B. Mann Consulting

I wrote a bit about Jungle Disk in passing. I am using it for personal archive and backup. It's been working great, and I decided to try out the Workgroup edition: you add additional accounts and can set permissions on different buckets / folders for each person / account. At $2 / account / month for the workgroup functionality, it's quite good.

Except, you have to get people to install and setup Jungle Disk (the download link for Workgroup is a bit hidden). And ... it's not Dropbox. I tried it for a bit, and it works as advertised, but you a) have to keep paying on a monthly basis and b) you have to do a fair bit of handholding and account management.

Then I tried Dropbox today. Easy. Amazing. Amazingly easy. And it does shared files, too. Share a folder, add some email addresses to invite people, and you've got synced folders / documents on multiple computers. The public stuff is actually easier ... there is a default folder called Public, and files in there you can right click on and get a publicly accessible link directly to.

Update: CAUTION! -- I didn't realize this, but according to Michael Tsai, Dropbox doesn't support resource forks on Mac OS X -- "If you use Dropbox, resource forks disappear, packages turn into folders and can no longer be double-clicked, etc. ". What this means is that some files will have issues. Basic files like Word docs and binaries shouldn't run into issues, but for applications, potentially Keynote files and others, your files may not work correctly any more.

Currently, there is a 2GB storage limit to the accounts (free). This also sits on Amazon S3, although on their account, not yours like Jungle Disk. Dropbox is offering a paid upgrade to 50GB of space for $9.99 / month, or $99 / year. Hmmm....2GB still seems enough for now...

I'll stick with the Jungle Disk Desktop edition for my backups and long term archives. I've paid the $20 for the Desktop edition and I can backup and store as much as I want on my own Amazon S3 account.

For multi user sharing of documents, Dropbox is just so much simpler. The low end pricing is cheaper than Jungle Disk (free!) while the high end of 50GB is cheaper with Jungle Disk (0.15/GB/month with S3 x 50GB = $7.50).

I think we're going to continue to see great innovation in better ways to share / sync / collaborate on files, in part driven by cheap, reliable, API-driven storage options like S3. Epd.io is a local Vancouver startup to keep an eye on...

Flock’s 1.1 Beta Has Arrived! And so I'm testing it (the last time was August 2005). I met my first semi-local Flock'er (Mark Lise) at the last DemoCampVancouver. They came back in force from Victoria to storm the Northern Voice conference (Flock was a sponsor).

At left, that's me watching Clayton Stark, the VP of Engineering, giving Marc Canter a demo, while myself, Rob Scales, and Dickt Hardt look on. Initial impressions (on my desktop PowerMac G5)

• Nice job on integrating Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and del.icio.us
• Oh, wait, I can set status message/tweet/whatever in the same predictable place??! Oh, um, please just build MoodBlast functionality in directly...and integrate Jaiku, of course
• delicious has links sorted by tag...my usage is most often by reverse chrono...can I toggle between a tag view and a recently added bookmarks?
• I added this Drupal aka Self hosted blog, but it seems I can't set the label of the blog (my username is the same on most sites, so a label like "bmann: blog" that is returned by auto discovery isn't going to help)
• The media bar mini-bar at the top for searching and browsing Flickr, and for drag/dropping into this blog editor, RAWKS!
• Yeah, I like the blog editor
• Some loads seem a little slow...but really, everything on my ancient, low memory PMac are slow...media bar and other stuff are saving me time
• OK, I'm now doing three blog posts at the same time...I don't think I can let go of this
• One more feature request: if I hit the "add link" button in the editor, and I've got a URL in my clipboard, please auto-fill it...kthxbye

If you hadn't heard of Flock the first time around, try it as a replacement (yep, replacement...) for Firefox. If you had gripes/crashes/etc. the first time, erase those memories and know that Canadian engineers are on the job and you should give it another try. With Firefox, you can add a bazillion plugins and do lots of functionality. Flock has it all integrated and smoothed out for lots of the social media services that people use already. Firefox is to Flock, as Drupal is to WordPress?

Works for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Anyone else using it again / for the first time? I have some ideas of other things it COULD do, what do you think?

(slight snafu in posting, but blog posts got autosaved / recovered. yay!)

Disclaimer: my company may end up doing some work with Flock. Of course, we also just helped Spread Firefox recently

In joining forces with RCS and going from 7 people to 22 people, I'm diving back into tools and process. It's actually quite enjoyable, and I've got some partners in crime that it's been fun to work with.

Highrise is something that I'm warming to. Ostensibly it's a contact management tool, but it also does CRM and task management. I like it because it gets rid of giant CC chains in keeping multiple people "in the loop" -- you just BCC the dropbox in Highrise and everyone can follow along, including grabbing attachments sent in email and so on.

But, it wouldn't be a 37 Signals product if it didn't have certain infuriating things about it. Well, maybe not infuriating, but it just leaves me scratching my head. Number one is having to hit "edit" to add an email to a Case (why isn't there just a nice big "Add to Case" button like there is for other activities?). The other is lack of LDAP. Adding LDAP support so that I could easily use my local mail client to get access to all shared contacts just seems a no brainer. I keep wondering when Gmail will do something like this (or, at least, a Plaxo-like "sync" functionality).

Oh, right, and it lets me add new contacts with email addresses that are duplicates of existing contacts. Yeah, there are a couple of things that bug me about it :P

Anyway, on a whole, Highrise is a plus. Lead tracking and pre-project business communications (contracts, scoping, hiring, etc.) are going to be its main tasks, plus "soft" tasks -- e.g. follow up with so-and-so, review this contract, give me your thoughts, etc. I call out soft tasks specifically because there is ALSO Basecamp which has to dos (but not dated to dos, which Highrise does do...oh 37S, how you confuse me and leave me in a puddle of love/hate...). Wonder to what use we can put the API.

The other tool is Merlin2 -- a Mac project management app that Djun and I had settled on previously. Scoping, estimating, budgeting, resource allocation -- seems to do a pretty decent job in a nice intuitive way. I keep thinking it would be great to hook it directly into trac so you can easily get high level overviews of tasks. This MUST be scriptable in some way, but would need some dedicated time to sit down and work through...

Oh, and what the heck, while we're naming tools, don't forget about hosted SVN / ticket tracking with Unfuddle. I think our trac install is going to go away and be replaced by per-project hosted Unfuddle (for easy hand off to clients -- main uses are developer-granularity tickets and client bug reporting) and an internal Drupal-based wiki/doc repository for the wiki component.

Me showing Monique the magic of flagging and unflagging and showing how it changes the starred / unstarred in the Gmail web interface. Photo by Duane Storey, you can buy some great photos of Vancouver from him.

I've spent this past week or so having switched to using Gmail's new IMAP interface. I had switched to using the web-only interface for perhaps the last year or so, and it worked quite well for me. POP3 doesn't cut it when you have multiple machines (laptop and home desktop) and devices (Nokia smartphone, iPhone, etc.). And that's exactly what the IMAP protocol was invented to take care: keep folders, messages, and other status (read / unread, flagged, etc.) synced across multiple devices.

I wasn't sure whether I would like going back to using a desktop email client. And it's been great. Email is fast, I can go back to having a couple of drafts open as separate windows to remind me to get to them today, and so on.

Gmail's labels become folders....with a few funky side effects, in that thinking of them more as folders rather than things you might use multiple labels for will be less confusing.

A big thing I miss: I'm so used to the Gmail search interface that I find myself typing "from:Some Name" in Mail.app's search box, rather than typing the name and then clicking the "From" button. I bet some enterprising soul could do a good job of an AppleScript or something that could change this to work Just Like Gmail Search.

OK, enough just talking about the outlines. Head over here for extended instructions on setting up Gmail IMAP for Mail.app or your iPhone, which has the excellent extra tips of "mapping" your Gmail Trash, Junk, Drafts, and Sent folders to the right folders in your local app, and everything "just works".

Those of you with iPhones (or Nokia phones or any other device that can talk IMAP to get email) will want to go this method, so you can actually quickly manage email on the go and have all those changes reflected when you get back to some other device.

Now what? Well, I need a way to sync my contacts in Gmail to my local Address Book. A Plaxo plugin already takes care of synching between machines, and the standard Bluetooth iSync syncs to mobile.

I'm helping out the local Vancouver Facebook Developer Garage event this coming Tuesday by running a "Future of Facebook" Q&A. Johnny Bufu of SXIP will be on hand to lend expertise around portable social networks, especially regarding identity, OpenID, the OpenID Attribute Exchange extension, and related tech.

The timing and title of this talk is interesting: there is an "all hands" meeting at Facebook on Tuesday, so the rep from Facebook that was supposed to attend can't make it. There is much speculation here, everything from "Microsoft will buy them" to "Facebook is worth $15 Billion". It will be fun to talk some of this through live at the event, but I'll mainly try and jockey live audience discussion, not do my own pontification.

It has been most interesting, with the "rise of Facebook", to see its vast spread into "non techies". Indeed, that's where *I've* found it to add real utility: since so many people are on there, both organizing events and seeing what people are up to "in the real world" has become much simpler, and has led to more in person meetings, for me at least. Pointing the way what a ubiquitous, interoperable identity infrastructure on the web could enable?

Some other preparatory material for such a discussion is this video of an interview of Mark Zuckerberg interviewed by John Batelle at the Web 2.0 Summit.

The event is this Tuesday at VFS starting at 5:30pm, full event details on Facebook, of course :P

I don't think I ever posted the "Web 2.0" video created by Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University doing "Digital Ethnography". I was really, well, I'd have to say *moved* by the original video. Much like Lee and Sachi's Common Craft videos in plain English, Michael seems to have taken many things that I've long thought instinctively and explained them a little more fully. Still way more geeky than CC's stuff, but I think understandable and interesting to watch.

In any case, here is the follow up video, Information R/Evolution. It walks us through how we are still exploring how to break free from the concepts of physical organization. The summary seems to be that we participants on the web are helping to build this R/Evolution, and it's based around links and tags, and allow us to put "stuff" at multiple "locations". Take the time to watch the video (and the previous one if you haven't), and tell me what you think.

Since I've been rambling on about Facebook recently, Mark Shropshire pinged me to let me know that Facebook is blocking / taking legal action against apps that attempt to remotely "automate" Facebook. Said like that, it sounds kind of bad, but in reality, it's MoodBlast trying to update your status across all systems -- FB, Twitter, Jaiku, etc.

TechCrunch has a longer write up on this trend. What does this mean? Well, it's probably not a good idea to treat a large, commercial system as a coral reef (hat tip to Dave Winer).

Aside: coral reefs and other ecosystems flourish around the rusting hulks of sunken ships. Should we extend the analogy to businesses as well? Didn't all these other social networks spring up because of the dead carcass of Friendster?

Not a big thesis on this topic, just an observation that this evening, as I was thinking about organizing something with friends for tomorrow morning, my instinct was to open a tab and go to Facebook to contact them...rather than email.

And of course, this is exactly what ActiveState's Up4 Facebook app is trying to help with as well.

Update: And of course, today I see that Facebook has added straight-to-email messaging -- "No more switching back and forth between email and Facebook. When you are writing a message, simply enter any email addresses into the “To:” field.". There is a longer post on the Facebook blog about this.

This was originally part of my BarCamp Vancouver 2007 wrap up post, but that turned into a monster and this is really about what's next.

So, you're still flying high on the good vibes from BarCamp Vancouver, and you're trying to figure out "What next?". Some things to watch for...

A DemoCamp Vancouver event some time in mid September. Need to spend some time talking to Rob Lewis / TechVibes about helping out with organizing these...I'm trying to shed as many organizing roles as I can, while still promoting / attending / etc. I love all this stuff, but it don't pay the bills...

Also on the plate....when are we going to do a Startup Weekend (once again, nod to TechVibes for kicking off discussion)? Late October, maybe right after a sort of "organizing" DemoCamp Vancouver on the Thursday before? This may ideally be the kickoff for a new take on the Innovation Commons that I hinted at in my other post.

I'm glad to finally see that the news about PubSub 2.0 is out there (see Om, TechCrunch, and the view on both from local Vancouver founder Ian Bell). One more great addition to the Vancouver tech scene that will be watched world wide.

One of these days I will tell the story of mine / Bryght's early involvement with PubSub 1.0. Looking at the Something Simpler about page, the bio for Lance Tracey outs him as our initial angel investor. It's good to see him being acknowledged.

I am (still) a big believer in the core technology of PubSub. The new tagline of "find the future" makes it very clear what the strengths are. Now, how to expose that in a user friendly way. That has always been the challenge since day one. Today, in a future where engines like Google News Alerts / Blog Search and Technorati are still not performing as well as the "old" PubSub engine, and we have many more orders of magnitude more "real time" sources of information, the need for filtering, reporting, and notification is that much greater.

I look forward to working with the PubSub team and seeing what they come up with. Beyond Ian and Lance, there are great people there already and they're looking for more.

Go, Vancouver, go! :P