Google Gets Back to Nick
Nick Saber just forwarded Google’s eventual response to what went wrong. Because thousands of people wanted to know the answer to the question why, here’s the first part of that letter:
Hello Nick,
I understand that you may have questions about the recent actions taken on your Google Account. We understand and respect your concerns about your account.
Our specialists performed a thorough investigation of your account ID: nick.saber@gmail.com. It appeared that your account was compromised on 08/01, and an unauthorized charge of $490.30 was attempted in your Google Checkout Account. For security purposes, we suspended this account to prevent additional activity and charges.
We’d also like to assure you that the security and confidentiality of your personal information, including your credit card number, is our highest priority. Your information is securely stored on our servers, and won’t be shared with anyone except under the very limited circumstances described
in our Privacy Policy at http://checkout.google.com/files/buyerprivacy.html. To learn more about
the security of your account and personal information, please visit http://checkout.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29075.We also understand your concerns regarding your account security. It is difficult to determine the exact nature of your account compromise. Please see below for useful information on safeguarding yourself online.
The rest of the letter reminds us not to fall into phishing scams, etc. Good advice.
But wow. Couldn’t this have started with an email saying, “Looks like someone was messing with your account. We shut it down to investigate.” Seems a little backwards to make Nick sweat for a day and change, only to reveal that someone tried to rip him off, and THAT’S why they shut him down.
Special note: Matt Cutts came by with lots of information once this story broke, and I’m grateful for that. Note to ALL companies: if you don’t have a respected face person like Matt out there, think about it. It does help.
What’s your take? How would you have handled it, if you were Google?
Lastly, I’m going to talk about this a bit more in my next newsletter, so if you’re not already subscribed, hop in!
Life in the Clouds
When you lose a hard drive on your computer, it stinks. When you lose two in a few month’s time, it really stinks. When your computer makes a weird “grrrrrrrr” sound and goes black, and won’t boot up even the little tiny apple, well, that’s deadly. That’s how things started out for me in the morning.
By 10, I’d called my boss and asked for a new laptop. By 3PM, I had it in hand. Tonight, when I had a moment, I pulled out my external storage drive, plugged it into the shiny new Mac, and turned it on.
It took an hour to restore everything to the last good save (a week old, but not horrible).
Because of the way these last several weeks have gone, I’ve learned a few things that I want to share. This might prove useful to you in a few ways: one, if your computer dies. Two, because this is the way I think things will move in the future.
Life in the Clouds
SEVERAL of my most used applications exist as web applications that I can reach via a browser:
- Gmail for email.
- Google Calendar for appointments.
- Google Reader for news.
- Evernote for notes.
- BatchBook for contact management.
- Flickr for photos.
- Blip.tv for movies.
- Google Docs for documents.
- Picnik for photo editing.
- del.icio.us for bookmarking.
It turns out that most of the apps I use in a given day exist on the web. But here are some exceptions that I would need if I had to rebuild another computer from scratch. (Note: this is a Mac list).
- TextWrangler - for complex text editing and text scripts
- Cyberduck - for FTP
- Adium - for IM client
- Skitch - for screenshots
- Keynote - for presentations
- Firefox - web browser
- Evernote - the desktop app side
The rest are all good to have, but I could live with just those and the built-in apps that come with a Mac.
Takeaways
What I’ve learned over the past month is that I can do lots of stuff on the web from any browser (have to remember that firefox bookmark sync addon - what’s it called?). I’ve learned that backups are important, and not to go more than a few days between them. I’ve learned that Time Machine for the Mac is a really powerful backup tool.
Further, I’ve learned that I need to get a file storage space on the web, too. The few things I lost access to involved files in progress in my documents area. I have most of them, but lost a few between backups. I’m going to check out a service like Mozy for storing some of that for me. That will complete that part.
How about you? What’s your experience been in this regard? Are you doing any of this differently?
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BatchBook is Great for Contact Management
BatchBlue Software was kind enough to give me a big sized account to try out managing my contacts with their BatchBook product. They let me do five things, if I’m so inclined: manage contacts, keep track of my communications, slice my contacts into lists (remember this one), manage to-do lists, and use their SuperTags to build small custom databases of meta information around my contacts. All of that is relatively neato, and something that lots of us aren’t especially doing well today (how many of you use a spreadsheet somewhere to track your important conversations?)
I should state that I know Michelle Riggen-Ransom (marketing goddess) and Adam Darowski (UX prince) through meetings at various social events, like SXSW, the occasional Tweet-up, etc. When you know the people who make the things you’re using, there’s a whole sense that everything could be customized or something. When I talk to Mario Sundar at LinkedIn, I feel the same kind of thing: like they care about their user base. Well, with BatchBlue, they are passionate about their customer base.
Things I Like
In the fun category, I like the little touches they’ve thrown in. I went to upload my latest LinkedIn database into BatchBook and combine it with my Gmail accounts. That ends up being around 6,200 contacts (boiled back down with dupes to 4760). When I uploaded the CSV file, here’s what I got:
Yep, the little touches like that are great.
Because I can tag things lots of ways, it means I can sort them lots of ways:
I further like that I can upload pictures for contacts, should I want a visual reminder of who they are:
But what’s coolest is the list feature.
Messaging Distinct Sets of People
Here’s where BatchBlue does something that most of my contact systems do not. Plaxo shares a lot of features with BatchBook, and it has one over on BatchBook insofar as user data on there updates when the other contacts change their information. Meaning, if you’re connected to someone on Plaxo, and that someone changes jobs, phone numbers, email addresses, your files are updated right away. Okay, cool.
Try messaging more than one person on Plaxo. Ditto LinkedIn. Ditto Facebook.
Grueling.
BatchBook has lists. For every one of the tags you assign a contact, you can sort those tags into lists, then download those lists into distinct addressable groups. So, for instance, if I want to email all the people I know who are related to PodCamp, I can. If I want to message everyone in the Boston area, I can. If I want to message people I’ve labeled as “mediamakers,” I can.
That’s the clever bit.
A Quick Note About SuperTags
They also have this feature called Super Tags. Basically, you can add all kinds of other fields and metadata around certain tags, such that you collect even more useful, sortable data on different kinds of contacts. I haven’t dug into that yet, but judging by the way Michelle and Adam talk about it all the time, I suspect that’s a cool feature and that I’m missing out.
In the End
I recommend BatchBook for the list sorting ability, for the tagging and slicing ability, for the Super Tags (though I’m not 100% clever on them yet), and if you have no other form of client relationship management software, this would be a great lightweight tool. I’m not using their todos or several other parts of the software, but that’s okay. I think it’s worth it for what I’m getting. Hey, I’m not a DBA, and this is a whole lot better for me to manage than a spreadsheet.
If you check it out, I’d be interested to know your take.
BatchBlue Software’s BatchBook might be just right for you.
Zoho Show 2.0 Launches Today
Zoho, everybody’s favorite cloud software developer, released a new 2.0 version of Zoho Show today. It’s presentation software that includes slide making features as well as chatting, remote sharing, and desktop sharing, making it a little more powerful than your typical Powerpoint or Keynote, insofar as features goes. That’s one of the tricks with Zoho. They’ve built such a suite of apps that they can mix and match.
Some of the changes in 2.0 target ease of use, and this is probably where I’ve complained a bit about certain Zoho apps in the past. I’ll tell you that I used it while on a conference call to doodle out what you see below, and it worked super easy and intuitively.
Zoho also allows you to embed the presentation on another site after you publish it (like SlideShare), and has about a dozen features that I didn’t cover here. If you’re in the world of presentations, this might be worth considering as a free, flexible offering. The closest similar product online is Google Docs and their presentation software, but I tell you, Zoho’s product works, looks, and feels better.
Good job, Zoho.
See a bigger picture here:
Three Photo Editing Tools to Check Out
I just learned about Dumpr from Download Squad. It’s a tool that offers free and pro photo editing options. Checking out this site reminded me to tell you that I’m also pretty fond of some other great web tools that you might not be using.
- A.viary is a hardcore photo editing app, kind of like Photoshop without the price tag and disk install. But it’s way cooler than that. It’s a whole lot of really interesting editing abilities and a whole community of people doing their own thing with the tools that makes this one a great choice. Note: it’s still in an invite-only beta period (when does that end, guys?), but maybe I can score you a few invites, if you’re interested. Let me know in the comments, and I’ll ask the team.
- Picnik is a lightweight photo editing tool that gets me through pretty much all of my needs right now. I use it about twice a day, and have found that it does most everything I need from a photo editor. It’s not really good with batch-based activities, but if you’re into editing things one at a time, this is for you.
- Skitch (the bonus round) acts as a screen capture and annotation tool. It’s super easy to use, has just enough tools to be useful but not so many that you feel bloated and misunderstood. I use it to do lots of odd jobs on capture screens and little images from web pages. Definitely good to have.
More and more, I’m choosing tools and applications that live in the cloud. Why? Because after dropping my laptop the other day and losing every on-disk application, I realized that there are lots of benefits to having my data and my tools available from anywhere there’s a web browser. There are some exceptions, of course, but when I find great web tools, I want to share them.
What about you? What are you using on the web that’s cool?
