Anything that Google does makes news. Case in point: the Mail Goggles extension to Gmail, fresh out of their Lab. It’s meant to be a sort of double-check on email sending, but I’m not convinced that it’s a good solution, or even that there’s a problem here.
Apparently the point of Mail Googles is to combat drunk emailing, which I wasn’t particularly aware of - at least in my corner of the email universe. After you enable it, Google will require you to solve a handful of math problems to send an email during specified hours (which default to Friday and Saturday nights). Get the answers right, and your email goes out. Struggle with them for a while, and you might have second thoughts about whether you want it to go out. At least, that’s the idea.
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There’s nothing like being able to work from home. But even what so many people strive for can end up being less than ideal. I enjoy the freedom I have to work on my own schedule, however, working from home doesn’t mean you always get more time to do your work. I also find that working from home instead of in an office setting can be isolating. I am not within earshot of peers who I can bounce ideas off of or hear the latest industry developments firsthand.
I’ve been fascinated by businesses popping up around major metropolitan areas that create a shared workspace for independent workers. Imran Ali wrote about the trend of co-working spaces back in April, and I’ll be exploring the trend further as I look to set up a co-working space in my town.
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There are few things more frustrating for a remote web worker than trying to get concrete feedback from a client who can’t quite explain what they mean. This is particular evident - at least for me - in web development and design engagements. Having someone at the opposite end of a phone line saying “no, this bit right here doesn’t line up on my browser” leads to comedic but non-useful conversations. I’ve mailed a lot of screenshots back and forth in my time to get around this.
Protonotes offers a free service that is designed to make collaboration around a web site prototype simple for remote teams. Signing up takes only a minute and an email address; they send you a snippet of javascript. Then you include that javascript in the web pages deployed to your staging server, and anyone who visits gets a toolbar with the option to create or destroy little yellow sticky notes. The whole team can view these, edit them, and move them around as part of a visual discussion right on the page.
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While looking into the Operation Foxbook story, I ran across Aviary - an application interesting enough to deserve some notice on its own. Aviary bills itself as “a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser,” and although they’re certainly no Creative Suite replacement, for Flash-based tools they’re pretty good - as well as affordable.
Right now there are three tools in the suite:
- Phoenix, a layer-based image editor with a reasonable selection of masks and effects.
- Toucan, a tool for putting together palettes and color swatches
- Peacock, a generative “visual laboratory” that is the funnest tool in the bunch.
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FairSoftware, one of the TechCrunch 50 finalists, is up and running and accepting alpha participants (although it’s marked as alpha, registration is open to anyone). The company hopes to give entrepreneurs yet another function they can outsource: that of actually providing a corporate and governance structure. It’s an interesting notion, though I’m not 100% convinced that it will make sense for the average small software project (though in theory you could use their structure for any company, right now it’s tuned for those selling software online).
After you set up an account with FairSoftware, you can create as many projects as you like. Each project has participants, and you assign shares to them to indicate their share of the profits. There are mechanisms for share vesting and voting on proposals, as well as payroll and sales tracking - the idea is that you form your team, you build your product, and you sell it via FairSoftware: you can have a purchase button on your own site, but all sales must go through FairSoftware, who take a cut (9.9%) of each sale to cover their expenses and profits.
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As I mentioned in my last post, I attended the first TechCrunch Meetup in Paris on Tuesday. I confess, I don’t enter the tech meatspace very often, generally preferring to observe from afar via the Web. But I couldn’t pass this up.
I didn’t find the millions of euros I was hoping for (I admit I didn’t try very hard). But I did find some real live French web workers/startup founders (including a delightful web-working couple with the delightfully French names of Sylvain and Jacinthe) and a startup with an app we web workers can use (more on that soon).
I also discovered La Cantine, which is where the event was held. It’s a great co-working space run by Silicon Sentier, a nonprofit networking organization for tech professionals.
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Despite the existence of dozens of competing services, del.icio.us remains the standard for bookmark storage for many web workers - if only because it’s been around so long that we’ve accumulated hundreds or thousands of bookmarks there. But one of the big annoyances of del.icio.us is its rather lackluster search feature: you can search for text in the title or tags of your bookmarks, but if you only remember a word or phrase from somewhere in the page, you’re out of luck.
Fortunately, third parties have stepped into this hole with their own solutions. At this point, I know of three ways to get full-text search across your del.icio.us bookmarks. One caution: if you try testing these in quick succession, and you have lots of bookmarks, you’re likely to have your API access throttled by IP address.
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When we looked at the landscape of file-sharing, one of our main concerns was that none of the available file-sharing services provided a compelling advantage over email. With creating email attachments being so simple, why would anyone go to a new service to move files around? Well, one of the entrants in this crowded field, YouSendIt, has been quietly pursuing a strategy that may yet bring them to email parity: increasingly, they’re integrated into your desktop, instead of being just another web service.
When you create a YouSendIt account (1GB of monthly download and 100MB file size comes for free; $10 per month will get you substantially higher limits), you get access to a variety of YouSendIt applications. These applications allow you to work directly from your desktop or from other software. For example, YouSendIt Express sits on your desktop (OS X or Windows, while the YouSendIt Outlook application is implemented as a Microsoft Outlook add-in.
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