Intriguing.  I’m attempting to embed a Meebo chat room below.  I’ll keep this window open for a while, and will make sure to be here at 7pm PST (10pm EST) today, Sunday.

I’m planning on quitting twitter.  Flickr—at least as a social site—is getting frustratingly unwieldly.  You know why?  Because pretty much all social sites like this treat all my friends, co-workers, acquaintances, online buddies the same, and it’s a big, stupid, completely off-putting mess!

Sure, these services want to reduce complexity… they know that many folks may not want to take the time to put friends into groups.  And eventually, some really smart service is going to actually do it automatically for me ("Hmm… Adam only looks at Fred’s pictures once in a while, but he looks at Mary’s photos minutes after he’s notified of her updates...").

Look, I’m not an insanely popular guy.  But I have over 600 people in my personal contacts folder.  I regularly interact with tons people at work, and sincerely care (personally) about at least a dozen or two of ‘em (to the point where I want to see their travel photos, want to know when they’re excited or depressed, etc.).  But when people have “friended” me on Twitter or Flickr, I’ve often unselectively reciprocated… and now I’m just getting overloaded.  Too much info.  Too much info I do not care about.

And this is where nearly all social services seem to get things wrong.  At risk of being callous, I could pretty much care less if a distant acquaintance is having an off day or just uploaded photos of his Aunt Elda’s wedding.  But I sure as hell want to know if my office mate is about to arrive at work grouchy or an awesome friend in a different timezone is having a rough week, and so on.  To the extent that social services of all types can eventually alert us to events and feelings that mean a lot to us, that’s a huge win.

Don’t get the wrong idea.  Despite having a cold and ironically being hot in an apartment with no airconditioning, I’m not unhappy with my life.  True, I’m a bit cranky again, but I’m not deeply bummed.  Just ornery and snotty.

Today, it was just a little thing that triggered my annoyance:  For perhaps one of the last times, I read yet another asinine tweet on Twitter.  In an effort to not call out a specific (normally nice and sensible) fellow, I’ll slightly obscure it thusly: “Going to the bathroom.”

Going to the bathroom.  We all do it.  We all know we do it.  It’s not particularly exciting—at least typically—and it’s hardly the thing a normal person would announce unless there’s some particular need-to-know (roomies in a one bedroom apartment, little kids asking to be excused from a class, etc.).  But make it Web 2.0 and, wheee, suddenly people believe that they need to share such crap with others… or that others have even a faint interest in reading such banal nonsense.

So, Adam, I imagine you retorting, chill out and just unsubscribe from those people that tweet lamely.  I would, except every once in a while, these same folks refreshingly tweet something interesting or useful… or even a note or question directed specifically @me.

It’s like how your Aunt Frida (hopefully no longer) sends you teeth-gnashingly stupid forwards.  Bill Gates is gonna give you a million bucks.  P&G supports satan worship.

Frida is a good person, a well-meaning lady, but sometimes she just doesn’t THINK before she hits “send.” And, clearly, you don’t want to filter her notes into your junk mail because at least one out of every ten notes she sends is something you really *do* want to read… a happy-birthday wish, a sad revelation about her health, or even just a simple cute “I’m thinking about you .”

Thankfully, nearly all of my friends and relatives have gotten smarter about e-mail etiquette.  When are (normally quite intelligent and thoughtful) people gonna wise up about Twitter?

At risk of being told, “Dude, who the bleep do you think you are to tell us what to do?” I’m going to, well, suggest what I think is optimal Twitter usage.  You sure as heck don’t have to conform to my personal views on Good Twittering, but I’m more likely to read / less likely to unsubscribe from your tweets if you do .

In case you're interested in stalking me and/or knowing what my thoughts are on various online presence / networking / bookmarking sites I have tried, here's a (completely unscientific, wholly biased, unabashedly uncomprehensive, and generally of questionable use) list

FYI, I'm findable via my full name on the services below unless noted otherwise.  And sites owned/operated by Google are indicated by [g], as a brief disclaimer/reminder since I work for Google (but not on any of the products or product-types below).

Lots of folks have noticed that five very cool new features debuted today in Gmail:
1) Enhanced UI, with Reply and other handy features placed at the top of conversations.
2) Notification when new messages have been made in the conversation since you started drafting your reply.
3) Forward an entire conversation (all messages).
4) Send chat messages to your friends using Gmail chat or GTalk even when they’re offline (the messages’ll be held for them).
5) Get Gmail on your mobile phone with a rich app (not just slow Web pages).

[Read more about these new gmail features]

But what I have to share with you is even more deliciously glorious… especially for those of you who are on lots of mailing lists or who have boring (albeit perhaps well-meaning) friends who just won’t shut up.

Okay, BLADAM friends, apologies for two rants in a row (in a sadly otherwise dry AdamBloggingSeason), but… why does T-mobile—an international company—charge so much for international calling, roaming, and texting?

And Cingular—the only other American mobile phone company I know of that supports international roaming—has rates that are even worse, from what I gather.

Anyway, on T-Mobile, the rates for me to call from the U.S. overseas are more than triple what I’d pay via a discount calling card or even AT&T Callvantage.  Calling from overseas to *anywhere* ranges from about $1 to $4 a minute for incoming OR outgoing calls.

But what *really* gets my hide is T-Mobile’s charge for text messages sent to and from my friends in Europe.  15 cents each for me to send a handful of text characters, and 35 cents each to receive the same.  What the heck?!  I know, I know, this voluminous amount of data has to potentially pass through companies that aren’t T-Mobile, but still!  And no, T-Mobile’s varied texting-bundle plans do *not* include international SMSes.

I’ve played with various SMS options online, but haven’t found any to be reliable for either sending or receiving text messages internationally.  Oh lazyweb, anyone know of good options? (other than calling up T-Mobile and telling them they’re provincial jerks for their usurious rates, which, I admit, doesn’t exactly qualify as a good option)

A few weeks ago, I already started transitioning all of my feeds off of Bloglines. Why?
- It's slow.
- It's down too often.
- Reorganizing feeds (moving them to different folders, etc.) is worse than being stuck in a closet with Vanna White. Night after night after night after night.
- It's similarly painful to mark just a few articles in a feed as read or unread.

I've moved over to Newzcrawler, a stellar newsreader app for Windows. Beyond just tons of cool power features, it also lets me pretty easily sync my feeds between my desktop and laptop using an external FTP site (okay, geeky, I know).

* * *

With that said, I've still been hoping to see some vast improvements in the online-reader front. Rojo seems to be getting better. And I've heard rumblings over other cool services as well. When I learned today that Google had entered this space, I was extremely excited. Please, I thought, give us another Gmail. Or Maps! :D If not for me, at least for my less-geeky friends whom I'm dying to get into feed reading.

So far, alas, I'm rather disappointed in the Google Reader. I know it'll get better, but for now, Googlers...

1) It's too cluttered and overwhelming.
Hide some stuff. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but blog text blends into all the other text and I find it just tiring to spend more than a few minutes in Reader.

2) No mouseovers?!

3) Ambiguities
Is "Read items" a description or an action? Okay, admittedly this is rather a nitpick, but it is a top-line link .

4) Search what?!
When I see a search box at the top of the page, I expect to be able to search the content-in-context. In other words, if I'm in my Gmail account, I expect to search my mail. If I'm in Reader, I expect to search for a string in my read and/or unread feed items. From an expected user-action standpoint, what's likely to be more common: adding new feeds, or working with the feeds one already has?

5) Save me from overload!
There's no way to mark an entire feed as read. Or group of feeds.

6) Why the weird quasi-breadcrumbs in center focus?!
Why do I want to see "New Subscription" "New Subscription" article article article... Just show me new articles. If I want to see what I'm subscribed to, I'll go to the Your Subscriptions tab!

My prediction:
Wikis have not yet hit critical mass, but they will by 2006 Q3 when I predict Yahoo! will unveil a well-integrated wiki feature called "Y! Whiteboards."

So what's a wiki?!
First, those in the un-know may be wondering what the heck a wiki is. Yeah, yeah, it sounds just as goofy as "blog," but it's worth getting to know.

A wiki is basically an application on the Web that lets practically anyone edit or even create pages and easily link them together. Think of it as an extendable set of whiteboards, with all interested folks having handy virtual dry-erase markers and erasers. It's a fabulous albeit admittedly not flawless solution enabling groups of people to collaborate on a particular topic or defined scope of topics.

Okay, gimme an example!
One of the grandest wikis of them all is Wikipedia, a massive free encyclopedia. Although not without controversies and challenges of its own, Wikipedia has inarguably grown up to be a valuable and impressive resource. And of course, it does have an entry on Wikis

Or take my new humble wiki, "Lindy Hop Whiteboard Supreme." A distinguishing factor of the (hosted) software I'm using is that folks using Firefox and IE can use rich-text controls to edit pages. Even so, though, I've found contributions to be few and far between so far. :| [Want to try it out? Play in the playpen ]

As hyped in breathless news articles over the last few days, Google came out with their own IM (instant messaging) client this evening, Google Talk.



VERDICT: Clean, uncluttered, intuitive, and rather unexciting in its current version.

[See other BLADAM entries on Gmail... and also, as I've noted earlier, please do not ask me for an invite; I don't have any to spare... sorry! - Adam]

A number of Gmail users -- including yours truly -- have noticed that Gmail has seemingly upped the service storage limit to one terabyte. That's right... 1,000,000 -- one million -- megabytes (compared to Hotmail's two megabyte free storage limit, for instance). To put this into perspective... even if you got 250 e-mails each DAY (averaging four kilobytes each), it would take you about 2,739 YEARS to fill up this much space.

Of course, there's certainly the possibility that the new indication of a terabyte of space is a Gmail bug. Gmail is, after all, still very much in beta. But what if it's not a bug? What if the terabyte storage limit is really, well, real? Would we truly want a terabyte of space? Or would this lead to more problems than benefits?