Google Docs, the company’s online office suite, now lets people create and use templates. There are many examples already posted in Google’s template gallery, including invoices, resumes, invitations, mileage caluclators and calendars.
Avery Dennison has already posted a number of templates for their self-adhesive labels. Now I have one less reason to use Microsoft Word, and the folks at TastyPopsicle seem to agree with me: see their article called Oh hell no, Google’s got templates!
I’m sure there are security concerns. How hard would it be for someone to post a template that lets users record their web passwords or credit card information, and then sends back that valuable data to the developer? Google’s videos don’t mention any of these issues - instead, users are told that they can email template-based documents to friends, who can fill them out and return the data in their email client.
Before trying these templates, I suggest changing your Google password to something stronger, like a passphrase, or using a Google account that doesn’t have much or any email or data in it. It’s much easier to set up a fresh Google account than to figure out who’s looking at your data.
There’s more information and a couple of videos in this Google blog article called Templates bring Docs to life.
Long-time readers of billso.com may remember that I used reCAPTCHA to validate comments about my articles. reCAPCTHA is a web service that shows users pictures of two words. The service knows one of the words. The second word was provided by an electronic book scanning project that needs help with its quality control. reCAPTCHA send the results back to the scanning project, to help them fix their documents.
A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) system is a simple test that determines if a computer user is a machine or a human. CAPTCHAs are small puzzles that people can solve quickly, while being too expensive for a computer system to solve.
I dropped the reCAPTCHA feature in May 2008, because the system was not stopping comment spam from appearing on my blog. “Comment spam” is just messages that have little or no relevance to an article or page.
In the past, people who wanted to crack a CAPTCHA system might pay users to stay at home and decipher dozens of captchas, in return for free content or Internet access. But people are slower and less reliable than computers. Processing power continues to improve, while CPU costs get lower.
Paying the price
Stephan Chenette, the manager of security research at Websense Security Labs, notes that CAPTCHA technology had made incremental improvements since 2000, while CAPTCHA crackers bought faster hardware and invested more in their efforts:
“CAPTCHA has been broken for the last year and a half. The technology has really not progressed. They’ve got a little bit harder but the hackers have made programs that can easily break them. This works both with print and audio CAPTCHA. All of these have been broken in one way or the other.”
In the last few months, the CAPTCHA systems of several major web sites have been cracked by automated systems:
January 2008: Yahoo Mail
April 2008: Gmail and Hotmail
May 2008: Craigslist
This has resulted in a flood of spam, scams, and fake postings on services around the world. It’s become quite easy to create a fake Web site that can fool many users. Social networks like MySpace and Facebook offer many more opportunities to trick users into revealing their credentials and personal information.
In the last few years, financial service companies and banks have adopted multifactor authentication systems that ask users for more than a password or a CAPTCHA solution. Now organizations in other industries are looking at similar solutions, because it has become much less expensive for scammers and crackers to break these companies’ systems. Several OpenID providers have added multifactor features to their authentication systems, too.
The retirement of Bill Gates from daily duty at Microsoft prompted bloggers and journalists to write long articles about Microsoft technology. It’s summer, and we have to fill the pages somehow.
The AutoPC was a voice controlled system that connected the driver to music, GPS and Outlook services. It went on sale in 2000 and died a quick death, but many auto manufacturers are offering systems with similar features in 2008. The same Microsoft business unit that developed the AutoPC also developed the SYNC system for Ford.
The second “miss” is another example of pervasive or ubiquitous computing. It’s interesting that both of these products were championed by Bill Gates himself.
I have worn my Suunto N6 HR SPOT watch almost every day for the last 2.5 years. Yes, the watch is a little large, and I have to clip it to a USB charger every 2 or 3 days to freshen up the battery. I never got the heart rate monitor feature to work properly, though.
Microsoft partnered with Clear Channel to distribute news, sports, stock market and other data to users via Clear Channel FM radio stations.The silvery rim of the watch face is the FM antenna. It’s a one-way device that receives broadcasts, so it’s impossible to send information from the watch.
I don’t use Outlook, so I never use the appointment and messaging features. But the baseball scores are usually up to date, as long as I’m in a Clear Channel city, and I never need to set the time. It’s synced by an atomic clock somewhere in the cloud.
Sadly, Microsoft discontinued the SPOT watch line in April 2008 - see this Engadget article called SPOT watches R.I.P. - 2004-2008. The cloud service still works on MSN Direct. I just go to the web site, log in, and select the information and faces for my watch.
I see fewer wristwatches on wrists these days. Many of my friends rely on their mobile phone’s clock instead, as they carry their phones with them everywhere. Most modern mobile phones sync their clock to their carrier’s system.
Image courtesy of billso through a Creative Commons license.
I’ve claimed for several years now that email is broken. At best, email is the lowest common denominator (LCD) for sending messages to a specific Internet user. Every ISP subscription comes with some kind of email account. Free webmail addresses are easy to get. Many mobile phone accounts come with an email address. Alex Iskold’s post from ReadWriteWeb called Is Email in Danger? discusses how microblogging services like Twitter can overcome the inherent problems of heavyweight email clients like Microsoft Outlook.
Broadcasting with a microblog
Microblogging services are best suited for broadcasting messages to lots of users. FriendFeed, Twitter and similar services are widely used by popular bloggers to publicize their latest posts and mention their daily activities. Most of these services accept text messages and offer mobile versions of their web sites, so they are easier to use than email from an ordinary mobile phone. iPhone and BlackBerry users have better email clients on their devices, but microblogging from these devices seems to work well.
I’ve never been a fan of Outlook. In its easly versions (Outlook 97 and 98), the application would crash at least once a day. Microsoft developed ActiveSync software to support PDAs, but 10 years later it is still a maddening piece of cruft.
Look out for Outlook and iTunes
My university uses Microsoft Exchange as its faculty/staff email server, so I occasionally get meeting invitations and Outlook forms in my Gmail my box. All of my university email is auto-forwarded into my Gmail account. Microsoft meeting invitations are useless in Gmail - I have to tap out a reply to accept or decline the meeting.
To be honest, Apple’s iTunes is following a similar evolution. It start as a music player, but has become a media storefront, disc burner and iPhone application installer. I’d think that several specific lightweight apps would work better than a huge, monolithic instance of iTunes. On a Mac, iTunes performance is barely tolerable. iTunes on a Windows box is a lumbering behemoth.
Gmail, on the other hand, was designed as a lightweight solution that would work in a standard web browser. I love Gmail because I can search for messages quickly, and I know I won’t run out of storage room for old messages. There’s no reason for me to delete an old message in Gmail.
Attacking the inbox
One approach to managing a bulging email inbox is to sit down and clear the queue. The Inbox Victory web page tries to make this process fun by letting users post pictures of themselves with their empty inboxes. I clear out my Gmali inboxes a few times a year.
Luis Suarez of IBM claims that he reduced his incoming email by 80%, thanks to his usage of social networking tools like RSS feeds, Twitter and IBM’s internal clone of Facebook, Beehive. Suarez discussed his article in the New York Times called I Freed Myself from E-Mail’s Grip.
Suarez admits that his job as a social computing evangelist helped him cut his email volume. He’s supposed to encourage his fellow IBM employees and managers to use Beehive, which is as much a knowledge management (KM) tool as it is a social intranet application. IBMers are supposed to use Beehive to share events, lists, pictures, tips, and ideas across the enterprise, as part of formal and ad hoc workgroups and project teams.
Image courtesy of gwENvision through a Creative Commons license.
