Update 3-9-2011: Turns out the issue was on my iMac — PeerGuardian software appeared to be blocking the port required (5222) for HipChat to connect. I’ve no idea why other services have worked fine on my iMac and so far only HipChat seems to have been an issue. Turning off Peer Guardian resolved the issue.

HipChat looks to be a Campfire type group chat solution with a few extra features — hopefully the main one being that it doesn’t constantly announce that you enter or exit the chat.

Sadly I’ll never know how well it works as the desktop (Adobe Air – sigh) client refuses to login. I’ve never experienced firewall issues of this type before. I take it as an omen to uninstall and remove my test account.

Yes HipChat has suggestions on how to work around this. Can you imagine in your wildest dreams signing up for a paid chat service — and then having to serve as the support desk for a bunch of users (most of who you probably had to convince to use the service in the first place?).

No, really. Picture yourself walking these unsophisticated users through Telnet and then opening up ports on their firewall…

Thank goodness for 30 day trials. If there’s one thing I’m starting to learn — always give technology a full evaluation period before deciding on purchasing.

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVLsRo7-3Lk[/youtube]Google today have just released a new upgrade to their Android based Google Maps v5.1 which includes check in to their places pages as well as designations as described below:

Latitude is built right into Google Maps for Android so check-ins work across Latitude and Maps seamlessly. For example, check in at that new hamburger joint, and you’ll see its Place page with reviews to help you order. When friends check in at a place, you can go straight from their Latitude profile to its Place page to learn about it, fire up Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for turn-by-turn directions to them, and more.

You can also check in at a favorite place to earn special status there; you’ll see if you’ve become a “Regular,” a “VIP” or a “Guru” on its Place page. Keep checking in to hold onto your status or reach the next level.

If this all sounds familiar (check in, special status) – thats because other applications like Foursquare and Gowalla and Facebook have all had the ability to check into various locations for quite some time. Rather than seeing one large integration social offering from Google it seems we’ll now have a trickling of social enabled applications.

Update: Google Latitude check ins do not yet appear to work with Google Apps for Domains accounts which have been migrated and cannot yet support a Google Profile.

Google Latitude

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Trapster’s apparently the latest to send around the “If you’ve been using the same password and login on multiple sites – then you’re a moron because we think we just got hacked”. Of course these follow Gawker Media’s famous episode of losing secure web visitor information. If it wasn’t gone before – the days of sharing a login between sites is certainly gone now.

In actuality I am thinking much harder about whether I want to try new “neat” sites for fear of having to create a unique password and login which I have to remember. If I use a standard login then apparently I’m at the very real risk of having it hacked and re-used.

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In what’s becoming a very sad and regular occurrence the Google Voice system is once again down. Callers to my voice number hear a “you have reached a non-working number” message. Attempts to access the web interface return the above error message.

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Supposedly Google “fixed” their flawed login system which caused mega problems if you regularly used more than one Google account for email or apps. Here’s a great example showing that the Google login is still broken and not any better than before.

In the example before is a Google Apps document that’s been shared to my wayne@s-consult.com account.

When I click to view it — I’m immediately (and incorrectly) logged in as my other Google account (wayne.schulz).

Can you save “hot steaming fail”.

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For the past month or so we’ve been using Manymoon for our project management collaboration. There’s a free version though I paid the $180 or so for a yearly subscription (which is starting to look like a mistake).  Overall, when it works,  it’s a great little tool for it’s tight integration to Google Apps which we use for our internal email, calendar and documents.

Sadly for the past several days the Manymoon service has been largely unreachable for me. I’ve left support a problem report but have yet to hear back from them on what the issue with their service is.

When it is reachable there tends to be an error message related to SSL  connection failures or the speed is unbearably slow. This is a big issue for Google as well because ManyMoon is listed as one of the top installed Google Marketplace Apps! The marketplace is a relatively new location for Google to showcase new Software As A Service (SAAS) applications that integrate tightly with Google Apps.

When Google Marketplace first arrived I was hopeful that there would be lots of applications that could be purchased and integrated to my Google Apps account in a manner similar to how applications are purchased and used on an iPhone or Android device.

Sadly for me that hasn’t happened. Instead what I have experienced is what to me seem half-baked products that tend to partly work.

For example, an earlier experiment with using Kwaga, which purports to “displays profile information from the social web.” resulted in an incoming email from someone who I knew  (luckily) where Kwaga completely mis-identified the person’s picture, web site, social media sites. Emails to the developer uncovered that this was pretty much a known issue.

Sigh. If an application whose primary purpose is to identify your social contacts – fails or is only sometimes correct- what good is it?

Thinking of the Google Apps Marketplace? My recommendation is to stick to the freebies until you’re able to see the applications that charge a fee are stable and in business for the long haul.

Update 7/15/2010: Just spoke with the Manymoon folks. They’re taking steps to ensure this issue doesn’t recur. They have a blog post that explains what happened here and future updates will also be posted to their blog to keep everyone posted.  We continue to use Manymoon to manage our projects and will keep you posted with our experiences.

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I’d write more about my experience with DocsToGo for iPad — however I have to get busy recreating my document that I just lost. DocsToGo was at least polite – gulping the document down in two bites. The first swallowed half my edits. The second disappeared my document from the iPad altogether. The article I was writing – ironically about SaaS (Software as a service).

My two word review: Good Riddance

Here’s another two: Avoid It.

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As Twitter suffers through another period of sporadic downtime many critics have pointed to Google’s new service Buzz as an example of the type of social media service that doesn’t go down and seems to be able to scale with the number of users that have been adopting it.

The only problem with the comparison is that as of 6:00 am today the Google Buzz site while still displaying Buzz postings seems to be rejecting posts. The latest posts are also not coming in sequential order and scanning quickly the latest live postings appear to be about an hour old.

Edit: Google Buzz is back but definitely not operating at 100%. Images aren’t reliably being attached and the service is having trouble with editing.

Google Buzz

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The Hartford Courant is reporting that Google has admitted to collecting unencrypted Wi-Fi data in the State of Connecticut. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal had sent Google a letter seeking information on whether any data was collected by the company’s street view cars.

Google’s acknowledgment that it vacuumed up data from unencrypted wireless computer networks in Connecticut is disturbing and demands additional inquiry,” Blumenthal said. “Google grabbed information—which could include e-mails, passwords, and web-browsing — that consumers rightly expect to be private. Google needs to better explain how this practice happened, exactly when, where and why

Google is facing a number of lawsuits in different states from people who believe their privacy has been invaded when Google’s street view cars drove by taking not only pictures of the road but allegedly collecting data from their unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

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Thankfully Google Voice’s Do not disturb (aka DND) feature has been updated so that you can now specify a period of time for which the phone service should automatically send all callers to voicemail. Prior to this addition the DND feature was convenient for times when you were busy and couldn’t take any calls – except it was all too easy to forget and leave activated thus unintentionally sending all callers to voice mail until you remembered to switch the feature off. Google Voice is a beta service offered by Google which provides a free phone number which in turn can be forwarded to any live phone. The service is useful for people who want to give out one number without worrying that when a number changes (such as a if they purchase a new cell phone) that they don’t have to give out a new number to their friends.

Google Voice

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