The thing about useful stuff is

Zipiko - meeting friends made easy Monday, November 10, 2008

Zipiko is a new approach to arranging meet-ups with friends that I can imagine catching on, which is showcasing at Le Web.

In concept it is very similar to Upcoming.org or even Meetup in that it is orientated around the notion of publishing events which your friends can see. The service is free [no ads spotted either] and is entirely web-hosted.

Members set up an event, detailing time and place plus comments. Thereafter friends can either be specifically invited or the event made public amongst your friends who can choose to participate in the open invite. Hence you can see events that your friends are organising and elect to opt in e.g. join your friends to watch the rugby in the pub.

I found that setting up an event was very easy and intutitive, via the simple online interface. Likewise, inviting friends was very easy. Interestingly the service currently send free SMS messages or emails to invite people, as well as notifying you of their responses.

To add friends to your account, you have the option of importing your phone contacts as well as importing contact from Gmail. Any friends you do add have to positively accept your invite to connect. I confess that didn't find either appealing since my address books co-mingle friends and business contacts. I think they should definitely be looking to add the capability to import contacts from services like Facebook, Twitter etc and you can buy code to do this off the shelf these days for less than $100.

The site claims it has been configured to be easy to use via mobile phone and a brief check on my own Blackberry phone browser did confirm this.

Connecting your events to your calendar is possible albeit only 30 Boxes appeared to be supported when I tried.

Whilst I understand that the team behind this are keen that you regularly use their site, I think the service would benefit from creating an ical feed of events from your "crowd" that could be accessible by calendar applications, with entries that link back to the Zipiko site. I say this because Gmail and Google calendar are two webapps I use constantly whereas I am initially less likely to have Zipiko open constantly. Likewise, it would be great if you could "send an calendar invite" to your own Zipiko account from say Google calendar to be added to the events list.

Worth trying when organising your next social meetup.

Labels: gmail, Google Calendar, meeting, meetup, social networks

posted by John Wilson @ 8:43 PM Permanent Link ,

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Hurrah - Gmail now supports autoresponders Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Image representing Gmail as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBaseFinally, Gmail have announced a Labs feature which enables you to create email autoresponders. Entitled "canned responses", you can create email templates that can be used manually i.e. select email template to reply, or in combination with Gmail filters to autorespond to emails e.g. out of office

Up until now, only vacation autoresponders were provided within Gmail, so this is an excellent improvement.

Labels: gmail

posted by John Wilson @ 10:44 AM Permanent Link ,

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Gmail spam filter is letting more stuff through Tuesday, June 03, 2008

I've noticed far more spam getting through the Gmail spam filters over the last two weeks than I have ever experience. Normally very reliable, there could be many reasons why it's missing items. Inevitably I shall not be alone in this experience.

Oddly, you forget how invaluable the Gmail spam filter is until it's breached.

Labels: E-mail filtering, gmail, spam

posted by John Wilson @ 2:49 PM Permanent Link ,

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Meet with Approval gets my seal of approval Friday, May 09, 2008

Meetings are often held in conference rooms

Image via WikipediaThe welcome page to "Meet with Approval" underwhelmed me, but after trying this meeting scheduler service out I confess to quickly upgrading my opinion of the site.

It has deliberately been kept simple and free of gimmicks, as a consequence of which I anticipate adoption rates will be high, provided people don't mind paying $30 for a year's subscription to arrange unlimited meetings via the service, after using up their two free attempts.

The site uses a simple form to capture meeting information in text form from the organiser, allowing them to specify multiple dates/times options for the proposed meeting from which invitees can signify their availability.

Invites are sent via the service and email address may be manually entered or imported from a range of services/locations like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo which is catered for [most sensibly] via Plaxo's address book widget.

You can also send reminders to non-respondents, a process which has to be manually initiated within the site.

Once responses are in, the organiser confirms a meeting slot and all invitees notified automatically.

Pros
- very simple to use
- suitable for meetings involving many people
- allows people to indicate all the times they can attend
- highlights most popular meeting time automatically
- attendees may leave comments
- paid-for service includes ability to apply your own corporate branding
- subscription cost is trivial
- excellent log-in, which avoids passwords and simply asks you to provide the answer to a memorable question you determined at sign-up

Cons
- Meeting Duration is shown in the comments to the meeting
- Comments are the only way for invitees to suggest alternate dates/availability
- Unfriendly error messages

Unlike Timebridge which limits you to 5 time slots, I didn't hit a restriction on the number of time slots that could be offered to invitees.

Just to note, in testing I did hit "Runtime Error" screens when I attempted to cancel a meeting, which would scare unsophisticated users. However, this is an early version of the service and I hope such wrinkles will be attended to quickly.

Overall, it is simpler to use than Timetomeet, a free alternative, and the use of a list of options rather than a calendar display that needs to be scrolled through, will certainly be easier for most people to immediately comprehend. In my [painful] experience, when presented with a calendar view on these types of service, many people fail to appreciate that they need to scroll through the displayed weeks as some options offered may be out of sight. In contrast, a list view shows them all options in a concise and complete fashion.

Labels: gmail, meeting, Microsoft Outlook, plaxo, Timebridge, Timetomeet

posted by John Wilson @ 8:42 AM Permanent Link ,

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Remember the Milk's gone sour Monday, April 28, 2008

For too long I've fallen into the trap of keeping emails in my inbox and re-reading them on different occasions to jog my memory on what I needed to do with them. A couple of months ago I installed the GTDInbox Firefox extension for Gmail, which is a productivity assistant designed to help you focus on reading and dealing with email at the first attempt i.e. action it or archive the email. Like many others, I found its' presence encourages you to be more disciplined by categorising the item on opening.

Last week I read an article about Remember the Milk ("RTM"), a simple online task manager service that had released a Blackberry companion, the attraction being that it wirelessly synchronised with the online service. I confess that the last time I'd looked at the offering, admittedly some time ago, it was a simple standalone online task manager. Since then, they've evidently invested considerable effort in linking it to numerous services, most notably Gmail.

My immediate reaction was that GTD Inbox and RTM would be excellent stable mates inside Gmail, performing complementary functions to enhance my productivity. I was therefore dismayed and astonished to find that these two Firefox add-ins are seemingly incompatible each other. After installing RTM for Gmail, whilst GTD Inbox continued to work, the RTM add-in continually kept logging itself out mere seconds after being refreshed/logged in.

Looking for a solution to what I presumed must be "my user error", I managed to contact ProductiveFirefox, creators of GTD Inbox to report the problem. Andy Mitchell, its' founder, responded quickly and said he knew of the issue, but would need to work with RTM to resolve it as evidently the two applications were competing for the same Gmail resources. Sadly without chatting the code through with RTM [which they don't publish] he couldn't easily resolve it. Positively, he indicated that he'd be delighted to collaborate with RTM to fix this as he too realises these applications are perfect complements for each other and not competitors.

Sadly, I've had less luck speaking with RTM but I do hope that they will be as open to resolving the issue, as I'm sure many people would like to use both and evidently there are some 80,000 users of GTD Inbox currently denied the chance to use RTM. Come on RTM, please freshen the milk.

Labels: E-mail, Firefox, gmail, GTD Inbox, Remember The Milk

posted by John Wilson @ 4:46 PM Permanent Link ,

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User heaven on a Blackberry Thursday, April 24, 2008

I confess to being a blackberry fan and have used one for about 5 years, finding it indispensable. For the last few years, I've also been free of the shackles of a large corporate IT department and hence able to determine what gets installed on my device [8820].

However, I've found relatively few applications worthy of installing other than
- the superb Google maps for mobile, which integrates well with the device's GPS capability, notwithstanding Google maps inherent capability to provide approximate location data via mobile phone cell information
- Gmail for blackberry which offers me a backup in case problems arise with the T-mobile blackberry email as well as to access old emails

Whilst I added Opera mini browser, I almost never have cause to use it, finding the native browser being adequate in most cases. This allows me access to all of my internet services when I'm on the move.

As for the Facebook blackberry application, it was installed and quickly uninstalled, matching my waning interest in that social network.

Lately, it has been great to see an increasing number of applications being developed for data synchronisation with the blackberry to the "cloud". The consequences of losing the device and related data has always been a concern to me.

For instance, Google recently released a free blackberry calendar synch application, allowing your device calendar to be directly synchronised with Google calendar. I'm not using it because I'm happy with my alternate configuration that I described here. Obviously, many corporate users will have real-time synch of their calendar over the air with their Exchange server, but very handy for SMEs.

Yesterday, I read about a blackberry synchronisation application for Remember the Milk, which is a task manager that also integrates with Gmail via a Firefox extension. Sadly this is a paid for application.

I was also excited to come across TellMe's offering. A Microsoft subsidiary, and only operating in the USA at present, its' blackberry application provides a voice interface to a location based search service e.g. find local services. My interest related to a start-up I dealt with a few years ago who were focussed on exactly this space but whose ambitions were inhibited by the widespread absence of GPS enabled devices and cell data. Right idea, but ahead of its time in infrastructure terms.

The sad thing, as ever, is that many corporate blackberry users are denied access to many of these superb offerings because of IT department inertia or paranoia. If you don't have google maps as a minimum on your blackberry you should definitely complain.

Labels: facebook, gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Remember The Milk

posted by John Wilson @ 8:33 AM Permanent Link ,

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Gmail IMAP - I mope Sunday, October 28, 2007

Gmail gets IMAP. Fantastic I thought. Given that I consolidate several accounts inside Gmail as an additional backup service and presently have to manually synch them , this would make life much easier.

And then you read the small print courtesy of Webware

it's worth noting that the IMAP support is one-way: You can use IMAP clients to read and send your Gmail. You cannot use the Gmail interface to access e-mail from non-Google IMAP servers or from Exchange. The only non-Google e-mail servers that Gmail can access are POP machines, and you don't get any mailbox synchronization with that method.

Oh well.

Labels: gmail, Google

posted by John Wilson @ 10:42 PM Permanent Link ,

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Music inside gmail Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Perhaps these things were always there, but I keep discovering new features in gmail. Today someone sent me an mp3 file attachment (legit as it was free distribution by the artist, before you ask) and gmail had a link to "play". I clicked on it and a new dialogue box opened and it played.

I've seen the feature to open a word doc and pdfs as html or google docs in the former case, but this was a new one on me.

Labels: gmail

posted by John Wilson @ 10:36 PM Permanent Link ,

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Gmail is the social centre of the universe Sunday, September 30, 2007

I think gmail is an excellent online email app and I'd be happy to use it for all my email were it not for the fact that it insist on sending out emails that are tagged with my gmail account "on behalf of.." which ever email account I'm intending to send it from. Maybe there is a way to change this but I can't find it!

Anyway, I liked the ideas advanced here that enabled you to use gmail to orchestrate other social network accounts and tells you

How to use Gmail to post to social networks
How to track your friends and their replies using Gmail
How to build a "lifebase" inside Gmail that maintains a record of your various friends/connections
How to use Gmail to prioritize the right friends and weed out the ones you want to un-friend

Labels: gmail, social networks

posted by John Wilson @ 9:44 AM Permanent Link ,

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