Just when I was starting to knock Google’s track record of innovation they roll out GrandCentral. While it isn’t truly a Google “innovation” what they will be doing with it sure is innovative. I’m not a user of it – yet, but it sounds like an awesome idea and I’m very excited about getting into the application.

If you never heard of GrandCentral, it’s a phone aggregator…. in a nutshell it will allow all your phones and voicemails to be managed under 1 account.

Here are just a few of the features I’m excited about:

• One number, rings everything
• Let people call you from a Web pageClick2call from your keyboard
• Call Record. Yep… record your calls… this will be fun to see the lawyers debate
• Voicemail notifications via SMS
• Mobile Access, similar to the iPhone visual voicemail

I can just hear the telecos whining about this latest invention by Google. But why are they doing this, I’m only guessing at this point but let’s follow the money for some clues.

• Phone based ads using AdWords
• Click to Call, perfect for tracking AdWords conversions over the phone
• Planting the seeds for the Google Phone
• Searchable Voicemail

OK, I’ve drank the juice and I haven’t even used this yet. I encourage you to visit the site and sign-up as well.

In the beginning we loved working with Basecamp. We were early adopters and Basecamp served as a point of differentiation between us and our competitors. Most of our clients loved the system purely out of the simplicity of the overall experience; however there has always been a small undercurrent of our clients who either are confused by it, find it to simplistic or hate something about the system.

… and this is OK, according to 37Signals.

37Signals has made it clear over the years that their products aren’t meant for everyone and some people will eventually outgrow their system, we’ll I guess we are heading down that path. Let me explain our experience with Basecamp, and I’d be interested in hearing who else has outgrown the software and why.

The Good

• The simplicity of use. I guess I can’t see why customers are confused by the system, it’s pretty easy to use.
• Lack of clutter. Visually, Basecamp is easy on the eyes which makes it more likely to stay up on my screen all day.
• I find the FTP integration useful because it allows us to store customer data on our own server where it’s backed up and portable.

Critiques which fall on deaf ears.

I would submit these ideas to 37Signals but after reading "Getting Real" I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to give a damn about what I have to say.

• The Dashboard. Interesting idea but it really falls short when you have multiple projects. Especially if your projects all follow the same general outline. For instance, if we have a Web site redesign project going for 4 clients then my Dashboard calendar is useless because it doesn’t clearly tell me which project a milestone is due for.
• Email flow and usage. I can’t tell you how many clients reply to the email which says "DO NOT REPLY". However, can’t 37Signals modify Basecamp to track and thread my messages. For instance, if I send an email to a client and cc a unique email such as myaccountid@basecamphq.com then Basecamp would permit us, and our clients the freedom to work from our email accounts, while Basecamp tracks the volley.
• The Calendar. Why on Earth does the calendar slide to the current day? To me this is a big break from common usage. My iCal on my computer doesn’t shift me to the current day, it stays on the week and highlights today’s date. Basecamp just removes the previous day and starts the 2 week calendar on the current date and time. Uh?
• Templates. If I have a new project I’d sure like to be able to apply a milestone template which dropped in default project goals. For us, the current "to-do" template is entirely useless.
• Milestones. If I set a milestone to be completed on Feb 7th, 2008 and it isn’t completed until Feb 14th, 2008 then why doesn’t Basecamp track the date it was completed and who checked it complete?
• To-dos. Where is the functionality of "Ta-Da-List" and why isn’t it used here?

I can keep going but I’ll stop here.

Now, the things which are a huge turn off.

• The lack of support and the general F-U attitude of 37Signals. We wanted to build a Basecamp Hours Widget and we found that the 37Signals team was both unresponsive and kind-of unfriendly when we tried to use their API.
• Their general attitude towards new features. Why not encourage feedback from the customers? I’d love to see the top 10 most requested features and 37Signals’ stance on why or why not those features would be integrated.

That’s the extent of my rant. I think 37Signals has also done alot of good for the Web-based software movement, and I don’t want to minimize that contribution. We are still using Basecamp as of today but the plans are in the works for a new system to replace it before the end of the year. I’m interested in hearing the experiences of other Basecamp users out there.

Every now and then I drift into the Google Labs to have a look at the current projects underway. This latest round I was intrigued by several cool projects baking in the Google oven.

Google Notebook

http://www.google.com/notebook

Pros: This is my favorite item coming out of the labs. Especially if you install the "My Notebook" toolbar for your browser. This way you can highlight and right click items on a Web page and save them to your notebook. It is sort of a glorified scribble pad of idea, text and links which you can search on later.

Cons: I haven’t found one yet, but let me keep working with it and I’ll be sure to find something it can do better.

Google Music Trends

Visit http://www.google.com/trends/music

Pros: The default listing isn’t that interesting but once you select a Genres or Country, then the list becomes a bit more interesting.

Cons: It’s just Google Talk participants so the data feeding into this is a bit suspect to say the least.

Google Trends

Visit http://www.google.com/trends

Pros: Presents a visual trend line on various search terms. The regions and cities is a useful subset of data which sometimes shows very distinct differences how users search.

Example: I used "web site, website" to see which term most people search on. Interestingly enough both terms have dropped in search volume from 2004 to 2008 however the news references for the terms has increased in the same time period. Plus, India much prefers the grammatically incorrect "website" whereas the French and Italians lean towards "Web site".

Cons: The news on the right seems a bit odd and out of place. I actually stumbled on two broken links during my short tests.

Google Code Search

Visit http://www.google.com/codesearch

Pros: If you are looking for code examples to steal learn and integrate into your project, this is certainly a good point to start from.

Cons: Just stay away unless your a coder.

Google Mars

Visit http://www.google.com/mars/

Pros: I think I found a real nice piece of real-estate once we find a way to get there.

Cons: For real? Why do we need this? And why does it wrap 4 times when you zoom all the way out? I’m still waiting for Google to drop a Martian into the map as an Easter egg.

Google Information / 411

Dial 1-800-GOOG-411

Pros: Uses voice recognition to locate businesses and then patches you right thru, and yes it’s free. They located "Imulus" in Boulder, Colorado just fine and on the first try. Not bad for a word which is hard to decipher with voice recognition.

Cons: Where is the residential side of this

Transit

Visit http://www.google.com/transit

Pro: Once you find a location which has public transportation the familiar Google Map interface is overlaid by transit locations which highlight when you select a schedule which is close to the time you wish to leave.

Cons: The city availability is pretty limiting, especially in the US where the coverage is scattered and seems to defy logic. For instance why would they have coverage for Grand Junction, Colorado rather then Denver, Boulder or even Colorado Springs? Sorry, no New York or Chicago either.

A few months ago we moved our website from Alentus to Sungard (formly Inflow), with what we thought was great success. The latency between our office and our dedicated server was cut in half. When we accessed the server from various connections such as Qwest and Comcast our download rates were far improved. Then one day we received a call from a client saying that since we moved them into our new facility, they’ve received increased complaints of download failures.

Our initial response was one of skepticism because we were seeing improved performance, not a decrease. Using terminal services to connect to our other dedicated servers around the country I was able to reproduce the client’s experience. Apparently, about 70% of traffic around the country was having difficulty or decreased performance while accessing our servers. I then stumbled on a tool called Website Pulse.

Website Pulse monitors your website for performance and related issues from various locations internationally. In the chart below you can see the results of downloading a 22 MB file from our servers. The numbers on the left are seconds needed to download a file from Chicago over a backbone provided by nLayer, Level3, UUNET. The drop in seconds occurred when we moved our servers out of Sungard and into ViaWest in Denver, CO. The sudden increase on the 5th of October was an issue with the switch used in our rack.

Unknown to us, when Sungard acquired Inflow they also changed their policy in regards to capping bandwidth. Rather then allowing for bandwidth overages, and then surcharging the customer; Sungard’s policy was to cap bandwidth and not tell the customer of the performance hit.

Prior to this issue we didn’t realize various locations around the country experienced our websites in such a wide variety of speeds. With Website Pulse we receive alerts when any of our sites a falling below our acceptable load times.

It’s a great tool and I highly recommend using it for website monitoring.

A few weeks back I received an invite to check out JumpChart.com, a tool designed for the quick gathering, editing and deployment of web content. Ironically, we’ve discussed building a tool very much like JumpChart; to assist us with our client content gathering woes. JumpChart beat us to the punch and they did a great job executing the overall application.

Imulus is just like every other agency / development house out there who is frustrated with trying to gather client content for web projects. Typically we start with a timeline which is dead-on and very achievable, yet the project gets delayed because client has under-estimate the amount of work which goes into content writing, gathering and editing. The second part of that problem is the client’s inability to visualize the content they are tossing over the fence in Word, Excel, and PDF format.

JumpChart goes a long way toward solving these problems. The interface is intuitive and extremely useful for quickly building web structures. It took me 10 minutes to layout the structures of a 30 page site. And it took me another 15 minutes to copy & paste in all the client’s content. The resulting effort produced a clickable website skeleton which was publicly accessible by the client. It quickly became apparent to the client that there was much work which needed to be completed before the site could go live. By stripping out information architecture and content from the actual design, it forces the client to evaluate their content structures, page lengths and overall voice before that content is formated and embedded in the website.

Once the client has signed-off on the JumpChart content you can export all the goods in CSS / HTML which can later be imported into your favorite content management system.

To really do this service justice I suggest visiting their website and looking at the video tours. http://www.jumpchart.com/video-tour/