Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Google are on a roll and introducing the Priority Inbox (in beta) -- an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail, identifying important email and separating it out from everything else:

“Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.”

Here it is in action

According to their blog The Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread”, “Starred”, and “Everything else”. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you.

Simon Capel is Google’s Enterprise Sales Manager for Australia and New Zealand and is a man with a vision – for people to work in the cloud. What does that mean? Work anywhere, using any computer, securely access what you need and collaborate in real time. Why is this important? It changes the way we do business and, importantly, changes our expectations.

Simon Capel Presentation on Leveraging the Google Cloud

Working in the cloud for business uses Google Aps which delivers tools (like word processing, spreadsheets) through a web browser (think Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the new player, Google Chrome), tailored specifically to the user, and Google want companies to ‘get it’.  The business version is backed up with a service level agreement and support – Google are doing business.

Why is this different from what we have already?  It allows secure, easy collaboration and information sharing.  It’s not tied to fiddly accessing data through an intranet.  Data is stored on their servers – pointing to lower IT costs and lots of space (no more having to empty your inbox before another message can come in). Large government organisations (think city of Los Angeles), companies, as well as Universities have started using the cloud – my guess is they chose to do so because of ease of use, the collaborative tools offered and that it has the potential to save money.

Simon’s presentation is Google’s vision of the cloud changing the way we do business, and play.

A GP who is also an education professional and an expert user of social media, Anne Marie is a natural and presents a superb discussion posing some difficult questions of her readers:

How are people using social marketing in health? Now you have surgeries tweeting, blogging, opening YouTube accounts but what has social media got to do with me as a health professional?  What does ‘engagement with consumers’ using social media, ‘establishing a brand’ got to do with health and health care organisations?

Anne Marie has a real life example of a Government organisation encouraging people to use twitter to contact a sexual health nurse, Zena.  Zena is using twitter, a website and a facebook page to contact patients. But:

• What about private issues being discussed between health professional and patient on a public site?
• How to guide patients online? To use it in a safe way?

This is what this presentation is about – well worth a listen to and if you are really struck with how good this is, the comments on Anne Marie’s blog from health professionals including Zena and patients are enlightening too.

Health professionals and social media

And my two pennies worth: – I admire what this sexual health nurse is doing – not only getting her head around the technology, but putting herself out there as a professional in social media opens her up to all sorts of discussions, comments and criticisms, in a very public way.

I agree with Anne Marie’s concerns that what happens online stays online.  Forever. And from the comments from patients here it’s worth remembering how vulnerable people are especially when they have health problems, their concerns may overtake their care for privacy.

I see what professionals like this nurse are doing as advertising good information to people on a variety of networks, giving them the channels to communicate/find someone, and then taking the conversation off line.

Even if you have the best expertise in health – if you don’t use social media how are patients going to find you?

In response Anne-Marie wrote

“I agree that social media may be a useful way to disseminate contact details. But I do have grave concerns about encouraging its use a contact medium. And it may be heresy but the people who probably most need Zena’s help probably have the least access to social media in any form. This is where enabling patients to make contact by SMS is really useful. Those are 140 private characters.”

Google wave is to be no more, the Google team in Sydney, having put a lot of effort into an innovative new product will see the technology developed in a different way.  What happened?  Wave had some internal competition from Google Buzz, and users were having to get used to two very different ways of communicating.  And in both cases you need someone to communicate with. A very active Sydney Wave user group dived into the technology, visited Google HQ and began to experiment.  Here are some of their discussions on hearing the news but first, from the Google blog:

… Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

I didn’t know you could be a Google Fellow! But that aside, here are comments from the wave user group in Sydney on their experience with using wave and interacting with the Google Wave team. The discussion took place on facebook, but some of the points raised are so pertinent I wanted to post them here. I agree with Tony’s comment:

Tony Cosentino

It’s funny, I was at a gathering the night before the announcement and when wave came up in conversation someone said ‘does anyone even use it?’ Most agreed not.

I made a statement that I believed they had rolled out BUZZ and WAVE the wrong way around. I think WAVE should have been offered to all gmail users from the beginning to allow a critical mass to use and understand it. It was so hard to try putting groups together in the beginning with limited invites it all became like a secret cult with little documentation.

I feel for Gina Trapani who wrote the ‘Complete Google Wave Guide’ as an ongoing project. And also the programmers we have met at google wave meeting putting a lot of time and money to develop wave tools. No One in google lost their jobs over it.

I am also glad I hadn’t put anything really critical on wave that I was relying on as a long term repository.

Frances Jones

What I appreciated about Wave was that Lars, Jens & co created it in Sydney and I will always admire them as entrepreneurs. Heck, Lars even came to see us speak at the User Group. Many of the nscm crowd got together at Google HQ because of it. It created positives for us.

Google spent I don’t know how many $millions on Wave which Sydney benefitted from. Positives all round for us I’d say.

Tony Hollingsworth

Spot on Frances – the community building and support that occurred remains.

For example, some memories include:
http://gwsug.eventbrite.com/ – the informal user groups where you can see the range of people interested.

http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%23gwsug – we coined the hastag #gwsug for Google Wave Sydney User Group and can enjoy the history via FriendFeed, including the photos of the community.

Finally your teriffic blog posts Frances capturing the initial excitement and promise of Wave:

First impressions of Google Wave, An Australian Perspective
Innovation according to Goovle Wave co-creator Lars Rasmussen

These guys (and many others) really were experienced on wave and their comments, to me at least, say a lot.

The iPad is neither fish nor fowl.  It’s not a phone, it’s not a laptop. Its useful but fiddly.

Leaving the laptop behind I took the iPad away for a weekend when visiting family – things I had to work on were a slide presentation for Monday morning, emails, along with notes to write and verify by using the internet. What was Great, what was Average, and what was Pants?

Great

INSTA-connection.  Bus, plane, 10 mins at a cafe.  There’s no ‘firing up’ your computer.  Switch on. You’re connected

LOADS of battery power for the plane.

I can move images around with a swivel of my fingers, whether in pages (word document) or on slides.  It’s like magic.

Internet connection and gmail is great to use. So far hasn’t ever not been able to connect.

Skype – sound quality is fantastic and it’s not even made officially for the iPad yet

Light, easy to transport (in comparison to taking my laptop everywhere), great for showing presentations.

Reading – it’s my first experience of reading a book on a computer.  I’m addicted.

I can play on it – lots of fun apps to brows and go ‘ooooh look at that’ – free.

Average

You can only work on one thing at a time – I’m guessing that’s a first generation thing. So there’s a lot of flipping back and forth but things open exactly where you left off and they open quickly.

No camera (some may say that’s a good thing).

Writing and taking notes – is done via typing on a keyboard on the screen.  It’s slower than using a mouse and keyboard but on the plus side you don’t have to take them with you.

Auto-correct – you need it more because of the keyboard set up and when it works great, when it corrects wrongly it’s a pain (see lack of arrow and delete keys below).

Slide and document fonts are not as extensive as on laptop.

Pants

Typing, moving things around are all done with your fingers (as opposed to keyboard and mouse).  It’s Fiddly if you’re not used to Mac movements on an iPhone (which I’m not) I kept selecting the wrong thing, deleting when trying to paste – with practice and I suspect that will get easier, and the developers may also make it easier.

No delete key and no arrow keys. Very annoying.  You have to press on a word, get the curser in exactly the right place and then fiddle to edit it.

Because of the ‘finger editing’ – working on documents and presentations is Slow.

Social sites – I share a lot of things from websites.  Sharing urls on facebook and twitter is a few too many clicks yet.  Not convenient or easy.  Again, suspect it’s a first generation thing.

Tried to edit a wordpress blog – wouldn’t show me the html code.

Overall

I can’t easily do on an iPad everything I would do on a laptop, but I can do the majority of things.  Am I glad I’ve got one – very. Main things are small, transportable and I love the INSTA-connect, no fuss, no hassle, and I’m online with all my work software to hand. Also, I have books, music all within a touch of a finger, for some reason this works psychologically for me better than on the laptop.

Skyping from an iPad is Easy, and the sound quality much better than from my laptop. How do you get it: Log into iTunes, go to the App store, search for skype, download.

At present it’s voice only, but excellent quality.  It was very useful to be able to make the skype call on the iPad while I worked on the laptop.