Archive for the 'Web' Category

Google and the Username Conundrum

Published on November 26, 2009 in Web. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The web is still a relatively new occurrence,  being publicly available for at most 15 years. During this time the Web has seen staggering growth, that has seen it come to the centre of society due its impact on the economy, communications, socialising etc. However this is not to say there haven’t been problems, there have been plenty, although the one issue I want to mention here is with usernames.

With the web being at most 15 years old, it is almost impossible to get usernames you’d actually want on popular services such as Google. I realise this is something that affects all popular service and it’s unfair to focus on solely on Google, however it easier to focus on one service and it is with Google that I find this annoyance with usernames most acutely.

As of now it is pretty much impossible to get any decent email address on Gmail, at least if you have an Anglo name. Have fun trying to get tommorris@gmail.com or any other combination of initials or letters that are vaguely recognisable without having to resort to adding random numbers/letters at the end e.g. johnsmith3451@gmail.com, which not only looks stupid is starting to become a barrier to usability, as the more random character that are introduced the greater the possibility of transcription errors when people write down the address.

We are having this problem now with only 15 years on the web and 25% of the world population on-line. The proportion of the global population using the web will only grow as it becomes more fundamental to the functioning of society, the global population itself could grow to as high as 10.5 billion by 2050, this is compounded in that future generations will likely use the web to a greater extent than current generations.

So how can a web service provider like Google address this? In the example of Gmail they could possibly add more available domains on top of gmail.com, but I expect this will only partially help. One way to counter this, at least in the medium term is to allow users to use their own domains with Gmail, this is of course possible now with Google Apps. However this is a very business/institution focused service and doesn’t account for people using it for personal use. However the fact remains that many people use apps for personal use and this likely to grow as the pressure on traditional usernames increases.

It seems to me that Google should take notice of this trend and create an apps product targeted at personal/family use, which enables full integration with Google’s existing services. Otherwise it takes the risk of alienating users who may move elsewhere.

Why Google Apps Sucks for Non-Business Users

Published on October 18, 2009 in Web. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I recently shifted to the Google Eco-System in a big way and have generally been pleased with the results. Gmail is substantially better than Hotmail and I have started to use Google Calendar which can sync with my Windows mobile device (I don’t believe MS Live calendar can do this).

However, there are have been a couple of especially irritating issues, which is due to my use of Google Apps. The crux of the problem, is that the Google Apps account is not perceived to be a “Google account”  by Google. So in order to access Google services other than those available through Apps, you will have to create a Google account.

Naturally I already had a Google account, but thought i’d set up a new one with my Apps email in order to keep everything together (or so I thought!). This is where the issues start, as when you create a Google account, it also creates a contact list for that Google account, separate to the contact list in the Apps account.

So because of this I can use Google Reader with my Google Account, but can’t use the social features with the contact list in my Apps account. I also can’t link faces to Apps contacts in Picasa. I’m sure there are other areas where this is an issue, but this the most I have come up with so far.

Needless to say this incredibly annoying, especially when it comes from Google, a company that claims to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“. Unfortunately they aren’t doing a very good job of organising Google Apps data and making it available to their own products.

A simple backup solution for Gmail

Published on August 17, 2009 in Web. 2 Comments
I have previously never bothered as I have always thought the chances of a company like Microsoft or Google losing email to be quite remote, however this is more an attitude born of laziness rather than good sense, as a quick search will show mistakes can happen.
So with this in mind, I set about finding the easiest way to backup my Gmail account. I came across a solution (that suits me at least), which leverage my old Hotmail account. All I did was setup the Hotmail account to collect mail from my Gmail account via POP and dump it in a newly created folder called “Gmail Backup”. I selected “Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded)” in the pop settings so it would pull all the mail in the Gmail account to the Hotmail account.
I’ve found this to work really well, as it will pull down not only the email received at the Gmail account, but also all the email I send from the account. Granted the mail on the Hotmail end is completely unstructured (i.e. no labels or differentiation between sent and received mail) but it’s better than nothing and best of all it works completely automatically without any input from me required.
Hopefully this will prove a fairly resilient system, as I imagine the chances of Microsoft and Google both destroying/losing/incinerating my email, at the same time, to be vanishingly small. Or perhaps I’m being lazy again…

Having recently moved to Gmail from Hotmail, I thought I should tackle another email related task I’ve been putting off, namely setting up a backup regime for my email.

I have previously never bothered as I have always thought the chances of a company like Microsoft or Google losing email to be quite remote, however this is more an attitude born of laziness than good sense, as a quick search will show mistakes can happen.

So with this in mind, I set about finding the easiest way to backup my Gmail account. I came across a simple solution (that suits me at least), which leverages my old Hotmail account. All I did was setup the Hotmail account to collect mail from my Gmail account via POP and dump it in a newly created folder called “Gmail Backup”. I selected “Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded)” in the pop settings so it would pull all the mail in the Gmail account to the Hotmail account.

I’ve found this to work really well, as it will pull down not only the email received at the Gmail account, but also all the email I send from the account. Granted the mail on the Hotmail end is completely unstructured (i.e. no labels or differentiation between sent and received mail) but it’s better than nothing and best of all it works completely automatically without any input from me required.

Hopefully this will prove a fairly resilient system, as I imagine the chances of Microsoft and Google both destroying/losing/incinerating my email, at the same time, to be vanishingly small. Or perhaps I’m being lazy again…


Moving from Hotmail to Gmail

Published on August 4, 2009 in Mobile Stuff and Web. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Over the last couple of days I have been making the transition from Hotmail to Gmail (using google apps) for my main personal email address.

The main reason I decided to do this, is that i’m planning on getting an Android powered phone in the next couple of months, and the integration between the Android OS and the google applications is a big draw for me. However the extra functionality Gmail has over Hotmail is also appreciated.

Exporting Mail From Hotmail

As far as I know, the only way to export all your mail from Hotmail is to use microsoft outlook connector (you may be able to use the POP access if you store all your mail in your inbox, but I didn’t want to destroy my folder structure to try it).

Outlook connector, as the name suggests, is a plugin that connects outlook (in my case Outlook 2007) to the Hotmail service. It allows you to sync mail (preserving folder structure), contacts and calendar data into Outlook. It will take a while to download all your mail, especially if you have a lot. After it has fully downloaded, I would suggest taking a backup of the data by exporting the entire Hotmail mail box to a .PST file, so if things go pear-shaped you’ve got something to fall back on.

At this point I setup IMAP support for my Gmail account in Outlook (instructions here) and setup labels in Gmail that corresponded to my folders in hotmail. All you need to do then, is to copy the mail from the Hotmail folders to the corresponding IMAP folders (which should have appeared in Outlook after you set them up in Gmail). If you do this though, transfer only small groups of messages at a time, as it takes ages to upload to Gmail, and apparently Gmail limits the number of emails you can upload during a given time period and blocks you out.

Another issue to lookout for, is that Outlook connector has a nasty habit of sometimes incorrectly downloading mail. It will sometimes download blank mail instead of the actual mail in your account, which is incredibly annoying (I think around 30-50 messages of around 3000 emails where blank). I tried re-downloading by deleting my Hotmail account and adding it again, however this seems to make things worse with more blank email being downloaded.

Exporting Contact Information from Hotmail

This was fairly straight forward, you just export your Hotmail contacts in a .csv file (options > more options > Export Contacts), which can then be imported into Google Contact manager.

Conclusions/Lessons Learned

Exporting email from Hotmail to Gmail using the above method took absolutely  ages, if i’d known how long it would take, I would have been very tempted to give up my folder structure, move all my email into the inbox and get gmail to import it all via POP (assuming Hotmail will make the entire inbox available through POP). This would have lost my folder structure, but it would have been a lot quicker, and I wouldn’t have  had the issue of losing some of my email to the Outlook connector blank email problem. Suffice to say even with the loss of some email, i’m very glad to have escaped Hotmail. Gmail is by far the better product, i’m very tempted to upgrade to a payed account in order to get the outlook sync and Postini features.

Another surprising development, was that the data syncing capabilities of Google apps with Windows Mobile 6.1  are far better than that with Hotmail! I will put a post up about that at some point.

Amazon “Items dispatching soon”

Published on June 16, 2009 in Web. 0 Comments Tags: , .

When processing an order (especially ones with  super-saver delivery), Amazon tend to have an intensely annoying habit of setting the order to “items dispatching soon”, so it cannot be ammended or cancelled, and then leaving it at that stage for ages (I think nearly a day for my current order). In the past I’ve had this go on for days for other orders.

I think this is something Amazon should really look at, especially if you get annoyed with how long its taking them to fulfill an order but can’t cancel it! (I don’t buy that an order can be “dispatching soon” for several days)