Adding your geolocation to your Gmail signature

I was chatting with a friend earlier this week and she asked me about this line found on the bottom of my Gmail signature, "Sent from: Cary Nc United States." She thought that maybe I'd sent the message from my iPhone, but I hadn't. It had been sent from my notebook, and works with your Gmail account no matter where you are or the device. This capability was added to Gmail just last week: New in Labs: Add your location to your signature.

When she was asking how I did it my first thought was to make a screencast, and here it is:

Gmail: Displaying your geo-location in your signature from Kevin Gamble on Vimeo.

This uses your IP address to determine where you are and then automatically adds it to your signature. It works perfectly when you are on known networks. It may be 80-90% accurate when you are on the road. For example, hotel network traffic is often routed to distant locations, and it may be showing you as somewhere that you aren't. This is really no big deal though. The geolocation information is added to your email messages as soon as your start to compose them. If you originate a message while on the road and the information isn't right, it's easy enough to correct or just delete.

I hope you find this useful.

YouTube HD didn't last long

Back at the end of November YouTube made a big announcement about their newly enhanced support for High Definition videos: Bigger Isn't Always Better... But in This Case, We Believe It Is

Over the years we've heard a lot of feedback from you about what you'd like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind. That's why today we're excited to announce a bigger YouTube player.

We're expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don't worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player.

So I was surprised tonight when I uploaded an HD screencast and couldn't find an HD viewing option. I went looking for an answer and found this buried in the YouTube site issues forum:

We made improvements to standard quality for video uploads! Unless there is a large difference between standard quality and HQ , the upload will produce standard quality by default (and not HQ as before).

So, YouTube just arbitrarily decides that your HD video isn't worthy of being displayed in HD format? They may have made some improvements to their standard video format, but it still sucks in comparison to the HD versions. Screencasts shot for HD consumption are blurry and much lower quality when not viewed in HD. There is a large difference. A huge difference. That's why people produce HD in the first place.

For this reason I'm moving my screencasts to Vimeo where they can be viewed at the higher quality I intended. I know they won't have as many views as they receive on YouTube, but what are you supposed to do? I'm not going to produce them for less than optimal viewing when I know I can do better.

You can compare the quality of the videos for yourself:

Vimeo: Gmail: Displaying your geo-location in your signature.

YouTube: Gmail: Displaying your geo-location in your signature

UPDATE: Googl is now making it available in HD-- so who knows. They read my blog post? :)

Facebook's ethics?

I had to laugh at this move by Facebook to recover from the damage created when they totally displayed their inner evilness with their new Terms of Use: Facebook Launches Facebook Bill of Rights, Reverts to Previous Terms of Use

To help ensure they don't make the same mistakes again, they've also started the "Facebook Bill of Rights," a Facebook group formed specifically to allow people "to give input and suggestions on Facebook's Terms of Use."

I'm not one of those people who believes in organizational values. People have values, and the decency of an organization only goes as deep as the ethical framework of the people who make the decisions.

That said, you don't form committees to "decide" on your basic values. You don't have to ask your customers what is right and wrong. If you don't know, YOU ARE TOAST. I don't care if you have 175 million users. They can leave as quickly as they arrived. Read this and tell me this is a person who is driven by any higher purpose? I dare you to find a moral compass in this diatribe: Update on Terms.

I can't wait to see the jokes that people will me making of this.

UPDATE: And the humor begins:
BoomTown Decodes the Zuckerberg Terms of Service My-Bad Memo (Now With 10 Percent More “So Very Sorrys!”)

Twitter and real time search

Interesting article in TechCrunch: Mining The Thought Stream:

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday.

I've been thinking about this the last few weeks, or at least since USAir Flight 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson. When the plane crashed I was chatting with a friend.

She asked, "Do you know anyone flying into Charlotte today?" My first thought, without asking why, was that there had been a crash, and I went immediately to search.twitter.com. Yep, #1 trending topic.

Later on I wondered why I didn't check CNN or some other news source, but I already knew the answer-- Twitter is faster in situations like this.

That Twitter just got another $35m investment doesn't surprise me in the least. Twitter is anything but frivolous.

A link to my blog from Wikipedia

Wow, I think I can stop blogging now. Someone thought that something I wrote was worth a link from Wikipedia: Workstreaming. What's left to accomplish?

Of course, now the big questions going forward are:

• Will the link survive?
• Will freeranging finally get its own page?
• Is it time for me to finally get that Wikipedia tattoo?
  

Being friended by your parents on Facebook

Previously I blogged about friending my daughter on Facebook. Now it's happened to me. I was just friended my my 83 year old father.

My daughter (@stopstalkingme) found this too funny. One of those what-goes-around-comes-around moments. I've decided to confirm the friendship, we are friends after all, but I hope he's not depending on me for all sorts of great Facebook dialog. I hate Facebook. For me, it is nothing more than a portal for scrabble.

I'm guessing I need to call my father and try to get him started on FriendFeed-- if he's really wanting to keep up with me.

Transforming news and other information intensive endeavors...

Dave Winer has a great read: One more time -- open the news industry!

The manufacturing process for news has radically shifted. The question is, as with the economy, whether we can transition the existing process to become the new one (imho preferable) or does the old system have to collapse before the new one can rise to take its place.

The news industry isn't unique in this regard. I can think of many information creation and distribution entities of the past that are ripe for radical transformation. The question-- must they totally collapse, or can something of value from the old be salvaged?

My money is on collapse.

Creating FriendFeed imaginary friends

I've created another screencast. This time I take on creating FriendFeed imaginary friends. One of the things I hear most often from people as to why they don't want to try FriendFeed is, "All my friends are on X." Where X is usually Facebook or Twitter.

The beauty of FriendFeed is that it is an aggregator so your friends (and you) can pipe their information into FriendFeed from a variety of sources, and you only have to go to one place to see it. But that doesn't work so well if your friends don't use FriendFeed. To solve that problem FriendFeed allows you to create imaginary friends. Basically, you can follow them as if they were really using the service. It's actually very cool.

There are three use cases for imaginary friends:

• Staying up with people who don't use FriendFeed
• Following people where you don't want them to know you are following them. Yes-- stalking
• Creating hybrid friends-- combining several feeds from disparate sources into a single feed

If you've been thinking of moving to FriendFeed, but haven't because your friends don't use it, then perhaps imaginary friends is just what you've been needing to make the leap. Give it a try.

NOTE: Be sure and watch the HD version of the screencast. It was rendered in HD and it is far more viewable than the lower quality default formats. Also, YouTube tells you this is a little over 9 minutes long. That isn't right-- it's actually 6 minutes. This was my error. I've replaced the video with a sparkly brand-new clean version.