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Interaction designer Sandosh Vasudevan has come up with gDocsBar (download), a solution that rolls up all the functionality you’d find on the home screen of Google Docs and puts it the side bar of your browser, meaning it can be summoned and dismissed in an instant.

The sidebar features a search-as-you-type box to find your docs, drag and drop uploading of files from your desktop or from the Web, and filtering by title, date, and author. You can also go in and browse documents by type to separate documents from spreadsheets and the most recent addition–presentations.

(Credit:
Sandosh Vasudevan)

1/31 Update: Okay, Vasudevan just tweaked this today, and all my docs are showing up now. There’s also a new feature that lets you filter by author when you right click any doc. Full changelog here.

[via Google Operating System]

If you’re a Google Docs user you’re probably used to keeping a separate window or set of tabs open for your document source list. What if you could kill that extra tab or open window and manage everything from the sidebar of your browser instead?

I gave it a quick spin this morning and am definitely keeping it as an add-on, considering it lets me quickly jump between documents while remaining in the same tab, which is a big time saver. Power users can also simply right-click any doc on the source list and open it in a new tab or window. Oddly enough I was only able to get it to load up three of my most recent documents, but the quick uploading and document jumping features are enough to make it useful for me until the kinks are worked out.

Note that TigerDirect won’t let you return the item unless it’s defective, and even then you can only exchange it for a replacement. On the plus side, it’s backed by a 24-month Logitech warranty.

That’s why I’m seriously eyeballing the Logitech AudioStation, an iPod speaker dock that also has an AM/FM tuner. It’s packed with other features, too, like a remote, an audio input jack (for connecting non-iPod players), and composite and S-Video outputs (for watching iPod videos on a TV). It also charges your iPod, of course, and cranks out 80 watts’ worth of audio goodness.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

The AudioStation sold for $300 (!) when CNET first reviewed it (and rated it 8/10), but now you can grab one for a mere $49.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate.

(Credit:
Logitech)

My
iPod spends more time in its speaker dock than it does anyplace else. The dock resides in the kitchen; the iPod serves up tunes when the Cheapskate clan is cooking, cleaning, eating, and so on. My only regret is that it doesn’t have a radio, meaning we can’t listen to NPR when the mood strikes.

Craigslist.org can’t be held liable for discriminatory ads posted on its site, according to a court ruling released Friday.

The ruling (PDF) is good news for the many Web sites that host public forums, giving them further legal protections against liability claims based on content posted by their users, but is an obvious setback for proponents of fair housing online and off.

A group of Chicago lawyers had sued the online classifieds site over real-estate ads that stated discriminatory preferences such as “no minorities” or “no children.” The group, the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, argued that such ads are prohibited under the Fair Housing Act and that Craigslist should be held liable for allowing them to be posted on its Web site. Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, likening Craigslist to courier services such as FedEx or UPS, which do not read or screen the messages they deliver. Easterbrook said it would be expensive and problematic for Craigslist to filter messages before they were posted.

Google on Thursday announced Android Market, an online center that will let people find, buy, download, and rate applications and other content for mobile phones equipped with the open-source operating system.

These screen shots show the Android phone interface to the Android Market. The software shows what applications can be downloaded and reviews of applications that people are browsing.

(Credit:
Google)

Attracting developer attention is a key part of the Google-led Android software effort, and those who produce applications will have an easy time getting them to the market, Eric Chu of Google’s Android project said in a Thursday blog post.

“Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it,” Chu said. “We chose the term ‘market’ rather than ’store’ because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available.”

Though the first Android phones are planned to arrive later this year, Chu said to expect the initial phone-based Android Market application to be a beta version that might only support distribution of free applications. An update later will handle different versions of applications, support for different profiles of Android phones, and analytics to help developers track adoption.

The move was expected. Google said in May at the Google I/O conference that it would provide a central repository of Android software.

commentary

Last week Apple decided to try its hand at bundling. Tying is just around the corner.

Apple already has a place on the desktops of many Windows users through iTunes. Like Microsoft before it, Apple figured this was a great Trojan Horse to start pushing its other software. Like Microsoft before it, Apple stepped over the line, as John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, suggested:

What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad — not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web.

John then goes on to say he’s not against Apple’s use of iTunes to push the
Safari browser. He’s wrong. Larry Dignan suggests John’s complaint stems from Mozilla trying to protect its lucrative search relationship with Google. He’s wrong, too.

If a browser had anything to do with iTunes, this wouldn’t be so egregiously bad. But it doesn’t. No, Apple’s move bears the imprint of a would-be monopolist that cares more about its market position than its customers. I’m guessing it has little to do with Safari and much to do with…the
iPhone.

I’m a huge Apple fan. I have a few Macs, iPods, and iPhones. But I don’t want my entire computing experience dominated by any one vendor, including one that I like and trust as much as I do Apple. For this reason I consciously choose to use a variety of different software applications on my
Mac, much of them open source.

So, I don’t use Safari and can’t fathom any reason for a Windows user to adopt it. It’s a great browser but…who cares? It doesn’t provide any differentiation that Internet Explorer or Firefox don’t already provide.

Except for its tie to the iPhone, of course. Safari is the application platform Apple uses for its iPhone. Why should Apple care about which browser you use? Because it cares about which phone you use. Apple won’t sell a single license to Safari, but it’s definitely hoping to sell you a boatload of iPhones.

All of which makes me highly disappointed in Apple’s decision to force Safari on users through its iTunes update service. “Safari-gate” couldn’t have happened with open source, as iTWire notes. It doesn’t work in a transparent, trust-based relationship.

It only works when Apple starts to betray Microsoft-esque tendencies, tendencies which we should help to squash. Immediately. Before Apple begins to rely on its market position more than the quality of its products, in ways similar to how Microsoft has grown.

Apple makes incredible products. I bought the Macs because they’re better. I love my iPhone for the same reason. I, and millions of others, don’t need to be tricked into adopting Apple’s software and hardware. We just need to be given a compelling reason to switch. Millions are doing just that, and not because of some sly software “update.”

With all the talk about social network aggregators over the past few weeks, you’d think they were going to reverse global warming.

Technology blogs have been chirping enthusiastically about “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and Socialthing, which claim to provide an answer to growing complaints about “social-networking fatigue.” They sort updates across networking and community sites into a single destination–which, in a sense, actually might be the social-media world’s equivalent of reversing global warming.

Unfortunately, they still don’t get rid of the hot air.

Let me get this straight: The last time I checked, I had accounts on Facebook, MySpace.com, Twitter, Flickr, Plaxo, Digg, Tumblr, Pownce, and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting–that’s not even counting whatever I do with my Google and Yahoo accounts. Now I’m supposed to choose between Pulse, FriendFeed, Digsby, Socialthing, Spokeo, Profilactic, and goodness knows what other start-ups that offer me the ability to aggregate my contacts’ activity from all the aforementioned social networks, and more. Oh, great.

Don’t get me wrong. I think we need some way to tidy up the messy social Web. What OpenID is trying to do for log-in and password management, lifestreaming services are hoping to accomplish for the voyeuristic itch to know exactly what all our online contacts are doing. That’s a good thing.

“The big sell for these sorts of products is the tipping point at which users will see these as a viable alternative to manage their many profiles,” social media strategist Oz Sultan told me in an interview. He compared it to the rise of universal instant-messaging clients like Adium and Trillian several years ago, which took off amid the disconnect between chat software from AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and more. “It becomes either overkill or a system resource hog,” Sultan said.

But taking overkill and putting it all in one place doesn’t mean that it’s not overkill anymore. Consider it social-networking’s first identity crisis.

To anyone with more than three or four social-networking profiles, lifestreaming services should be a godsend. That is, until you consider the flip side: too much information, and for the most part, not much flexibility on the picking-and-choosing front. A single, giant feed of dozens of Flickr photo albums (”Grand Canyon Vacation Album #3!”) alongside Facebook status updates (”Brad is at the office”) and Twitter minutiae (”I really need a shower!!!”) turns us on to the realization that even our friends broadcast a whole lot of dumb stuff that we don’t really care to read about.

“Right now, we just simply feed all this stuff in, and it can be a bit overwhelming,” said Matt Galligan, founder of Socialthing. One of the company’s goals, he explained, is to be able to showcase “interesting” updates without requiring the user to do a whole lot of manual prioritizing. “Getting the most important stuff to you is what I really want to do,” he said.

To an extent, the lifestreaming services have an excuse. “A lot of (lifestreaming) is early to market,” Sultan said. This is, after all, the fast-paced world of Web applications, where it’s common to announce or roll out a product eons before it’s truly ready (hello, OpenSocial). With small start-ups, it’s less likely that someone else will replicate the idea first, although the fact that there’s already a glut of lifestreaming services does sort of render that point moot.

So it’s understandable that something as new as a social aggregator has a long way to go, Sultan continued. “They still need to enhance functionality to allow you to dial it down or filter only what’s relevant,” he said. “When either AI (artificial intelligence) technology, ’smart’ filters, or other user-based filters are implemented, the model has a high chance of taking off.”

Then there’s the fact that, despite the information overload that a social feed aggregator provides, it’s still feature-light. Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed, perhaps the most “social” of the bunch, let users comment on items and add favorites; many of the others, like Socialthing, are meant to be more along the lines of a personal reference. In either case, none of them replace the need to still log in and visit all the Flickrs and Twitters and Diggs from which they collect data.

“Social-media aggregators provide a high-level view of activity taking place on social networks, but do not replace the experience of being immersed within them,” commented Eric Litman, chairman of social-media agency Aux Interactive. “So much of the tone of the dialogue in social networks is set by the user experience of the networks themselves.”

That’s really the final word on lifestreaming services: they help out, but simply don’t do enough to clean up the social-media experience. Beyond simple aggregation, it’s a whole new can of worms–I can handle multiple e-mail and IM accounts through Digsby, update Twitter and Pownce and Jaiku through Twhirl, and take care of all my photo- and video-uploading needs through the Flock browser. That’s enough to make any geek want an aggregator for the aggregators.

Whoever manages to mesh all this into a single “social dashboard” just might be the next hero of the Web.

commentary

It’s one thing to listen to vendors talk about the rise and importance of open source. It’s quite another - and much more interesting - to hear customers talking about it.

I was fortunate to spend some time with Jon Williams, Chief Technology Officer at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, the multi-billion dollar test preparation company. Jon is keynoting this year’s Open Source Business Conference and gave me a sneak preview of what he’ll be discussing at OSBC. I’ve worked with Jon over the past year and find him to be one of the industry’s most interesting visionaries in enterprise software.

That comes through loud and clear in this podcast in which Jon talks about how to introduce open source into an organization, where it fits, how to integrate it with proprietary software (and proprietary mindsets), and other things. Well worth a listen for anyone who wants to see where open source is going next.

commentary

I nearly cried (really) when I read Mark Shuttleworth’s eloquent and searing analysis of the United States financial crisis. He doesn’t necessarily call it such, but he points to my country’s failure in economic leadership…and the adverse consequences for the planet.

Underlying it all is a too-easy addiction to credit:

To make matters worse, a series of financial innovations created a whole industry designed to help people go back into debt on their houses. I remember trying to watch TV in the US and being amazed at the number of advertisements for “home equity withdrawals”. They made it sound like turning your major personal financial asset - your paid-off house - into an ATM machine was a good thing. In fact, it was a means to spend all of your primary store of wealth. And with inflated house prices, it was a way to spend money that you did not really have. A convenient way to get into a deep, dark hole of family debt.

The result? The average American owns less of her home today than she did 30 years ago - 55% as opposed to 68%. Easy money makes people poorer….

I was not raised to rely on credit and feel fortunate that my only debt is in my house (which I will pay off as fast as I can - I don’t like owing people money). But I look around and can’t help but be depressed by the mess that Americans have gotten ourselves into. We are addicted to spending far beyond our ability to afford it. Saturday Night Live’s skit “Don’t buy stuff that you cannot afford” should be required watching for all Americans.

Is the system at fault? Maybe, though I also wasn’t raised to blame anyone besides myself for problems. Life happens and people have to take responsibility for how they react to it. But I still get angry when I hear friends or family citing reasons for spending that they clearly imbibed from the television or other clever marketing. (”But it was on sale! I saved a ton of money!” No, you spent a ton of money.)

It is shocking to see how economists and the US government (Democrats and Republicans alike) have reacted. Tax rebates…to get people to spend more. (Fortunately, the evidence on balance shows that people save their tax rebates or pay down debt, which makes them useless for the immediate pain but good for consumers.)

I believe that to get through the crisis we have to learn to save again. This will help to perpetuate the near-term problem but it will save the United States financially in the long term. Spending our way out of a recession, if the money isn’t there to be spent, won’t help. It will exacerbate the problem.

Maybe there are people who can afford to spend mountains of cash in the near term to stave off the recession. But those people aren’t stupid enough to spend in such a fashion. For the rest of us, we need to save more and spend less.

Thanks for writing, Mark.

commentary

IBM is now giving away its Lotus Symphony product for free. Not “free” as in open source, but rather as in “Please take since people won’t pay for it,” as only a few hundred thousand downloads have been registered since September 2007.

The gesture is intended to take away money from Microsoft - probably a losing cause going head-to-head on Microsoft’s territory - but also to provide a platform upon which to sell IBM’s collaboration software. This second strategy has a better chance of success, but would be much better off it didn’t first require enterprises to adopt Lotus Symphony because, quite frankly, they won’t.

A much better route would be to a) extend from
Microsoft Office (though this is fraught with problems because Microsoft controls the platform) or b) shift the battle to new terrain that Microsoft doesn’t own, as Google has.

If I were a betting man, I’d lay my money on email as the disruptive platform that IBM should build upon, and I don’t mean it’s widely used by hugely clunky Domino/Lotus Notes combo. I mean Zimbra or Mozilla’s new email push.

I spend most of my day in email or in my browser. I only use Microsoft Office when I absolutely must. It’s not that I don’t like Office - it’s fine. But this isn’t how I work anymore. I work in messaging. IBM, according to the article above, sees collaboration as something you do around fixed assets like documents. This is one way to collaborate, but it’s not the way that most of us think about collaboration.

Rather, for most of us, collaboration is an extension of communication.

IBM shouldn’t fall into Microsoft’s errors. Microsoft couldn’t extend Exchange to enable real collaboration because Exchange is a crumbling dinosaur of an architecture. So it invented Sharepoint. The same is likely true of Domino/Lotus Notes. So start afresh.

IBM has been exceptionally active in various open-source projects. Why not commit an army of developers to Mozilla to improve Thunderbird? Make Mozilla’s Thunderbird the “standard” platform upon which all these other IBM collaborative programs run….This is bread-and-butter strategy for IBM (witness Linux and Apache). It should do the same with Mozilla.

Yahoo!, meanwhile, has a massive opportunity with Zimbra. Email should be the center of the new enterprise software universe. Research in Motion apparently gets this. Yahoo! could become the hub for enterprise software, newly defined. Zimbra is the key to that strategy, but would probably need to open up further (as in source) in order to become a full community standard.

Anyway, IBM’s strategy of giving away Symphony in order to provide a platform upon which to build is not going to work. Microsoft Office is too well-entrenched. The way to undermine Microsoft is through the web (social networking, web services, etc.) and through email.

Sen. Barack Obama has already proven himself to be the most popular presidential candidate on the Internet, what with his more than 1.3 million Facebook supporters and lofty aims of 2 million online donors. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee is not only outshining other politicians on the Internet, but also the very stars of social networking–Obama has just overtaken Kevin Rose’s spot as the most followed person on Twitter, according to Twitterholic.

By Twitterholic’s last count, Obama stands at 56,661 followers, compared with Rose’s 56,442. Obama also has the second highest number of friends on Twitter–59,338–according to Twitterholic, which calculates individual statistics for each Twitter user a couple of times a day. The candidate’s Twitter page offers up such rousing tidbits of news as “Holding a town hall on economic security in St. Petersburg, FL.”

But for all those followers, there just may be a few who don’t feel sufficiently networked with the candidate. For those who want to be in-the-know about all things Obama–like his VP choice–a millisecond before millions of others, the candidate reminds us to sign up for his text message alerts.