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Google Wave Experience And Productivity

Productivity And Google Wave
Google Wave

About three weeks ago I euphorically wrote about Google Wave, had a Wave embedded in the blog post, got a lot of comments, … and did many things with Wave in the meantime.

Since then I also have started a list with my humble suggestions for improvement of the user experience.

Let me give you a quick update on my personal Wave experience.


Status Quo


Wave has already become a sort of everyday tool for me. My firefox plugin shows the number of unread messages in the inbox and the number of people I communicate with is on the rise.

We even use the ties from Wave into Google Groups to create private Waves with restricted access. Therefore, with a small circle of partners and friends Wave has partially replaced email for some communication needs.

Never having been fond of walkie-talkie style instant messaging or chat conversation or Twitter the feature of instantaneous, collaborative, style of communication is certainly a great one. And Wave crushes it. We nailed communication which would have taken much more effort and time for accomplishing the same results via email, chat, skype or phone.


Brilliant Concept


The concept of hosted conversations with synchronous access for working collaboratively is just brilliant. The real power comes from the combination of — the removal of the barrier between — synchronous and asynchronous collaboration in one tool, one document.

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Business Strategy Lesson Learned - Now Back To Normal

Yesterday I reported about local DNS problems happening everywhere in the world lately. I am talking about the underlying service that tells your web browser where the server for a webpage is located.

I did not even notice until my blog suddenly disappeared from the Internet. Luckily this was just from my perspective. 99.2% of my regular visitors did not notice any problem accessing my blog.

And as of today, Telefonica, the large ISP operating in Europe and South America, servicing millions of customers with usually quality low- and high-speed internet access has fixed the problem.

This is truly a misleading statement, because most likely the problem has fixed itself. What I mean is that the Domain Name System guarantees that all changes are replicated throughout the globe within a maximum of 48 hours.

I know we have been spoiled with the way .com top level domains for example are set up nowadays, which is, you register a new .com domain and it will be accessible in huge portions of the globe within minutes or a few hours.

However, if a network administrator of an internet access service provider (ISP) messes up the DNS configuration by accident it can take up to 48 hours till the system is fully operational again. That's inherent with the IT/network architecture in use. Nothing or very little one can do to speed things up.


Again, my blog can be reached “normally” again without using any DNS magic tricks, which I wrote about yesterday.


Business Strategy Lesson - Repeated



I used this as an opportunity to write the article, How Safe Is Your Web Business?, stating that once your business is rolling and bringing in money, you should spend some effort to build redundancy and diversify your income streams, remove bottlenecks, single points of failure, and so forth, …

I might add to this article from yesterday:
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How Safe Is Your Web Business?

Is your Web income at risk?

Does this sound like a dumb question to you?

Only because you have the “Hacker Safe Logo” legitimately on your Web site doesn’t mean your web-based business is 100% safe.

Your site doesn’t need to be attacked by criminals there are many different possibilities for having your web based income stream disrupted. Now I remember that I wrote about the subject of protecting your virtual assets back in December 2007, too.

Think about those scenarios:
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Most Important Lesson About Your Career

Career Advice at its finest
“Stay Hungry” by Becky Blanton.

Let me be honest with you right up-front. My friends and I need your help. But, we've prepared something for you in return. All you need to do is to vote for “Stay Hungry” in the Johnny Bunko contest. And tell all your friends to do the same.

Update Sep 2009:
Becky Blanton's Blog
The contest is long over, but you can visit Becky's new blog.


And now I'll tell you why



Did I tell you that we have a cool, free, funny, smart ebook for you. More about this later. However…

(Watch the animoto video inside!)

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Discover A Free Mind Mapping Online Tool

MindMeister.com

A friend told me about an online mind mapping tool that helped him to organize the 1,000 ideas in his head. So let me pass on this little productivity tip to you.

Without further ado, here is the tool he recommended to me.


MindMeister.com (↑)

Mind mapping allows you to lay out your ideas and thoughts kind of visually. Related items are close together. Therefore, you don't need much space and keep the overview easily. I am not going into the details of mind mapping (sorry), but some advantages of using an online tool like the one my friend recommends.

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Fix Bad Habits Become More Productive

A couple of days ago I have written, “Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously”. Today I want to combine that important fact with a very easy to do management or personal development practice, that helps you to achieve your goal, tune out distraction as you learn to focus on what's really important.

You will see it's not about time management or life management as some call it. You still have to come up with a way to use your time efficiently. Of course you can refer back to my original series of articles about Productivity and Time Management, “Touch It - Do It - Get More Done”. I wrote a total of 4 articles on that subject and they are available combined into a single PDF report in the download area for my newsletter subscribers. Actually the PDF contains some extra content that is not released on my Blog.

Might be the right time to sign up to my newsletter, right now. (To my existing subscribers: I'll send you the download info as soon as I have finished this post.) Sorry for the little detour.


Let's get back to productivity issues. The little, but nonetheless important advice I'll give you fits almost everybody.
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