Just like the last post, let’s start with some background. I’m between full-time gigs at the moment as I am blessed to be in the position to resign from my former gig and take some partial downtime while examining where, what to do next. I state partial downtime as I am still doing some consulting work for my former employer.
My goal is to examine at some depth, all that is going on the Web 2.0 buzz-world and try to separate the wheat from the chaff. The goal being to find in the wheat what opportunities are there for either putting together a start-up or finding a start-up that found the right opportunity before I did (humility dictates my asserting that this latter is the more likely case). I figured the best way to do this was to pursue a project I’ve long had in my “rainy day” to do list, put together my own online environment where my public and personal lives could be managed in a unified manner. My family is relatively online savvy and there’s a lot we could do online to better stay in touch and foster tighter communications as we are flung widely across the U.S.. How to do this and retain privacy while at the same time provide an outlet for the public and professional ramblings, one of which you are now reading?
Given the recent data portability issues arising in the social networking world, I was and remain reluctant to put much, if anything, in the hands of Facebook, MySpace or any of them for that matter. I want to retain the capability of managing at least two of my online identities, Hahleq and Tim Renshaw, but centralize my communications so I wasn’t having to monitor multiple e-mail accounts. Last, I wanted to set up something that any family member could participate in that would get them the abilities to blog, share calendars, chat, etc., but without the cost of our all having to subscribe to an Exchange hosting service.
I’ve read a couple things recently where Microsoft is getting ready to rollout their Office Live, or whatever they’re calling it today, service. The problem was that it wasn’t here yet. I haven’t revisited the beta version recently, but I’ve got a solid month of organization and construction under my belt and I won’t be looking at remodeling for at least 6 months.
I’d done some playing around with Google Apps and it was indeed available and ready for use. So I setup up RenshawHome.com in Google Apps where I’ve begun issuing family members accounts so they can have their own @renshawhome.com email address, calendaring with sharing, etc.. I created a home page for RenshawHome.com with pointers to the Google Apps portal page as well as pointers to the various blog pages family members have setup. Interestingly enough, both my siblings had started blogs on Google’s Blogger.com without any coaching from me. I also have my private family blog on blogger.com and we all have them set with very strict, private “vetted members only” permissions.
Obviously, I have this blog here at TimRenshaw.com with my public, professional, “real me” email address under that domain. It however forwards to my Hahleq email address at Gmail.com. I run this blog with WordPress hosted at a reputable ISP. Mostly because I wanted to learn more about WordPress and have full control over look and feel, structure, etc. as well as have the flexibility to branch it into various directions over time.
All of this was readily accomplished using Google properties, services and functionality. I have all my various “real me” and Hahleq email addresses (at least 12 addresses from at least 5 different email providers) funneling to a single gmail account and appropriately filtered, labeled, categorized, blocked, etc.. My father and I are able to view each others calendars. My communications with my siblings and my nieces and nephews has increased tremendously in just the last couple of weeks. I’m hoping other family members will catch the buzz and join in the fun.
It took me about 2 days banging around with Google to at least conceptualize that what I wanted to accomplish, could be accomplished. It took me 3 days with Microsoft to figure out that it was nigh unto impossible to accomplish, let alone as elegantly. The cool thing is that I’m still discovering fabulous features of my new setup with various Google properties (Google Reader) that are further confirming that I made a great choice between the two parties as they currently stand.
At this point, Microsoft owns my home and travelling operating environment (Windows runs every online device I own), they have my networking, media sharing, backup, disaster recovery (Windows Home Server, Media Connectors, Xbox 360s, Xbox Live) and those are huge things I can’t see anyone taking away from them anytime in the next decade at least. However, Google owns my online life with regard to communications with the exception of this WordPress installation. This can be shortened to this over-generalized statement: Microsoft is how I get there, Google is where I go.
Next, some observations on Google shortcomings.
Originally posted March 7, 2008
