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The year of online spreadsheets June 6, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : web, google , 3 comments

The blogosphere is going gaga over news that Google will be launching Google Spreadsheets, most likely sometime Tuesday morning in the States. As might be expected, especially after Google acquired Writely, the pundits are claiming that this is yet another hammer in the coffin of Microsoft Office. To which I say, hogwash! Google have a terrific opportunity to steal alot of marketshare from Excel at the small end of the market, probably why the examples they have on their sneak peek are ‘little league timetables’ and the like. But in the heady world of investment banking that I am working at present, I doubt that the quants and accountants will be letting go of their intricately built Excel models anytime soon. But spreadsheets are defintely moving closer to servers and the web; from Dan Bricklin’s wikicalc to Excel Services which will be available in Office 2007.

Nevertheless I am looking forward to playing around with this. I expect and hope that an API based on GData is available soon. The small end of the market can be a profitable one, assuming Google has a way to monetize this (how do you use keyword-based advertising when the text in question is mostly numeric?). However it is disappointing that, just like Google Calendar, Safari will not be initially supported. Looks like there are some Mac-haters over at the Googleplex?

My calendar nirvana May 1, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : web, google, apple , 1 comment so far

I’m somewhat late to the party I guess, but I have been bitten by the Google Calendar bug. I think it was being able to type “Bill’s birthday party this saturday at 6pm for three and a half hours” into the Quick Add box and IT JUST WORKED. Wow.

For some time I have been using iCal for all my appointments. I have been successfully sync’ing it with my mobile phone (Nokia 6600) and publishing the calendar to my host where I can also read it (but alas, not edit) using PHP iCalendar. Events created on my mobile phone are successfully synchronized with my iCal store, thanks to iSync.

All I need now is synchronization with Google Calendar. Its easy enough to subscribe to .ics files created by Calendar in iCal. But when will I be able to enter events into iCal and have them synchronized via the Calendar API? I have a feeling that Syncbridge might solve this problem sooner rather than later. Then my calendar synchronization nirvana will be complete. Oh, apart from a voice recognition interface to the Quick Add feature!

Server-to-Server interop with Google Talk now live January 18, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : google, xmpp , 1 comment so far

As speculated by Melo, the server-to-server port of Google Talk is now live (via Om). The days of proprietary IM networks are now numbered. Or are they? Despite the breathless praise that many are heaping on Google (and don’t get me wrong, this is a GOOD THING) I think it will be a while before we see much migration away from MSN or YIM. The fact is, those networks and their clients have all sorts of additional ‘value-added’ ‘features’, such stock alerts, a million different smilies, parlour games, video chat, etc, etc that have hooked many of their users. If you are using messaging purely to CHAT however (now there’s an idea!), you should take a long look at what XMPP offers you.

I am eagerly looking forward to seeing the new applications that will be built on top of XMPP due to the broader take up given Google’s participation.