Vallery.net

I’ve used Google Apps for many years given that it is a reliable way for me to host my personal email for free.   I own my own domain (obviously) and I enjoy having the address jason@vallery.net.    Since the surname Vallery isn’t terribly common I’ve also had the occasion to setup email addresses for close and distant family members who wanted the novelty of name@vallery.net.    With the free version of Google Apps you can create up to 10 accounts which was more than enough for my limited needs.

Given my role in technology I’ve also had the occasion to help friends and family with their own personal web needs.  Over the last few years I’ve helped several folks get off the ground with a basic website and email on their own domain for either personal or small business use.   Every single time I’ve turned to Google Apps as the solution for them to host their email, calendar, etc.

Now that Office 365 has been available for a while I decided to evaluate both my own usage of Google Apps as well as what tool I’m recommended to people who ask me.   What I’ve found has redefined the problem a bit and changed the way I approach the answer.

For my own use I migrated my domain over to Office 365 last fall (around November 2011 I think).   I was pleased with the tools that Microsoft offered to accomplish this.   It was a pretty simple task for me to import the users, migrate their email, and then send them their new login credentials.   I had a little bit of effort in walking the family members through configuring Outlook and/or their Phones but it generally went well.

There were a few things that I immediately noticed were missing however:

• No custom CNAME for the login page.   Everyone had got used to logging in at https://mail.vallery.net/.   Now I have to have them go to https://portal.microsoftonline.com?   What is that about?   It would have made the transition quite a bit simpler if I could have just remapped the CNAME so the URL wouldn’t have changed for the users.

• DNS management is tricky.   Microsoft has the expectation that I’m going to just hand them over my domain and use their DNS servers.   No way Microsoft!!   I use my domain for a lot more than email and instant messaging.   I’ve got a number of complex records that need to be maintained.  I want the ability to dynamically update those records via an API.   That is why I turned to paying for the premium service from dyndns.org to host my DNS.   With the limited capability that Microsoft is offering for DNS management there was no way I was going to switch to their name server.   As a result I had to “trick” their system by looking up all of the records that they would have inserted on my zone had they been hosting it and then create them on dyndns.org’s server.   This wasn’t a big deal but shortly after I setup my account those records changed and my service stopped working.   I had to go and repeat the process.   I understand why from a stability perspective Microsoft wants to be able to handle the DNS for the domain but that just isn’t practical until their tools are as robust as other offerings.

• Of course the biggest difference is cost.   For free with Google Apps you get 10 mailboxes, calendar, cloud storage for documents, instant messaging,  SAML claims support (ADFS),  and a marketplace full of additional capabilities.  For free from Microsoft you get….  nothing.    The cheapest Office 365 plan is $4/month/user and that only gets you exchange.   For $6/month/user you can include Lync and a SharePoint site collection.   You still don’t get full enterprise features like sync with AD, true SharePoint (mysites, multiple site collections, etc).   That doesn’t kick in until you get up the E1 plan.  Current Office 365 pricing and plans: www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx

So what does that mean?   For someone like my cousin who has a classic car restoration business (http://chclassics.com) it would make no sense for him to pay $6/month/user for email.   He has five employees and only two of those actually use email.   With Google Apps he can get free hosting for his email and calendar and it meets 100% of his needs for free.   I can’t help but recommend that he go that route.

For someone like myself who lives in his email it makes more sense for me to go Office 365.   I mentioned the things that Office 365 was missing above but I didn’t mention what it brings.   This is exchange.   The most powerful mail server that has ever existed.   I get to push my email down to Outlook.  No more IMAP.   I get 25GB of storage to archive and search my old messages.   I get a SharePoint site for hosting my family’s documents.   I have a shared One Note with my wife with all kinds of stuff in it (tasks, shopping list, recipes, finances, etc).

So – if you’re a small business with a technical savvy audience that can appreciate the real value that having a true exchange/SharePoint based solution can bring then obviously Office 365 is the way to go.   If you need the very basic functionality and are watching your expenses very closely than I’d say stick with Google Apps.   For me the $6/month/user I’m paying is a small price to pay for the functionality that I get.   I will certainly continue to recommend Google Apps though for people like my cousin who just want to get their email.

Obviously neither Google or Microsoft are making their money off customers like myself or my cousin.   That isn’t the market that either of them are after.   The under 10 user customer isn’t even on the Microsoft radar.   I think from a public relations perspective though it would benefit Microsoft to consider introducing a plan that would directly compete with the free Google Apps plan.  Who knows…  maybe some day my cousins 5 person business will turn into a 50 person business?  Wouldn’t it be easier for him to continue using Google Apps then switch to Office365 at that point?

In follow-up to my earlier post I wanted to share my thoughts now that I’ve actually used my iPad during my day to day routine.

I’m still very pleased with the hardware.   The size is just about perfect for taking to a meeting or sitting on the couch.  I haven’t yet traveled with it but will have that opportunity next week.   I expect it to be great for use on the plane.

When using the Apple case I find that sitting the slightly raised iPad down on the table to be at the perfect angle for typing.

The battery life is great.   While I had my initial concerns about the inability to charge the iPad with anything but the included wall charger, that hasn’t proved to be as big of an issue as I expected.   In reality I haven’t dropped below 60% battery usage after 2 days of fairly heavy  usage.  I just plug it in the wall charger at night before I go to bed.   I still think they will need to address the issue but it’s not bothering me.

The browser is absolutely fantastic.    Aside from the obvious and unfortunate omission of flash support it is actually a really capable device for basic web surfing.   Initially I was concerned that there is no native Facebook application that leverages the capabilities of the iPad.     I’ve actually found using the full web version of Facebook to be great thanks to the screen real estate and the capabilities of Safari.   I would argue that thanks to the touch interface surfing the web might actually be better on the iPad compared to a traditional PC.

I really can see the potential to lower my dependency on my laptop for basic tasks.   In example, I’ve found it to be particularly useful for basic emailing and calendar activities.   Contrary to my iPhone it is actually pretty easy to type on, copy/paste, etc.   I don’t mind writing an email on my iPhone in a pinch but it’s not something I would do regularly.   With the iPad it’s actually a much more pleasurable experience.

I’ve also been enjoying a few additional applications:

Kindle for iPad – To correct my earlier post, it turns out there is a Kindle app for the iPad.   I’m happy to see this since I have a decent investment in ebooks from Amazon.  The UI is fine, but not as polished as Apple’s iBook.

Evernote for iPad  -  I’m already a big user of Evernote so the iPad version was very welcome.   I used this in meetings yesterday and today to take notes.   It’s great to sit the iPad down on a conference table to keep track of what is being discussed.   I think this use case has the potential to be the single greatest “killer app” to bring the iPad to the enterprise.

Twitterific for iPad -   I had been using Tweetie 2 on my iPhone as of late for interaction with twitter.   Based on the great reviews of Twitterific for iPad I gave it a shot.    This is a much better UI for interacting with twitter, thanks to the additional screen real estate.  I’m hopeful that the folks behind Tweetie will come out with an iPad version because there are some features missing in Twitterific.   I particularly enjoy the location aware components of Tweetie including searching for “tweets near me” and the inclusion of google maps links when a tweet includes lat/lon information.

I’ve had the iPad now for 24 hours so I thought I’d write up my first impression.   I’m no longer the Apple fan boy that I once was.   I’m a bit more cynical about Apple these days so when I purchased my iPad I did it with eyes wide open.  I opted for the cheapest model available which is the 16GB version without 3G.

Out of the box the iPad feels very nice to hold.   It’s got a pleasant heft to it and feels very solid.  The weight feels very evenly distributed so it is easy to hold no matter what orientation.  Upon opening the box you’ll find the iPad, a standard iPod cable, and a wall charger.   There are no headphones included which was a bit of a disappointment for me.

The iPad came fully charged which was a nice touch, however in order to begin using it you must connect it to iTunes.   While Apple offered to do this in the store for me I declined and activated it when I got home.   This step seems a bit strange to me since there is no mobile phone service to activate.   I understand the rationale for the iPhone but I don’t see the need for the iPad.

After plugging the iPad into my computer for it to activate with iTunes the first thing that caught my attention is that in the upper right hand corner of the screen where the battery indicator is at said “Not charging”.   It turns out that there is an issue with the charging capability of the iPad currently and it can only be charged with a Mac computer or the included wall charger.   My Dell desktop apparently was insufficient to give this thing juice.   Curious, I took my iPad out to the car and plugged it in to see how it would behave in the car.   Sure enough, no charge love there either.    I expect this to be fairly inconvenient if not fixed soon.   I charge my phone almost exclusively at my desk and in the car.   I can get a sync and a charge at the same time this way.

I brought the iPad back inside and hooked it up to my PC again to let it sync with iTunes.  You have all the same sync capabilities as the iPhone so I won’t cover that in detail.   Given that I only purchased the 16GB version it filled up very fast.    The sync copied over most of my iPhone apps so my first experience  with 3rd party apps were the upscaled iPhone ones.

After the sync I opened up Facebook for iPhone to see how it worked.  It’s great that the iPad can use iPhone apps but in reality I can’t say that I would really want to.   For example take a look at this screenshot of Facebook scaled up to the “2x” mode.  As you can see the text becomes very grainy and it just looks plain awful.

In comparison I downloaded the latest version of NetNewsWire from NewsGator which is an iPad native application and it looks simply stunning (notice the “Not Charging” in the upper right).

There are a number of great apps similar to NetNewsWire that were available at lunch.   The much anticipated Netflix is probably my favorite.   I was able to stream a movie live from Netflix without any hiccups over my wifi.   It was a very enjoyable experience to watch a movie this way and I’m looking forward to using that extensively on my many work trips in the hotel.

I was a bit surprised that Apple has cut out some of the applications that ship with the iPad compared to the iPhone.   The stocks, weather, calculator, and voice memo applications are all suspiciously missing.

Purchasing content with the app store is just as easy on the iPhone.   The cost of applications seems to have gone up dramatically.   Many apps are looking at $9.99 price tags which seems a bit high to me.   I’m sure the market will adjust as both more applications and iPads are on the market.

Reading books via iBook is very pleasant.   I’m particularly impressed with the page turn effect.   I know it’s just eye candy but I still love it.  I previously owned a kindle so I’m hopeful that Amazon will release a kindle application (and that Apple doesn’t block it) similar to the one they have for iPhone.    I have a several titles I’ve already purchased in the Amazon store and I’d hate to not be able to access those on the iPad.

The last comment I’ll make is that 16GB is surprisingly little.  When I opted for the small version I didn’t really expect to load it down with media.   I expected that most of the time I would be using Pandora/Netflix for movies and music so storage wouldn’t be an issue.   It turns out many of the iPad applications are surprisingly large.   For example the “Real Racing HD” game comes in at a whopping 171 MB.

Penn and Teller did it again, this was a great episode. I’m glad to see them taking on the immigration issue. Most American’s are opposed to immigration, and support stricter border controls. I think changing that opinion will be a hard pill for most American’s to swallow.

Penn and Teller are critical of the government’s plans to install 700 miles of fencing on the border at the cost of $60 billion dollars. They setup a mock version of the wall and show how easy it is to circumvent. Their illegals are able to get past it in around 3 minutes using a variety of different techniques. In addition, they pointed out that majority of illegals actual enter the country on legal visas and overstay their welcome. I think the most fascinating fact that they pointed out is that the contractor, golden sate fence company, who was hired to build the wall was actually fined for using illegal workers!

The one thing that they didn’t get into that disappointed me a little bit is the philosophical side of immigration. Immigrants are the core work force of this country. America was built on a tradition of immigration. By limiting immigration, you’re increasing manual labor costs, which in turn increases prices and lowers the value of the dollar. Immigration laws are another great example of “unintended consequences”. On the face it sounds like a good idea, limit the number of people entering the country, thereby ensuring jobs for the people already here, lowering the demand on social services, and controlling population growth. The problem however is that if you try and control the immigration you are forcing the “illegals” deeper into a black market. Mexicans will always find a way to get here, there is no physical way to stop them. Once here, the harder you make it for them to work, the harder you make it on everyone. You not only put the “illegals” into harms way, but you put Americans into danger as well. If their existence here is criminal, they will avoid authority at all costs. They might be witness to a crime, but they won’t report it. They might be in medical danger, but they won’t go to a hospital. They might resort to identify theft in order to remain here. You’re forcing honest, hard working, principled individuals to become criminals, just so they can provide for their families and better themselves.

A bit closer to home, I have a guy that takes care of my lawn every summer, let’s call him Bob. He is one of the hardest working guys I’ve met. He does a fantastic job, is punctual, and cheap. Of course, he is also probably illegal. Last fall he came to me and said “I’ve got to go back to Mexico, so I can’t take care of your yard next year”. Of course I don’t know the details, but I can only imagine. Why would we do this to someone who wants to work hard and make money. He has capitalistic intentions, he knows that he has to earn what he makes. He embodies the spirit and work ethic that this country was founded on. I’m proud to pay him to do the work, I feel a sense of satisfaction in our transactions. It’s hard to explain, but he lives for the ideas and principals that I believe in with all my heart. Yet someone has the balls to tell him that he can’t work here? That what he is doing is illegal.

Before we turn away men like Bob we need look in our own backyard. Some American’s are nothing more than looters, living off the system, living off our tax money, our social services, and our charity. Perhaps we should worry more about our existing problems in society before we cast stones on the immigrants. Instead of our money being taken at the point of a gun by our government to feed these American looters, maybe we should embrace the work ethic of our neighbors to the south and force the unproductive members of our society to take these men as examples. I say open borders for all, any man that has a work ethic like Bob and can help make this country a better place is welcome here in my book.

Here is the Libertarian party’s official stance on immigration.

The Issue: Our borders are currently neither open, closed, nor secure. This situation restricts the labor pool, encouraging employers to hire undocumented workers, while leaving those workers neither subject to nor protected by the law. A completely open border allows foreign criminals, carriers of communicable diseases, terrorists and other potential threats to enter the country unchecked. Pandering politicians guarantee access to public services for undocumented aliens, to the detriment of those who would enter to work productively, and increasing the burden on taxpayers.

The Principle: The legitimate function and obligation of government to protect the lives, rights and property of its citizens, requires awareness of and control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a threat to security, health or property. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demands that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders.

Solutions: Borders will be secure, with free entry to those who have demonstrated compliance with certain requirements. The terms and conditions of entry into the United States must be simple and clearly spelled out. Documenting the entry of individuals must be restricted to screening for criminal background and threats to public health and national security. It is the obligation of the prospective immigrant to demonstrate compliance with these requirements. Once effective immigration policies are in place, general amnesties will no longer be necessary.

Transitional Action: Ensure immigration requirements include only appropriate documentation, screening for criminal background and threats to public health and national security. Simplifying the immigration process and redeployment of surveillance technology to focus on the borders will encourage the use of regular and monitored entry points, thus preventing trespass and saving lives. End federal requirements that benefits and services be provided to those in the country illegally. Repeal all measures that punish employers for hiring undocumented workers. Repeal all immigration quotas.

I have to admit, I’m a huge fan of Penn and Teller. When I heard that they were going to be covering Wal-Mart on an upcoming episode of Bullshit I was extremely excited. Like many small and medium size towns across the country, Wal-Mart hysteria has come to my home town of Longmont, Colorado and I was in the front lines of the debate.

Back in 2003 I had decided to run for City Council here in Longmont, and at that time Longmont was looking to annex a plot of land right outside of town by request of the Wal-Mart corporation. The plan was to build a new Super Wal-Mart store on the lot, and the city wanted to get the tax revenue. Typical to these decisions, the public outcry was immense. The anti Wal-Mart groups arranged speakers from all across the country to come and petition our City Council against the annexation. Of course, in the end cooler heads prevailed and the City Council voted to annex the land, and now we have a brand new Super Wal-Mart (to complement the smaller Wal-Mart across town).

Penn and Teller did an okay job in this episode, I’m just a bit disappointed that it didn’t go into more detail around the pure capitalistic nature of Wal-Mart, and really get down into the philosophy behind it. As anyone who knows me can attest, I’m a hardcore Libertarian. I live, eat, and breath free market capitalism. Nothing gets me more excited than seeing it in action, and nothing pisses me off more than special interest groups with agendas trying to stop it.

You see, Wal-Mart isn’t evil, capitalism isn’t evil, outsourcing and sweat shops arent’ even evil. They are all the natural product of a free market doing what it does best. Wal-Mart is one of the most amazing American success stories ever. A company that was able to find efficiencies in everything they do. Reinvest their profit into smart growth, cut costs where they can, negotiate bulk buying deals with manufacturers. There is a reason why Wal-Mart is the number one retailer in the United States, it is because they are the best at doing what they do, selling us household items at cheap prices. Wal-Mart isn’t here to put small business out of business. If that is a by-product of giving the consumer choice, then that is the essence of the free market.

What is evil is groups that preach the “social good”. Perhaps this is because I just finished reading it, but I’m reminded of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. The world is so concerned with the social welfare of the disadvantaged, the poor, the needy, that they “loot” from those who are productive members of society to give to the unfortunate. The same thing is happening with these anti Wal-Mart groups. They are going around spouting about the evils of Wal-Mart, using the plight of the common man as their evidence. Their motive may be well placed, but the outcome of such actions will eventually mean that Wal-Mart won’t be able to open new stores. They won’t want to deal with the headache and the legal loopholes that are put in place against them. Like the example Penn and Teller gave in Chicago requiring Wal-Mart to have a higher minimum wage than other retailers (Which gets me on an entire different minimum wage tangent, which I will save for a future post). The hurdles they will encounter will be so high that it will impact the profitability of a given store, and then they won’t have the justification to build it. What happens then? Who really suffers? Is it Wal-Mart, or is it the common man that now has to pay more for his television set at the local electronics store? Or is it the unemployed mother who still can’t find a job because nobody will hire her? Maybe it is the city who now has less sales tax because their residents are driving to the next town over to shop at Wal-Mart?

One of the great things about this country is that not only do we get to vote on election day. We get to vote every time we go to the store. Consumers vote with their dollars. They are saying that they want a higher quality of living for less money. They are saying that Wal-Mart offers them what they want at the best price. If the established businesses are adversely affected by the opening of a new Wal-Mart then that is the product of the kind of change the market is dictating. To survive, the established businesses must learn to adapt to the changing economy. People want convenience and they are casting their ballot loudly and clearly with every dollar they spend at these “big box” stores.

What is Web 3.0?

Just when you started to get used to the idea of Web 2.0, the trend setters on the web start tossing around the term Web 3.0. Can’t they just let us get used to one version before pushing another one on us? Fortunately Web 3.0 is in its infancy, and nobody is certain of what it really means at this point. The direction of the internet and its users is a fickle thing. It’s hard to predict what they are going to want and use. The next big thing is all about the right idea, in the right place, at the right time.

I’ve been attending the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media conference the last couple days and listening to some of these visionaries talk. While there certainly is no consensus about what the future holds, there are definitely some key trends to take note of. I decided to go this year because it just so happened to be local for me. Normally I wouldn’t have taken the time off of work, incurred the travel expenses, etc just to go to a conference like this. For some bizarre twist of fate they decided to hold the conference in my home town. Given my personal work in blog research, it seemed like a no brainer to go to this conference.

The topics presented at the conference were fairly diverse, ranging from sentiment analysis to gender bias in blogs. There were three invited speakers and a number of academics presenting published papers. I have to say that by far I got more out of the invited speakers than the papers, although there were a few the sparked my interest. The three invited speakers were Danah Boyd (a prominent blogger), Andrew Tomkins (a researcher at Yahoo!), and Evan Williams (founder of Twitter). Here are some of the highlights from my notes.

Danah Boyd – “MySpace is *my* space”

In the talk she gave us a brief history of social networking starting with Friendster and went on to discuss a number of specifics about MySpace.

• 93% of American teenagers have access to the Internet.
• 55% of online American teens 12-18 have a profile on a social network site (That are willing to admit it in front of their parents).
• 91% use it to talk to friends while very few use it to talk to strangers.
• The number one spot in the “top 8″ is dependent on culture. Some cultures dictate that it should be your significant other, some your best same sex friend, and others say family members like your cousins.
• 66% of teenagers use MySpace in a private fashion in order to avoid marketeers and adults (parents).
• Teenagers think something is fishy on a page without ads. They suspect at some point they will be asked to pay for something if they aren’t being force fed advertisement.
• Gadgetry has broken the gender barrier. More teen girls have game consoles, iPods, and trendy cell phones now.
• If parents are flipping out, they know it’s going to be fun!

In addition to the key points about MySpace, Danah also discussed the direction that she sees social networking going. The future to her is about mobile devices. We already see the prevalence of SMS in Asian cultures, and it is slowly becoming a phenomenon here in the US with the introduction of sites like Twitter. The problem is how this move will take place given the current atmosphere in the mobile market. The major cell phone carriers control every piece of software on their phones and every byte of data that goes over their network. There is no self-interest for them to open these platforms and networks up for development. They want to be in control so they can utilize the technology to make as much money as possible. Because of the competitive nature, there is not likely to be any major cooperation between the carriers, which will stunt social networking’s growth.

Andrew Tomkins – “Social Media, Storage, and Data Analysis”

Andrew is a PhD member of the Yahoo! Research team. His talk focused on several different topics, including the evolution of search, and Flickr.

Interesting things being done with search:

• Moving away from the “10 results” model and devoting more real estate to targeted results.
• Search is adding in shortcuts to specific verticals. For example, integrating weather and movie times right into the search results.
• Google Co-Op allows content providers to integrate their results in your Google search.
• The current approach that is used is naive, based mostly on regular expressions and filtering for target words.

Is search solved?

• Search is really good at finding content on relatively open and static pages. Search does not integrate results where content might be buried in forums or other social network sites.
• The data sits behind walled gardens and is generally unavailable. There is lots of money still to be made in search, but it will require a large capital investment and structured deals with the owners of the content to let search inside their walls.
• For example, the Yahoo! Answers data is fully crawlable but the several billion posts in Yahoo! Groups are locked up from the outside.

Andrew also showed off a demo off a timeline based view of Flickr tags. This can be seen over at Taglines. He also mentioned that they are developing a “game” that users can “play” that will actually generate metadata and tags for Flickr images.

Evan Williams – “The Evolution of a Social Media Platform: Twitter “

Evan is the founder of Blogger, Odeo, and Twitter. He is one of the leading entrepreneurs in social media and brings a unique perspective to the conference. Most of his presentation talked about Twitter and the things they are doing. Twitter started just 9 months ago, and went through a complete revamp in November of 2006. Over the last few months the number of “tweets” being sent into Twitter has doubled month over month.

• 2/3rds of the inbound tweets come from the web and IM, the remaining 1/3rd come from SMS
• They are currently working on an API that will soon be released
• While they don’t have hard data, their informal research indicates that the core demographic of Twitter is 30 year old web geeks, not teenagers as you might expect.

Evan also presented a quote from Lisa Reichelt about ambient intimacy that describes Twitter.

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

There was also a quick demo of Twittervision. This is a site developed by a 3rd party that integrates Google maps with Twitter. The result is that users who send a location code with their tweet (l:Boulder, CO for example) will be shown on the map display.

Summary

While the future is far from certain, one thing is for sure. The future of social media and “web 3.0″ will be focused around two key areas. Mobility and search. Developers needs to come up with better ways to get at the information you need and make it simple to do from mobile devices. While some predict the death of sites like Twitter, I think they are ground-breakers in their field. When blogging can become a commodity that is approachable to anyone, and all of that data is well organized and searchable, that is when we can say that web 3.0 has arrived.