Robert Stinnett

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Archive for category Tech Stuff

If you want to understand the Cloud, visit an airport

Jan 16

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Tech Stuff | No Comments

Lately I’ve been talking to a lot of folks about cloud computing, and while most people have heard about it, many still aren’t exactly sure just what exactly it is. In fact if you ask 5 different people in IT about what the cloud is, you will more than likely get 5 different responses. It seems were all talking about it, must for many of us we aren’t quite sure just exactly what it is we are talking about.

While watching a WebEx about cloud functionality in Control-M from the folks at BMC Software, they used an analogy of a private fleet of airplanes to explain it. I thought they were onto something rather good, and decided to take that analogy and expand upon it. Having said that let me welcome you to…

Cloud International Airport (CIA, no relation to the other guys – maybe, perhaps, we’re not telling)

Imagine that you work for a company (I know, hard, huh?) and you take frequent trips for business purposes. Your company can either book your flight on the company fleet of planes or they can choose to use a public carrier, such as Delta, Southwest, etc. You don’t really care what method they use to get you to your destination, just as long as you get there.

This is analogous to the cloud in many ways – the private planes that your company maintains are the servers that exist within your organization today. There are only so many of them, and they can only carry so many people to so many destinations at a time. If you have 15 people who need to fly to 15 different destinations, and there are only 5 company planes then you have a problem. You have run out of capacity. Someone will have to wait similar to how when you run out of capacity on those internal servers some program or process is going to have to wait or the company will have to buy more planes or maybe figure out a way to optimize the flight routes.

Let’s say that you are one of the unlucky 10 that there simply isn’t any capacity for on the private planes (the private cloud or traditional server farm) your company owns. Instead you book your flight on Delta and arrive at your destination on time and ready to rock and roll. This is similar to how the public cloud works – you have a workload (yourself) that needs to complete a task (get to Denver by 10AM Tuesday) and you just need to the resources (plane) to do that. You go out into the public cloud (the airlines) and ask for capacity (buy a ticket) and they provide it (the ticket and the plane) and process the workload (get you to Denver). In fact you might fly on Southwest, American, Alaskan Air — you don’t care, you just want to get to Denver. All those different airlines are analogous to the public cloud providers out there today (Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, etc).

It may be that a group of 5 of you need to get to Denver, and the company has the capacity to fly 2 of you there on the company fleet, but the other 3 have to book through the airlines. This is similar to how a hybrid cloud environment works – some private, some public, but the results are the same. It’s fairly transparent to the end user. You all get to Denver, on time (the work gets done, the processes process!)

But wait, there’s more to an airport than just the airlines!

Take a look around CIA and you’ll see similarities to the cloud everywhere. As you walk into the airport the first thing you encounter in the ticketing counter and agents. They are there to figure out where you are going, find you a seat on a plane, and get you scheduled to get to your destination. This is similar to how products such as BMC’s Control-M for Cloud work. It helps direct the workloads (the people) to the appropriate servers (airplanes) and makes sure that we aren’t trying to put 200 jobs on a server that can only support 20 (number of seats on the plane). Just as the ticketing agent can help direct folks to the gate and get them on the right type of plane going to the right destination, workload management software helps make sure your workloads and business processes are getting to the right servers and completing on time. It also knows how to direct the workloads (the people) to the right type of servers (private fleet, public airline, cargo jet, etc.) and to make sure that all the resources that the data that is needed to run the workload is available for use (the luggage actually makes it to the same place you are going).

While the ticketing agents and gate folks at getting people onto the planes someone needs to make sure we get the planes fueled up, they have those tiny packets of peanuts fully stocked, and that your luggage actually gets on board. This is where our ground crew comes into play. Companies such as Zenoss play this role. They are constantly monitoring the resources available in the cloud (the number of planes at the gates, and the right plane is at the right gate), the right hardware is available (the peanuts are fully stocked, and for the 1st class passengers the little bottles of wine) and that you can take the appropriate actions to help alleviate problems before they turn into critical outages (the planes get fully fueled so that they can safely make it to their destinations).

Security is big at airports, and it’s one of the first factors that companies should think about when considering the cloud. Just as the airport isn’t going to let just anyone walk in and get on a plane, companies have to make sure that when they use the cloud that their data isn’t just walking off. Like the security checkpoints in the airport that screen passengers and check tickets, companies like Anx help you to secure your data in the cloud and to make sure that your private business processes running in the cloud remain just that – private. As the airplanes take off and leave; luggage is loaded and unloaded; they are there to make sure that only the right people are on that plane and that nobody else tries to sneak off with your luggage when you aren’t looking. The same concept applies here – we want to make sure that your data gets to the cloud, processed, and back to your company without anyone rifling through it. Just like security is first and foremost the biggest concern at the airport, so should it be with your data and your move to the cloud.

As you stroll down the moving walkway to your gate you glance out the window and notice the air traffic control tower. These guys are making sure that planes are taking off and landing safely, and that each one of them has their own “lane” in the sky. They are the traffic cops of the air. In the cloud the air traffic controllers are the cloud providers themselves – the Microsoft’s and the Amazon’s of the world. They are making sure that servers and services get provisioned, you get assigned the right configuration for your needs and that if something should happen to the systems you are using, you can get rerouted around the problem (much like how planes get re-routed due to weather).

Of course we can’t leave our airport just yet without taking a stroll through the food court and all the shops. I mean, really, who needs a mall when some airports have shopping centers that make malls look quaint by comparison? We can get everything from fresh baked cookies, the latest book on cloud computing and a new laptop before we get to our gate! All these shops and vendors in the airport represent the concepts of agility and independence the cloud brings to services, software and processes that are running in the cloud. As we walk through the shopping areas our choices are so varied and many that if one shop is out of our favorite magazine we simply go the next one (if we no longer need a server we can re-provision it on the fly) or if we don’t like the selection of shops in this concourse we can walk over to the next one (if I don’t like the quality of service a cloud provider is providing me I can switch with relative ease to a new provider). When we finally get to Denver we can use that new laptop to get to our data and infrastructure regardless of our physical location. If my laptop runs out of power, I can use my tablet or smart phone.

Hopefully this has given you a little better idea of what the cloud is all about – and some features, benefits and uses it might provide for your organization. Now you’ll have to excuse me – I have to catch my plane to Denver!

The Numbers Don’t Lie with Google+

Nov 7

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Social Media, Tech Stuff | 1 Comment

Not too long ago a professional acquaintance sent an e-mail asking my thoughts on Google+.  After we kicked the can back and forth the general consensus was that it’s more of the same; and try as we might neither one of us could come up with a selling point to get any of our other friends or colleagues interested in making the switch from the social network leader, Facebook, over to Google+.  Sure, many of our friends tried it out for a few weeks – but as time went on very few us kept returning or using it on a daily basis.

Now let me be straightforward here and say that this isn’t meant to be a Google bashing post.  Even though I argue that Google has lost its innovative spark over the past few years there are still products of theirs that I use on a daily basis – like Google Voice.  What I really wanted to find out, to ask of others, was not so much “Why didn’t Google+ succeed?” but rather “Why aren’t you using it?” – of course you can’t have one without the other, but for each question there are different answers.

So I e-mailed a few friends and talked to a few colleagues who had used, or are still using, Google+ and asked them their thoughts.  The answers I received back pretty much followed a single thread, mainly they saw nothing “exciting”, “different” or “new” about Google+ compared to their usual hangout (Facebook for almost all of them).  One colleague of mine put it this way, “It’s like driving a 2010 Toyota Camry with 20,000 miles on it and the car dealer calling you up and asking if you want to trade it in on an identical 2010 Toyota Camry with 20,000 miles – what’s the point?” 

Google+ never had anything that differentiated it from Facebook.  The one thing it did have going for it was the Google name – and true enough when it was first released we saw this massive frenzy of people who wanted to get in on the ground floor.  Nothing says prestige like exclusivity, and Google did a great job of making it a “you can only get in if you know someone who is already in” type affair.  This kept the initial momentum for the service high for a period of time, but people soon found out that once you were “in” there really wasn’t anything “cool” to keep you around.  Worse yet, the majority of your friends were still hanging out over on Facebook and a party of one gets very lonely after a while.

Meanwhile … In grocery stores marketers use a variety of techniques to watch what you buy and how you decide what brand of peanut butter to purchase.  They use everything from hidden cameras to researchers just blending in with other shoppers to observe your behavior.  I decided to borrow a page from the professional market research playbook then and sort of wandered the aisles of the Internet to see just how much people were using Google+.  It soon became apparent that this was one brand of peanut butter that people weren’t buying.

First I went seeking out popular news articles from some of the major news sites that have Google+ tie-ins.  My first stop was MSNBC where I checked out a number of popular news stories and decided to use one about the death of Andy Rooney as my example (full MSNBC article located at http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45173371/ns/today-entertainment/).

 

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Just take a quick look at the social media share statistics listed for this article.  Over 27,000 Facebook recommendations; 4,700 other shares (e-mail, LinkedIn, Newsvine, etc) – and only 58 Google+ shares.  Compared to Facebook that represents just two-tenths of one percent.  Not exactly a rip-roaring testament to the popularity of Google+.

It was recently announced that Google+ is throwing the doors wide open for everyone – including businesses to set up their own pages.  The exclusivity factory is now moot.  However, again I have to ask – where’s the innovation?  Sure, I can put my business page on Google+ but why?  What are you going to offer me that the other guy isn’t?  And why should I do it at all if all my customers are hanging out on another site?

It’s sad to see Google lose its way with innovation and become a “me too” player.  If you look at the history of both AOL and Yahoo you can see the same fate pretty much played out the same way with both of them.  Yahoo created a lot of firsts for the online world, but then they started slipping.  Instead of innovating they started to copy, acquire, play the “me too” game.  Now, they are pretty much known for only two products – Yahoo Mail and Flickr.  Some argue that these two pieces of Yahoo are the only real saleable assets they have left.  Sad.

What’s the future hold for Google+?  Without innovative new features I don’t see the need for Facebook to get worried about the competition anytime soon.  The problem is that people have already tried it out, kicked the tires, and left.  It’s going to be hard for Google to get them come take a test drive again.  It’s going to be even harder for them to convince people to try their brand of peanut butter.

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Want to go to the cloud? You are already there.

Oct 24

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Tech Stuff | No Comments

No doubt you’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “the cloud”.  It’s something that many folks have heard not only in their IT organizations where they work, but also in consumer commercials and ads.  For end-users (you and me) the cloud represents this magical place where we can store and access files, photos, etc. no matter where we are, or what device we are using.  For IT organizations it means a lot more than that – but we’ll let those guys sort out all the geek speak.

So you might be thinking to yourself, “Wow!  I could access my photos and documents anywhere, anytime from any device?  Where do I sign up?”

No need to sign up – you’re already there.

Every day millions of people access their email through services such as Hotmal, Gmail or Yahoo Mail.  Thousands of photos are uploaded every hour to photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Facebook and others.  We tweet about what we are eating for lunch; we use services such as DropBox to store our files; and we upload our videos to Youtube.

And all the while, unknown to many, we are on “the cloud”.

You can upload a picture to Flickr, leave your laptop at home, get on a plane and fly halfway around the world, go into a coffee shop in Belgium and login to Flickr and your photos are there waiting for you.  Just like magic – except it isn’t, it’s cloud technology at work.  Your data (the photos) is being stored on Flickr servers that are located around the world.  You don’ t have to worry about how much space you are taking up, keeping the original backed up or carrying a USB stick around with you.

The same goes with your mail.  No matter where you are you can fire up a browser, use a smartphone or tap on a tablet and access your Hotmail account.  You don’t have to worry about how the mail gets there, just know that it does.  This is a far cry from years ago when checking e-mail meant you had to launch a mail program such as Outlook; and if you decided to switch computers it was a chore to get everything set back up again – and even when you got it right your old email was gone, or rather stuck on the old machine.

In fact this webpage you are reading right now is hosted “in the cloud”.  The data is kept on servers “out there” and I don’t have to worry about maintaining them, backing them up, etc.  I can access my blog from anywhere, using any device.  It’s just “there” and that’s the way it should be.

For end-users like ourselves the cloud represents the ultimate in freedom.  It allows us to finally break the chains that bind us to one particular computer, a single laptop or a mobile phone.  We can now switch devices instantly, access our data from anywhere and never have to worry about backing up our files in case something unfortunate were to happen (and let’s face it, how many of us actually backed up our data on a regular basis, if at all?)

So the next time you hear someone talk about the cloud pat yourself on the back – you’re already here.

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Windows Phone and SkyDrive–Who Needs USB Sticks!

Oct 20

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Tech Stuff, windows live | No Comments

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the upcoming Computer Measurement Group (CMG) conference in Washington, D.C.  I’ve been involved in some of the social media efforts and working with the organizers to get a few things going to expand our reach into the social arena so that people can learn more about what CMG is.  As I’m sitting at work this morning I get an e-mail from one of the conference organizers saying that one of our inserts that needs to go to the printer for publication in the agenda is missing some information.  The only problem?  I’m sitting in a meeting that doesn’t have an end in sight and they need the file ASAP.  What to do…

The file was stored on SkyDrive, in the cloud if you will, so getting to it wouldn’t be a problem – I just needed a way to get too it.  Then I remembered that one of the new features of Windows Phone Mango that I had recently upgraded too was that the Office Hub could connect up with SkyDrive.  I was on to something.

As I sat in the meeting I managed to use my Windows Phone (a Samsung Focus for the curious) to connect up with SkyDrive, edit the file in Word on the phone and then save it back to the cloud and e-mail it back to my colleague.Windows Sky Drive Image

Now. Tell. Me. That. Isn’t. COOL!

Isn’t it amazing how far technology has come.  At the ripe young age of 37 I remember the evolutionary path of how we used to transport data.  It started with floppy disks, and I’m sure many of you remember stuffing them into your backpack and running off to the school or library to work on those papers (“Sneakernet we used to call it for the fact that you had to literally walk the data to wherever you wanted it”) – you know back in the days before we all had 3 PC’s in our homes.

Floppy disks stayed around for quite a while and then came ZIP drives.  They stored a lot more data, but their problem was that they were just too darn expensive.  They had a few glory years in there, but they didn’t quite kill the floppy disk just yet.

As more and more of us got connected we started using e-mail to mail files back and forth to ourselves.  It wasn’t perfect by any means but it was good for small documents. 

IMN42439 Imation 1.44MB Floppy Disk - 1.44 MBAlong the way we also experimented with CD’s and such, but the fact that they could only be written once made it impractical to use for documents and files that were modified often.  Though somewhere around here I think I still have a stack of about 500 America Online CD’s if anyone needs a coaster.

For the true geeks we also experimented with FTPing our files back and forth.  I remember in college you weren’t a true geek unless you had your own FTP server running – preferably one with the latest warez to share with your college friends.

Finally we got to USB sticks – and their low cost and popularity has made them the favorite for data transport for quite a few years now.  The problem is that if you are like me, you tend to lose the things or find out when you are in a hotel 700 miles from home you left them laying on the kitchen table.  There was also an issue of data integrity – USB sticks do fail and only have a lifespan of so many read and write cycles. 

Now we have “the cloud” – or the ability to store data “out there” on the Internet somewhere and access it using any device we choose to an extent.  Services like Microsoft’s SkyDrive let people store data and access it from work, home or even halfway around the world.  Forget that important presentation?  No problem, just connect up and grab it.  The latest, greatest copy always waiting for you.

It was so cool to see that my Windows Phone could connect up to SkyDrive and not only access my documents, but let them edit them and store them back out there.  Most of the work I do is with Office products, and this has broken down some of the final barriers of me having to be chained to my desk.  Granted, I won’t be writing a Shakespearean play using my phone just yet, but it’s great for touching up documents and adding data to them on the go.

Somewhere around here I have some 5 1/4” floppy disks from my teenage years.  Perhaps its time to find an old drive and upload whatever data has survived on them to the cloud as well.  My childhood could be immortalized in the cloud for generations to come. Now that’s cool.

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Windows Phone 7 Rocks (And I don’t even own one)

Apr 6

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Tech Stuff, Windows 7 | No Comments

Would you trust a movie review written by someone who hasn’t seen it?  Probably not, so I know it may be a little hard to believe this – but I truly believe Windows Phone 7 represents an evolution in smartphones, and I don’t even own one.  Why am I singing the praise for something I don’t own? Well, it’s a little like this…

Ever since Windows Phone 7 came out last fall, I’ve been following the various offerings.  I’ve steered many a friend from purchasing an iPhone or Android based phone over to Windows Phone 7, usually by going to the store with them and showing them some of the features that caught my eye.  I even got to play with an evaluation version, briefly, of the Samsung Focus.  I feel so in love with it that I immediately began singing the praises of not only the Focus, but of Windows Phone 7.  I found that if I could just get my friends and others to try one, they too became hooked.

Without a doubt “the” feature that attracted me to Windows Phone 7 was the live tiles.  These are the tiles you see on the home screen of the phones that react to different events.  Get a new e-mail?  It changes the number to reflect it.  New status update from a friend on Facebook?  Their picture shows up on the tile.  Upcoming event?  The tile reflects the event.  Simply put, the live tiles let you get information from the phone without being sucked into the phone.  How many times have we seen people walking down the street or in store just totally absorbed by fiddling with their phone?  The beauty of Windows Phone 7 is that you don’t need to be engrossed in the phone itself – you simply glance at it to find the update you are interested in; if you need to know more, you select the tile to be transported to that specific event.  Simple brilliance – and ever friend I’ve shown has been hooked.

There is also the simple elegance of the clean design.  I hate clutter, and the one thing I’ve noticed about WP7 is that it feels as if the OS was designed for a phone.  It wasn’t simply “adapted” for the phone or slapped together.  Things just flow.  You really don’t need to sit there and hunt for the next screen, or next command – it just flows naturally.  I wish desktop OS’s could work as well as Windows Phone 7 does in this regard.

The phone is also a powerful social network integrator – there is no denying that younger and older generations alike are clustering together online at sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and countless others.  WP7 has done an excellent job at integrating these social networks.  Plus, when you like your Windows Live account, it opens up a whole new world of integration between Windows Live and WP7.  I sold one friend on WP7 merely by pointing out how well it integrated Facebook!

It’s good to point out that WP7 doesn’t just “connect” to the social networks, but it integrates them.  You will notice that it’s not about what so and so is doing on Facebook, and who sent you a text message, and what colleague called you from work.  Rather, it’s about what people are doing.  You can see that Fred called you from work this morning, send you two text messages and posted a status update to Facebook – it’s the timeline of Fred.  The same for Seth, Jennifer, Zach and all your other friends.  WP7 is about connecting you to your friends and colleagues – not about trying to differentiate between social apps and networks.

So yes, Windows Phone 7 in my opinion rocks.  So why do you ask don’t I have one?  Well, like most people nowadays, I have to budget my expenses and since my old Windows Mobile 6.1 phone works (and has for over 2.5 years now) it just isn’t in the numbers for me to get one.  Trust me, I’d love to be able to put my “money where my mouth is” but as an adult (versus that pimply kid I was 17+ years ago) I have learned how to admire from afar.  And admire, I certainly am…

Rock on WP7!

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Some Thoughts on Workload Automation & a Mobile Workforce

Dec 26

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Tech Stuff, Workload Automation | No Comments

A rather interesting discussion is taking place on LinkedIn about workload automation and mobile devices.  We got into a debate about whether the traditional model of having someone watch the scheduling environment 24×7 is still a good use of resources in the workplace.  I argue it is not, and that modern workload automation tools (such as BMC Software’s Control-M) can help you streamline your workload automation and reduce the need for people to be watching anything 24×7.

You can read the entire thread over on the Enterprise Job Scheduling & Workload Automation group on LinkedIn.  Below I’ve included one of my posts where I talk about my thoughts on the subject matter.

A few things…

[…]

"Watching the jobs": First, nobody at our company watches the jobs. The Enterprise Manager (we use Control-M) is never running 24×7 on anyone’s desktop. I tell people from day 1 that the Enterprise Manager is strictly a "novelty tool to give you pretty pictures". All jobs should be setup to handle known errors correctly, and to escalate and use other tools to notify for unknown errors. We are strictly lights out. Right now we are on Christmas holiday and nobody is "watching" anything in our scheduling environment. It’s all handling itself and if something should go wrong then the tools will take over to notify us and help us handle it appropriately.

I’m not a manager – I’m down in the trenches with the rest of you. However, there is a reason these tools are no longer called "Batch Scheduling" and are now called "Workload Automation". The idea of anyone watching anything is so 1979 it isn’t funny. If you aren’t automating failures and error recovery then you aren’t using the tool correctly. Three years ago I set out on an effort to massively overhaul our environment to automate everything that required manual intervention. Today, we all go home at 5pm and don’t worry about it.

As others have pointed out, no you don’t need the full GUI on your mobile device. However, you need to be able to interact with your jobs no matter where you are when things go wrong. I have absolutely no need to see my entire environment — but when a job errors and automation cannot recover from it I need a menu of options presented to me. For example, today I get an Alarmpoint notification and I can (from my phone):
* Force the JOB OK
* Bypass the job
* Rerun the job
* View SYSOUT (sends it to me via email)

I can do this no matter where I am on whatever device I am using. Those 4 commands let me do most of the diagnosis I need to do. It doesn’t solve everything, but it’s been at least 8 months now since I’ve had to wake up in the middle of the night and take care of anything. Compare and contrast that to three years ago when I was lucky to make it through a night without being woke up.

It’s all about how you use the tools – and companies nowadays are looking to take a lot of this stuff to the next level and are investing money to gain efficiencies. If you still have a staff that "watches" 24/7 that is not a job I would want to be in because I can almost guarantee you that those jobs won’t be around in 5 years time.

[…]

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Computer Measurement Group 2010 Conference – Here We Go!

Dec 5

Posted by Robert Stinnett in CMG, Tech Stuff | No Comments

Greetings from Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL!  I’m here for the 2010 Computer Measurement Group (CMG) conference which takes place this week.  It’s the conference for geeks, like me, who are interested in computer performance, workload metrics and where technologies such as VMWare and Cloud Computing are discussed and examined to figure out how they will impact business computing in terms of performance and capacity.

My agenda is full for the week, and there are a lot of sessions I’d like to attend.  The fun starts off tomorrow morning with morning workshops.  I’m going to be attending one talking about how to kick-start capacity planning efforts in the workplace.  I’m eager to find out how others have done it and how we can use it at CARFAX to continue to deliver better performance at a low cost so we can continue delivering the best vehicle history information possible to consumers and dealers so people can make a smart used vehicle purchase.

During the week I will be posting information from the conference here Photo-0007at on my homepage, and also on Twitter.  If you are a Twitter tweeter feel free to follow me at @robertstinnett to get near-real-time updates from various sessions.  If you can’t be at CMG this year it will be the next best thing – or at least just enough to justify you attending next year!

Of course it’s not all just geek talk here at the conference.  Gaylord Palms is a huge resort complex and tonight they had a terrific live Christmas concert going on.  This wasn’t some run of the mill concert, these guys rocked!  They have the place decorated beautifully for Christmas.  I feel more in the Christmas mood here in Florida than back home in frigid Missouri!  You can’t help but get in the festive mood with all the wonderful sights around this place.  Very cool!

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Instant Messaging is so 2000 and Late

May 7

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Tech Stuff | No Comments

While doing some work here at home tonight I realized something – for corporate communications in our workplace, I love instant messaging.  It helps us keep connected even though we have offices and employees scattered across the US.  With just a quick “ping” I can engage in a conversation with one of my colleagues in Virginia, or with a click of the mouse I can share my desktop and hold a virtual conference with folks working in the field, at home, wherever!

I then realized that as much as I love IM in the workplace, here at home I haven’t used IM actively in probably three or four years now.  For social connections its a “dead” technology to me.  Who wants to have to run a myriad of instant messenger clients because friends are scattered across different IM networks – that is, if they even have an IM account to begin with.  Not to mention it seems like its no longer real-time communications.  If I wanted to IM someone socially I’d have to catch them when they were logged in, and then hope we had the same version of the software running so we could share a file or send a picture.  What a hassle.

Besides, who needs IM at home when you have things like Twitter or Facebook?  I don’t have to worry about what “version” of Facebook you are using, or if you are logged into Twitter.  It’s an always-on, connect any way you like, wherever you like technology.  You aren’t there?  Fine – you’ll get my message later.  It’s a pull technology as well – Twitter, for example, let’s you follow me but you don’t have to get an annoying pop-up every time I send out a message.  IM on the other had was a push technology.  If I wanted to talk with you I had to push a message to you (and only you).  Talk about social isolation – one to one conversations that were intrusive and hard to manage on the go.

Perhaps I’m getting “old”.  I remember when instant messaging was the revolutionary app. Logging into AOL to “chat” with my friends or downloading the latest beta build of ICQ to keep in touch with other Internet nerds like me.  Then again, maybe I’m not getting old and it’s the technology that is changing.  For every need there is a technological solution it seems, and for keeping up with friends nowadays IM isn’t it.  For keeping up with co-workers IM fits the bill just fine.

That is, until the next technological revolution begins…

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Virtually Yours

Feb 19

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Tech Stuff | 2 Comments

I’ve been under the weather since Monday, so I haven’t had a chance to hit the gym for the past 3 days.  I learned long ago when you are sick that you don’t want to try and push yourself too hard.  Sometimes rest and relaxation are the best things you can do for yourself.  Besides, who wants to be coughing and hacking while trying to run on a treadmill or lift weights?  Ew!

 

image This week I had a training class for BMC’s Proactivenet software.  Had this been a traditional on-site class there would have been absolutely no way I could have made it.  I just did not feel up to going out in the cold weather, and I surely was in no shape to be traveling!  Lucky for me this was my first online “virtual” class through BMC.  I had my reservations before the class started about how good it was going to be, however once I came down with this nasty cold and logged into the class on Monday I was pleasantly surprised.  The class was excellent – and since it was online I didn’t have to worry about traveling or spreading my germs to anyone else.  Everything I needed was at my fingertips!  A headset and a high-speed internet connection was all that was required. 

As the class wrapped up on Friday it occurred to me that what happened during the week was more than just training.  It was getting work done no matter where I was at.  Technology has come so far and yet so many of us are still scared to death to use it.  Sure, we carry around our iPods and Blackberries and all sorts of gadgets – but we still think that in order to get training we need to be in a classroom; in order to meet we need to be in a conference room; in order to work we need to be sitting at a desk. 

Luckily companies far and wide are starting to see that technology use (not just implementation) is going to be a big productivity and cost-saving factor in the future.  Why in the world would anyone spend money on flights, hotels and rental cars when you could achieve the same thing with a WebEx session and a high-speed connection?  It just doesn’t make sense.

I’ve learned a lot about Proactivenet this week, but I also learned a lot about using technology instead of just “having technology”.  When you use it the right way it can really make a world of difference – not only to you, but to your organization as well.

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Why Do You Need My Address and Phone Number?

Jul 18

Posted by Robert Stinnett in Customer Service, Tech Stuff | 2 Comments

So I got yet another e-mail from another company, this time Elance.com, informing me that my personal data had been “breached”.  Breached is the new term companies are using for stolen, swiped, copied and leaked out.  Breached is somehow supposed to soften the blow and make me feel like it was a covert operation by a spy organization from the former USSR and that I shouldn’t fear because the Man from U.N.C.L.E. is on top of it.

Please.

Lately it seems like every time I turn around its my bank, or a credit card company or some online retailer or site sending me an “Ooops, sorry” letter.  There was a time when this happened they at least offered to buy you a subscription to a monitoring service – but you don’t see that much nowadays, I guess they figured that it happens so often now that its just standard procedure to notify you and then ask for forgiveness.  “We really, really promise to try harder next time!”  Next time what?  Next time you put my private data up for grabs?

Please.

It’s time that websites stop collecting personal data.  Period.  After all, most websites (I’d argue well over 95% of them) have no need for personally identifiable information.  I shouldn’t have to share with you my home address and telephone number just to be able to browse your website.  In fact, for most websites out there all the information they need is a way to identify me (a username) and a password to make sure its me.  That’s it.  They don’t need my zip code, my birthday – nada.

To be fair, some websites have already seen the light and are heading in this direction.  Sears Holding Corporation, parent of Sears and Kmart stores, recently made it so you can login to their customer service sites using a plethora of identification services such as OpenID and Facebook.  Even blogs are starting to get in the act and allowing you to “authenticate” with your Twitter or Facebook id to post a comment.

Of course, that’s not to say we should automatically trust Facebook, Twitter or even OpenID with our personal information.  However, I’d rather take my chances with a small number of companies that adhere to strict data privacy guidelines than giving it to every Joe Six Pack on the Internet who starts his own blog.  We can hold companies who setup guidelines accountable when they misuse our data or abuse our trust a lot easier than we can anonymous strangers behind a website.

If anything it encourages more interaction because we don’t have to interrupt our train of thought to create yet another account we’ll forget about or have to write down somewhere and keep track of.  Ever since some blogging platforms started allowing me to authenticate using Twitter and Facebook I’ve noticed I’m more willing to jump in and participate instead of thinking about participating and then opting not to because “I have to create an account first <Groan>”.

It’s time we stopped giving out our personal data to websites and start asking questions about why they want it to begin with.  Heck, I won’t even give out my phone number to people anymore, instead I give my Google Voice number to folks – even my friends.  Heck, I’ll even give that out to you – complete Internet stranger – just look to the right of my blog for the link!  I trust Google to keep my real phone number private (perhaps I’m being a bit too trusting?)

The past 16 years on the web has been the wild, wild west – but there is a new sheriff in town, and a whole lot of townsfolk who have had it with privacy “breaches”.

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