Files: File sync seems to be the most mature component of Owncloud. Given that it is sort of the core of the application, that makes sync. If File sync is your primary need, Owncloud might be a solution for you. There are sync clients for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Music: My shared web host limits file uploads to 2 MB each, making the music feature sort of worthless for me. That obviously isn’t Owncloud’s fault.

Photo: It does securely share photos, but it is a very basic app. You can’t even rotate a photo, no captions, etc. Coppermine, which I already use, is much more fully featured.

Calendar: There is no ability to subscribe to other calendars outside of your own Owncloud instance. I can’t pull in my work calendar, the FredLug calendar, the Purdue football schedule, or anything else that I might want to see on my calendar.

Contacts: it seems to work just fine.

It just doesn’t do enough to be useful to me. I’ll keep trying every time there is a major release. If the calendar would talk to other online calendars that would be enough for me to stick with it just for calendaring.

Files: File sync seems to be the most mature component of Owncloud. Given that it is sort of the core of the application, that makes sync. If File sync is your primary need, Owncloud might be a solution for you. There are sync clients for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Music: My shared web host limits file uploads to 2 MB each, making the music feature sort of worthless for me. That obviously isn’t Owncloud’s fault.

Photo: It does securely share photos, but it is a very basic app. You can’t even rotate a photo, no captions, etc. Coppermine, which I already use, is much more fully featured.

Calendar: There is no ability to subscribe to other calendars outside of your own Owncloud instance. I can’t pull in my work calendar, the FredLug calendar, the Purdue football schedule, or anything else that I might want to see on my calendar.

Contacts: it seems to work just fine.

It just doesn’t do enough to be useful to me. I’ll keep trying every time there is a major release. If the calendar would talk to other online calendars that would be enough for me to stick with it just for calendaring.

The Internet was buzzing yesterday with the news that Google is shutting down Reader on July 1. I predicted this last year. That does not make me particularly smart. When they killed Adsense for RSS Feeds it was obvious. Also, the Reader blog had not been updated in 2 years. Reader had been on life support for a while.

Because I was expecting it, and had already failed once at transitioning away from Google, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS this AM and had it running here on ODonnellWeb in under an hour. It’s not as pretty at GReader, but it works. After one day, I think it’s good enough for me.

For email, I had already tagged PolarisMail as a worthy replacement for Gmail. Today I paid for an account and started setting up my email there. I’m not really happy with any of the 5 webmail options they have, so I’m back on Thunderbird, which is fine. I like Thunderbird, and I have the calender syncing with the open source Horde calendar, so I dropped Google Calendar too. If they will enable HTML email support in Horde I think it will work just fine for me. I’ll have to ask about that.

Hopefully, the 1000 lb. gorilla of the RSS reader world getting out of the market will spark a bunch of innovate and cool RSS related projects. There is definitely opportunity there.

The Internet was buzzing yesterday with the news that Google is shutting down Reader on July 1. I predicted this last year. That does not make me particularly smart. When they killed Adsense for RSS Feeds it was obvious. Also, the Reader blog had not been updated in 2 years. Reader had been on life support for a while.

Because I was expecting it, and had already failed once and transitioning away from Google, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS this AM and had it running here on ODonnellWeb in under an hour. It’s not as pretty at GReader, but it works. After one day, I think it’s good enough for me.

For email, I had already tagged PolarisMail as a worthy replacement for Gmail. Today I paid for an account and started setting up my email there. I’m not really happy with any of the 5 webmail options they have, so I’m back on Thunderbird, which is fine. I like Thunderbird, and I have the calender syncing with the open source Horde calendar, so I dropped Google Calendar too. If they will enable HTML email support in Horde I think it will work just fine for me. I’ll have to ask about that.

Hopefully, the 1000 lb. gorilla of the RSS reader world getting out of the market will spark a bunch of innovate and cool RSS related projects. There is definitely opportunity there.

Every single pair of Google Glasses will have the ability to permanently record (on Google servers of course) everything that the users sees and hears.

Just think about that for a moment.

You are talking to a friend wearing the Glass. Not only are you not sure if he is actually reading Twitter in his glasses while talking to you, he could be recording the entire conversation. Now take it one step further and Google will auto translate and transcribe the conversation in real time. 60 seconds after you walk away from that friend the entire conversation could be transcribed and indexed at Google.

It’s a dream come true for the surveillance state, and they won’t even have to pass any draconian laws to make it happen. We’ll be doing it to ourselves. Even if there are privacy policies in place that prevent users from posting their Google Glass recordings publicly, the government will most certainly still have access to all that data.

Welcome to the future.

Every single pair of Google Glasses will have the ability to permanently record (on Google servers of course) everything that the users sees and hears.

Just think about that for a moment.

You are talking to a friend wearing the Glass. Not only are you not sure if he is actually reading Twitter in his glasses while talking to you, he could be recording the entire conversation. Now take it one step further and Google will auto translate and transcribe the conversation in real time. 60 seconds after you walk away from that friend the entire conversation could be transcribed and indexed at Google.

It’s a dream come true for the surveillance state, and they won’t even have to pass any draconian laws to make it happen. We’ll be doing it to ourselves. Even if there are privacy policies in place that prevent users from posting their Google Glass recordings publicly, the government will most certainly still have access to all that data.

Welcome to the future.

Seriously, I do think businesses are going to start to realize that neglecting their blogs in favor of Facebook was a mistake. Produce interesting content on your blog, where you maintain control and ownership, and use Facebook, Twitter, etc. to drive traffic back to the blog. That is the recipe for using the Internet to strengthen relationships with your customers and prospects.

Seriously, I do think businesses are going to start to realize that neglecting their blogs in favor of Facebook was a mistake. Produce interesting content on your blog, where you maintain control and ownership, and use Facebook, Twitter, etc. to drive traffic back to the blog. That is the recipe for using the Internet to strengthen relationships with your customers and prospects.

WashingtonPost.com has a decent job section. Careerbuilder is ok, but they are getting a lot of their jobs from The Post anyway. Indeed.com purports to be a meta search engine, but it seems to miss a lot. Running the exact same search on Indeed.com and Careerbuilder.com don’t give the same results, even though Indeed is allegedly crawling Careerbuilder. LinkedIn probably has the most consistent quality of jobs, but the quantity is lacking as it costs $150 to post a job and a lot of companies don’t want to pay that. I’ve heard Craigslist is good, but in the DC area it is mostly useless. It’s all “business opportunities” and low end jobs, very few professional level jobs are listed there. These guys are trying to invert the model to eliminate recruiter spam. But that is really only a problem for developers right now. My friend Mike tried that a few years ago too. He may have suffered from bad timing as the market was totally crashing when he tried it. But I’m not convinced that really solves the problem anyway. Recruiter spam is not a problem for most people. Job discovery is the problem that needs to be fixed.

Why do corporations even need to pay to put jobs on LinkedIn or Careerbuilder or Monster? Most of the companies are putting the jobs on their own web sites anyway. It seems like a syndication or notification service for the career section of the corporate web sites would work better. Instead of 250 different niche job sites, all with unique logins and mostly lousy user interfaces, we need a simple way to identify and describe job info. I believe that is what XML does. Then the companies simply push out the new job opening to Google or whoever and anybody that is looking for a job only needs to go to one place to find all the jobs in their town, or field, or all the jobs in their field in their town. There would still be plenty of opportunity for niche job sites to act as trusted filters, pulling out the best sales jobs in DC, or the best python jobs in Silicon Valley, or whatever. But the user would also have the option of going straight to the syndication engine and doing their own filtering.

The model for online job search is inverted. Instead of me going out looking for jobs at 12 different job sites, I should be able to tell Google (or whoever) what I want and the jobs should come to me as they are posted. And corporations shouldn’t need to deal with 12 different job sites to find candidates either. The current model is optimized for the people making money on job search. It is virtually unusable for job seekers and employers. Somebody should change that.

WashingtonPost.com has a decent job section. Careerbuilder is ok, but they are getting a lot of their jobs from The Post anyway. Indeed.com purports to be a meta search engine, but it seems to miss a lot. Running the exact same search on Indeed.com and Careerbuilder.com don’t give the same results, even though Indeed is allegedly crawling Careerbuilder. LinkedIn probably has the most consistent quality of jobs, but the quantity is lacking as it costs $150 to post a job and a lot of companies don’t want to pay that. I’ve heard Craigslist is good, but in the DC area it is mostly useless. It’s all “business opportunities” and low end jobs, very few professional level jobs are listed there. These guys are trying to invert the model to eliminate recruiter spam. But that is really only a problem for developers right now. My friend Mike tried that a few years ago too. He may have suffered from bad timing as the market was totally crashing when he tried it. But I’m not convinced that really solves the problem anyway. Recruiter spam is not a problem for most people. Job discovery is the problem that needs to be fixed.

Why do corporations even need to pay to put jobs on LinkedIn or Careerbuilder or Monster? Most of the companies are putting the jobs on their own web sites anyway. It seems like a syndication or notification service for the career section of the corporate web sites would work better. Instead of 250 different niche job sites, all with unique logins and mostly lousy user interfaces, we need a simple way to identify and describe job info. I believe that is what XML does. Then the companies simply push out the new job opening to Google or whoever and anybody that is looking for a job only needs to go to one place to find all the jobs in their town, or field, or all the jobs in their field in their town. There would still be plenty of opportunity for niche job sites to act as trusted filters, pulling out the best sales jobs in DC, or the best python jobs in Silicon Valley, or whatever. But the user would also have the option of going straight to the syndication engine and doing their own filtering.

The model for online job search is inverted. Instead of me going out looking for jobs at 12 different job sites, I should be able to tell Google (or whoever) what I want and the jobs should come to me as they are posted. And corporations shouldn’t need to deal with 12 different job sites to find candidates either. The current model is optimized for the people making money on job search. It is virtually unusable for job seekers and employers. Somebody should change that.