Software

something for the weekend, Sir

Publish your metrics as a colourful chart in Google Spreadsheets or upgrade to Thunderbird 2.

goodbye pMetrics

Looked good but you forgot the cardinal rule of CRM.

It takes 3 years to win a new customer and a mere 3 seconds to lose a customer.

I was away for two weeks so didn’t have time to follow the ‘soap opera’.

goodbye last.fm

You are supposed to be unobtrusive software.

On two computers, you have spontaneously stopped working.

No changes to Windows Media player.

Plonk.

Yahoo! Mail versus Gmail

I was staggered to read on TechCrunch that Yahoo! Mail has 250 million users while the much younger and rapidly growing Google Mail (beta) service currently has a paltry 51 million users in comparison.

I wonder what proportion of these users, in these impressive headline (marketing) numbers, actively use the respective services on a daily basis.

However, I was not surprised at Yahoo’s offer of ‘unlimited’ email storage which gets a cheap headline and was pretty inevitable. A tiny minority will gleefully claim they really need infinite storage and think of inventive ways to upload the entire contents of their PC to a server. Yahoo! will then ban them for uploading copyrighted material.

Vista installation complete

Extracted the shiny new Dell PC from the tall cupboard yesterday. Pretended this PC was for ‘homework only’, would solely use Google Docs and wouldn’t connect to the Interweb.

Lasted two minutes before yielding and plugged in Linksys USB wireless card. Briefly marvelled at the quality of the flat screen, then downloaded drivers for Windows Vista, followed the instructions on the Linksys technical support site and successfully connected to the burgeoning wireless network first time.

Sharpcast versus Picasa

Curiously, after reading about the Picasa upgrade, a related article about photo management software popped up in Google Reader, courtesy of Robert Scoble’s excellent link blog.

Robert Scoble had published a couple of podcasts featuring a product demo and an interview with Gibu Thomas, CEO of Sharpcast. Sharpcast is yet another photo management software tool and appears to offer a number of advantages over Picasa:

• Unlimited free storage
• Automatic synchronisation between PC and Web albums
• Original images are preserved

The unlimited storage seems too good to be true and is very useful because, at some point in the near future, I am likely to exceed Picasa’s storage limit unless Google follow suit. Secondly, if I ever edit an image or perform any housekeeping, I will have to manually replicate those changes to Picasa Web Albums. As I am very lazy, that is unlikely to happen.

Picasa Web Albums upgraded to 1GB

Google have increased the amount of free storage to 1GB (previously 250MB) available at Picasa Web Albums.

This means I can now backup all of my photos comfortably (854MB) in one place.

If you have lots of photos of your cat, $500 upgrades the capacity to 250GB.

in praise of Google Desktop

Like most people, I store information in many different places. Lots of data is stored directly on my work laptop while yet more data is stored on my computer at home.

• Mail folders
• Address book
• Text files
• Corporate blogs
• Presentations
• Word documents
• Intranet resources
• Whitepapers
• Web history
• RSS feeds
• Photos
• Music

Even more data is stored on external servers

• Gmail
• Blinklist
• Web site, blogs and mySQL databases at Bluehost
• Post-it on fridge
• Mobile phone
• Palm PDA
• My head (last resort)

I first used Google Desktop a couple of years ago when it was first launched. Back then, the ongoing indexing process seemed to add a unreasonable load on my laptop, so I decided to uninstall the program and revert to old-fashioned searching in Windows Explorer and Outlook (and now Thunderbird).

not dead, just resting

Darren Prowse kicked off an interesting discussion asking what makes you unsubscribe from a feed.

This prompted me to revisit my list of my inactive blogs in Google Reader. Normally, I tend to leave most blogs intact because I don’t religiously unsubscribe purely because an author hasn’t posted in a while. However, I find it useful to occasionally check the status of sleeping blogs to see whether the feed has actually died or migrated elsewhere and prune my subscription list accordingly.

how to display Google shared items on WordPress

This post put me in a quandry. I found the video very amusing so I was torn between leaving a grateful comment on Donncha’s blog and awarding the article a (Gold) ‘Star’ in Google Reader.

But if I only did that, my friend and a couple of (ex-) colleagues who might appreciate the joke may miss it. That would be very selfish. Forgive me Father, but briefly, I toyed with reverting to Web 0.1 (beta) and sending an mass email to ‘Friends/Ex Colleagues’.