Microsoft launches IE8 to the public this morning; you can now download it from the Microsoft web site. But do most web workers even care? Despite using a Windows machine, I haven’t touched IE for weeks. I downloaded the release candidate to check it out but since then I haven’t opened it up once.
IE’s marketshare has declined markedly over the past few years as better alternatives have entered the market. IE8 just doesn’t have anything to offer me over my two staple browsers, Firefox and Chrome. My thinking seems to tally with web workers generally: according to Google Analytics, only 22 percent of you access this site using IE, while more than half use Firefox.
However, as Om noted last night, for those people who are unwilling to consider alternative browsers, IE8 is an improvement on previous versions — particularly with regard to security — and probably does enough to stop IE’s browser share declining much further, so IE isn’t going away any time soon.
Will you download IE8?
The news that Gmail went down this morning (UK time) got me thinking about how we increasingly rely on third parties for essential business services. With a proliferation of web apps offering to meet our every business need and the inexorable rise of cloud computing, are we investing too much trust in them?
Fortunately, I have Offline Gmail support enabled, which meant that I could at least continue working on emails received overnight while Gmail was down. But judging by the outpouring of angst on Twitter, many people had a pretty unproductive morning, with some four hours of downtime.
Gmail appears to be back up now, but you can bet that this won’t be the last time a major web app suffers downtime. While we can probably be reasonably confident that Google has the engineering talent to recover from most failures quite quickly (especially as Google’s paid-for Google For Domains users have a service-level agreement, including an uptime guarantee of 99.9 percent), we’ve seen many services suffer from a lack of continued support and investment, and some that disappear altogether.
Are we putting too much faith in services that we have no control over? Do you have a backup plan in place in case a critical part of your workflow goes down?
Or at least it feels that way every time it happens.
Gmail, including Google Apps, went down for about four hours or so this morning (or this afternoon, depending on where you are). It says a lot for Gmail’s reach that when it does go offline, it makes immediate headlines.
Like many, the first thing I do every morning is check my email accounts. When the errors started popping up, I went straight to Twitter Search to be assured I was not alone.
I had other things to do. I could have checked headlines. I could have finished some work that had nothing to do with email. I could have balanced my checkbook. Heck, I could have spent extra time with the morning paper or gone for a brisk walk. But no, I kept trying to load my email while keeping an eye on Twitter. Judging by the tweets, I was not alone.
I know I’m over-reliant on email. As soon as I saw it was a global problem, I knew Google would resolve it quickly, and they did. But still, it bothered me that it was so difficult to concentrate on anything else until service was restored.
Checking email is part of the web worker’s routine. Does it throw you off kilter when it’s not available? What do you do to pass the time until Google gets the hamsters running again?
Last week, Pinch Media released some interesting statistics about App Store usage in a presentation, now available online.
In short, they’ve found that while free apps are downloaded like crazy, active use drops off fast. Paid apps tend to see more use after installation and are used for longer periods. If it’s a paid game, all the better.
Long before he stopped using his iPhone altogether, Om raised similar questions on GigaOM regarding app usage.
Does your own iPhone usage support this data?
Read the rest of this entry »
Technology propels society forward, and web workers are more keenly aware of that than anyone. In just the last five years we have made leaps and bounds in terms of how connected we can be, how quickly we can receive and disperse information and how we communicate with each other. It has been an exhilarating ride as we have embraced all of the new technology innovations.
I began thinking about what has had the biggest impact on my ability to be an effective web worker when I heard about a PBS “Nightly Business Report” feature: 30 Most Important Innovations from Last 30 Years. This list will be announced on the show tonight.
Read the rest of this entry »
Not too long ago, I posted about BookGlutton, a service which allowed for online collaborative reading. You could also upload your own work, but that wasn’t the main focus of the site. Smashwords, on the other hand, is a web site devoted to self-publishing. It doesn’t lend itself to collaboration, necessarily, but it does present another possible method of content delivery, and for web workers looking for another revenue stream, it may provide an avenue for monetizing your content.
For me, it also raises the age-old question: is self-publishing really just a form of vanity publishing, along with all the negative connotations that implies?
It’s a thorny question, and one that takes on new significance as we slowly but surely move away from print media towards online publishing. I went to school for writing, and had it drilled into me pretty much every day that unless it was someone else’s name on the masthead of the journal or press I was publishing with, I wasn’t accomplishing anything.
Online, however, many of the most successful professionals are self-published, and self-made. Darren Rowse, Guy Kawasaki and Om Malik Richard MacManus come to mind. They are dealing primarily in the medium of the blog, however. The stigma associated with self-publishing doesn’t seem to have entirely disappeared when it comes to books. Read the rest of this entry »
This week, Google finally answered our pleas and introduced over-the-air contact and calendar sync for Windows Mobile and iPhone. Instead of a separate sync application, as with the Blackberry, the syncing works through the Exchange client already in the device.
I’ve decided to only sync my calendar between Google and my iPhone, which after one false start now works well. I didn’t bother syncing contacts. Why? Because nowadays when I need to find someone, the last place I seem to look is in my usually-outdated contacts application.
Sure, I have some contacts in my desktop address book which I sync back to Google with Spanning Sync. Mostly immediate family, doctors, school contacts, etc. Those few people I really need to call when out and about. Every work contact is in our organization’s CRM and is accessible through the Salesforce iPhone app. The rest of my life is either in Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn where the contacts themselves make sure their own data is up-to-date. All are easily accessible from my iPhone.
When I leaf through my desktop address book there are so many out-of-date entries, I often wonder why I bothered putting them there to begin with. I know there’s Plaxo for keeping an address book updated, but that utility comes with its own set of problems.
Let’s hear how other web workers handle their contacts.
Has your local address book been shoved aside in favor of web-based tools? Do you worry about the accuracy of contact data on your phone or desktop? How do you keep it all up-to-date and in sync?
Many of us here at WebWorkerDaily seem to have a love-hate relationship with Google and its products. While we love the conveniences and features that allow us to be so productive, we also lament lost opportunities and frustrating limitations.
For example, while Judi laments on the languishing Grand Central, I am sharing some of My New Favorite Gmail Features.
My current frustration is trying to manage multiple Google accounts and resources. I maintain a personal Gmail account along with a few domain accounts and I am finding it increasingly difficult and frustrating to manage them all. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
