I do my own stunts

2009: Products I Can’t Live Without

I don’t know why I ended up on TechCrunch today, the website is not on my daily feed reading list, but after seeing this blogpost by Michael Arrignton, containing the 4-year table of products he “can’t live without”…

I couldn’t happen to reply with my own list of web products and startups I will need to survive in 2009, so, without further ado, here is the top web services and hyped products I can’t live without:

• a…
• hmm…
• [Tumbleweed rolling]

That’s right, I don’t need ANY. How can someone list Digg as an essential website to maintain life going on is beyond my understanding. I mean, Digg???? C’mon!…

Ok, it was just an exagerated headline, maybe even a joke and MA doesn’t really meant that(or did he?) I know that. But it does show how people need to put some things into perspective. Here is an example:

Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

Wait, so Youtube, Digg, Facebook, FriendFeed, Animoto and Twitter are tools that help with productivity?? Holly shit!! We might just have foud the cure for ADD!!

I can understand the happiness part though, some people just don’t have a girlfriend or a family and to fill the gap I am grateful that Facebook and Coupa Café exists, otherwise their life would be miserable ;)

Don’t get me wrong, I too use a bunch of this services nearly every day, they are interesting, fun and even useful (Google and Wikipedia anyone?), but if the web ended tomorrow I wouldnt be jumping from the Bay Bridge, It would be a total bummer and I would be very sad, I would lose a bunch of stuff that I consider important, but I would continue living my life after it with no problem, maybe even get a job on a Fast Food restaurant and go fishing on weekends.

Last year I have learned the hard way that there is life without Gmail, and even without Google whatsoever, our parents and grandparents used to have perfectly good lifes and even achieve great things without overhyped companies and easy funding. So please, turn off your iphone for a while and go have a tea in the park for me, ok? And take Robert Scoble with you if possible =)

I have now officially lost my faith in Google

Over the past week, my Gmail account got disabled again, and recovered again, and disabled again. It has been more than 3 days that I cannot access gmail, google docs, blogger, orkut, google code host, google analytics and a bunch of other websites and services that are important to my life.

I am still a big fan of Google, and think their products are normally great, they are very useful and handy when they work, but once something unexpected happens or an error occurs, you are out of luck. Basically because they are too huge of a company now to not have a support infrastructure that is almost completely automatized.

Having scripts to solve the most common issues is essential to any big company providing consumer services on the web. However, some sort of fallback-to-human policies should come along with, even if I had to pay for it.

Being unable to access important bits of my digital life for a long time now, made me realise some important tips:

1. Avoid Single Sign Ons at all costs!

Again, when it works, it is handy, but the day it fails, you wont be able to identify which of the services you use under this single sign on was the responsible for the problem, and until you have your problem solved and your account back all of the services you used to rely under this single sign on will be compromised as well.

Staying one week without personal email is not the end of the world, it might actually force you to setup another POP or IMAP email account under your own domain name, which is a good thing, being banned from Gmail for no particular reason thaught me that we can use other solutions and still survive fine, now I have a brand new email under a domain name that I control (fabricio.org) and the fact that I started from scratch made it easier for me to setup an inbox zero policy too, so not very terrible…

However, because of one gmail account I also lost ownership of my public repositories for open source projects on Google Code, and I lost access to my Google AppEngine account (thank God there are not many people using my apps there!), and I lost all my online documents too, some of them containing very important information. This is the kind of loss that can mean direct financial loss, and reputation loss, and overall huge business and psichological impact on a web entrepreneur’s life.

So, my suggestion here is to have a separated Google account just for Gmail, and then a separated Google account just for Docs, and a separated Google account just for Google Code, you got the idea…

2. Make backups, but don’t make them all in one shot

After my second gmail account recovery, I was already scared and my first reaction was to enable POP on Gmail and retrieve all my information from there as soon as possible, because in the event of a new deactivation, at least my data was safe.

That was a wrong move, Thunderbird downloading 3G of emails might have triggered the account disabling bots radar again, and now I am without my data and without my account(still trying to recover it using the automated scripts).

3. Never have only one owner for your groups, communities and projects

Google groups, Docs, Blogger, Code hosting and others have the option to give super user privileges for other users, like having more than one owner or giving some users moderation habilities.

Having your alternate email address (one that you own the domain name) listed as owner of your projects will be a great tool to prevent agony desperation and suicide attempts the day your 6 years old blog or open source project is made hostage by Google because of a random deactivation of an email account(or sometimes not even random, but intentionally by your enemies sending bogus abuse reports to google to get you down unfairly)

4. Keep your cookies and sessions!

In the event of a deactivation, sometimes the services you were logged on before continue to work because you are already in. So do not logout and use this opportunity to transfer your access to an alternate account and to retrieve your data that may become unavailable for days or even, God-forbid, gone forever.

The second time my gmail was disabled I could still blog on blogger and post scraps on Orkut, that helped me warn my closest friends to not contact me over email for a couple of days until I manage to have it back. The third time my gmail account was disabled I could still use google groups because the session was still open, I had then enough time to transfer the ownerships for the alternate account.

5. Have your contact list backed-up somewhere

The day your personal email goes MIA for days, you will eventually need to email friends and family from your new alternate email, but you were just too lazy and confident in Google not to have you contacts list somewhere else. And you will find out that Thunderbird or Pine doesnt have that supper auto-complete on Mail composing that were the results of years of gmail system training with your mail habits.

6. Stop using GTalk on Adium

Or have a separate account just for that. Several adium login attempts sometimes trigger the deactivation bots too.

7. Diversify your options.

Don’t keep all of your digital life in the hands of a single company, over this period that I lost my gmail login, at least one thing I was proud of myself: I am still a Bloglines user!

Bloglines is a good RSS reader, no need to go Google Reader.

Identi.ca and Twitter are ok microbloggings, no need to go Jaiku

280Slides is a good Presentation software, no need to go Docs

PBWiki is an Ok Wiki/Documents solution, no need to go Docs

Flickr is superior, and I don’t think anyone uses Picasa anyways :)

Vimeo, Blip.tv and countless others are better than youtube, one shouldnt need to store videos in there only.

Same thing for blogs, Blogger.com is nice, but there are several competitors and your-own-server solutions that are great too.

[Update 18-Dec-2008] After 9 days, I got my google account recovered again. And now I am taking some measures to prevent total data access prevention next time it happens, I basically have an alternate account now and all the important stuff like my blogs, documents, communities and applications will have now 2 owners, so if one fail the other can still log and get the data out, here is the partial list of steps I took after the recovery:

1. got my Google account recovered!! now, what should I backup first? maybe transfer the ownership o f my docs and apps… (tweet)
   
2. add my alternate(now main) email as the owner for my 7 google code projects (tweet)
3. export Gmail contacts CSV (tweet)
4. add my alternate google user as admin for my personal blog on blogger.com (tweet)
5. oh, I think I spotted what is triggering all this deactivations, google thinks one of my old blogs is a spam blog! (tweet) – RESOLVED – I deleted that crappy useless ridiculous-old test blog
6. add my alternate google user as admin for 6 other blogger.com blogs (tweet)
7. add my alternate google user as the col aborator for 89 docs
8. delete google checkout credit card info (tweet)
9. delete all google alerts
10. add alt. email as admin on my analytics accounts
11. I’ve got an orkut community hijacked while my account was disabled, who shou ld I talk to? (tweet) – UNRESOLVED
12. I am not trying to erase my GLife , just introducing some redundancy (tweet)

Internet Platforms revisited

On September of 2007, Marc Andreessen wrote an interesting blogpost about internet platforms with some good observations and a preview of what could be the next generation of internet platforms. The 2 most important points from that post that I would like to repeat here are:

1- If you can program it, then it’s a platform. If you can’t, then it’s not.

And:

2- the difference between the chicken and the pig at a ham and egg breakfast. The chicken’s involved but the pig is committed.

At that time, Ning itself was one of the companies working on a model that was close to this ideal “Level 3” platform… but that’s not the point of this post. Suffice to say that due to market-fit and growth we are now back to the transition to Levels 1 and 2 , which is not a bad thing, there are plenty of successful business built on top of platforms of all levels, as Marc said back then, “they’re all good… …Having a platform is always better than not having a platform, period.”

This post is to showcase 4 examples selected by someone who codes (myself) of companies that are currently getting close to that ideal of the “runtime environment”, the “committed platforms” with “develop in the browser” tools, infrastructure to “run in the cloud” and if possible with an “open source ecosystem within the platform to let users freely share code with one another”.

The platforms are: Freebase Acre (aka freebase applications); Google AppEngine; Heroku; and Appjet.

Freebase Acre

• Applications are programmed with server-side Javascript, a template language that extends html and MQL
• The interface to edit the source code is web based
• Users can view the source for any application, and clone them easily
• The application is hosted by Metaweb
• The application runs in the cloud
• The application has to run on Metaweb’s infrastructure. If the pig becomes a chicken you are out of luck

Google App Engine

• Applications are programmed with Python(a limited version of it) and an API to the “DataStore”
• There is no web-based interface to edit the source code, you have to develop/test it on a local SDK and then deploy
• Users cannot view the source for any application, all apps are closed by default
• The application is hosted by Google, however, the SDK(a limited version of the platform code) is open source.
• The application runs in the cloud
• If the pig becomes a chicken, migration is kinda-of possible (because a version of the platform code is open)

Appjet

• Applications are programmed with server-side Javascript(with small extensions and a mini-framework with helper functions)
• The interface to edit the source code is web based
• Users can view the source for any application, and clone them easily
• Modularization and KISS is encouraged (1-file apps + make-it-a-library mentality)
• The application is hosted by Appjet, however, the necessary files to run an appjet app runner in your own server are available and open source.
• The application runs in the cloud(if you want)
• If the pig becomes a chicken, you can migrate your app to another host (because a version of the platform code is open)

Heroku

• Applications are programmed with Ruby/Rails
• There are web based tools to edit the source code, but also git integration if you prefer to develop locally first
• Users can view the source of apps flagged as “public”, and clone those is easy
• The application is hosted by Heroku
• The application runs in the cloud (using EC2)
• Since it is a Rails app, you can easily migrate your app to other hosts if the pig becomes a chicken

My Google Chrome Review/ First impressions

Bad:

• Windows only
• Windows only
• Windows only
• Slow b/c I have to run it under VMWare
• UGLY non-standard UI
  • how can I change that blue top and borders? blue is shit
  • how can I change those vista-wannabe minimize/maximize/close buttons? (my virtual windows machine is a win XP with classic theme, not blue/green shitty/childish xp)
• No ad blocking = slow page rendering
  
• Automatically send statistics is the default
• ugly and big icons
• no indication that a website has RSS whatsoever
• no firefox addons support
• the “such tab has become unresponsive” popup is intrusive, will show up while you are reading other unrelated tab.
  • the time to consider something as “unresponsive” could be longer
  • to keep asking if I want to wait for the page to “become responsive” again and again is annoying, of course I want to wait!
  • 
• the minimum tab width to display a favicon could be smaller (it is around 33px today)
• having the space of a single tab to display the page title is stupid
  • I would rather have a title bar since they are already spending real state with that ugly, blue, useless shitty top-background
• twitter looks weird, with that ugly-gray resize handler in the corner of the text input
• page resize is suboptimal
  
• no about:config for power users
• on the empty tab page, clicking on the google chrome beta logo doesn’t take you to the google chrome beta webpage
• pages with embbedded flash sucks (at least under VMWare, don’t know about on native windows)
• font rendering on Gmail is bad (but maybe that’s windows fault)
• requires visual studio 2005(full) to compile

Good:

• Preserve lot’s of firefox shortcuts
  • unlike Camino, middle-click do close tabs, which is great!
• about:memory = cool
• about:internets = awesome
• Bug report form already takes a screenshot for you
• You can disable the “automatically send statistics”
• You don’t have to agree with the EULA to test it ;)
• Awesome Comic Book!
• The tab character for the frozen tab messages and tab crashes is cool, reminds me of the Finder face, love the pixelated art on that
• the source is publicly available
• the issue tracker is publicly available
• although no firebug, the dom inspector is not that bad
• the irc chatrooms of the chromium project are pretty active

In summary, this is a true beta software, like in the good old days when this tag meant something. It is not ready for prime time (specially if you don’t use windows) and there is still lots of work ahead until it comes near the maturity of Firefox.

Still, it is nice to have a new take on web browsers, and more important: another open source option.

Kudos to the Google Engineers involved! :)

ADD-Friendly Notification Clips

A small series of short clips to be setup and used 1 minute or 30 seconds before meetings conference calls, bill payment deadlines and other easy-to-miss appointments.

Yahoo RIP

My very best whishes for Stewart and Caterina, success on their new projects, whatever they might be.

Yok.. I mean, Microsoft may have fucked up with things, but some tragedies happens for a good reason, I am sure the future will be interesting =)

Sorry, your account has been disabled.

I got my Google account disabled this afternoon. :(

I don’t remember doing anything nearly close to a TOS violation, so I pretty much believe it was a mistake on their part. I have contacted their support and I have one open ticket with them to recover my access… the page say I should wait 24 hours, so I decided to write a blog post about single sign ons, Google, ourselves and other related things… I will use an unordered list since I don’t really want to connect the items in a way that makes textual sense:

• while disabled, emails sent to my account will bounce. that’s lame, knowing that an account can be errouneosly flagged for disabling, Google could at least keep the emails on your inbox for when you recover access.
• disable first, warn later. It would be nice to have a note about what kind of radar/algorythm was the responsible for the account shut down, and if this was something caused by me, a warning before I trigger the red light somewhere explaining that my account was doing something odd (if that was the case). Or a better message after the turn off, something like “your account was automatically disabled by the such and such bot. That way I could have a hint about if my account was turned off because virus suspicion, spam, crawling, piracy, porn, or whatever their bot believes I am guilt of (DISCLAIMER: I am not involved on any of the above activities just for the record)
• several important and unrelated services under a single authentication umbrella, or break one = break all. Google makes awesome web products, they are known for great reliability and quality even for their “beta” services, and more than that, their good software covers a very hybrid range of applications. Search, webmail, a full featured office suite, calendar, maps, personal webpages, blogs, code hosting, website analytics, ads publishing and managment, photo sharing, video sharing, social network, mailing list groups, web applications hosting, rss reader, shopping, translation, instant messaging, etc… We got used to them and we are naturally confident enough about their quality to rely more and more important pieces of our digital lives to the company, the problem is that if one of the services you use for whatever reason flags your account, you lose them all, it doesn’t matter if a photo from picasa was inappropriate, your appengine will go down, it doesn’t matter if your orkut got a virus, you will no longer be able to chat with your comrades, if your appengine hosted application because of a programmers mistake go crazy and explodes you might lose years of important email archives because of it, your youtube opinion video about a random company may be asked to be taken off and you can loose update access for a 5 years old personal blog and so on…  They should be independent services, even if the login is the same. More granularity on this one would definitely improve Google’s success and good netizen image :)
• Why don’t we backup? 1-we take things for granted, 2-we are lazy, 3-it is not always trivial to export your data from web services, 4-we don’t think about catastrophes and exit plans that much…
• on the bright side of the issue, I am happy to not be a google reader user :) Go Bloglines!!

Happy CSS Naked Day :)