Google Archive

During the SXSW conference in Austin this week, Google held an all day hackathon event. The idea behind the hackathon is to allow developers to create applications in one day and also get help from Google employees on applications they are developing.

I recorded the session that discussed Google App Engine and the video is below. You can also download all of the “code labs” which are simple tutorials on how to use a variety of Google APIs and services including Google App Engine.
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The post below was authored by Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

The title provides a short answer to the question: Why do we integrate with Google Apps? An important emerging theme in cloud applications is the one-page or to be more accurate the one-browser-tab approach to design – i.e contextual integration of information across applications, so that whichever app the user happens to be, it pulls relevant information from other apps, and displays it in the right context. In the traditional desktop and client-server world, data is slave to the application that created it. In the cloud, data is liberated so it can contextually go where it is the best fit. We have used this as our architectural blueprint in Zoho, as we integrate Zoho services with each other (such as our CRM & Email integration), as well as in integrating Zoho with third parties.

Take the Google Apps marketplace announcement yesterday. At that event, there were plenty of demonstrations on how contextual integration works across vendors. Notable ones include Intuit Online Payroll integration with Google Calendar, Atlassian Jira.com integration with GMail/Docs/GTalk, and of course our own Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects integration with GMail/Docs. It is fair to say that every single case of integration demonstrated at the launch even yesterday takes the cloud based ecosystem functionality ahead of where traditional enterprise systems are capable of today. Even more important, we completed our integration with Google in under 2 months, even while they were still refining their APIs. We thank the Google team once again for inviting us to be a launch partner.

Why do we want to integrate with Google Apps? The most important browser tab, in a business context, is the one dedicated to email. Given that GMail is the cloud email provider of choice by far, it is natural for Zoho to integrate our suite with GMail and Google Apps. While we agree with Marc Benioff on enterprise apps taking design inspiration from Facebook (well, not too much inspiration, we are not sure we want to go around “poking” our customers!), we would also like to point out that email is where the majority of business users spend their time. Of course, given that Salesforce has no email strategy, it is natural for them to try to redefine the market away from email and towards social networking. This is Salesforce’s third attempt at making their CRM a business app platform, but unfortunately for them, email is a far more natural starting point than CRM – we say that as a company that has a strong CRM suite. Besides, to be a real platform, you have to have a degree of openness, and our experience with Salesforce demonstrates the opposite, and sets up a direct contrast to Google’s platform approach.

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Last November I took a look at the user experience for a new user who attempts to access Twitter.com. Tonight I’d like to provide the same new user experience for a person attempting to use Google Buzz. I don’t plan to touch on the privacy issues which seem to be the big topic as of late. In my opinion, the user experience is miserable and probably pushes away many new users (especially those who aren’t “social media experts”). For the purposes of this post, place yourself in the role of a new user no matter what your so-called expertise level is. You should also read Adrian Chan’s Google Buzz breakdown.

Let’s begin with a simple question — what exactly is Google Buzz? Is it a new type of messageboard/forum? Should a mainstream user be able to compare the user experience to something they already know? Or is this a brand new type of online user experience?

Accessing Google Buzz

When a user agrees to use Buzz, the only link to Buzz appears inside of Gmail on the left menu under their Inbox. Is Buzz a folder like the Inbox, Sent Items and Spam are? No, Buzz is an entire entity – welcome to confusion. Let’s assume Buzz remains inside of Gmail, the link to Buzz needs to be moved away from the folders. Frankly it should become a “module” similar to the chat module. This would also allow for customization and some items could be pulled into that left menu module as well based on user requirements.

ignore the 669 new messages in the inbox, I use Gmail mostly as a newsletter catcher
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By now you probably have heard that reMail, an email search client for the iPhone, has been acquired by Google and was removed from the AppStore. What is a little bit more interesting in my eyes is a look back at how reMail has evolved. Let’s take a look at what reMail looked like in version 1, and what has changed.

In the very first business plan Gabor showed me, the idea for his startup was completely different. I can’t talk about this publicly, because I think this could be something Google might be interested in as well. But if you know Gabor and know how “obsessed” he is with email, you can imagine how cool his initial idea was.
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reMail founder Gabor Cselle has just announced on the reMail blog that the service has been acquired by Google. Cselle notes that he will be re-joining the Google Gmail team as a product manager. I say re-joining because Cselle worked as an engineering intern on the Gmail product back in 2004. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

If you aren’t familiar with the service, reMail is an email search for the iPhone. reMail was part of the winter 2009 Y Combinator class.

Cselle notes that the reMail iPhone application has been removed from the iPhone App Store and will no longer be available for purchase. He notes, “You might be wondering what will happen with reMail’s product. Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store. reMail is an application on your phone. If you already have reMail, it will continue to work. We’ll even provide support for you until the end of March, and we’ve enabled all paid reMail features for you.”

With all of the Gmail Buzz talk as of late and with their team apparently having to work overnight for a few days (the horror!), more product managers will be welcomed to the team.

Update: In the comments, Paul Short makes a smart prediction, “Ah ha! I’ll bet you one cupcake and a subway ticket that reMail ends up as an app on one of those Google phones! (as if it’s not obvious already…).”

I am aware of the irony of posting about the the buzz on Google Buzz this week. But there’s no other way to contribute than to heap yet more on the pile.

I’ll skip over the many good points that have been raised this week within buzz and alongside it. If you are reading this, you have probably read them.

I want simply to make a few observations about the Buzz user experience, some of which are simply unavoidable, and many of which belong to the “conversation” space in general.

Talk is a difficult thing to facilitate using social tools and services. This is because in addition to the content itself, there are contributors, readers, relationships, audiences, social scenes, and public. And talk is a form of social action. A statement alone is communication. A response is action that communicates. Many kinds of actions involving talk exist (greetings to wedding vows), involving varying degrees of sincerity, expectation, commitment, trust, and so on.

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By now most people within the sound of this blog post have already heard about Google’s launch of Google Buzz. The service, which is amazingly similar to Friendfeed, basically brings together a person’s (or brand) social activity from across the Web and allows their friends (or customers) the ability to vote and comment on items.

Most of the people I’ve had discussions with regarding buzz all seem to agree that Google placed Buzz inside of Gmail for the “instant userbase”. One of the reasons that Google Wave has seemed to not grab users interest is that it’s on a separate website which creates a need for Google to market the service to users. By jamming it directly inside of one of the most popular email services, Gmail, they instantly have the userbase that Friendfeed never was able to achieve. Even though many of us have talked about a social network inside of email for years, it still seems a bit odd. Perhaps it will become more familiar over time. Sadly now I need to use Gmail even though I very much prefer Yahoo Mail (except when they don’t deliver my mail for hours or days).

<begin crazy theory mode>

Back in November, Adam Ostrow from Mashable and Caroline McCarthy from Cnet wrote about a partnership between Twitter and Google which would allow Google access to the content on Twitter. McCarthy noted, “Google and Twitter have cut a deal where Google is essentially licensing a data feed from Twitter to get that information in search results.”

It appears that Google is paying several million dollars for this data feed. Now that Google has launched Buzz and you can add your public Twitter datastream into Buzz, is there a need for Google to pay for the data feed?

Naturally it’s easy to say that not every Gmail user will use Buzz and those that do may not include their Twitter feeds. But with Gmail having a larger installed userbase than Twitter and with (my speculation) a near 1:1 overlap in users, might the Buzz Twitter stream get Google pretty close to the data feed? In addition, by using the Google Buzz Twitter stream, it gives Google a better way to rank tweets in search results rather than just a person’s Twitter follower counts and simple usage patterns.

In addition, it would allow Google to basically push the search results into Buzz instead of to Twitter.

<end crazy theory mode>

So am I crazy or not?