Google 365 - Episode #50 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 50th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the first day of July 2011. This episode is titled Plus 365. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, computing experts, and I'm your host on this very tiresome Friday, Friday afternoon. My name is Jason Atwood and joining me is the co-host for the 50th time, which we almost decided to do some sort of back behind the scenes podcasting thing, but then it it was too late to do it so we'll leave it for the one year anniversary is my co-host Justin Edelstein. Justin how are you doing today? I'm tired. It's a Friday. It's a Friday before a long weekend. Yeah we should do some Thursdays more often. Friday's tough although we can't wait for the news and we only have two bits of news because really two big things rocked the cloudy world today or in the last week. One was that Microsoft released 365 which is their new Office cloud product and Google released their competitor to Facebook or I guess a social networking competitor called Google Plus and rolled out a whole bunch of stuff with it. I mean they rolled out new looks to Gmail, new looks to Calendar, all which are kind of interesting but we're gonna talk about those two topics because when you get those two players basically in the software industry doing cloudy things it's time for us to bring them into to Cloud Focus Weekly. So let's start off with 365, because it was the first in the series. It's been kind of long-awaited. Microsoft has had many, has projected this out, saying that they were going to get into the cloud. They're going to move their full Office suite to the cloud. And this is a direct shot at Google in a lot of ways, because it is a combination Office suite and email suite. So it's Outlook online as well as Office. So Word documents.

Justin Edelstein: It's more than just that.

Jason Atwood: Word documents and Excel and PowerPoint and, well tell me about it then.

Justin Edelstein: It's a full collaboration suite. So it's got email, like you said. It's got the documents, but it also has chat and it has SharePoint. And SharePoint being...

Jason Atwood: So, sites to SharePoint, chat to Google Talk.

Justin Edelstein: Well, SharePoint's more than just sites. It's kind of a collaboration suite, if you will.

Jason Atwood: Would you say Google Wave?

Justin Edelstein: You could say Google Wave. That's interesting. You threw that in there. Yeah. But it allows you to, and I've been playing with it, the SharePoint piece actually takes up quite a bit of it. it's mostly SharePoint, because SharePoint had the document management. SharePoint had the online collaboration piece of the document management where you can sync documents back and forth. In this case, you're opening documents in either an online editor or you can choose to open them in an offline editor, edit them, save them, and it saves back online. That works really well. I've tried it a couple times. Their online editors are really good. The word is exceptional. It's really well done. Excel's a little slow, but it does some neat things. And the PowerPoint. What's a neat thing? Give me a neat thing. Well, it feels like Excel. So it does all the filters. It does all the sorting. It does all the pivot table type stuff.

03:48 Jason Atwood: All the stuff that Sheets now does. Right.

Justin Edelstein: But you know.

Jason Atwood: But looks like Microsoft.

Justin Edelstein: It feels and looks and feels like Excel.

Jason Atwood: And we talk about this a lot. When you get to user design, one of the things that you try to do, and I think I even slammed Salesforce for this a little bit, is that when you get to navigation and working with a program for a long time, part of it becomes muscle memory, or where that button is exactly, you just know to go to it. You know that that's the place you go. You don't have to read it, you don't have to know what the button does, but you just know to go to it. What I think has happened with Word is you just know that on the right there, and I'm pointing to a mythical place, that's the place where you go set the font. Your mouse goes up there and you go to look for it. When you switch to another editor, no matter if they have the feature or not, you're like, oh wait, oh, it's not there. Where is it? Then that little bit of stoppage is what I think a lot of people find irritable, just because they've learned one system. You get with Outlook users and switch to Gmail, it's like I don't even know where to go start new email because it's not this big button that says new email or new.

Justin Edelstein: The PowerPoint was also very well done. Little slow. I'll say the whole thing's a little slow. Everything in it is just a little bit slow, but it works and the PowerPoint works really well. The online editor for the PowerPoint works very well. I was able to create different slides, create different types of slides, add images, bolt lists, slide designs, etc. It worked really well and the team site, you know, it's just like a team site if you're used to PowerPoint or sorry if you're used to SharePoint, it has the things that team sites have. It has the document repository, it has the sort of the message board like with the posts and things like that. And then on the other side, you know, you have Outlook so you have this whole Outlook environment online and I'll say it's a little weird because you're in this environment that's this holistic 365 environment but it does really bounce you back and forth quite a bit so you know there's three main links at the top there's a home link there's an Outlook link and there's a team site and that's your main top-level navigation and if If you click to TeamSite, you're at, for us it's arkasinc.sharepoint.com. And if you click Outlook, it jumps you to outlook.arkasinc.com. But first it logs you in, it goes to login.something, then outlook.something, then pod something, then something else. It jumps you from URL to URL to URL to URL, like four or five different times. And it's slow to get there. It takes a long time to get from the SharePoint environment to the Outlook environment. Once you're there, you're there and you still have your top level navigational elements to get you sort of back and forth between the two. It really does look and feel just like Outlook except it's online.

07:07 Justin Edelstein: It has search, it has your inbox, it has all the different folders. But still, it's really slow bouncing you between.

Jason Atwood: The browser, do you think it's a browser slow or a network slow? Because there's a difference. Browser slow means that they've packed it so full of JavaScript and jQuery and whatever that it's downloading so much to actually render it in the browser, it's slowing down the browser. Network slow is it's got so much data in it that you're literally pulling down a meg of stuff every time you change things. What do you mean?

Justin Edelstein: A little from column A, a little from column B. It does seem to want to jump you from place to place to place when you're going between SharePoint and Outlook. Now once you're in an environment, it's a little quicker. I think the SharePoint one's a little slower as far as being browser slow. There's a lot going on. It's trying to do a lot of things in the browser, which are slow, like Excel rendering things PowerPoint every time you want to build a new slide it's just a little slow so but all in all I think this is a good start for them you know they have Outlook they have SharePoint like we said they have link which is instant messaging audio and video calling and online meetings so they've really packed a lot into into this product and we're on you know we we did the 30-day trial so that we can see what it's all about. Do you know which one we're on? Are we on the small business?

Justin Edelstein: I mean, that's the thing. It's very confusing. There's like five or six tiers. And within tiers, there's a couple levels. So the pricing is a little.

Jason Atwood: Windows 7 Professional Enterprise 2020?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it's not Google Apps for Business, where it's like $50 a year and done. $60 per person per year.

Jason Atwood: Done.

Justin Edelstein: And it's more like small business plan one, enterprise, enterprise two, enterprise three, enterprise four, and with it comes a bunch of different features. But not exactly sure which one we're on because we're on the free 30 day trial. Is there a way to find that out? Do we know?

Jason Atwood: I don't know, but we could look it up. So my experience was I signed this up for the trial because it came out and I wanted to see it. And I agree that when you're in the editors, it does, it's really just the icons. The icons feel familiar. The thing that looks like a find, the thing that looks like a data or a delete or, you know, just the icons are so familiar that you say to yourself, oh, I'm in Excel. I don't feel the power behind Excel on my desktop and Excel here are the same. And I worry that the reason I use Excel at all on the desktop, most of the stuff we do on collaboratively on Google Docs obviously, but when you're going to open up a five, six megabyte file and you need to sort it and re-sort it and filter it, I'd rather have the processor power of my computer doing that than having it doing it virtually through a browser because the browser isn't really meant to handle massive amounts of data and I don't think these programs are really, they're not optimized for it as far as I've seen so

10:35 Jason Atwood: far. In the future I'm sure it'll be much better but right now having, it's kind of like Photoshop, if I want Photoshop to do a Gaussian blur, having that render in my browser isn't going to be as fast. So I like using the, you know, online or using the desktop version. So this to me prevents, basically it doesn't give me anything more other than a sort of similar looking field than what Google Docs gives you. I don't feel like the feature set is higher. I think it looks more familiar to Excel users. And that's going to be a big win for them. It's pricier. It's not as, they don't give as much storage.

Justin Edelstein: There's also a couple of, well, there's some really great things like open in Excel. You open the doc in Excel, you do it, you hit save, it's seamless, it goes right back up. There's some weird things though, I'll say. Like the Excel documents, first off, online, the difference between this product and Google Apps, and I'm used to working on Google Apps with online document creation and collaboration is, you go to a Google App, you open it, boom, you're in like edit mode. There's no like view mode, you're in edit mode, just start editing. Here you open a document and you're looking at it, then you have to hit a button to start editing it. little weird, little herky, little jerky.

Jason Atwood: It's very web version to do that as opposed to any document on your desktop.

Justin Edelstein: If you open it, you're editing it, which is very odd. The second thing I noticed is there's different patterns for saving documents depending on what program you're in, which is bad, because Excel and PowerPoint, there's no save. It auto saves. It saves for you. Word, on the other hand, you have to save the document. So I started with Excel, I did a document, I went to save it and it's like, you don't have to save this, it saves it for you. I went to PowerPoint, created PowerPoint, I went to save, you don't have to save this, we save it for you. I went to Word, I closed the document, it was gone. You have to save Word documents. It's very odd that there's these three document types and there's also OneNote which we haven't mentioned, but there's these document types two of them autosave one doesn't just weird I'm not sure why you would do that maybe it was an oversight it is the it just came out I mean they can presumably they can change this the way that Google Apps changes their stuff like you know overnight or you know within a browser refresh oh new works again right but I just found it really odd that they had different like saving behavior depending on what document you were in, or document type.

Jason Atwood: And obviously, being in the cloud, they're going to get much better at collaboration. You can have multiple people viewing the same thing at the same time. Checking things in and out via Excel, that's much better, although I try to do it, and my version of Excel doesn't support it. So here's where I would immediately say I have an issue. Okay, so the $350 piece of software that I have that I bought here, and the whatever $60 a month subscription thing. Oh, by the way, I don't have enough. I am not paying you enough to be able to edit the document on my desktop. I need to go to the next version of Excel. I'm not on that version, and keep paying you for the online version to do that. So it's ... There seems like they're still stuck in that world of, well, you still gotta pay a lot of money for this app, the app that you own, and you still gotta pay money up here to use the full functionality up here. That to me, and just as a general user, I'm like, well, I don't wanna do both. The thing about Google Docs is once you pay, you do everything. There's no like, oh, you gotta get this piece of software

14:18 Jason Atwood: if you wanna do something extra special. And that software's gonna cost you $300, $400. So I just think Microsoft's caught in a strange world of having sold stuff for so much money for so long that they have this monopoly on, or slowly maybe dying monopoly, that how do you charge for these cloud services? How do you handle this? It's an interesting take. I'm not sure I'd be ready to suggest it to clients yet. The integrations with other things, I think, are probably yet to come. And I think both of our experience was it doesn't feel as just sort of work, just working. It feels a little kludgy, it feels a little put together. It feels like they took products they already had and kinda maybe built a couple new products and then put some old products with it, you know, web, web outlook, and then mashed them together. And it feels mashed together. doesn't feel like it's a fluid, doesn't feel like 365, it feels like 65 plus 200 plus one plus 50 plus 50, right? It feels like a bunch of things added together.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. So that's Microsoft. Speaking of companies jumping from there, from one side of there, what they normally do to doing something completely different, Google, having basically slammed the 365 agreement or 365 announcement by releasing their social platform. Long awaited, called many, many things. Everybody thought it was the plus one thing that we saw and we talked about, what is this, what does this mean, all this plus one, how does this work with the Buzz and all these other things that they've kind of done. We know that they've gone into checking in with Latitude. Google has done a lot in this area. It feels like there's about six different groups, all independent, who never talk, all trying to build some kind of social piece to their application. Well, they've kind of brought some of them together. And created.

Justin Edelstein: I think they've brought a bunch of them together.

Jason Atwood: They've brought a bunch of them together. And we'll talk about what it is. But it's called Google+. Which, as a naming convention, I'm not sure that really helps. I don't know. Google+. I thought Google Me was better. Felt more personal. Google+. Feels like, I don't know, something you'd buy off the I don't really care. It's not Google. It's Google+. I don't really care. I mean, Google is such an amazing, the word has so much power to it that I understand why you want to use it. Gmail, I always felt, was kind of a bad naming thing, because yes, it becomes its own thing, Gmail, but they lost some of what they had in Google. Most products since have been Google Maps, Google Wave, Google whatever, Google Apps, because Google has a lot of name brand recognition. So Google Plus. In essence, they've done a lot. You now have a profile.

Justin Edelstein: You've always had a profile.

Jason Atwood: You now have a social profile and the big add-on to it. Well, they've done a bunch of things. They've integrated chat into it. They've created what is a new theory, although not entirely new, but kind of a new take on it, which is you have these circles, kind of like what you wrote about in your blog post. Someone must have read that. So you have circles. And in those circles you put people. And you can put people in multiple circles. And they're your social circles. And then when you're doing the Facebook type of stuff, and it looks very much like Facebook. I mean it kinda acts like Facebook. There's a feed, there's a stream. You can see the different streams of your different groups. There's a chat in it. There's even a, they've even built in video chat. Well, we haven't tried yet, but.

17:54 Justin Edelstein: I tried, I started a hangout earlier, but no one was around.

Jason Atwood: No one was doing your hangout?

Justin Edelstein: Well no one was around, I only opened it to one specific circle called Arcus that only has Arcus members but nobody was on Google Plus so they didn't see it I guess.

Jason Atwood: So I got that but I didn't, now that I'm logged in I don't see that that's available to me

Justin Edelstein: but well it's no longer open. It's only open when you open it and then you close it it's gone.

Jason Atwood: So there's a chat, there's a video chat with four, up to four people I think which is pretty cool. It's not bad. called the stream. There's of course photos and all this sort of stuff.

Justin Edelstein: Well, it's Picasa. Right.

Jason Atwood: But I'm saying that they've all connected these things up. Yes, it's Picasa, but it's in the social side. So it takes in the people that you've now connected into your circles. They show up. Their photos show up in your photo area. You've played with it this morning. I've been playing with it for a day and a half. Basically, it's not out fully yet. You have to invite people. But it looks like as long as you send them an email or try to invite them into a circle, they get in.

Justin Edelstein: It's kind of weird. They get in. I got in, but I didn't get an email telling me I was in. So I had to just sort of ask you what the URL was. Where do I go?

Jason Atwood: Google Secret. I like it.

Justin Edelstein: I think it's nice. I think they did a really good job of thinking through what a social network, using all the assets that they've already built, could be. So they have all these things that are connected to your Google account, how could they bring them in in a way that is is easy on the eyes to see and interact with and also thought through unlike in the past where they've gotten dinged they thought through the privacy aspect of things so they've thought through this whole circles where you can create different groups of people that I you know I want to post this to my stream but I only want this group of people to see it that's really well done your plus ones that are all over the web now will show up here and you can post them to different different aspects it sort of showed they show up in certain places I found that they show up a little bit a little bit later but they do show up in your stream you can plus one things in a stream it's it's much like liking on Facebook it's it's pretty much the same premise. You know, I went in and posted some photos from a album that I had on Picasa. It was very seamless. And I mean, you can, you know, you can post photos, you can post videos, you can post links, you can post your location. It's a social network.

Jason Atwood: The thing that I think that, so a couple things I think I've got brilliantly. Social circles is great. You can put people in multiple circles, you name them what you want to name them. a nice interface for dragging and dropping them. They actually go into, their pictures go into these circles. And again, the idea that I might want to post something that I only want this group of people like about Dreamforce, right? But I have a bunch of partners and I have a bunch of clients maybe and I can segment them so when I post I say, oh, it's a Dreamforce thing. It kind of can connect up what I would consider two different worlds as you would, as you talked about in your blog post, you know, the social circles. You use social circles to separate out applications. I only let certain people into my Facebook because you're either all in or not. LinkedIn, anybody can see. I think the thing they've really gotten right is this sort of ... I think it's going to be hard for them because it's a little confusing, is when you're looking at your profile and editing your profile, you can make almost any element of your profile available to any

21:36 Jason Atwood: social circle. It's kind of like a many to many relationship. It's like, okay, so I can make this email, or this email section available to these social circles, or this, or my history available to these social circles. So, part of it, you're then gonna have to remember what you did or did not do. And I think that's where, you know, with great complexity, and probably the reason that Facebook is kept away from this, is because it is complex. And will the moms and pops of the world who are just figuring out Facebook and posting and what not to say on Facebook. Are they gonna come to here and be like, oh wait, when I post something I gotta pick a circle? What's a circle, who's in a, it could get confusing.

Justin Edelstein: Well by default it just goes to everyone. So if you don't care, you don't care. I do, I'm still not 100% sure like how it all works. Do I have to add you to one of my circles in order for you to see things on my profile or is it all by default? Like I'm not 100% sure, I still don't necessarily get it all.

Jason Atwood: It's not 100% clear.

Justin Edelstein: It's not as easy as Facebook in this respect. You're either friends or you're not.

Jason Atwood: I will say that I think when, Facebook we have three years worth or four years worth of using it to know all the different intricacies of it. Friending, I friended them. I'm sure four years ago whenever you started on Facebook, you're like, wait, if I ask for their friendship, are we friends? Do they have to require my friendship? Like there were questions we had. So this is kind of not a new paradigm, but I think the same questions are gonna come up. Some interesting things. One is, once you're in it, if you're logged in, it then takes over this top, and this new top black bar. So, where I think they're going to, you know, we've always talked about Google, in fact, two products they killed off this week as well. They killed off the medical, Google Medical, or whatever it's called, Google Health, and the Power Grid one, where they'll monitor power grids, tell you how you're using your energy in your house. and we've seen them do this to other products. Like Google Wave. Right, Google Wave, because of adoption. Interesting, once you're in this, you can't forget it. That's for sure, because anytime you search Google, it's up there in your top bar, and you see your name, your thing, and there's a little icon that shows you if anything new's happened, and you have a little plus.

Justin Edelstein: You have a share thing that you can easily post a status from.

Jason Atwood: Plus anything on the system, Gmail, calendars all there. So you, once you're in, you're kind of, They're taking it the other way around. It's like, you love Google, now you've got social around all of your Google elements that you wanted, right? So now this is a social thing. That I think is really smart, and I think that's why it'll probably do pretty well at the start, until people start to do that, like, well why am I in this versus this? Do I need to upkeep both of them? Most people I know don't wanna have multiple social networks going at the same time.

Justin Edelstein: When does Google decide that this is something that an enterprise might wanna use? I don't know.

Jason Atwood: There's so many millions of features missing from this. I went to see if there were, we have a Facebook page, facebook.com slash Arkasenk, right? There's pages, you can post as pages. Also, just stuff that Facebook has done that clearly is not here yet. The other thing I would say that I'm a little bit, I don't quite get.

24:52 Justin Edelstein: Just totally brushed over my question.

Jason Atwood: So when do they go to the enterprise? Well, yeah.

Justin Edelstein: I mean, this could be a very interesting, forget pages, because that's a Facebook thing. This could be a very interesting, This could be a very interesting thing to use inside of a company. Like a chatter. That's right. Like a chatter competitor. I mean, you've already got your email and your calendar and your documents. Turn those social with the stream on it and instead of photos, you have documents. You have the IM, you have circles, executives, assistants, whatever, right? A group. Good. Private group. You have calendar events that could show up in streams and collaborate on. It could be very interesting in the enterprise. I think it could.

Jason Atwood: I think that will be a long thought and a long wait. Right now it's blocked, so you could try it as a Google app.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I know I have to use a different browser because I'm always logged into our Google, our enterprise account on my main browsers.

Jason Atwood: The other thing I'll say just and then maybe we'll round it up is that I don't think it's clear with the other different products. We've been using Google Reader, which is the RSS reader, used it for years. They originally had liking, right? Well, originally there was nothing. If you wanted to send an article to someone, you'd email it to them. It had the email button. Then it became, then there became a like. Then you could like, no, first it was share. It had share. Share, and then share with comments. Right. Then share with comments. Share with comments was the greatest. Right? Then you could share with comments, and then the comments kind of went into a thread. They went into a thread, and then they did like.

Justin Edelstein: No, then they did send to. Well, okay. So you could send it to places. Send it was after share, I think.

Jason Atwood: After share, then like. So now we have like, share, share with comments, and send to. Let's leave send to off. That's more of moving to another application. Then they introduced Buzz. So we have Buzz. Then they introduced plus one. So I now have, let's count them off, share, like, share with comments, Buzz, and plus one. I now have this new thing called, I don't know what it is. What is this thing? When I go to my Google profile and I type in here, the stream, okay, I type in the stream, what am I doing? Is that any one of those six things I just listed off?

Justin Edelstein: No. It's another thing? But those other six things will show up in your stream. It's not consistent. I've tried it.

Jason Atwood: It is consistent. It's not consistent.

Justin Edelstein: Well, the things that they say are included are consistent.

Jason Atwood: If you put something in your, if you like something, it doesn't show up at all in Google Reader. If you share something in Google Reader, it doesn't show up.

Justin Edelstein: But on my profile, there is a link to my shared items in Google Reader. Yes, but it doesn't show up in your stream. So it does not show up in the stream, but the plus ones and the buzz do.

Jason Atwood: But okay, there's a problem. I can tell you right now, Google is having-

Justin Edelstein: It's not like it's inconsistent, it is what it is.

Jason Atwood: It's not understandable to the users who are users.

27:54 Justin Edelstein: I just understood it.

Jason Atwood: No, because it's not, so I have a stream, a plus one, a buzz, and I share and like. And of all these things, I don't know how they cross, what they cross, what sharing, whatever. In fact, the other day, I did something in the stream and it ended up sending an email off to someone I invited to Google+, but they couldn't even get into Google+, and I'm like, what is this? Why am I getting this email? So I can tell you right now, as a power user, I'm a web power user. It's already kind of trying to connect all these things, but I don't think they're connected brilliantly.

Justin Edelstein: All they need to do is pull in the Google Reader shared items, and they have it all connected. That's the only thing that they're missing, and it's there.

Jason Atwood: But do you think that normal users, who are the people who have been posting statuses incorrectly and sharing to the world that they're, whatever, all these funny stats.

Justin Edelstein: I don't know what you mean by normal user.

Jason Atwood: The confusion over Facebook and who can see what is a very big confusion that's been going on for years and still going on. So now I've entered in a whole new three sets or four sets of things which I'm not even clear whether, okay, so I have a question. If I search for something in Google and I see a plus one, I hit plus one, does it show up in my stream?

Justin Edelstein: If you're logged in, sure.

Jason Atwood: It shows up in my stream? Yes. Okay, so if I plus one it from a Google search, it shows up in my stream.

Justin Edelstein: Or if you're on a page that has the plus one button and you click it, it'll show up on your stream.

Jason Atwood: That would then show up in my stream. Yes. OK.

Justin Edelstein: The only things that aren't showing up right now is the Google Reader stuff. Buzz. Buzz is coming up. Buzz totally shows up. It's right there.

Jason Atwood: It's Buzz. No, it shows up on your profile, not in your stream. The difference. You plus one that article in the York Barbecue. You didn't buzz it.

Justin Edelstein: Buzz I don't even use, so I couldn't even tell you. Well, you just told me. Wait, hold on. Back truck up.

Jason Atwood: You just told me that it did show up, and you understood it fully. This is the point. The point has been made.

Justin Edelstein: I have to buzz something to know if it shows up or not.

Jason Atwood: I was buzzing stuff yesterday. I was buzzing it, plus-ing it, liking it, and all that, and we were testing it back and forth to see which shows up.

Justin Edelstein: I think Buzz is connected to my Twitter. All right. Point. Let me tweet something. Forget it. Forget it. Point, counterpoint, done. The point is- I'm just tweeting the word Buzz.

Jason Atwood: The point is it is a little too confusing right now with all their different concepts about liking or starring or whatevering. I think that as an end user, are they going to get it or are they going to get frustrated that there's so many different ways to do this as opposed to Facebook which has said you have the like button and that's it. The Twitter is you tweet, you Twitter it. But this, there's like five. Are they too confusing? Why did they release Buzz three months ago? Plus one, two months ago.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it wasn't three months ago. Buzz was not three months ago. Four months, six months ago. It was over a year ago. No. Yes. No. Yes. We covered it all. Because I can tell you exactly where I worked, and I wasn't working at Arcus. So over a year ago.

30:57 Jason Atwood: Not Google Buzz.

Justin Edelstein: Yes, Google Buzz. Oh, yeah, maybe it was. Oh, yeah. Wait, hold on.

Jason Atwood: I'm going to pull up the article right now. February 9, 2010. You're right. Over a year ago. It's over a year ago.

Justin Edelstein: So they clearly, and they made a mistake on that one. They didn't get it. They made a mistake, and they learned from it, and they put this out.

Jason Atwood: Why did they release Plus One three weeks ago?

Justin Edelstein: Plus One was clearly a predecessor to this product. It was a way to get stuff into this product.

Jason Atwood: I guess. It gets people to put Plus One buttons all over their websites. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: And then get the content into the stream.

Jason Atwood: Don't cross your streams, though.

Justin Edelstein: I'm not going to cross my stream. So here's the deal. Buzzes don't come into the stream. Buzzes go into the buzz. I just checked. Because I buzzed stuff from Twitter.

Jason Atwood: I posted the word buzz. So that doesn't happen the way I would think it would happen. No.

Justin Edelstein: The plus ones go into the stream. The buzz doesn't. That doesn't make sense. And the likes?

Jason Atwood: What about the likes in Reader? Or Share with Comments?

Justin Edelstein: No, the shares go into the, if you're on the About page on your thing in your links, there's the My Shared Items in Google Reader.

Jason Atwood: I want you to go explain this to your mother and your father tonight. But my mother won't care.

Justin Edelstein: She doesn't use Good, See? She does. She doesn't use Google Reader. No, she does not. That's right. So she doesn't care where her Google Reader shared items go. Because you know what? She doesn't have any. She doesn't use Buzz. She doesn't care. She doesn't care where those go either.

Jason Atwood: She's going to say, I just love this new plus one stream integration.

Justin Edelstein: Here's the thing. She won't even know that that exists either. People do post. No, my mom's never even going to use this, guaranteed. She doesn't even have a Gmail account. So she's not even going to use this.

Jason Atwood: That you can pretty much cross. Well, the other 40, whatever, 200 million people.

Justin Edelstein: There's a thing you say like normal user. I think the normal user.

Jason Atwood: It's not the ones in this room. No.

Justin Edelstein: But the normal user doesn't necessarily have the Buzz and the Google Reader shared items and the likes on the Google Reader. You know what? They have their Gmail. They have their Gmail contacts. They have their chat in their Gmail. And this will be a little addition to that.

Jason Atwood: This will be a social profile on top of Gmail. That's right. That's what this will be. Does it connect up with your chat? chat in this connect with your chat in Gmail? I've not even chatted from this. I have no idea. It says

Justin Edelstein: I can do it. I haven't done it. I've tried to start a hangout, but nobody was hanging out with me.

Jason Atwood: I have no idea. This is where I think that they're gonna have an issue. I don't even know how to start a chat. I have it right here. You can start a chat with circle. I'm gonna pick a circle. I don't

Justin Edelstein: want to start it. I want to do it with a person like you. Right. Well, I'm enabling. Well, here's

Jason Atwood: Here's what's nice about this, is that you can enable a chat for a circle. So let's say I want to have chat enabled, so whenever I'm in this, people see that I'm online. But in Facebook, it's like everybody can see you're online. And I don't want everybody because there might be some extra.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, that's it. It's very simple. Yes, it's totally integrated. Actually, I just had to look for it. If you're on the home thing, it has start chatting. And then boom, all your Gmail contacts show up to start chatting with. Right. So that's actually very simple.

34:05 Jason Atwood: same product that's good. I don't know what sparks are. Sparks are there don't know what that is. They're in your stream. I don't know what this means though. You buzzed your spark in your stream.

Justin Edelstein: Find stuff you're interested in. Alright let's let's let's let's. Hold on I want to see what. I'm interested in

Jason Atwood: soccer. I understand. There are news feeds. Whoa okay so it's like news feeds. Got it. Alright let's let's back away from this. Overall thoughts on it. Is this a Facebook killer? Not a killer. Is it a competition? Yeah. People will move from on facebook to this now

Justin Edelstein: really known as you say openly in face book and go to this now

Jason Atwood: at this point you want to actually want to leave a stop but don't have an alternative and i think

Justin Edelstein: and the people that want to leave face book just don't like the idea of social

Jason Atwood: networking we've been there for a while they've been burned by a third you know everybody's size the gracing slice bread we have a right like it but

Justin Edelstein: uh... i plus one this i'd like that i plus one

Jason Atwood: I buzzed it.

Justin Edelstein: It's up to seven.

Jason Atwood: You keep putting that in your Spark or in your stream. Buzz it and plus one it. All right.

Justin Edelstein: How do we get Arcus as a Spark?

Jason Atwood: We have to get our own Spark.

Justin Edelstein: We need a Spark plug.

Jason Atwood: Reminding me of Transformers. Wasn't that called the All Spark? I have no idea.

Justin Edelstein: I've never seen that movie.

Jason Atwood: Let's move on to the Cloud Focus app lately. So overall, brand new. Brand new. Try it if you can try it. Totally. I think it has much better privacy controls and much better sharing controls. I think it is a little bit complicated and suffers from that. And whereas Facebook started off very, very, very, very simple and has built features over time, this is like all these features are here and there's some more complexities to it, which I think people are gonna have a hard time with.

Justin Edelstein: Well, that's kind of, I mean, let's bring it full circle and bring it back to, we'll bring it back to what Microsoft 365 did versus what Google Apps do. Google Apps got to start fresh. They said, OK, we've got a web browser, and we want people to be able to edit documents. And they started from there, and they built it out. It included Gmail, and it included Calendar, because that made sense, and the chat, and Docs, and then Spreadsheets, and then Presentations. Microsoft had to say, well, we have 20-odd years of stuff that we've built, and we sort of need to make all that work. people are used to it and this is a Microsoft product they they couldn't start fresh so it's much easier to start from scratch then sort of have all these pieces and cobble them all together and I think that's sort of a good parallel right Google had to cobble all these pieces together that they've put together over the course of the last five or so years Gmail, Chat, Buzz, Plus One, reader all this stuff that's potentially social and the Casa and then try to make it social. Microsoft had to do the same thing with 365 online. They had to bring all these pieces together and make them sort of talk to each other in a new environment that maybe wasn't really meant to be the way that you know this is a new environment it's not meant to be the way that it that it always worked.

37:19 Jason Atwood: The other thing that I'll say the other minus one for Google which is becoming Does that make it a zero? It makes it a zero. I'm going to plus two it, minus three it. Is that Google has shown in the last, I would say, year, two years, that if they can announce something as big as the world, but if they don't feel like they get their adoption numbers, whatever that number is, they don't share it with us, they don't say, hey, it's two people versus 20 people. Google Wave. Yeah, well, we mentioned it a few times. That they'll kill it. And they will kill it without any recourse or there will be no ceremony, there will be no funeral. It's like, oh by the way, that thing you've been using and maybe really integrated into your life. I was a Google Health user but I didn't really integrate that. Maybe someone was using that power media and stuff to really see where their power was going and using it to report up to the government. Who knows? But then they kill it because they didn't get adoption or because something else. So I would say that you know Facebook isn't going to kill Facebook because Facebook is model is to do what it does. Google has a model, but all these other things around the Google world, I would say outside of AdSense, you know, Search, Gmail, and Docs, are all kind of like, they almost could be on the chopping block at any time. So...

Justin Edelstein: There's no ads in this service, by the way. Not yet. Not yet.

Jason Atwood: Not yet. There will be. There's, I mean, they have the model. They can make a trillion dollars out of it.

Justin Edelstein: through here for them to correlate to between all the plus ones and stuff that people are sharing and then commenting on their stream. A lot of data flowing through here. One more thing I'll say.

Jason Atwood: So the minus, I'm going to give it a minus and I'm going to give them a plus one. So the minus is, you never know with Google, they might decide to destroy it. They don't really hang on to stuff. That's the minus. It's good of them. The plus to them is, I think Google has learned more lessons about security and about enterprise security and keeping people's stuff private than Facebook ever did. Facebook is coming back the reverse. They've had to go learn about that stuff. Google's learned about it in the last three or four years, even the two-factor authentication now. You can be a Google user, turn on two-factor, and know that your Google Plus profile is a little bit more secure than your Facebook profile because it's got another level of security on top of it. I think that helps them. I might even put more information into Google because I know that they have a level ... that I've turned on another level of security on top of my social profile. Anyway, end of story, let's move on to our Cloud Focus app picks of the week. I'm going to pick 365, you pick plus. Okay, done. Alright, what's your Cloud Focus app pick of the week?

Jason Atwood: And let's see if it's... Oh, we're not done? No, we're done. Cloud Focus app. No, you haven't, you've got to give me a call. I mean, I know you didn't have anything before the show. I really didn't.

Justin Edelstein: So I scrambled and I remember Tom Tobin mentioning something in the Dreamforce portal earlier this week about new sample dashboards being put out on the AppExchange for Salesforce.com. I'm a big fan of these sample dashboards. You go to the App Exchange, you click a button and boom you have a bunch of dashboards and reports that you can just start modifying. They're nice, easy, free. They're really good starter. Great starter packs. They're great for when you're starting off a project and you know you're at the point at which you're building out analytics and dashboards and the client really just wants to see a couple to see what they could potentially be and look like. Or for those who work you know at a Salesforce shop and executive just wants to see an example you can very easily just download these into your instance. They're released under the force.com labs name but not sure it's really a labs project. They're called salesforce.com dot com CRM dashboards on the app exchange free download them you get I

41:08 Justin Edelstein: think you get seven dashboards you get four sales and marketing dashboards a marketing sales executive sales manager salesperson and then you get three customer service dashboards an agent supervisor overview a service executive overview and a service KPI dashboard all redone done how it will make redone with With new reporting styles and the new charting styles because they hadn't really updated those types of things in a while.

Jason Atwood: So I'm going to do a little cross pick here because we didn't mention my blog post this week. No we didn't. Which happened to be called Tame the Email Monster with these three easy tips. I posted it to the blog. at blog.archessync.com or we'll be there momentarily. But just to talk about it for a second, well, go read it, but basically it's about how to sort of deal with email, some things that I do with email. I wrote one, I think six months ago, about using sort of the mail. thing, smart folders and things like that. That was a great one. This one is really more talking about how to re-look at how you deal with email and turning email from something that tells you what to do to you telling it what to do. Because I think a lot of people-

Justin Edelstein: I quite enjoyed this one as well when I read it on the Google Wave. That is five mentions for Wave.

Jason Atwood: That's like way too many. So- It's like a drinking game. This is a plug for another tool that I use that if you're hungry for the tools that I use, which might or might not be, another tool that I use, and I haven't mentioned, I may have mentioned, but I haven't made my pick of the week is a tool, I'm sure there's one that's very similar for the Windows, sorry, Windows people. It's called TextExpander. And what it does is something that a lot of actually mobile devices have built in now, which is you create a couple of different.

Justin Edelstein: How is this a plug for an email tool? I'll tell you why. Okay. Because I use it all the time in email. Tell me.

Jason Atwood: It runs on your application, runs service-wide, and you give it a couple of parameter, you give it a couple, three or four letters, and when you string those letters together, it then builds, it expands it out. So I always end my emails with thanks, JMA, thanks comma whatever. So I've turned that into TJMA, and when I type that, it then expands it out, puts it in my email. You can do it for signatures. So if you wanted to include a signature or not, you can just put a little three letter thing. I use it for phone numbers. So like the phone number here in the office, I have as a three letter, I think the Arcus office number, A-O-N and then it pops it in and puts it as the number. So it's great for when you're answering emails and common stuff that you answer all the time or say all the time, maybe to clients or to your boss or whatever, you can just quickly put them in and then every time they just become part of your writing an email.

Justin Edelstein: So anywhere in the system, it's not even just email, it's anywhere. If you're in a Word document or a Google Sheet or something or on the Google Wave where I've seen you do this, we take notes in the Wave, and you type in gwmeet, and all of a sudden, it builds out an agenda.

44:20 Jason Atwood: Yeah, and it puts in the time, the date. It can do a lot of different stuff. I use it for the podcast. The podcast template is in TextExpander, and I type in cf, whatever, Cloud Focus Podcast. And it builds the entire HTML for me. So I don't have to go copy it from somewhere else. It's really, really useful. As you start to think about it, you get more and more into, oh, I could use it here, and I could use it here. I use it for, we do a lot of WebEx meetings, or go-to meetings, so WBX, when I type it in a meeting event in salesforce.com, builds out the URL, puts in the password that we always use, tells the people that when you go there that the conference number is available once you log in. I use it for the GTM, which is go-to meeting, which builds out the URL for that. So again, tons of uses, TextExpander, I think it's by a company called, I'll definitely be on the on the pot you know best one to be on online but I think it's smile software they actually make a couple pieces of software they make another one that does PDF stuff I haven't tried it I know there's a couple

Justin Edelstein: others of this type of software in the Mac App Store yes and this is available

Jason Atwood: in the Mac App Store to the trial is pretty much a long-term trial so you can use this for as long as you want it over this basically say demo for a while give it a try. I know you tried it. I tried it, had a bad experience with it. Because it just

Justin Edelstein: didn't work. It didn't work, it kept crashing the apps that I was using it in, so I had a bad experience. Now it didn't do that at first, so at first I had just started getting in the flow of actually using it, because it does take a while. You know, you don't think about, oh instead of typing out this sentence, I can just type three, three letters, or four letters, or this thing that I'm always typing out, I can put it in text expand. It takes a lot against that mentality. I finally got a little bit used to it and it's the mentality, and then it started crashing things. So I uninstalled it. But I didn't pay for it. Maybe if I paid for it, it would have worked. It is.

Jason Atwood: 34.95, Vail Pause. I'm sure there's ones that work on Windows. And I know they're building into the new iOS. They're going to do the same thing. So you can actually put snippets across your entire iPhone or iPad, so it'll pre-populate things. So then you can really get used to using it all across the world. or all across your different devices. Anyway, TextExpander, and so you want to read about that or the blog post at blog.arkusinc.com, twitter.com slash arcusinc, twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood, twitter.com slash just edelstein, and facebook.com slash arcusinc, and plus.google dot, no, doesn't exist yet, but when it does, we'll put a plus.google.com profile. For the podcast, always remember to subscribe in iTunes. I'll leave reviews there. You'll get the podcast whenever we do it. This is a late Friday afternoon one, but busy week. So until next week, it's not very cloudy day at all. Beautiful day here in New York, in downtown New York City. Um, downtown New York City, Times Square, New York City. Um, enjoy those cloudy days. Bye!