Megen’s been using Google Docs for doing a lot of her work for Medical School.  They aren’t allowed to save to the computers at school so using Google Docs lets her work from any computer and continue working at home.  There were some small issues with formatting but other than that it sounds like it worked really well for her.

The Ben Golub

I now have the number one search for Ben Golub (but not “Ben Golub”).  I used to be the Benjamin Golub but now I’m also the Ben Golub.  This is pretty big news because Plaxo’s CEO is also a Ben Golub.

Another Ben Golub was hired at my company recently and I’ve been getting all of his meeting invites and emails (including one asking me to record my hours in order to get paid; super confusing and scary because I’m on salary).  Lame.

New Toys

I purchased a 50mm 1.8 and a DK-21M today.  This cheap ($115 for the lens and $30 for the eyepiece) combination will open up a whole new realm of photography for me: low light and narrow DOF.  The 50mm will be manual focus only on my D40 but the DK-21M will help by magnifying and brightening the viewfinder.  I’ll write more about these when I get a chance to use them.

The only outstanding issue was that I had to add all of my Google Talk contacts on my Google Apps account.  This could have been much smoother but it looks like most of you have already accepted the invite.  I had to send them out in batches because Google limits the number of chat invites you can send at once.  Not terribly painful but it could have been easier.  I also had to edit my SRV records to that I could use Google Chat outside of the benjamingolub.com and gmail.com domain.

There is a bit of a disconnect because I’ll still be using Google Calendar, Reader, etc with my Gmail account but I can live with it until Google comes up with a solution.

Today I fixed that issue.  RSSmeme language filters now work for every language.  Here is the Chinese homepage:

http://www.rssmeme.com/?language=zh

Spanish:

http://www.rssmeme.com/?language=es

Persian:

http://www.rssmeme.com/?language=fa

Next on my agenda: add language filters to the RSS feeds.  This will require dumping the Django built in feed framework.  A side effect of this will (hopefully) be an easier to develop API using JSON.

Here’s how it works.  I ask Google the language of each story by sending them the title.  I accept any answer from Google (even if the reliability is very low).  By default RSSmeme does absolutely no language filtering but if you tack on a language parameter like so:

http://www.rssmeme.com/?language=de

RSSmeme will do it’s magic and only give you stories in that language.  This doesn’t work for RSS feeds (yet).  I haven’t come up with a great UI for this so for now you’ll have to tack the parameter onto the URL yourself.

It is far from perfect but I always believe in releasing early and releasing often.  It doesn’t even work for the language of the country that visits RSSmeme the most (China).  Python and unicode aren’t exactly best friends and I haven’t worked out all of the kinks yet.

Spread the word!  Any feedback (especially UI ideas) would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: The UI is done, what do you think?

Some heavy hitters make the list including FriendFeed, Mashable, Lifehacker, Perez Hilton, kwiry, GitHub, Twitter, Disqus, USTREAM.TV, LibraryThing, Techmeme, Hulu, Common Craft, tipjoy, TwitPic, deviantART, Weebly, Coding Horror, and I Can Has Cheezburger.

Also some well known bloggers like Mathew Ingram, Bwana, Chris Brogan, VentureBeat, Paris Lemon, Internet Duct Tape, Loic Le Meur, Jason Calacanis, Simon Wilson, and myself are using Google Apps.

It’s good enough for them; is it good enough for you?

Yes I did go through this 2058 line file to find the popular sites above.

Domain Name

It all starts with a domain name; mine is benjamingolub.com.  For around $10 per year you can purchase your own domain name.  You don’t need to buy hosting (expensive); just a domain name will do.  I stress that you choose something professional for your domain and definitely go with a .com.  You cannot do better than firstnamelastname.com.  Some people might scoff at the idea of being so public with your real name but trust me: your name is already all over the internet.  By purchasing a domain containing your real name you are controlling your online identity. Domains are purchased from a registrar like Go Daddy or DreamHost; any registrar will do but it’s best to choose a well known company that gives you full control over DNS (which is how you will later point your domain to various services).  Again, you do not need to buy hosting which is going to be at least $10 per month; you only need the domain.

Blog

Now that you’ve got a domain name (we’ll use firstnamelastname.com for our examples) it’s time to do something with it.  By far the best way to own your online identity is to start a blog.  Without paying for expensive hosting you have a few options here.

You can use WordPress (which powers this blog) for $10 per year or you can use Blogger for free.  Both have their pros and cons.  Wordpress blogs tend to make commenting easier (but there are solutions like Disqus that make Blogger better) but Blogger lets you upload your own templates.  I lean heavily towards Blogger just because it’s free and simple.  Sign up for Blogger and follow the custom domain instructions and you’ll quickly have a blog up and running at firstnamelastname.com. Start blogging and pretty soon you’re likely to become the top search result for your name.  Now you are controlling what visitors learn about you based on what you write about.

Mail

The next step is to get mail working for your domain.  This is a very important and often overlooked step towards owning your professional online identity.  It looks much nicer when you are emailing potential employees from firstname@firstnamelastname.com instead of firstname.lastname@gmail.com.

This used to be the most difficult part of the process; requiring hosting and complicated setups.  But now Google Apps makes it drop dead simple and free. Google Apps will take care of all of your email and let you use the outstanding Gmail web interface but with your own domain instead of @gmail.com.  You can make 100 accounts for free (each with over 6GB) but you’re likely to only need one (with aliases).  I forward all email into my personal Gmail account so I don’t even need to check two accounts.  Google Apps will also let you setup a custom URL to access your email.  Instead of remembering a complicated URL you can simply visit mail.firstnamelastname.com to access your email.  You’ll also get POP3 and IMAP access in case you don’t want to use the Gmail web interface.  Google Apps will take you step by step through the (relatively simple) process of setting up mail for your domain.

Other Services

Now you can go nuts and sign up for other services.  Twitter is another good way to control your online identity.  LinkedIn is great for your professional contacts.  Whatever you end up using make sure you are public about it (try to use the same real name for all of your accounts) and attempt to tie it all back into your blog so there is one central location under your control that defines your online identity.  You’re now well on your own to owning your online identity.

For those of you who do not know about App Engine it is a way to run web applications on Google’s infrastructure.  It throws a lot of ready made stuff at you including a web framework and a method of using Google accounts within your application.  But the real draw is you get to use Google’s Bigtable through the Datastore API.  Anyone building a web application knows that more often than not the database (and memory) is the limiting factor.  With App Engine (assuming your queries are relatively simple) that is no longer an issue.

So I ignored everything other than the Datastore API and set to work porting FriendFeed Stats over to App Engine.  FriendFeed Stats was already written in Python (specifically Django) so it was the simple matter of converting the models (StringProperty instead of CharField, IntegerProperty instead of IntegerField, DateTimeProperty instead of DateTimeField…you get the idea) and the queries (Service.all().order('name') instead of Service.objects.order_by('name') and queryset.filter('ffuser =', ffuser) instead of queryset.filter(ffuser = ffuser)…very simple) to use the Datastore API instead of the Django ORM.  This only took a few minutes really.  If you understand any ORM you should have no trouble with this.

Next I had to play with the FriendFeed API because it uses urllib2 and sockets.  Sockets are a no-no on App Engine.  Instead you use Google’s URL Fetch API.  This took a little longer to debug and still isn’t perfect yet.  I haven’t gotten POSTs working but I haven’t really tried because FriendFeed Stats doesn’t POST anything to the FriendFeed API.

And that is all it took to get FriendFeed Stats ported over to App Engine.  To get the proper indexes I just ran the dev_appserver and clicked around which will auto generate an index.yaml file for you.  To get around the fact that I don’t have cron anymore I switched to updating by accessing a “hidden” url.  My server uses curl and cron to hit that url which causes App Engine to use the FriendFeed API and update the site; convoluted but effective.

I think Google has a real winner here.  My only complaint so far is that count queries are limited to returning 1000.  I understand that other queries need to be limited to returning 1000 rows (this is a free service after all) but limiting count seems kind of silly and makes FriendFeed Stats global pages just about wortheless.  Any query that should have resulted in well over 1000 (like the Twitter service) is returning 1001 right now; I’ve submitted a report and hope that this is fixed.

Communication

Google Apps would be my primary form of communication for sure.  It provides a robust mail solution with support for webmail, POP3, and IMAP.  Plus, it’s free (or only $50/user/year)!  I have no problem with hosting my mail on Google’s servers, especially because of POP3/IMAP support.  I wouldn’t put any rules as to what interface my employees could use; if they like webmail they should be able to use it because I know I would!

Chat might not seem important to some people but I think it is crucial.  It sucks to be interrupted while programming; you lose your train of thought and need to spend another 10 minutes to get back in the groove.  Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to send a one line question via email but chat solves this; I can answer your question at my leisure.  At work we use an IRC server; which is great for technical users but not ideal for anyone else.  If I were to start my own company we would use both an IRC server and Google Chat.  I have not looked into Campfire yet but it might be a contender too.

I don’t think phone lines are a necessity.  I’d certainly have a few around the building but for the most part I think it would be smarter to just provide employees with cell phones.  Nothing fancy; I don’t think Blackberries are a requirement.

Organization

Google Calendar might be a little simplistic for a large company (although I’m sure Google uses it just fine) but it would work fine for my needs.  Not to mention it has a great API that would make it easy to add in fancy features like resource allocation (projectors/conference rooms/etc).

Basecamp would power things on the project management side.  I’ve tinkered with it and think it would be excellent for use in small company.  I’ve only heard of one downtime from 37signals; not a bad track record. It provides some necessary features like milestones, file sharing, to-do lists, and time tracking (yuck).

Depending on the company we might need a product like Highrise to keep track of clients.  It just makes sense to use Highrise if you’re using Basecamp.  I haven’t really looked into it too much but it looks like it could be useful.

Is there a reason to use Backpack if you are already using Basecamp + Google Calendar?  I’m not sure if it adds anything other than more confusion to the mix so for now I’m saying no to Backpack.

Servers

Ah, the fun part.  Since it’s my company of course it is going to be some sort of web service.  Before Elastic IPs I would have said we’d most likely have our own data center or collocate.  Now I’m going to lean towards using Amazon EC2 for our servers; at least in the beginning when money is tight.  Amazon EC2 gives you a very powerful machine for only $72/month (assuming you want it up 24/7) and allows you to scale as necessary by just adding more servers on the fly.  Amazon S3 would definitely provide storage; the cost is very reasonable.  Can you tell I like Amazon?

Employee Computers

This is one area where I would definitely splurge.  Employee’s would be given an option between PC or Mac laptops.  Whichever PC I went with would need to use reasonably well Linux supported hardware because I’d certainly allow them to install any operating system they want.  If you work twice as fast in Linux then I want you working in Linux!  If you need OSX to save 30 minutes a day doing some task then I’ll get you a Mac!  The benefit to using all of these “cloud” services is that it doesn’t matter what computer you use to access them.  No being tied down to Exchange and PCs for me.

In addition to the laptops everyone would get whatever keyboard/mouse they want and a decent sized LCD.  Providing a laptop to employees gives them options to work extra hours from home if they feel an itch.  Laptops are just as fast as desktops these days so when you throw on a nice keyboard/mouse and large LCD you can’t tell the difference.

Office Space

If possible I’d avoid having cubicles and closed doors.  When I worked at Hyland Software nearly everyone worked out in the open in large “pods” with very low (~3 foot) walls and it was great.  People higher up on the totem pole had their own offices but every office had glass walls so they could not hide; it was great.

I’d try to provide as many services as possible to keep employees in the office.  At first this would probably only mean providing lunch and free drinks/coffee.  Back at Hyland Software we had a cafeteria and even though it wasn’t free it definitely kept me in the building.  Not having to drive for lunch saves at least 10 minutes a day.  Later on I’d try to add more services like haircuts, dry cleaning, and child care.  Happy employees work harder.

HR and Payroll

I have absolutely no clue what people use to manage HR if they don’t have their own HR team.  Can someone help me out here?

Conclusion

Can you tell I have a lot of faith in the cloud?  Maybe I’m being naive but I think it would be a huge time and cost saver to not have to deal with the issues that arise from building your own solution to already solved problems.  There are so many benifits and very few cons.  Do you agree with my decisions?  Did I forget something?  Let me know!