Web Worker Daily

Yesterday Google introduced a ‘remote signout’ feature for Gmail, providing a capability that sets an inportant precendent for web-based applications and indeed web workers.

Most web workers tend to hop between multiple devices to access our web applications; Gmail is a great case in point with multiple interfaces mechanisms spread across web, mobile, IMAP and POP3 formats, however it’s easy to lose track of where you’re signed in and compromise a little of your privacy and security if you’re not careful.

Remote Signout enables Gmail users to keep track of recent sessions by IP address and remotely logoff from any of those sessions if the time or location seems suspect.

Gmail inboxes, where the feature is being rolled out progressively, will include a new item in the footer labeled ‘This account is open in x other locations’ with a link to a more detailed view, as illustrated here to the left. Of course, you’ll need to know your own IP addresses to understand if any unauthorized usage is taking place, so it’s not the best user experience, though it works and is a welcome feature.

More significantly Remote Signout sets an important precedent for all web applications - namely that such a feature should be a design pattern employed in all web applications.

Oftentimes the only indication a user has of malicious use is when unusual things begin to happen within their services, in real life, or the arrival of unsolicited password reminder email in their inboxes! By wiring in the means to audit access usage of an application, one of the barriers to policing your personal security and privacy is lowered, enabling us all to be just a little more preemptively vigilant.

Learn more about Gmail’s remote signout feature at Google’s Gmail blog…

To the envy of developers everywhere, Google Software Engineers are granted what they call their “20% time.”  As a result, Google coders get 20% of their working time to work on projects that the developers select away from management approval.  Many well-known Google projects have resulted from 20% time, showing that the effort benefits the company as well.

Gmail, one of WWD’s favorite web based utilities, has been put into the spotlight as Google opened the door on Gmail Labs.  This section of Gmail’s website will house new “beta” add-ins and features in an effort to gather feedback from users.  To get to Gmail Labs, inside your Gmail settings pane, click on the Labs tab.  Note: GMail is still rolling Labs out to users.  If your Gmail doesn’t have it yet, check back a little later. It appears that this is only available to @gmail.com email addresses and not Google Apps addresses.

Anything web worker useful here? Let’s take a look.

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Being able to bookmark and save web pages for future reference is a functionality that has been tried by many players, including Instapaper, toread, and Iterasi (previously covered).  However, a new entrant called LaterLoop is approaching this web page saving space with some unique and interesting features.

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One of the challenges of a constantly changing technology landscape is that nearly everything one recommended to clients a few years ago is not always desirable today. A few years back I was asked to help companies build web sites. Today, people want blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.

One of the benefits of a constantly changing technology landscape is that as a consultant, I can continuously grow my diversified list of services that I offer to clients adding new and interesting tactics. In the last year, I’ve been exploring virtual worlds and lately it has really been paying off as I’ve taken on new Second Life marketing projects.

More recently, I’ve been exploring custom social networks for my own projects and for my clients. With moves by major Internet sites toward a more open, “social Web” including Google’s new FriendConnect service that is currently in beta, I think social networks and virtual worlds will become more and more relevant to how companies and organizations communicate their messages and do business online.

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Like a lot of Web Workers, I am fairly dependent on the Google suite of applications, and with good reason. They are feature rich, they’re reliable, I can get to them from anywhere on just about any hardware, and they’re free.

That doesn’t mean that they are perfect though. Each application has it’s own quirks and improvement is always possible. Thankfully, if you’re a Firefox user you can tweak these and other applications to add some really great functionality using the Greasemonkey add-on. We’ve talked about the benefits of Greasemonkey in the past, and with an impressive library of scripts available it can be used to modify quite a few web applications, including those made by Google.

Here are some of the more useful scripts I have discovered in my travels that help my Google experience be even more productive:

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Every once in a while, I come across a site that just rocks my world. This week, I found two - Addictomatic.com, a search aggregator with a nifty interface (Mike G. reviewed it) and Spinscape, a site I learned about through a comment on my previous posts about mind mapping. After a flurry of emails to get past the closed beta gates, I was in and mapping away in no time.

If I had to describe Spinscape in one word it would be: Elegant.

From the dramatic dark gray and black backgrounds that makes the colored bubbles or “nodes” pop to the subtle tool buttons placed strategically about, Spinscape looks great. But elegant goes beyond looks. Spinscape functions well, too, with some features that were unexpected and surprisingly useful.

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Just read Mike Gunderloy’s post Times: Looks Aren’t Everything. One thing he said really stuck out for me…

Times is worth looking at, though, if you’re trying to gently introduce someone new to a few RSS feeds.

He’s talking about me, I thought, as I read that line. He knows my secret. And now you will know it, too.

I am terrified of RSS feed readers.

You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I have no problem saving feeds to my reader of choice - Google Reader - but have no idea how to get started with actually reading any of them. And using Google Reader is nothing more than a knee jerk choice based on using several other Google applications and finding them to be useful. But actually reading something in Google Reader?

(Cue the horror movie music - you know, the one that plays when the mutant serial killer is coming up behind the heroine.) Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, the blogosphere was abuzz with news about GrandCentral, a service we’ve covered before, experienced an outage.  For a few hours on Sunday morning, calls to GrandCentral were not getting relayed to their users and GrandCentral’s website was down as well.

This event should encourage all those of us who work on the web to build redundancy into your web-centric work life.  It’s no secret that our internet and web infrastructures are vulnerable to many threats whether they be man-made or occurrences of nature.  Taking simple measures can help ensure you stay productive and in contact should some part of your work infrastructure go down.

For enterprises, allowing people to work from alternate locations (including home) is conducive to disaster recovery.  In the case of this GrandCentral outage, users of this service should simply give all important contacts an alternate number to reach them in case of GrandCentral being unavailable.
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