Google+

Had a quick play with Google+ and wanted to share my thoughts. I know it's early days, Facebook and Twitter have had a lot of time to get this right, but I think it's way short of features.

I would do that on there, but it's a bit of a lonely place right now, so here goes:

Like:

• The notify button. It rules, it's all over Google stuff, perfect. It's got potential to be cluttered though, FB style different notifications for messages friends and news might be required if it gets busy.
  
  
• Circles. Very nicely presented and I like the way you directly add people to a circle rather than just 'friending'. Means you might actually tidy your shit up from day 1.
  
  
• Hangout. Looks nice even if it's just fancy google talk. Hate the name, what do you call doing it with someone. Lets 'hangout' isn't like 'skype me' in terms of clarity.
  
  
• +1 button. Like the idea of it being all over the web, often see things that I want to 'like' but can't, but it has to be everywhere. A Chrome plugin would be cool here.

Don't like:

• Stuff missing. No direct messaging and events is the biggies for me.
  
  
• Lack of 'entity' following. I use FB and Twitter to track favourte things as well as people, companies, sports teams, bands..none of that seems to be in +
  
  
• The 'share' button is misleading. It's not a 'share' button like reader where you share the thing your'e currently at, it's just a way of doing a quick tweet/status update. Everyone knows what a tweet or a status update is, and they think they know what a share is. This is neither.
  
  
• Sparks. It's shit. It should be either like google news or like reader. It's like neither, just some weak news aggriator? Horrible.
  
  
• Lack of sucking stuff up from other things. Why's it not grabbing my buzz follows into a group for example?
  
  
• Picassa integration is weak. The face tagging is horrible. Click tag, drag the box, name it. It's shit compared to FB tagging. Where's the face recognition stuff picassa has? Why would you use this poor effort compared to picassa, it's crap.
  
  
• Integration. Where's the rss sub for streams for example? Where's the notification's for different circles? Where's +1 in blogspot? Will this blog appear in Google+ like it does in Buz?

Interesting that according to a recent report, Netflix has overtaken bittorrent to be the biggest source of internet traffic in the usa.

I've long been of the view that piracy isn't done just to get things free, it's done because often it's the most convenient way of actually consuming the content. Rather than complicated applications, drm, hoops to jump through, downloading a file and pressing play is just simply better. This is changing, with stuff like Spotify and Netflix making accessing digital media convenient, cheap and ubiquitous across many devices means people are prepared to pay for it.

Good.

The benefits of a robust patch test method

It's tempting to become lazy with patching. They're now a very regular occurance, they rarely cause an issue and can be installed and forgotten about. But if a patch does cause problems, and you've rolled it out to all users, the results could be an all-user fail.

The February black tuesday updates contained a patch that caused VMware view to fail, VMwares advisory can be found here:

VMware KB: Unable to connect from the View Client on Windows 7 to the View Connection Server after installing the patch in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 2482017 or 2467023

VMWare view is a client that connects users to a virtual desktop infrastructure. Potentially you could have auto approved this update to your network and prevented all users from connecting to their desktops. VMWare were very quick to respond with an update that fixes the problem, but applying View patches to all your machines might not be an easy task compared to rolling out Microsoft Patches.

As virtualisation and cloud computing spreads, the potential for this kind of failure multiplies. Test those patches!