I enjoy Google Buzz

Byrichard

Whilst everyone makes fun of Google Buzz and continues living their daily life between google buzz and facebook I have jumped into google buzz with a passion and found it to be nice. It’s a social aggregator of content from a number of google services where you can discuss the content with a close network of friends.

The strength of this social network is that it is plugged right into google mail. As a result you are guaranteed to log into this site for the whole day. When you have some free time you can go through the threads of conversation and comment on those of interest. Once this is done you can go back to the mail client.

As the day progresses so will the number of people commenting on posts. You will see these comments in gmail and answer straight from there.  It means you don’t have to wait for a notification, click on the link, scroll to the bottom of the page and finally comment. Here you just type the comment and then use the keyboard to progress onto the next thread with a comment.

The J and K keys can be used to go backwards and forwards between e-mails in Gmail. They can also jog from one item to another in Google buzz. The result is a very quick, natural way of conversing with the least amount of resistance.

The biggest drawback at the moment is the lack of users who find any use for such a site. It’s hard enough getting interactions from Facebook so you can wait a few months before Google Buzz reaches critical mass. I will be there in the meantime enjoying conversation with others, who like me are early adopters.

Vancouver live in Europe – Streaming

Byrichard

The European Broadcasting union are providing live coverage of the Vancouver Olympic games to Eurovision member states. There are 6 live channels in Standard definition as well as a channel for certain events in high definition. Also available are the live broadcasts that members of the European broadcasting Union are making available to their home audiences. As a result you have a wealth of streams in a number of languages.

Vancouver live is where you will find this content. I am mentioning this because a lot of blog space and articles are dedicated to covering how the United States are providing streamed content to that part of the world but without demonstrating that streaming also has a place in the European market.

Buzz buzz buzz

Byrichard

Google thinks it’s a bee. That’s why they have the new service google buzz. I spent some time looking at it and it makes me think of jaiku, friendfeed and other services all combined into one. It’s threaded conversations and status messages based on geo-tagged conversation triggers.

It has a good interface with google reader and of course the question which I cannot answer yet is what does the full version have to offer that will enhance the user’s experience

MobileRSS for the Iphone

Byrichard

When you like to control the information that is available to you through feedreaders the one that I have found most useful is google reader. It allows you to navigate using keyboard shortcut keys rather than the mouse. As a result you are able to navigate more effectively through the sometimes hundreds of posts.

For a while now, about three years, I’ve been looking for an app that gives us the convenience of google reader whilst on mobile devices. For a while I had the N95 and ipod touch, the ipod touch and the miniS and now the Iphone and N97.

The problem I kept having is with keeping everything up to date on all the devices. I didn’t want to read through twenty articles on a mobile device only to have to wade through the same articles a second time when I arrived back at the main computer I use for content processing.

That’s where MobileRSS for the Iphone and ipod touch comes into it’s own. It is a simple, intuitive way to go through your google reader feeds whilst mobile. Select the view you want, whether using “show new” or “show all”. Show all will give you several thousand posts along with all the key words you’ve added, something that is not so easy to manage.

The “Show new” tab however is great. When I pick up the phone and update all my feeds it gives me all of the new posts in an easy to process format. I have the option to view all feeds if I desire or to see each feed one at a time.

As you know some information sources like to post dozens of posts a day whilst others like to post just one or two a day. Those that post once or twice a day are usually the first ones I’ll read. This is because they’re more specialised, more thought out posts. As a result they’re more relevant.

There are two three ways to navigate through the content. The first is by selecting the list view. You see the headlines you want to read. In the second view you can read article by article and click the up or down icons to get to the previous or next posts. You can also drag the article from the one you’re reading to the next one. This speeds up the process by minimising the number of button presses.

When I am reading each article I can add notes, keep unread, star, share or even send it to to a number of other places. As a result I can share the articles I find of interest according to the way I think other people prefer to share.

The options for sharing are email/facebook/twitter/readitlater/instapaper and delicious. This means that I can share content within seconds, rather than minutes, anywhere I am, whether in a traffic jam or waiting to pay for the day’s shopping.

Another advantage is that it’s always on. Whether I have wifi or 3g I have access to all of the latest articles. I’d recommend using it. See whether it makes information gathering and sharing easier for you too.

More information

Turn by turn navigation with the Nokia N97

Byrichard

Last night I recovered my N97 after lending it to a friend for a few days and he told me it was too complicated to use, which I do agree with, after seeing how easy the 3gs is, but that’s not the point of this post. Turn by turn navigation is.

For those of you who know me you’ll have heard that I’ve used the N95, N97 and Iphone for navigation and each has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Mainly the biggest weakness is having to wait until you’re stopped at a traffic light before checking whether you were going the right way or not. That has now changed.

Nokia have recently come out with an excellent, yes, that’s my opinion, add on to the maps software that provides turn by turn navigation with a choice of hundreds of voices. That’s what makes the Nokia N97 such a great, although expensive GPS. You select the voice, in my case female Canadian french, and she will tell you which way to go. She will tell you when you’re at a roundabout, whether to go right or left and more. Best of all her voice will allow you to keep your eyes on the road.

If you’re travelling with a fellow geek who can play with the phone whilst you’re driving then they will notice the counting down, telling you how far you are from the next change in direction, show a map of the route as a forerunner to the actual journey or even a map of the complete journey.

From what I’ve described above you see that the N97 behaves just like a dedicated navigation GPS that’s constantly online. As a result you get traffic information telling you what to look out for. It’s a beautiful piece of software and I’d love to go on a road trip to test it.

I’m in favour of this in car navigation. If you buy a GPS you’d pay 300-400CHF in some cases, several hundred CHF for the Iphone tom-tom app, or you could get it for free with your N97. The choice is yours. I’m very happy with how well it performed.