It’s been five years since I started on our SharePoint implementation project, and recently a new opportunity arose that piqued my interest.  The opportunity was to rejoin the e-Commerce group, however this time as part of the business team instead of the IT team.  It’s a great opportunity for me to become directly involved with the products we sell and learn more about our business operations.

This new role also sets me on a track which will likely result in me relocating out of the Buffalo area, which will be a bittersweet change as I’ve grown to know so many people here and invested so much time and affection in certain pet projects.  However, those experiences certainly helped build my skills which ultimately prepared me for this career move.

For the near term, though, I’ll be sticking around and continuing to work with our IT team here, and our business teams in Chicago and Danbury.  I’m excited to be taking on this new challenge at Praxair.

I am pleased to announce that Derek Punaro, currently Lead IT Information Architect, has accepted the position of E-Commerce Specialist, reporting to me. Derek will replace [redacted], who has left Praxair to pursue other opportunities.

Derek’s main focus will be the e-catalog that supports all our different packaged gas e-commerce channels and will work closely with everyone on the team in this capacity. One important part of this will be to work with the Product Data Hub project team to align the system and workprocesses with the e-catalog efforts. Derek’s broad experience in information architecture, programming and systems will be a great asset to the business.

Derek will work to transition from his current position to his new role over the coming weeks and will be in contact with many of you to understand our projects, data, systems and work processes. Please join me in welcoming Derek to our team!

Jakob Janzon
Marketing & Business Development
Praxair, Inc.

#1 – Thank you. [Wikipedia]

The Wikipedia blackout is over — and you have spoken.

More than 162 million people saw our message asking if you could imagine a world without free knowledge. You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.

For us, this is not about money. It’s about knowledge. As a community of authors, editors, photographers, and programmers, we invite everyone to share and build upon our work.

Our mission is to empower and engage people to document the sum of all human knowledge, and to make it available to all humanity, in perpetuity. We care passionately about the rights of authors, because we are authors.

SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The Internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you’ve directed your energy to protecting it.

We’re turning the lights back on. Help us keep them shining brightly.

There’s also a “read more” page to find out more about the milestones of the blackout, and of course about the issue itself.

#2 – Megaupload Taken Down On Piracy Allegations [TechCrunch]

Popular file-hosting site Megaupload, probably known to our readers for a variety of reasons, has been taken down after the FBI charged some of its staff with copyright infringement and “conspiracy to commit racketeering.” Seven people have been charged, and four arrested (in New Zealand), and the site itself appears to be down as authorities around the world closed in on the site’s resources.

The day after the SOPA/PIPA protests, the FBI illustrates why we don’t need those bills by orchestrating an international takedown of a site that was a haven for piracy. The system works, and if you break the law, the law will come and take away all your toys.

#3 – Twitter Is Making A Gigantic Move (And Going To War With A Board Member) [Business Insider]

Twitter is slowly finding a way to curate its own massive fire hose of information.

Twitter has typically been a pure stream of information that’s gone uninterrupted. Thousands of tweets fly across the Internet in a given second — sometimes tens of thousands, depending if there’s a big event.

But just moments ago, Twitter announced it acquired Summify, a service that crunches Twitter and other social media sites and creates a personalized news digest based on that information.

I subscribe to the Summify service – it does a pretty impressive job of curating your social feeds and sending you highlights of things that are of interest to you. This is particularly useful if you’re not continuously plugged in to your networks scanning for the latest news, or if, you know, sleep. This acquisition should be making the future of the Twitterverse interesting to see how the integration works. Hopefully they do a better job than they did maiming Tweetdeck.

#4 – The Wired Q&A: ICANN President Rod Beckstrom on ‘the Biggest Change in DNS Since Dot-Com’ [Wired]

Beginning Wednesday, Jan. 12 — midnight UTC, to be exact — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) starts accepting applications for new, bespoke top level domains (TLDs). This will be the first time website owners (at least governments and businesses) will be able to request their own replacement for .com, .net and .org. Think .facebook, .losangeles and .lolcats.

The number of top level domains was originally restricted to give the internet user some idea of what kind of a site they were going to – .com for commercial, .edu for educational, .org for a nonprofit, etc. Of course, the vast majority of TLDs accessed in the U.S. are .com, which forces some institutions to register multiple so that unsuspecting folks don’t end up at the wrong site (remember that whole whitehouse.com debacle?).

Countries also have their own country-specific TLDs (.jp for Japan, .de for Germany, and the ever-spammy .ru for Russia), and then some companies, especially those URL shorteners, found they could get cute and repurpose, say, Libya’s TLD .ly to create sites like bit.ly, although one of the original domain “artists” was none other than del.icio.us, using the relatively unused TLD for the United States.

So the underlying question is, will all hell break loose now that anyone (with $185,000) can get their own top level domain? Not likely. People don’t rely on the TLD anymore to know where they’re going. In fact, with browser search integration, a lot of people don’t even realize they’re typing “amazon.com” into Google instead of the address bar. Search and social media will drive people to sites, so any new TLDs will just be a new kitschy advertising device.

#5 – Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL [Habitudes for Communicators]

Watch it. Then hang your head in shame at how many of these things we’ve all done.

Steps:

First, you’ll notice an out-of-the-box email references the “Open this task” button, but does not include the link to the SharePoint workflow task. This is fine if the document is a Microsoft Office document and the person approving it is using Office 2010, but there doesn’t work for other circumstances.

To adjust this, we need to open up the site and then workflow in SharePoint Designer. Note that in this case we are modifying the OOTB workflow itself, which will change it for all instances of the site collection. If you want to make a unique instance of this workflow, right click on the workflow and choose “Copy and Modify”.

Click Edit Workflow

Next, click on Approval.

Under “Customization” click Change the behavior of a single task.

 
Under the “When a Task is Pending” section, find the line that says “then Email task notification to Current Task:Assigned To” and click the underlined link.

The Define E-Mail Message window opens. Insert the highlighted text, select the text you wish to make a link, then click the Edit Hyperlink button.

 
In the Address field, click the … button, then click Add or Change Lookup, and choose “Current Task: Approval” as the Data source and “Form_URN” as the Field from source:

Click OK all the way back out of the dialog boxes, then Publish your workflow back to the server.

Start the workflow on a new document and you should get the modified email.

Click the link and it should take you directly to the task page!

It’s important to note that this is not the only location an email is defined. Overdue notices, for example, are defined elsewhere. You may need to make the same modification to multiple places in the workflow.

Friday Five is my [most]weekly technology tidbits post.

#1 - Google’s ’20 Percent Time’ Will Survive The Death of Google Labs [TechCrunch]

Google announced this morning that it will be shutting down Google Labs, a platform that allowed users to interact and give feedback on experimental products produced by Googlers in their 20 Percent Time.

While many were left wondering, Google tells me that the company has no changes to announce with regards to the 20 Percent Time program; killing Labs doesn’t mean the discontinuation of the one day a week Googlers get to spend on “projects that aren’t necessarily in [their] job descriptions.” “We’ll continue to devote a subset of our time to newer and experiment projects,” Google representative Jason Friedenfelds tells me.

I was going to start out this week by mourning the death of Google Labs, but after reading this TechCrunch article, I don’t think it’s a big deal. The 20% time is the valuable component of the Google Labs puzzle. If anything, maybe this means that Google will actually launch products instead of being perpetually in beta.

#2 - Intranet Portals: Personalization Hot, Mobile Weak, Governance Essential [useit.com]

Early definitions of “portal” focused on the gateway concept, but times have changed: characterizing portals as mere doorways to other places no longer adequately describes the sophisticated role they play. Today’s portals are not just about access; the best ones provide true integration of enterprise information, resources, and tools in a unified user experience. The portal is a dashboard that offers all the enterprise information and applications that employees need to do their jobs.

At the same time, the distinction between intranet and portal is diminishing as companies increasingly adopt a portal perspective for their intranets. The trend is toward “an intranet is an intranet is an intranet” and a portal is just a nicer, more functional intranet that integrates more systems.

The ROI from achieving the full portal vision is clear: saving countless, costly staff-hours that would otherwise be wasted hunting for information on various systems and learning incompatible user interfaces. Of course, the ideal vision rarely happens: for example, single sign-on remains an elusive chimera, though companies are closer and closer to achieving it every time we study this problem.

The biggest finding from our new research into enterprise portals? The sad fact that portals are not adding mobile features at the expected rate. Outside the firewall, the mobile space is teeming with innovation, but inside companies, mobile progress seems to be progressing at a snail’s pace.

There’s a lot of great info in this latest article from Jakob Nielsen. First off is confirmation of a tenet I stand by – stop getting caught up in terminology. There is no more distinction between “portal” and “intranet”. Now if we could talk people down from “the cloud” as well, we’ll all be better off. Second is the fact that mobile is important. While this is a “duh” statement to anyone who has a smartphone or tablet, recognition of this fact (or acknowledgement to do something about it) inside the enterprise always progresses at a snail’s pace. There’s also an interesting bit on governance here, where Nielsen claims that responsibility of who owns the intranet is shifting more towards corporate communications. It’s interesting in the fact that I believe here at Praxair we’re seeing that trend in the opposite direction.

#3 - None of the top 100 best companies to work for block employee access to social media [Stopblocking.org]

Click through to see a video with Mark Ragan and Erin Lieberman Moran of the Great Place to Work Institute discussing why blocking employee access to social media is hurts your company’s hiring ability.

#4 - The making of a social media slut [grow]

Before I tell my tale, let me relate a few of my experiences this week …

• A very talented friend told me he was rejected for a job at a major ad agency because his Klout score was too low.
• A B2B marketing agency Managing Director told me he chose between two qualified candidates based on their Klout score.
• A friend in D.C is creating a Klout 50 Club exclusive to people with high Klout scores. Why? He wants to find good hires for social media marketing.
• A woman told me her boyfriend was accepted to a prestigious conference based on his Klout score alone.

These experiences occurred in the span of 72 hours.

Klout is the newest fad in the social media space. They proclaim it as a way of measuring an individual’s social media influence using a bunch of metrics they created like “Network Influence” and “Amplification Probability” and “True Reach”. Klout isn’t the first website to take on this space and it won’t be the last. The author goes on to say how he felt “dirty” that he suggested to a recent college grad that she pander to the internet and beef up her Klout score to get an entry level job. Frankly, I don’t think it’s that big a deal. If you aspire to work in the social media world, the most important thing is being up on the daily-changing trends in social media. Klout is the meme of the day and if nothing else it tells an employer looking to hire someone specifically for a social media role that the person at least uses social media. Outside of that specific job world, I don’t see it replacing resumes any time soon.

#5 – The Interconnected World of Tech Companies [INFOGRAPHIC] [Mashable]

The “tech world” is really more of a “tech family.” Between digital giants’ appetites for acquisitions and the tendency of their ex-employees to start new companies, it’s easy to see how nearly every blip in the ecosystem is closely related.

We’ve mapped just a few of these family ties between “Xooglers,” the “PayPal Mafia”, “Softies” and the many other tech connectors who have yet to be nicknamed.

Interesting (and very large) graphic. Give it a glance!

Friday Five is my [most]weekly technology tidbits post that I write for my internal Praxair blog and cross-post here.

#1 – Google+ invite received, we go hands-on [Engadget]

When news of Google Plus’ arrival broke today, we called the service an “all out assault on social networking.” After playing around with it for a bit, we believe that our previous description seems even more apt. Past services like Buzz have suffered from a half-baked approach to the space, but Google has clearly pulled out all of the stops this time. With direct shots at some of the leading market software in the form Facebook and Skype, Google is in a position to extend its search dominance to other realms. As usual, the company has created a smooth, intuitive, and enjoyable experience. However, now comes the hardest part: convincing people that they need another social network in their lives, because without friends, you’re just hanging out by yourself.

The big news in tech this week is about the launch [to some] of Google+. Of course, in typical Google fashion, it’s a buggy beta product and you will have to beg everyone via your other social networking tools for an invite to it. That’s a poor launch plan in my book, since a social network without users is useless. So will it be a Facebook killer? Given Google’s track record in this arena… probably not. Although what could give Google an advantage is that they’re designing from the ground up for mobile, vs. Facebook which is continually being adapted for mobile devices via a litany of device-specific apps. And what about that other social network – My…somethingorother?

#2 - MySpace Sold to Ad Network for $35 Million [Mashable]

News Corp. declared it was ready to sell MySpace in an earnings call in February. The media company was reportedly hoping to get $100 million out of the sale.

In 2005, News Corp. bought the site for $580 million from its original owners, but MySpace’s traffic has plummeted in recent years. All Things Digital reported that News Corp. will still hold a 5% to 10% stake in the company.

Other reports this week indicated that close to 50% of the site’s staff could be cut after the sale, and it’s likely that any further iterations of the service will focus on music.

I don’t think the fact that MySpace being sold is a surprise to anyone. I think what’s surprising (and funny) is that it sold for less than it cost to make a movie about Facebook.

#3 – Another study distorts the cost of employee social networking [Stop Blocking!]

Shame on CBS Radio News.

On its June 23 6 p.m. (EDT) top-of-the-hour newscast, CBS reported on the results of a study that indicate Facebook and other social networking sites are costing companies lost worker productivity.

I dashed home to find the source of the report. What I found was a month-old study that focused on all manner of workplace distractions. In fact, email processing and switching windows to complete tasks both ranked higher as sources of distraction (33%) than social media activities (20%).

Interestingly, the study was commissioned by harmon.ie (formerly MainSoft) which is a product we use here at Praxair, but the point of the study is not to put down social networking sites, but to sell their product which integrates into the email client so you don’t need to switch windows and can process email more efficiently. Ironically, they pitch themselves as “a provider of social email software that brings document collaboration to every business user by transforming the email client into a collaboration and social workspace.” That document collaboration includes a tool specifically for Google Docs which of course integrates into Google+ (see article #1) which would be one of those social networks. One-sided studies are dangerous, and news organizations are generally lazy looking for something sensational to push. This study fits both descriptions.

#4 – Should I Change My Password? [ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com]

ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com has been created to help the average person check if their password(s) may have been compromised and need to be changed.

This site uses a number of databases that have been released by hackers to the public. No passwords are stored in the ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com database.

Great way to quickly check and see if you have to worry about your password being out in the open for hackers to steal.

#5 - Xerox PARC: Still Inventing Cool New Stuff After All These Years [Forbes]

Launched in 1970, PARC has given the world an amazing array of inventions: laser printing, graphical user interfaces, object-oriented programming, Ethernet, and various advances in lasers, document printing, data storage, fiber optics and other technologies.

…

While PARC may be doing more applied research than it was known for in the past, the research center is still doing work on the cutting edge. Hoover notes, for instance, that PARC has been working on a concept called “content-centric networking” that would radically remake the way information moves around the Internet. The original ARPAnet, Hoover notes, was really engineered for point-to-point communications. But that’s not really the way the Internet is generally used now. Ergo, he says, a lot of complex stuff has to happen if millions of people simultaneously want to watch the same YouTube video if you want to avoid bringing the network to a standstill.

I’m a former Xerox employee, and the joke was always on Xerox when it related to PARC. PARC had developed some of the most important computer-related technologies and Xerox could never figure out how to sell them right. It took Apple and Microsoft to fully realize the GUI. But putting the business management aside, you have to appreciate the outstanding visionary work done by PARC researchers. It’s great to see them continuing on in that vein.

“But, Derek – aren’t you on vacation today and Monday?” you’re asking. Yes, I am. But I already had a treasure trove of material for this week’s Friday Five by Thursday, so I drafted and scheduled this post for Friday. Ah… the awesomeness of scheduled publishing.

#1 – Social Media Policy [Youtube via Digital Landfill]

A brilliant way to present a policy to employees! It’s engaging and gets the message across. Here’s hoping Praxair comes up with something similar (both the policy and the delivery format).

#2 – You, yourself, and Google: Managing your personal search ranking [TechRepublic]

There are a lot of firms and consultants making a lot of money on the web, solely on the business of helping people shape their Google search results. For corporations, brands, and causes, the Google ranking is a kind of web stock price, with just as much obsessive energy invested. For your own name, though, Google has just released a few tools to help you monitor where and how your name shows up, and it’s definitely worth a lunch break visit.

It’s not often that The Google gives you a way to directly influence search results, but this is one of them. The Google Dashboard is also a great tool to bookmark.

#3 – Dropbox Accidentally Unlocked All Accounts for 4 Hours [lifehacker]

Dropbox accidentally dropped the need for password authentication this past Sunday so anyone could log into anyone else’s Dropbox account with any password—all they’d need was an email address. This lasted four hours and, according to Dropbox, less than 1% of users were affected. Still, this is another good reason why you should add an extra layer of security to the data in your Dropbox—particularly if you’re putting sensitive data in there.

The cloud can be a dangerous place, friends. It’s not all puffy white blobs of happiness up there. Give a good thorough thought about what you use cloud services for.

#4 – Firefox 5: New, but improved? [ZDNet]

I’ve liked Firefox since it first showed up. But, this new Firefox 5 concerns me. Oh, it’s a fine browser. But, it’s not a major new release. At most, I’d call it Firefox 4.1, but really it’s little more than Firefox 4.02.

The Mozilla Foundation, following in the footsteps of Google’s Chrome Web browser, seems to believe that if they keep popping out new “major” releases every six weeks, they’ll convince people they’re better than the competition. That seemed like a dumb idea to me when Microsoft went from Word for Windows 2.0 to Word for Windows 6.0 back in 1993. The idea hasn’t improved any with age.

I skimmed through a lot of FF5 articles to find one with the tone I was looking for, and this one’s it. I have version number games. Come on, Mozilla, don’t release bug fixes as a major version number. That’s idiotic. On top of that, extensions break because not all developers are going to rush to update their extension just to say it works with 5.x as well as 4.x. For a good laugh, take a look at this and this. Who knew Microsoft could be funny?

#5 – 15 Classic Tech Ads [PCMag]

Take a stroll down memory lane!

So, kicking things off this week, an in-depth article on search ranking in SharePoint 2010:

#1 – Improve SharePoint Search Relevance [NothingButSharePoint.com]

SharePoint Enterprise Search includes a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research. It is specifically tuned for the unique requirements of searching enterprise content.

The great news is that it is possible for IT Professionals to customize the way SharePoint ranks search results. This can be done through creating a custom model (ranking model) and instructing SharePoint to use the custom model in a particular area of the solution or even to set the new ranking model as the default for SharePoint Search.

This article will provide you with the necessary background for SharePoint Ranking Models and will guide you through the process of creating and implementing your own custom ranking models.

There’s a ton of detailed info in this article, but even for the casual SharePoint user it provides a bit of insight. The first sentence I quoted points out that searching enterprise content is a different beast than searching the web. No, you really don’t want Google as your intranet search, so need something smarter that understands the nuances of your business and company. Admittedly we have not focused a lot of effort on search at Praxair yet, but as we move to SharePoint 2010 it will become an area of focus.

#2 – The Filter Bubble [Chris Smith-WNYMedia.net]

Essentially, Facebook, Google and others are turning into automated confirmation bias machines. Facebook, specifically, is trying to optimize your news feed to make it pleasurable for you to come back frequently, generate page views and increase ad clicks. As Facebook becomes the personal internet for people around the globe, is the company optimizing for social value by actively working to challenge your personal assumptions and connect you with people who might disagree with you? Not really.

The idea behind this article is really thought-provoking. Programmers have been continually striving to make “social” mean “understanding you better” so they can feed you more “relevant” information. But is that a good thing? Be sure to also watch the 9 minute TED video embedded in the article to learn more about this phenomenon.

#3- International Usability: Big Stuff the Same, Details Differ [useit.com]

Earlier this year, we ran a range of usability studies of websites, intranets, and mobile sites and apps in Australia, China, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Of course, we’ve always done lots of international testing (in 13 countries total), but this latest round — which covered 3 very different parts of the world — offered a good opportunity to step back and consider the big picture of international user experience.

(Definition of international usability: the effectiveness of user interfaces when used in any other country than the one in which they were designed.)

The highest-level conclusion? People are the same the world over, and all the main usability guidelines remain the same. After all, usability guidelines are derived from the principles of human–computer interaction (HCI), which are founded on the characteristics of computers and the human brain and the many ways the two differ.

Relevant info as we’re now starting to roll out intranet sites for other countries.

#4 – Traditional Texting Slows As Instant Messaging Grows In Popularity [The Consumerist]

Cellphone users sent and received more than a trillion texts in the second half of 2010, which is only an 8.7% increase over the previous six months. That marks the smallest gain in texting since it became de rigeur 10 years ago.

Apple announced their version of instant messaging this week, which will allow Apple users to send free messages to each other over the Internet. Google is said to be developing a messaging application for Android software as well, and RIM’s BlackBerry users are already fans of its messenger service.

Texting revenue reached $25 billion in the U.S. and Canada in 2010, with fees from around 20 cents per text or unlimited monthly plans for an additional fee. So without that, cellphone carriers are going to be pretty annoyed, considering many people would rather text than actually carry on a conversation.

The fact that people are willing to pay as much for texting as they do baffles me. It’s a tiny amount of data yet the fee for use is astronomically marked up (7314% by this article’s calculation). IM has been around longer that texting, which makes it even more baffling that people will pay for something they used to be able to do for free. Now that the phone technology is catching up to computers, the text-based communication methods are coming full circle. (For what it’s worth – I use Google Voice to text for free.)

#5 – Jobs’ Spaceship Apple Headquarters: A Dream 30 Years In the Making [Gizmodo]

Steve Jobs recently approached the Cupertino City Council with what seemed like the crazy vision of building a spaceship-like campus for Apple HQ. It turns out he had the same dream back in 1983. And it was just as ambitious.

Back in those more youthful days, Jobs approached the newly-elected mayor of San Jose, Tom McEnery, with a plan that would forever change their fortunes. His’ idea was something out of storybooks, “a shimmery glass structure surrounded by oaks and grasses.” He had even hired renowned architect I.M. Pei, the man responsible for the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, for the job. While viewing Coyote Valley—deemed to be the next frontier in development—for the first time, Jobs was “unequivocal about the vision he saw there,” envisioning a campus that incorporated the landscape into the design.

What can’t Steve Jobs do? I watched most of the city council video and I was amused by two things – one Steve Jobs is a lousy speaker, and two the Cupertino City Council may be the biggest Apple fanboys/girls in existence. At least they have the tax revenue as an excuse.

#1 – Official: TweetDeck Has Been Acquired By Twitter [Tweetdeck Blog]

The past three years have been an epic journey, with many highs and lows, accompanied by the constant thrill of never really knowing what to expect next. We’ve grown from one team member and a single user, to a team of fifteen and a user-base of millions. The reason for this growth is simple – our unwavering focus on providing high-quality tools and services for the Twitter-centric power-user. This has always been our core audience – the most active, influential and valuable users of Twitter and social media in general. Quality over quantity.

It is precisely for this reason that Twitter has acquired TweetDeck. The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs “more power”.

Hmm… as a Tweetdeck user myself, this one could be tricky. One of the things that makes some of the third party applications for Twitter (or any service) great, is that they extend and push the capabilities of the service itself. Having Tweetdeck as a part of Twitter may limit that innovation. I’m particularly curious to see what will become of deck.ly, which when it was launched by Tweetdeck a few months ago created a bit of a stir because it overrode what many see as a weakness in Twitter’s 140 character limit. Will Twitter kill deck.ly, leave it as-is, or make the Twitter service itself more robust?

While we’re talking about Twitter…

#2 – Ending Support for Tweed, our Twitter client for HP webOS [Pivotal Labs]

Over the past two years we’ve worked on Tweed, our webOS Twitter client, we’ve learned a lot about mobile development, JavaScript techniques and of course the Twitter client space. But the landscape has changed a lot recently so we’ve been thinking a lot about Tweed.

We’ve realized that it takes a lot of resources to maintain a Twitter client to the level of features and quality that Twitter users demand. The Twitter API changes frequently and new Twitter-related services appear all the time.

HP is shipping new webOS devices and has a new framework to go with them so we would need to reinvest a lot of time in order to keep up with the platform.

Add in that Twitter recently changed their policy regarding 3rd party client applications and the justification of continued effort is questionable.

After careful consideration we decided that the correct course of action is to formally end development and support for Tweed.

My mobile Twitter client of choice was Tweed. It’s amazing just how short the product lifecycle is in the mobile space. Two years and out for Tweed. I guess one of the problems with the low retail cost for mobile apps is that the developers frequently aren’t making enough money to justify continuing to maintain these products when they bore of them. On the upside, there’s always another app ready to take its place. My new webOS Twitter app is Carbon.

#3 – LinkedIn Doubles on First Day of Public Sale [CMS Wire]

People looking to LinkedIn’s IPO as a bellwether for how social media sites would do in the stock market are happy today as the stock more than doubled in its first day, after sales in it were delayed for half an hour just in an attempt to match supply with demand.

…

LinkedIn’s initial public offering was expected to be valued at US$ 32 to US$ 35 a share, raising US$ 260 million and giving the company a valuation of up to US$ 3.3 billion. Due to expected increased demand, the company earlier this week raised its share price to US$ 42 to US$ 45, giving it a valuation of up to US$ 4 billion.

How LinkedIn did in its IPO was important not just for itself, but for a number of other pre-IPO social media companies, including Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., Zynga Inc. and Groupon Inc., that were waiting to see how LinkedIn did.

After today, it should be safe to say that we’ll be seeing more IPOs in this market space.

So… the tech IPO craze returns with LinkedIn. Interesting that demand shot the price up all the way to ~$86. Of course, as with most IPOs… people buy into the craze, ride the wave up, then it quickly falls back down. My guess is that it’s a good time to short LNKD (I don’t short sell, myself). I think LinkedIn has some serious issues to work out with their product so that it doesn’t just become a spamming ground. It’s pretty good as an online resume, but falls short in a lot of other areas. Disclaimer: The author does not hold any positions in any of the stocks mentioned. Also, do not take investing advice from an IT guy.

#4 - How people really use LinkedIn: The truth is in the numbers [OpenDNS Blog]

We took a look at visits to LinkedIn during a one work-week period in May, Monday through Friday, in the United States, and the results were surprisingly consistent. (Time zones were normalized.) Overwhelmingly people visit LinkedIn the most between 8 am and 4 pm, with a dramatic decline during non-working hours.

There are several ways to interpret this data, but one thing is clear: people use LinkedIn during the workday. And almost exclusively during the workday. My expectation was that the numbers would point to more evening usage – folks spending non-work time polishing up their profiles and making connections, but that is clearly not the case. Next week we’ll take a look at Facebook visits and compare LinkedIn with Facebook. Perhaps some patterns will emerge…

A professional networking site is going to be used during business hours. And since “non-business hours” are diminishing for many people, business hours are turning into “those hours when people are most likely to be in front of their computer.”

#5 – Behold, the World’s Worst PowerPoint Slide [Gizmodo]

It’s almost brilliant in its horror. Diabolical. The arrows. The colors. This is Satan’s face.

Is a single part of this slide legible, or even comprehensible in some abstract sense? Was the audience given telescopes during the meeting? Do those boxes even say anything, or is this just some sort of psychological experiment?

Happy Memorial Day weekend!

Let’s start off with the big news of the week – Microsoft buying Skype:

#1 – 5 Key Takeaways From the Microsoft-Skype Press Conference [gigaom]

On the morning Microsoft made its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype official, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates held a press conference in downtown San Francisco to discuss their views on how the deal fits in with both companies’ strategies going forward. With Google’s I/O developer’s conference happening just a few blocks away, Microsoft communications head Frank Shaw said the software giant decided to call the presser because it “heard there wasn’t much happening today.”.

Yeah, it’s standard Microsoft practice to try and steal the thunder from someone else’s event. They do it every year to IBM during Lotusphere as well. The difference is this announcement actually has some meat to it. Of the plethora of articles on this announcement, I picked this one because they had the same takeaway that I did – Microsoft really, really wants to own a verb. You know – people don’t search for things on the internet, they google them. Wanting to be a verb was the whole reason behind the “Bing” rebranding of their search product (and that hideous jingle). Since that didn’t work, they just decided to go out and buy one – Skype. Sure, you can posit how this will be a great integration piece with their other software and hardware offerings, but ultimately I think it was about one thing – finally owning a verb.

#2 – Safety Designed In [Auto Observer]

“(With lane-departure warning systems), if I move out of my lane, the car vibrates or flashes a light. But if I want to change lanes, oops! How do I tell the car I really want to? Well, we use the turn signal. Once upon a time, the turn signal was used to tell other cars what you wanted to do. Now it’s to tell your own car. Bizarre.

Usability design guru Don Norman talks about a number of vehicle design issues related to safety. I’m not sure I agree with his conclusion that the only solution is to have the car drive itself so you can focus on the entertainment portion of your trip. It would seem to make sense to focus on simplifying the most complex interactions, rather than the one he already admits is the simplest. But with Google already developing the technology, it may not be that farfetched.

#3 – IE10 Platform Preview and CSS Features for Adaptive Layouts [IEblog]

The first platform preview of IE10 contains many new CSS3 features all developed as implementations of evolving Web standards. In this post, we’ll look at three of those CSS features—CSS3 Grid Layout, Flexible Box Layout, and Multi-column Layout. CSS Grid Layout and Flexible Box Layout both help developers create layouts for complex Web applications and Web sites. Multi-column is designed to help developers create advanced text layouts for improved readability on the Web. These three new CSS features can make it easier to more effectively use screen real-estate across a wide variety of devices and resolutions—a longstanding and growing problem for Web designers.

Interesting new stuff coming in CSS3 that ultimately helps in designing more flexible web-based apps that can run on multiple devices. Quick adoption and implementation of these standards are important, because the going trend right now in the mobile world is to build platform-specific apps. And that sucks, because it limits the platform options out there. Now whenever you hear a company has developed an app, you know they’re talking about 1. iOS for sure, 2. Android probably, 3. What other platform? There are other platforms? Ironically, this is the same segmentation that nearly killed Apple the first time around, the only difference is that this time they’re leading the slaughter. For now.

#4 – How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords [lifehacker]

I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I’ll probably get into all of them.

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

Statistically speaking that should probably cover about 20% of you. But don’t worry. If I didn’t get it yet it will probably only take a few more minutes before I do…

If you’re using one of the above passwords, you’re in trouble. Let’s face it – it’s impossible to remember all the passwords you need to have, which is why I highly recommend LastPass. Create one, really strong but memorable (to you) password, and let it auto-generate complex, secure passwords for all your other sites for you. Since it will auto-fill or auto-log-you-in to those sites, you don’t need to know what the password to any individual site is, and if one of those sites gets hacked, that password is useless anywhere else.

And what if LastPass itself gets hacked? Well, first, being security-paranoid is their core business. So when they have even an unexplained log anomaly, they start locking things down and sending out notifications immediately. And due to the way that your account info and password vault is stored and encrypted, it’s far less likely that hackers are going to get anything useful without a lot more work than it would be to steal it from a site with far less restrictive security. That is, unless, you’re using one of those above listed passwords as the master password to your vault. And if you are, well, you’re doing it wrong.

#5 – Dilbert 4/23/11 [Dilbert.com]

Until next week…

#1 - Why Photoshop for iPad Marks the End of the Desktop Computing Era [Gizmodo]

When it came out, many said that the “Oversized iPhone” was doomed from the start. Others shrugged at its potential, dismissing it as “just a good way to consume” content, like web pages, books and Netflix movies. Many of those even said it wouldn’t be good to play games. And almost everyone declared that it would never ever be a good content creation device: “There will never be Photoshop for iPad!”

It seems all of those people were wrong.

The article is quite interesting in its viewpoint which pits touch tablets vs. traditional PCs. I don’t necessarily share that they’re two different things. A tablet, to me, is just a more direct, intuitive input device to a computer. A mouse or a touchpad is an abstraction from interfacing with the application running on the device. So I’m not really sure that this is the end of desktop computing as much as it is an end to the mouse, touchpad, and trackball. What you’ll see more of are large format touchscreen monitors attached to traditional PCs with heavy duty computing power, and more, larger, and increasingly powerful tablets.

#2 – This History of Web Browsers [TestKing]

Click on the link to view an interesting infographic of the history, functionality, and popularity of the main web browsers since the inception of Netscape launched in 1994.

#3 – How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line [KISSmetrics]

Another interesting visual view of a survey on user perception of web page load time. I’m not embedding these due to the large size.

#4 – Clive Thompson on How Information Can Fuel Jobs [Wired]

For the past few years, proponents of “government 2.0? have been trying to liberate public data. Their argument goes like this: Our governments collect tons of information about everyday life—crime, health, economics, weather. That data is paid for with taxes and belongs to the public, so release it openly and altruistic geeks can build apps that improve civic life.

But it’s slow going. Bureaucrats still snooze atop mountains of public data, with no political imperative to release it. It’s not something senators and congresspeople fret about while nursing martinis with lobbyists. “It’s not the primary mission of any agency,” notes Tom Lee, a director at the Sunlight Foundation, one of the foremost open-government groups.

So how do we get the attention of the political class? With one word: jobs. Shoving more public data into the commons could kick-start billions in economic activity. That’s because all that information becomes incredibly valuable in the hands of clever entrepreneurs.

The article goes on to illustrate a couple examples of how people formed companies around analyzing and repackaging slivers of the mass amount of public data that exists, but isn’t always in a friendly format. It’s fascinating in its potential not only in the ability to create jobs, but also in how the public sector could in turn improve government faster in many cases than government can reform itself.

#5 - YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious [delicious blog]

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.

Providing a seamless transition for users is incredibly important for both companies. Yahoo! will continue to operate Delicious until approximately July 2011. When the transition period is complete, your information will be moved over to Delicious’ new owner.

This is great news for long time delicious users (or del.icio.us for you old-timers) like myself. Yahoo had identified delicious as one of the things they weren’t really going to be supporting anymore, so it’s great that someone else was able to snatch it up and has plans to keep it alive and hopefully continue to improve it. My Firefox 4 is very sadly lacking a compatible version of the the delicious extension, and the new owners have already said that’s on the top of their priority list. Social bookmarking lives on!

Welcome to the fool-free edition of Friday Five!

#1 – REDACTED

I write Friday Five for my internal Praxair blog, and this post was just too specific to something internal to be worth sharing here.  Instead, here’s the worst song in the universe.

#2 – Amazon Cloud Player goes live, streams music on your computer and Android [Engadget]

Amazon rolled out its very own music streaming service which is conveniently dubbed the Amazon Cloud Player. Existing Amazon customers in the US can now upload their MP3 purchases to their 5GB cloud space — upgradable to a one-year 20GB plan for free upon purchasing an MP3 album, with additional plans starting at $20 a year — and then start streaming on their computers or Android devices. Oh, and did we mention that this service is free of charge as well?

First To Market, even for free apps, is important in today’s tech world. If you can include “cloud” in the title of the product, it’s 10x more important! So Amazon got to market first with this online hosted music storage/playback system. Which, of course, makes music labels mad (what doesn’t?) – especially the ones who were working on their own systems. Why Amazon would need a license to allow you to listen to music you already purchased is indicative of just how screwed up the music industry is, but it does keep many a lawyer employed.

The service itself is quite useful – upload music you already own, or if you buy from Amazon they’ll automatically add those songs to your Cloud Player for you and won’t count the megabytes against your 5GB quota. Since Amazon is not Apple or Google and doesn’t have its own mp3 player or mobile platform, getting this out ahead of the giants may be necessary to ensure its success.

#3 – The Google +1 Button [Google]

The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.”

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

Social capital has actual value. Some companies are studying to determine the actual cash value of a Tweet, a Facebook Like, a LinkedIn Share, etc. Google, not to be outdone in this arena, has invented its own social weight – the +1 button. Of course, as with most things Google, this ties back into search and advertising. Your +1 can help influence search rankings and help tailor advertising to your interests. This isn’t the first time Google has tried to integrate social influence with their search business, but with Facebook looking to take “Like” on the road, social influence is turning into a netwide currency.

The Google +1 experiment (more beta-y then beta?) can be a bit tricky to get enabled, but watch their video and follow the links to get started.

#4 - Set Up an Automated, Bulletproof File Back Up Solution [lifehacker]

More and more, the fragments of your life exist as particles on a disk mounted inside your computer—disks susceptible to temperature changes, power surges, fire, theft, static, and just plain wear and tear. Hard drives fail. It’s a fact of computing life. It’s not a matter of whether your computer’s disk will stop working; it’s a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life—and it won’t, if you have a backup copy.

Thursday was World Backup Day – love the tagline: “Don’t be an April Fool. Backup your data. Check your restores.” This lifehacker article walks through the benefits of using CrashPlan as your online backup tool. Back in February, I wrote about the discontinuation of my then-current backup provider and that I was piloting CrashPlan. So far, I couldn’t be happier with the change. It’s cheaper, it’s faster, and it’s far more flexible. If you’re still not backing up your data online (to the cloud!) take a good look at what CrashPlan has to offer.

#5 – Angry Birds Pork Rinds [ThinkGeek]

Succulent. Winning. Explosive.

Angry Birds Pork Rinds are the ultimate in high protein snacking. Since the only other green meat we’ve encountered has been a breakfast meat paired with green eggs, we’re calling these “The Other Green Meat.” Much like green ham, you can eat Angry Birds Pork Rinds here or there. You can eat them anywhere.

Nerd merchandiser extraordinaire ThinkGeek always likes to slip in a couple not-quite-available products into their lineup on the first of April. This one was my favorite (watch the video, too!). Apple aficionados may prefer the PLAYMOBIL Apple Store Playset, however. If you’ve never been to ThinkGeek before, you may be surprised at the merchandise they actually DO carry. I recommend the Bacon Salt.

Happy April!

#1 – AP Stylebook Finally Changes “e-mail” to “email” [Mashable]

The AP Stylebook, the de facto style and usage guide for much of the news media, announced on Friday that the abbreviated term for “electronic mail” is losing a hyphen, and with it, a relic of a simpler time when Internet technology needed to be explained very carefully.

The move follows the AP Stylebook’s decision to change “Web site” to “website” last year, at which time we wrote, “[We] hold our collective breath for other possible updates, such as changing “e-mail” to “email.’”

For those of you that do a lot of online writing, congrats on saving yourself a keypress!

#2 – What’s New and Awesome in Firefox 4 [lifehacker]

Firefox 4 is officially out, and it’s got a lot going for it, including a more minimalistic interface, synchronization, and a serious speed increase.

The browser wars are heating up once again! Firefox 4 just dropped, and it is hot! Huge performance improvements over FF3, and some great usability improvements like tab grouping, permanent application tabs, and more usable screen real estate. IE9 is also out, but only if you’re already off of Windows XP. For the Firefox aficionados, you may also want to look at How to Fix Annoyances with Firefox 4′s New Look, although I don’t find all the items they list to be annoyances. I suggest trying it as is out-of-the-box first.

#3 - Understanding social computing: SharePoint 2010 New Features from lynda.com [YouTube]

“Social” may be the biggest buzzword of the day, and social features are coming to SharePoint in the 2010 version, which IT will begin rolling out later this year. This video gives a decent overview of some of the new features available. You can also get more info direct from Microsoft.

#4 - Netflix is getting into the content biz… [engadget]

The rumors are true, instead of simply offering old content from others, Netflix is jumping back into the content business by licensing David Fincher’s upcoming drama House of Cards for Watch Instantly streaming in the US and Canada before it airs anywhere else, or has even been produced. In a blog post and interview with AllThingsD, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos justifies signing up for the series sight unseen by pointing out the popularity of the earlier BBC miniseries on which it is based among Netflix members and the collective skills of both the director and lead actor Kevin Spacey.

It seems that if the cable companies (or major networks) aren’t going to start offering a la carte channel offerings themselves, companies like Netflix are going to force them into it. We’re heading down the road of subscribing to individual content providers for new programming. On the plus side, this equals more choice. On the downside, this could mean free programming options could diminish. But the fast changing world of TV/video creation and delivery is one of the most interesting to watch develop.

#5 – Radiation Chart [xkcd]

There’s a lot of discussion of radiation from the Fukushima plants, along with comparisons to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Radiation levels are often described as “<X> times the normal level” or “<Y>% over the legal limit,” which can be pretty confusing.

Infographics are all the rage these days, and this one does a good job showing why – they have the ability to take concepts that are difficult to get your arms around and put them in a nice, visual medium. With all the meltdown hysteria in the news following the Japan earthquake, this infographic puts radiation doses into perspective.

That’s all for this week!

#1 - Videos from Design of Everyday Things [Don Norman's jnd.org]

One upon a time, many years ago — 1994 to be precise — The Voyager Company produced a delightful CD-ROM that included copies of several of my books (“Design of Everyday Things,” “Things that Make Us Smart,” and “Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.” As you read the books, if you had a question, you could just click wherever there was a link and I would pop up, walk on top of the text and illustrate the points being discussed on that page.

Voyager worked diligently on the CD-ROM: they did a marvelous job.  But they were too far ahead of their time. This was an early e-book, far ahead of its time. It was produced in Hypercard, an innovative platform for the Apple Macintosh that no longer exists. it doesn’t even run on modern Apple machines. (Weirdly enough, you can still purchase it at Amazon.com.)

…

Mads Soegaard, Editor-in-Chief of Interaction-Design.org, has worked diligently to recover many of the videos. He can’t get them all to work, but he is now posting the ones he has on the Interaction-Design website. (Apologies for the poor quality video, but in 1994, these were state of the art.)

These videos from Norman’s iconic “Design of Everyday Things” – a key book for anyone with an interest in design of any kind – were well done for their age, and the accuracy and current validity of their content makes them worth the few minutes to watch them. It’s funny to watch Norman forcasting in 1994 how we would be soon be living in a permanently connected world, which would make it difficult to unplug from.

#2 – User Experiences – Listen, Learn, Refine [IEBlog]

The IE9 beta reached millions of users around the world (over 25 million downloads), and we received a lot of feedback – a total of over 17,000 pieces of feedback since the start of IE9. The extensive reach of the beta gives us the opportunity to learn how users really use the product. Your feedback and opt-in user instrumentation are used to better understand your experiences with IE9. By listening to your specific feedback, and learning more about how you use the features through instrumentation, we gain more insight into how users browse. With those inputs, we took action to improve the overall user experience, and you can see the results in the IE9 RC.

Sorry those of you still stranded in the land of IE6… IE9 is currently being tested. This article is interesting to a broad audience because it describes how Microsoft gathers and uses feedback during its beta testing period. I especially liked the graphics illustrating how much effort is involved in trying to squeeze out every last pixel of available screen real estate. In talking about the feedback process, the article also highlights some of the new features of IE9.

#3 – Testing Multiple Versions of IE on One PC [IEBlog]

Testing production Web sites against multiple browsers and multiple browser versions is a reality of Web development. IE9′s emulation of older IE document modes makes this easier but those emulations are not exact. Some developers need a convenient way to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one PC. Windows 7′s Windows XP Mode is an interesting option for testing sites across versions of IE on one PC.

Also from IEBlog on IE9, but this article is particularly useful for the other IT folks in the group running Windows 7. The article also includes a link to the IE9 VHDs for testing via XP as well.

#4 - Full Text RSS Feed Builder Rids You of Truncated RSS Feeds Forever [lifehacker]

If you’re tired of RSS feeds only showing you the first paragraph or two of an article, Full Text RSS Feed Builder will give you a new RSS feed showing the full articles. It’ll even turn aggregators like Hacker News into regular feeds, showing the full text of the linked article instead of just the link they usually show. It’s completely free, doesn’t add any ads, and keeps you from ever having to leave your RSS reader.

For the RSS aficionados peeved by excerpted feeds in their readers, there now appears to be a solution!

#5 - Three Keys to Make Your Intranet a Collaborative Success in 2011 [CMS Wire]

User adoption is the number one challenge facing anyone in charge of a corporate intranet or employee portal. If you cannot get your users on the site for simple tasks like finding a document or contact information than there is no chance that it will become a collaborative resource for your organization

There are three key areas which can assist in transforming your intranet from a barren land of little use in the day to day lives of your employees to a vibrant resource for information delivery and corporate communication as well as a platform for collaboration.

Interesting, quick read on the topic.

AIIM defines Enterprise Content Management as “The strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to key organisational processes.” The “enterprise” qualifier indicates that this is something being evaluated across a company. We all use multiple content management systems every day – our email, hard drives, flash drives, CDs/DVDs, SharePoint, intranets, and extranets to name a few. ECM isn’t a technology – it’s a overall system that looks at how a company needs to store information to be able to find it as needed.

The certification process involved an online exam done at home after the class, and writing a paper based on a fictitious (though extremely reflective of many actual businesses) case study. After review of the paper, the title of ECM Master was bestowed upon me, which I promise to only use for good and not evil.

AIIM offers several other certificate courses, including one on SharePoint specifically. I’m not sure at this point if I’m going to pursue any others at this time, but I thought the instructor, Bob Larrivee, was excellent and that the course was worthwhile.

This week… a little bit of IT in the world of politics and a little bit of politics in the world of IT…

#1 - How Egypt Turned Off the Internet [Gizmodo]

“Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it,” Vodafone Egypt explained in a statement shortly after. Along with Vodafone, Egypt’s other three major ISPs, Link Egypt, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr, all stopped service.

The article goes on to talk about how without turning off ye olde landline telephone service, Egypt couldn’t really disconnect everyone, as those who still had analog modems were able to dial into other country’s ISPs. A pricy option, to be sure.

#2 - The Computer Attacks You’ve Never Heard Of [lifehacker]

We’ve all heard of worms, Trojan horses, phishing, and other common computer security attacks that aims to infect your system and steal your data. But what about bluebugging, smishing, and scareware?

Get caught up on your badware terminology! I think “pod slurping” is my favorite term of the bunch.

#3 – HTML5 and Web Video: Questions for the Industry from the Community [IEBlog]

1. IE9 will support H.264. Microsoft has released an add-on for Firefox on Windows to support H.264 and today we are releasing a plug-in for Google Chrome on Windows to provide support for H.264.
2. We will provide support for IE9 users who install third-party WebM video support on Windows and they will be able to play WebM video in IE9.
3. Many parties have raised legitimate questions about liability, risks, and support for WebM and the proponents of WebM should answer them.

If you look back at my first Friday Five you’ll see an article on Google dropping support for H.264 video in Google Chrome. Microsoft took this as an opportunity to not only say they will continue to support H.264 in Internet Explorer 9, but to go one step further and provide a plugin for Google Chrome so its users can still see H.264 encoded video. Oh, it’s on…

#4 - Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results [Search Engine Land]

Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.

As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work. Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test.

In unrelated news (or is it?)… Google suspected that Microsoft Bing has been pilfering their results for their own use. The article goes into great detail about how exactly Google determined Microsoft was doing this, and gets into a debate about whether this is “cheating” or just smart business.

#5 – Mozy Drops Unlimited Backups, Introduces New Pricing [lifehacker]

Mozy—our previously favorite tool for setting up foolproof, off-site backups—has changed it’s pricing, most notably dropping their unlimited backup plans. Bummer for Mozy users. Here are the details:

Under the new plan, you can back up 50GB on one computer for $6/month, or 125GB on up to three computers for $9.99/month… As a loyal Mozy unlimited user, I admit I didn’t really know how much I was backing up, so I checked the computer I back up the least from: Turns out, it’s 226GB. Uh oh. You can add an additional 20GB of storage to the 125GB account for $2/month per 20GB, so we’re talking an extra $10/month for an additional 100GB. In my case, for example, I’d need to pay $20/month to back up this one computer—up from my previous $5/month for the unlimited plan.

This one hurts me, personally, as I’m a user in pretty much the same situation as the one outlined above, and I’ve recommended them to others as a fantastic online (“cloud”) backup tool as well. Now, of course, any business has a right to change their pricing and their product offerings, however from the 70+ pages of customer complaints and the constant streaming of complaints on Twitter, Mozy probably could have handled phasing out a significant (and very vocal) portion of their user base a bit better. One real issue is that for people within days of their plan ending, they’re immediately pushed into higher cost plans before they’re able to switch to another vendor, instead of offering a 30-90 day grace period. As you can imagine, for home users with large backups, it can take weeks to upload that initial backup. The 25 GB test backup to another service I’m running right now is slated to take 3-4 days.

Mozy’s competitors wasted no time in offering incentives to switch, using cutesy names like CrashPlan’s http://crashplan.com/mozyonover (disclosure: I’m testing CrashPlan’s service now). However, I don’t believe that Mozy didn’t see this coming. Mozy was bought by tech giant EMC, and the rumor is the new division had trouble controlling costs. EMC probably forced the issue to get costs immediately under control, and at the same time is focused on turning Mozy into a corporate-focused tool instead of a personal tool.

The change also sparked much discussion on whether other cloud-based storage solutions were going to follow suit or not, but based on some of the great long term deals being offered by competitors, I’d guess probably not. It does, however, illustrate one of the issues of online tools that you “lease” vs. tools that you own – rarely do you have control over what the vendors decide to do with their cloud-based applications. You really can’t rely on any vendor, as they might decide to just close up shop one day and leave you with nothing. You always need to have one eye on alternatives. I didn’t with Mozy, and even though I’m among the fortunate that’s still locked into my pricing for another year and a half, I’m looking at the alternatives now. Mozy seems to be giving prorated refunds to departing customers, which is about the only positive thing they’ve done. I can’t say, though, that I know exactly what their terms & conditions specified in that regard, so I suspect that they could discontinue that practice any day. At this point, they’ve already done quite a bit to ruin their reputation, so one more log on the fire wouldn’t do much more. It seems like really understanding all the legalese you clicked “I agree” to will become as important and understanding the features of the product you’re buying.

#1 – Microsoft UC Team Blog: Don’t Be the Last Company on Notes [Ed Brill]

On behalf of 50,000 organizations worldwide, let me say this in the most professional way possible:

Don’t insult us, Microsoft.

Today, Microsoft came clean on their whisper campaign of the last six months, where they go to CIOs and say, “you don’t want to be the last company on Lotus Notes.”

Ed Brill is IBM’s preeminent blogger and the Director of Messaging and Collaboration, IBM Lotus Software. As IBM gears up for their annual Lotusphere conference, Microsoft will be preparing to issue their annual press release that digs at how Notes is dead. The reality is that both IBM and Microsoft have strong products. Here at Praxair we’ve been leaning away from building applications on Notes in favor of SharePoint & .NET in recent years, but at the same time are looking at the email/IM/messaging infrastructure of both companies. There’s always a risk of putting all your eggs in one basket, and the financial benefit of going single vendor for all technologies isn’t as clear as some may think.

#2 - The Reality of Social Media Usage in the Enterprise [CMSWire]

• Fifty percent of the 2010 Inc. 500 have a corporate blog (up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008)
• Forty-four percent say Facebook is the single most effective social networking platform they use (It’s also the tool that most (87%) are most familiar with)
• Fifty-nine percent use Twitter for their business

As for what purpose they are using Facebook, Twitter and blogs, the study reported that

• Fifty-seven percent report using search engines and social networking sites to recruit and evaluate potential employees.
• Most companies indicated that their blog aimed to engage consumers through accepting and replying to comments and providing a vehicle for subscriptions.
• Companies noted that social media is not only used for communication between business and consumers, but for communicating with vendors and partners as well.

Social media is as much a reality today as email. Companies that don’t get on board are just getting behind. Along the same vein…

#3 – 2010: The Numbers We Saw [OpenDNS Blog]

Data collected on how people used Web content filtering in 2010 shows this fact: Facebook is the #1 most blacklisted site. And interestingly enough, it’s also the #2 most whitelisted site. Other sites that were frequently blocked include MySpace and YouTube.

DNS is the system that allows you to type “praxair.com” into your web browser and get that request routed to the correct computer so it sends you back the right web page. This way, you don’t have to remember that 198.190.156.94 is the computer you’re trying to get to. DNS can also be exploited by scammers by making it look like you’re clicking on something legit but really sending you somewhere else. OpenDNS is a fantastic and relatively easy way for individuals to protect themselves from online problems. In a nutshell, at home you change your home networking router from using the DNS servers provided by your ISP to OpenDNS’s servers. OpenDNS will automatically prevent you from getting to any unscrupulous sites that it knows about, as well as allow you to block entire categories of legitimate sites (porn, for example). If you have kids, this is a great way to keep them away from the bad stuff on the internet.

OpenDNS is illustrating a strange situation here – that Facebook is one of the most blocked AND most allowed sites by their users. In their report, OpenDNS explains this thusly:

The fact that many of the same sites that appear on the Top Ten Blacklisted Websites list appear on the list below may indicate the diverse perspectives people have regarding many of these sites.

Indeed. However, the fact that people that typically block large amount of sites are whitelisting Facebook may be more telling than the inverse.

Since we’re on a Facebook roll…

#4 – Social Media Research + Employment Decisions: May Be a Recipe for Litigation [Social Media Law Update] via [Digital Landfill]

There are subjects that are considered off limits for employers to ask job applicants about. Under federal law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination when making employment related decisions. A company cannot make hiring, discipline and termination decisions based on any of the following protected factors: race, color, national origin, religion and gender. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) adds to the list with a prohibition on discrimination against individuals who are 40 years or older. And, finally, the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 prohibits discrimination against “qualified disabled” individuals. Employment decisions are defined broadly and include promotion, demotion, compensation, and transfers.

Many states add additional areas that are off limits for making employment decisions. For example, California also gives protected status to: sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, cancer, political affiliation, genetic characteristics, and gender identity.

It is very easy to see how someone with a Facebook page may post about these protected factors. Thus, the challenge for employers who are researching job applicants, or monitoring the social media activity of their employees, is not to let this protected status information bleed into their employment decisions. Under federal and state law, employers should not make employment decisions that are “motivated by” a person’s membership in a protected class.

My take on HR looking at social media channels for information about employees has been that they should be more concerned if they can’t find anything about a potential employee than if they can. I’ve said that before, and it’s certainly truer than ever.

And now for something completely different…

#5 - LibreOffice 3.3 Final Gives the OpenOffice.org Suite a Fresh Start [lifehacker]

The first finalized release of the OpenOffice.org spin-off, LibreOffice, has hit the web at version 3.3. It’s got a few unique features, an ever-so-slightly tweaked look, and the ability to export to Microsoft’s DOCX format by default.

You can read up on the new features and fixes and general release notes, but know that, in general, this is an OpenOffice.org package released under a different banner, for a multitude of reasons.

If you’re a fan of the free office productivity software package OpenOffice.org, you’ll want to read more about LibreOffice. Just as there are spats in the commercial software industry (see article #1) similar things happen in the open source community as well. Hit the “multitude of reasons” link above for more on that.

And to bring things full circle, another free alternative to Microsoft Office or one of the free suites above is IBM Lotus Symphony. Give it a try.

Here are this week’s five interesting articles, handpicked by yours truly.

A History of Enterprise IT in One Slide [AIIM Digital Landfill]

I love a good graphic, and this one is a pretty clear illustration of computing history.

Part 1 – FAST for SharePoint 2010 Features and Proposition [A Static State]

FAST for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP) is one of the newest and coolest features of SharePoint 2010. FAST was a major acquisition for Microsoft and it is one of the top Enterprise Search engines in the Gartner quartiles. Combined together, Microsoft really has a best of breed platform for managing content and building enterprise solutions.

It’s unknown at this point whether we’ll pursue adding FAST to our SharePoint 2010 architecture, but this article provides a good overview of the technology.

Four Lessons From Evernote’s First Week On The Mac App Store [TechCrunch]

Over the past year, about 70% of Evernote’s new users came from mobile app stores, mostly iOS and Android. This led us to the understandable conclusion that mobile was the crucial thing that made a platform attractive to independent developers. Last week made us realize that the reality is a little bit more nuanced. It isn’t mobile that’s overwhelmingly important, it’s the app store. Until a week ago, all the good app stores just happened to be on mobile devices, but someone with a shiny new Macbook is just as eager to get the best apps as someone with a shiny new iPhone.

This article points out something interesting – we’ve all seen the explosive growth in mobile devices, be they smartphones, tablets, eReaders, etc. One of the underlying reasons is ease of use, specifically around finding and installing software. I think this concept is adaptable to the enterprise. Why can’t we have a company app store that allows employees to browse and install useful software? This basically exists at the helpdesk level, but currently they need to run the installation. Employees can’t easily tell what software is available to them, and for licensed software, how much it costs. An app catalog approach would allow easier access to productivity-enhancing tools, while at the same time give IT an easier view into what software is really useful to the end users.

Apple’s Making It Impossible To Open Up Your iPhone By Secretly Swapping Its Screws [Gizmodo]

But people who have taken their iPhone 4s into Apple Stores for repair have apparently been noticing something a little bit different when they got it back: The screws were no longer Philips but some bizarre new flower-shaped ones referred to as a “pentalobe security screws.” And you almost certainly do not have a screwdriver that will fit them. In fact, no one does, except Apple.

Of course, it’s Apple’s prerogative to keep you from tampering with your iPhone, but quietly introducing these new screws to customers’ iPhones during unrelated repairs is patently absurd. You go in with an iPhone you can open up with an eyeglass repair kit, you walk out with one that’s sealed like Fort Knox. It’s outrageous for Apple, or any company for that matter, to think that they can alter a product without permission once it’s been purchased, swapping out parts willy-nilly as they come up with better ways to entomb the device. It’s more than a little bit underhanded, and it’s exactly the type of behavior that leads some people to think that buying Apple stuff is akin to being trapped in a technological prison cell, albeit a beautifully appointed one. The message here is that the user is totally powerless in the Apple domain—especially so in their physical domain, the Apple Store—and that regardless of whatever you think that transaction meant, these products still and will always belong to Apple.

There’s an interesting debate going on in the technology space (and often related to Apple) about what portion of something you purchase is still owned by the company that produced it? There seems to be movement in many areas towards the individual not actually owning what they purchase, instead only buying a license to use it (Netflix, most software applications, iTunes). The debate is now being pushed into the hardware realm as well.

The other interesting lesson here is that within hours of this article there were several vendors selling the right parts to give iPhone users control again, such as iFixit’s iPhone Liberation Kit. The lessons? Silly screws never stop a determined person. There’s a new market born every minute. And the appearance of security is usually just that.

Rumor: more tablet details emerge: Touchstone, size, features [PreCentral]

If you don’t know the history, Palm (the company that made the first, great PDA – the Palm Pilot) was acquired by HP last year. The real value of Palm was no longer in their hardware, but in their new mobile operating system webOS. HP now has the ability to release a new line of devices with their own OS, rather than need to license Android or Microsoft’s. I’ve been a long-time Palm user, having an original Palm III, a Treo 650, and now a Pre Plus, so the new tablets are exciting. webOS’s end user experience is on par with Apple’s iOS, but without all of Apple’s restrictions. There’s a huge homebrew community that builds apps for free and a separate catalog for you to install them from, aside from the standard reviewed Palm app catalog. webOS has been struggling to compete with the other mobile OS’s, but if the new hardware is good, there may still be life for Palm out there.

Microsoft estimates that you the customer will spend a total of $6.2 Billion on services related to SharePoint in 2011… According to Goldman Sachs data more than 50 countries have a GDP (Gross Domestic Product) less than what the world spends on SharePoint.

SharePoint is many things, but cheap it isn’t.  Interesting comparison.

#2 – How To Perform Nearly Any Task From Your Browser’s Address Bar -

By integrating all of your favorite services into your browser’s address bar, you don’t have to spend nearly as much time navigating their webapps. No matter what you want to do—whether it’s add a task to your to-do list, add an event to your calendar, send a quick email, or even get driving directions—all you have to do is hit Ctrl+L and type in a few choice words.

I admit it – I hate the mouse. I am eagerly looking forward to multitouch monitors, but in the meantime some well-constructed keyboard commands are always welcome.

#3 – Show/Hide [SharePoint] Lookup fields with jQuery –

I will show you how to show and hide form fields dependent on the value of a drop-down list field, with a special look at what to do with Lookup fields. I am often given requirements for SharePoint forms that have functionality that isn’t possible with the out-of-the-box controls, this is one such example.

I haven’t had the chance to try this, but our team has had a lot of success in manipulating SharePoint through jQuery.

#4 – Could this be the year we get to ditch the cable box? -

Unlike the attempts we’ve seen in the past, at CES this year there were a number of ways TV manufactures and cable companies figured out to bring HD to the TV without a set-top box. The commonality between the methods was that the provider will create and control the user experience on the TV. This means that no matter what type of TV you buy, the user interface will look the same.

Perhaps some of the most interesting news to come out of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year is how far along the mainstream cable providers are in being able to uncouple their programming from their physical network.  This would allow, for example, Time Warner to sell their cable TV package over a Comcast-provided broadband connection. Or bundle it with a TV purchase. Or offer their service as an app on your mobile device. We might finally be seeing some real competition in this space, and competition breeds better products for consumers.

#5 – HTML Video Codec Support in Chrome -

…we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

With the recent rollout of an internal video management solution we’ve been keeping a closer eye on video technology in our department. Just as soon as you think you have a handle on where the road is leading you, something changes. It was widely assumed that H.264 would be the standard codec for HTML5 native video, but this announcement from Google might change that direction quickly.

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That’s all for this week.  Hopefully everyone found at least one article that piqued their interest.  Stay tuned for next week…

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The WordPress 3.0 upgrade was the most painless software upgrade I’ve ever done. It literally took 30 seconds. No warnings, no errors, and my old theme even worked as if I did nothing at all.

Anyways… time to get tweaking. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes…