I’m usually on the lookout for new shiny objects. New ways of doing things that turn out to be better than the old way. A post on ReadWriteWeb demonstrates why Google’s online word processor and spreadsheets aren’t as good as Microsoft’s stuff. Richard MacManus said it brought about one of the funniest quotes on a blog comment ever: “Google docs is chock full of FAIL.” I can see where Karim, the guy who made that comment, is coming from.

On the other hand, I’m moving my stuff online increasingly. Why? First of all I have several computers. Second of all I erase their drives frequently and installing stuff just is a pain in the behind. Heck, just finding the DVDs for installing is a pain (I’m not that organized).

Also, I need to work with people all over the world now. Some of my editors are in New York. Others are in San Francisco. Rocky is an hour away in Pacifica. Shel is an hour the other way.

So, sending more docs and spreadsheets via email is just not going to do. Yeah, I know that Microsoft has online collaborative stuff, but it requires installing Office and pretty much having Windows (half my computers are Macs, which makes going back and forth even tougher).

Is Google’s stuff chock full of FAIL? Absolutely! Hope they are listening to Karim, cause if Google made all that stuff better it’d certainly be a shiny object worthy of our attention.

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Astute watchers of Scoble’s temple of ego (cute site, by the way, that one of my readers built — it shows everything I do including Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, and other sites) know that I’ve been goofing off. I haven’t been reading feeds much since early January. Been traveling and hanging out in Switzerland eating too much cheese.

But now we are coming back and the real work begins. On Wednesday Rocky and me are going to Seattle to visit some companies up there for our FastCompany.tv opening on March 3. Next week? Beverly Hills to visit MySpace. And, yeah, I’ll start reading feeds again, among other things. Anyway, today we’re traveling back to the states and will be back online late Monday, Pacific Time.

Got any questions to ask MySpace next week?

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I love Dopplr, because it shows me when my friends are in the same city I am. Anyway, Rocky and I are about to drive down to Beverly Hills to see Mahalo and MySpace. Of course, if you were on Dopplr you’d already know that.

Oh, and I’m now using Google Calendar to keep track of our plans. If you want to get onto our calendar, this is a good place to look for open time.

By the way, I love Plaxo. It keeps my calendar all synched up between five machines here. It also saved my life when PodTech closed my account. If I hadn’t used Plaxo my calendar would have disappeared. But thanks to Plaxo it was all backed up.

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Google Updates Android SDK
InformationWeek, NY - Feb 14, 2008
The latest version of Google’s Android SDK updates the platform’s application programming interfaces and developer tools. By Antone Gonsalves Google on …