There are a few small details I’d love to resolve though in my new system:

• There’s no way in iCal to NOT send a response when replying to a request.  Outlook gives you the option for staying semi-stealth if you like.
• Mail seems to add colored backgrounds to text pasted in from certain sites … something I do rather frequently and there’s no obvious way to remove this formatting.  In Outlook, I could just change the background color to white and it would go away.
• Some structured formats are a bit strange … Today I pasted in a bullet list from Word and it wrapped way left which made it a bit of a challenge to read.  I chose to compose this particular note back in Outlook so it would send properly as it was a client email.

Aside from these somewhat minor issues, I’m likely to stay with the new combo vs Outlook.    I’d still welcome solutions if anyone has thoughts …

This ad from Sprint really bothers me.  It’s not the completely smug attitude from the boss – I like the cheeky style.  What’s bothersome is the complete miss by Sprint on who’s paying the bill.  While it’s certainly possible that the bring your own device user base is growing, I can’t imagine that an international business would expect employees to carry their own weight for for data intensive things like video conferencing.  Who’d want to work like that?  Maybe Sprint’s business accounts are limited … 

Instead of simply doing a backup and restore to get everything on the new device, I’m going to take a more considered approach and only put the things I really need for now. There’s plenty to go back and get if I want from two years worth of apps – not too mention all the content I’ve also collected.

Remembering back to the original days with my iPad, it was amazing how quickly I started leaving my laptop at my desk and even at the office. I’m not sure that’s completely possible today thanks to VPN requirements, but I definitely see a strong return of the iPad in my campus and client meetings. LTE should also be killer on my commute … I’ve got two hours a day to burn through on the train and the mega speed boost and enhanced screen for reading are what I’m most looking forward to taking advantage of every day.

Here’s a quick recap of my first day in town …

Farmer's Market Breakfast @ The Four Seasons

Mandatory visit to Mellow Johnny's

Shrimp Po Boy @ Perla's

The Sampler @ Iron Works BBQ

Outside of search the social methods including those around the core property are really pretty passively being applied. The +1 button is the lamest offender in this approach. Before Google Reader dropped Share in favor of +1, I used to be able to easy share my read items anywhere I wanted thanks to the feed of my shares being made available. These shares would post to Twitter automatically and drove a fairly decent amount of engagement for me over the years. Since moving to the +1, I have two options and they aren’t the same across mobile and desktop web experiences. On the desktop, I can share from Reader using the same keyboard shortcut (Shift+S) or choose to +1 something which prompts for a share onto G+ and via a circle of my choice. On mobile, where I do a fairly intense amount of consumption thanks to an extended commute I can only +1 something and this is where things really, well suck. The +1 via mobile serves solely as a limited bookmark and saves content links onto my Google+ profile on the +1 tab. This mobile +1 limitation applies to any item on Reader or on a publisher site. There simply is no real way to share into Google+ directly from a mobile experience. On Android, you can use intents to open the share prompt and drop things into Google+, but the limitations again are quickly revealed. Unlike many other services, the Google+ mobile application (on iphone or Android) is incapable of traversing the link to provide any sense of context to what’s being shared. This means your post is just a lame mess. I can’t imagine the goal here is to have us save things in lists via +1. When was the last time anyone visited this tab for a contact let alone themselves? It’s an island of content — the least social you can be. There is no feed available for these items and no way to share them through any additional channels which frankly ends up being pretty de-motivating.

Another red headed step child of the Google social experience is Latitude. This has also remained something of a disconnected island within the ecosystem and I question why we should choose to use it. Google recently added the notion of points and a leader-board to check-ins as well as a proactive prompt to remind us to use it (on Android), but it’s hard to see why you would. The leader-board is for your latitude friends only (a sadly small group of early adopters in my case) and there’s no sense of what the points are used for – at all. There are no badges, no connection to merchant locations for offers. The prompts are even a bit aggressive. It’s also interesting to see that while I can share a check-in quite easily into a Google+ circle, a location appended to a post on G+ does not link back through Latitude. One way?

Right now, Google+ allows neither the syndication of my activity stream (ala Path) nor the ability to aggregate activities from the broader web (or even the Google system) like Facebook. As much as I want to use Google+ and enjoy the general engagement there, I find there’s an incredible amount of friction to use it. Social should not be hard.

PS – sharing this post into G+ also takes a few steps … sigh.

As someone who works in marketing, I’m a bit torn on removing myself from the selection process in targeted advertising.  That said I was rather stunned to see the sheer number of sites (230!) apparently looking to target against me – according to this helpful Chrome extension.  If interested in going incognito, this might be just the thing for you.

Cablevision has been running floating ads when connected on their metro-fi on top of pages to promote their core services. The problem is that these are seriously annoying to existing customers. Our house is a multi-DVR, broadband, and phone triple-play. Cablevision even has the MAC addresses of 4 mobile devices of ours so we can connect automatically (no captive portal) and yet they can’t suppress this messaging.

It’s impossible for me to even sign up for more service. Cablevision knows this. These ads need to go. Wake up Cablevision!

Strava very smartly filled the hole left by Nike+ for cycling though took it up a notch as well given the upper end athletic focus.  The somewhat recent addition of running makes it ideal for the multi-sport athlete and the social features and data viz make it habit forming.   Just about everyone I ride with uses it and speaks Strava as well.  I recommend the interview and of course the service as well.

Soon after this, I start receiving iMessages from my wife’s phone from Hannah.  We’ve all been playing Temple Run and she’s sharing her score and pretty quickly overtakes my best at the time.

Flash forward to today when I learn about a new music social discovery service called monstro via Scoble.  The gist is that you connect your twitter account and get a suggested stream of tunes based on your collective shares and discussions.  I added a few people to follow based on what I could see they were listening to and then went into my own profile where I saw this:

Imagine my surprise!

These are not guilty pleasure tracks!  I did buy this album for Hannah, but she’s the listener, not me (or my wife).  The crazy thing though is I couldn’t figure out how this was even associated with my account let alone via Twitter.  There’s a good chance Last.FM will pop from a device sync, but I did not overtly connect anything.  After confirming there was nothing in my account settings on monstro, I came back to my profile and noticed the subtle view tweet option which revealed this:

iTunes Ping!  Not something I actively use, though seeing that post I had the instant recall that my twitter account is linked for auto-posting my likes.  Hannah was actively exploring and using the phone (or perhaps my wife’s as the account is shared) and sharing all the things she likes.  She has no idea where this information goes – though I do now and I’m amazed with her self discovery.

When I got home tonight I went to look at the 3GS so I could see about turning Ping off which doesn’t seem too possible, btw.  In the process I noticed a exclamation icon and tapped into messaging where I discovered another pretty cool surprise:

Hannah had tried to send me an MMS!  I think it’s pretty cool that while she doesn’t fully understand the address bar yet, she knew she wanted to add a subject and then a name before sending.  The video is my two year old son, Sam being scared of a spider which is a funny family share captured by Hannah on the phone which is the cherry on top of everything else.