigation on the Google Group for Google Trends seems to confirm this. I think it would be a shame if Google Trends was to be decommissioned as the service provides a way for ordinary netizens to examine the behaviours of searchers online.

Whilst SEOs would be hardest hit I think that the loss for the rest of us is also significant. There are other similar services however I’d wager none would compare to the volume of data available to Google (dominating around 70% of search in most countries).

Don’t be too worried though, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the trends data appear in another format… Personally, I will keeping an eye on Google Analytics. Remember Google also bought MeasureMap, so by my reckoning there’s bound to be an uber analytics tool on the horizon. The free analytics tools are great for encouraging webmasters to continue to invest in Adwords and Adsense.

Update: Google buys GapMinder. They are really building up an arsenal of data analysis tools!

Update 2: Again Joseph Scott has the scoop on Google having updated the data available on Trends up to Feb 2007.

We seem to rediscover every few months that many users are typing the name of the search engine they are on into the search box. I read many disparaging remarks directed at this very large group of users and I wonder why the remarkers would think this behaviour is ‘clueless’ or ‘dumb’?

Forgetting what the user ‘should’ do, lets consider the two options for a moment. Firstly, in terms of physical and functional composition, both methods of navigating the web comprise of a single field and respond to the enter key; so no difference there. Further, one is placed at the top of the screen, the other often nearer to the centre. I’d say thats one factor that the search box has over the navigation bar.

Moving on, the navigation bar will in most cases punish you for mistyping. Google and other engines will offer a link to (most likely) the site you intended. Now thats handy! I’ve started using the search method for those times its handy. Google Desktop makes it easy to get to a search box (just hit ctrl key twice). This is much easier than ctrl-tab a few times combined with another key-combination to open an URL (and then you get to type the URL…). Who wants to be doing what they ‘should’ do anyway? That sounds clueless to me!

Not all instances of a search engine name being entered into a search engine is for the above reasons, though. ‘Google’ is entered into the Google search engine because who can remember where all their products are housed. Google, in their effort to deliver a ‘simple’ homepage, avoid the portal type page so typing ‘Google’ can be all users can do to find their many great products.

Another point to consider are those keywords put into the navigation bar which aren’t legitimate URLs are often sent to a search engine in browsers such as Firefox. Who wants to spend time repetitively typing the fairly redundant ‘www.’ and ‘.com’ anyway…?

What can we learn from all this anyway? Well next time you consider calling a user stupid, stop yourself and look for the efficiency they are seeking. It can teach you alot about how you could make your application easier. Not everything needs to be reduced to a unthinking action but its worth taking the thinking out of the tasks that don’t require it so that effort is most effectively spent.

Maybe browsers should ditch the navigation bar? Maybe the navigation bar and search box should be one? I’d like to know your thoughts.

Google have extended further into personalized search results for those with ‘Search History’ turned on in their Google Account. Its likely to result in all sorts of conjecture which I’d like to sidestep and instead spend a few moments pondering out aloud.

Could personalized search – whether this implementation by Google or a future one (by any provider) help reduce spam results by affecting the potency of SERPs? Imagine a time where everyone’s results are personalized by numerous factors, whether by search history, demographic, geographic, psychographic or any-other-graphic. The concept of SERPs disolves as the results are further segmented into a myriad of micro-niches.

Spammers incentive (and indeed, maybe even legitmate SEO implementers) to occupy the top SERPs must be diminished in line with the diminished reward? Could the effort required to achieve positions across the almost infinite permutations of SERPs (the results for phrases multiplied by all possible personalizations) tip the effort required to achieve a return to un-economic level?

You could argue that the number of permutations could be quite low. Whilst only some keywords will have differing meaning and contexts, most could have a context which may yield a different result for almost any user. This might not be practical, however, as one wonders what logic or intelligence could be used to determine which factors to apply to which keywords. When to apply geographic information, say for searches relating to buying a car versus when not to, in the case of me searching for a solution to a javascript issue I was working on.

Whatever happens, this is an interesting area of development – for ideas covered here as well as the many concerns currently being raised in the blogosphere.

Danny Sullivan does an excellent write-up on this latest release from Google so I suggest heading there for more details.

In these days of Google-mania it seems that Google has become the ultimate yardstick. I think this is strange as there is nothing standard about Google – it is the outlier, the edge-case and not definitely not representative of the market at large.

An unreasonable amount of speculation around Google and the companies seen to compete with them has an unnatural effect on people’s interpretation of the state of a business or validity of a strategy.

We’ve seen google become a verb (and yes people are googling on Yahoo as well) but to me the past-tense variation of this verb (‘googled’) has another meaning, that of companies affected (positively or negatively) by the overblown nature of the Google-myth at present. To put this word in context I think Yahoo is currently being partially ‘googled’. ‘googled’, to a company undergoing this phenomenon, is probably also a synonym of any number of slang words for coitus.

Google products entering new spaces cause people both inside and outside companies in the same space to make irrational decisions. Strategies change, stock prices drop and, from my experience, often for naught – many companies will report that Google entering their space, despite their initial panic and countless crisis meetings, actually saw an upturn in their own businesses.

A phrase I have always been fond of is ‘the elephant in the room‘. It evokes a brilliantly comic scene in my mind of some very sincere looking people talking whilst carefully ignoring an elephant which is perched in the corner of the room. This image visits me frequently when reading discussion about the state of the Yahoo business. It seems that many posters, enamoured with the creativity of Google’s endless list of products, fail to acknowledge the presence of the most successful publisher on the internet.

I certainly don’t want to downplay the issues at Yahoo, they clearly have structural issues which need to be addressed but I can’t help but just point at that friggin elephant that just sits there quietly blinking in the corner. Its a room with glass windows so the general public can see the elephant and they actually spend quite a bit of their time looking at it. It collects their mail for them, provides them news, helps them shop… sure, it looks like a patchwork quilt because many groups of talented frankenstein-like specialists helped put him together whilst carefully avoiding talking to eachother… but he’s always doing more for the public and his public go to him first when they are in need of information or a tool.

Meanwhile, us, the industry-types, the money-people, the other animals in this room are all looking at the chimpanzee that can poop primary colors and are throwing it peanuts.

I have been signing up to all sorts of web2.0 tools looking for a way to leverage my list of feeds. Many tools come close but have yet to offer quite the functionality with the level of completeness I have been after.

Matt Cutts, on commenting about the new Google customised search features, had this insight to share…

When I played with the first version, I wanted to avoid the standard stuff
where you plug in 1-2 sites and get a custom search engine that isn’t
blood-pounding-ly exciting (”Oh, a search box, and it searches. Great.”). So
what I did was take my feeds (I was using Bloglines at the time) and exported it
as an OPML file. Running a command like
cat export.opml | grep "title="
| cut -d'"' -f6 | grep -v '^$' | sort | uniq
was enough to get the
blog urls that I was reading (not the feed urls), and I threw those urls into
the custom search engine.

And just like that, *BOOM* I had a search engine that
covered 70+ blogs in the search/SEO industry. If I searched for [bug], it would
return search engine bugs, not bugs in general. OPML-import was so much fun that
the Co-op folks promised to support it (I know that importing from Bloglines
works; importing from Google Reader might still need a tweak to the OPML
parsing). It’s nice that every blogger can have a custom search engine that is
centered around their interests.

Smart guy, cuts straight through the gloss to a key use of this functionality. Hopefully they support a regular OPML import/sync from a fixed url (say a public newsgator OPML file…) so I can keep an engine up to date based purely on my web development blogs.

Combine that with certain del.icio.us links and now I have a massive information resource minus the majority of noise (you see I am not in the habit of bookmarking splogs and the like…).

In the mean time my dummy spit over that post still has me looking at other engines… A suggestion from a commenter got me back looking at snap.com. I’ve gotta say – its actually a joy to use! A recommend giving it a shot, its got liberal use of web2.0 features but in ways that really aid usability. The best feature by far being keyboard support.

With the issues I am having with my Yahoo! account and the innanity of Google’s legal goons attempting to dictate the public’s use of language, I find myself wondering what my options are in regards to a new search provider. Of course, like most other web developers, I use Firefox predominantly (Firebug being a big part of the reason behind that) and therefore want to add a new default engine into the search dropdown it provides.

I wandered over to ask.com (they’ve always done a nifty thing here and there and might be able to provide the quality of searching i require). The URL is also nifty short in case I need to type it. The offer a pox looking toolbar that makes me think ‘Web Browser Helper Object’ (that is not good).

A quick wander through a few links on Ask I find this page…

Its been updated for IE7 to guide you through setting Ask as the default engine but then goes on to give directions for… Netscape Friggin’ Communicator!?! No quick add link for the ‘Ask’ engine? Wikipedia.org, Dictionary.com and even our ticketing system at work has implemented one of these… Why not Ask?

Has anyone switched? Anything worth checking out and potentially switching to?