Email

City of Angeles moves to Google Apps

Interesting!

Google Apps will also help conserve resources in the city’s Information & Technology Agency (ITA), which is responsible for researching, testing & implementing new technologies in ways that make Los Angeles a better place to live, work and play. Because the email and other applications are hosted and maintained by Google, ITA employees who previously were responsible for maintaining our email system can be freed up to work on projects that are central to making the city run.

By ITA estimates, Google Apps will save the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google will free up nearly 100 servers that were used for our existing email system, which will lower our electricity bills by almost $750,000 over five years. In short, this decision helps us to get the most out of the city’s IT budget.

The decision to move to Google Apps was not taken lightly. The city issued a request for proposals and received 15 proposals, which were evaluated by city officials. The top four proposals were invited to give oral presentations, with CSC’s proposal for Google Apps receiving the highest marks. This decision was reviewed and discussed by the Los Angeles City Council which, after a healthy debate, voted unanimously to move forward with Google Apps.

Here’s a video for more:

Wave power

Google have announced something really rather interesting called Wave.

(Warning: looooooong video)

Essentially,

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Lots of people are very excited about it. Take TechCrunch, for example:

Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale.

What is really interesting is the way that Wave will work as an open standard, with APIs available to developers to make it possible to embed the way Wave does things into other applications.

Of course, before we get too excited about Wave, we need to remember Knol, Sites (which I actually quite like, but no-one else seems to) and Base. Google gets a lot of stuff wrong.

But when they get things right, such as with Gmail and of course search, the results can be devastating. For that reason alone, it’s vital to keep up with Wave and its development.

Hacking domains

Domain hacking is defined by Wikipedia as:

an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full “name” or title of the domain, making a kind of pun.

What does that mean? Well, it means taking the elements of a domain name (that is, the thing you type into your browser’s address bar) so that it spells out a word, or something similar.

For example, Delicious used to be found at del.icio.us – with the last element (known as the ‘top-level’) of the domain (.us, for the United States) forming part of the name of the site. Sadly, it’s plain old delicious.com now.

I recently registered a domain from the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands – which ends in .gs. The domain is vebrig.gs – can you see where I am headed with this? 😉

I’ve created an email address on my domain which is simple ‘d’ – so in full it looks like d@vebrig.gs which kinda spells out my name. I know this is very sad, but I like it!

By adding a sub-domain to vebrig.gs of da I can get the web address da.vebrig.gs which again is quite a neat hack. Not doing anything with the site right now though!

So, the main point of this post, other than making it clear to everyone what a total dork I am, is to let everyone know that the best email address to get me on now is d@vebrig.gs. My old one still forwards onto me, though, so don’t worry too much.

Now all I have to do is update all my social networks with the new address…

Telegraph switches to Google Apps

Been busy at WorkCampUK so haven’t been following my feeds that closely, but my eye was caught by a post written by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of the Telegraph’s web presence:

I’ve been testing Google Apps within the Telegraph for the last few months so I’m delighted that we’re now switching over entirely. The speed, accessibility and flexibility of Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs make them much better to work with than the programs we used before.

Interesting news. After all, if an august institution like the Telegraph can make such a move, why not any other organisation?

I do have a few issues with the Google Apps offering though. For a start, the version of iGoogle that comes as standard is a seriously crippled version which, amongst other things, only lets you have one page of stuff. Also, sharing forms using Google Spreadsheets doesn’t work for people without an account on the Google Apps domain. It also doesn’t make sense to me that Google Reader isn’t a part of the package too.

But just in terms of email, as someone who has used various versions of Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, Lotus Notes and other enterprise email systems, Gmail is better than any.

Go ColaLife!

One of the best sessions at 2gether08 was Simon Berry’s on his ColaLife project, to try and gather as much support as he can for his idea to use the Coca Cola distribution network to get dehydration salts to those that need them in the developing world. It was also frustratingly short – another argument for greater flexibility to be built into conference agendas.

Simon has been leveraging the social web like no tomorrow in an attempt to drum up as much support as possible, making regular posts on the topic to his blog, and creating a Facebook group which has, at the time of writing, 2,934 members. In this video, Simon chats with David Wilcox about the campaign’s development:

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One of the key challenges facing the campaign is how to actually get the huge Facebook interest to transfer into real action. Facebook is notoriously a walled garden – it is hard to get outputs from it.

So, to help continue discussions and open things up a bit, Simon has started a Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/colalife. This means that folk can chat via email, rss or web, pretty much however it suits them. It also means that information and documents can be shared online too.

Anyone can sign up to the Google Group by entering their email address in the box below:

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Please do so and get involved with this incredible campaign.

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