With news that Office Live Workspace — or what we might as well label Microsoft Docs — is now available, I gave it a quick try this morning. Via Microsoft Press Release:

People can sign up for free at http://workspace.officelive.com and will be granted immediate access to the service. Microsoft is also unveiling a number of new Office Live Workspace features, such as an activity panel, notifications, direct links and multifile upload.

The three pane window UI with the middle being the document section is familiar:

I like the simplified layout better than Office Word with the new ribbon but there is one big problem in Firefox that Microsoft needs to fix: you can’t type anything in the note section in Firefox.

This requires loading Internet Explorer to be able to type the body of notes. I’m not going to change my browser of choice to use this instead of Google Docs. Yeah, it’s beta and I’m sure they’ll fix this in good time but it would be nice to see Microsoft release (even in beta) a web app which has major functionality like this working in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer, not only the obvious latter. Silverlight?

Bonus points for allowing to create documents in Office applications offline and save them to the Office Live Workspace with this Office Live Add-in. You can learn more about how to use the Office Live Add-in with the tip that Vista users should install the Office Live Workspace Update for Windows Vista for best performance. Reboot required for that last one.

Curious what others think? (will update)
Michael Arrington isn’t impressed: "It’s a half way approach that still requires the installation of Office and other software on local machines."
Leo Blanco loves the competition: "What I love about all these price wars and cutthroat competition is it pushes companies to enhance consumer experience through low prices or better customer service."
David Chartier at ARS Technica: "Office Live Workspace is a well-rounded tool that removes a lot of the complicated and expensive overhead of collaboration."

Shot across the bow of Google or fart in the wind?
If you don’t own or use Office — and keep in mind that a lot of people, particularly business, do — there isn’t much to see here yet. However, for those who work in and around Office it’s nice to see Microsoft make this available. We have one Office suite for our online business while in our offline business we’re using OpenOffice. Will this make me go out and buy another Office license? Not yet. You?

For some reason the folks at twitter.com removed the hyperlinks on @names from the message stream (Update 1:30am PST: It’s a bug, says one of the developers that they are working on fixing). These hyperlinks were useful because they led directly to the profile of the person being spoken to/about.

Those who use third party Twitter clients might not have noticed, but I’ve seen several friends mention missing this feature and wondering when or if it would be added back. When the names aren’t hyperlinked, it makes it an extra step or two to get to the person’s Twitter page. Here’s what a message page looks like without the names hyperlinked:

Today, I took some time out and created a tiny little Firefox extension called Twitter Link (TL) which will add those links back. After installing TL here’s the same page with the missing hyperlink back:

This would have been ideally suited for a Greasemonkey script, but I decided to make it standalone for those who don’t use Greasemonkey. Twitter Link v0.1 adds the text “TL” to the status bar so you know it’s enabled. I’ll probably remove that in the next version though. TL will ignore email links and it only works on twitter.com at this time. I thought about leaving it open to work on any site with @name since it ignores linking email@address.com, but could easily enable that in TL v0.2 or later if others wanted it.

What happens when twitter.com adds back the hyperlinks? Just disable or uninstall the plugin from the TOOLS->Add-ons menu. Feel free to leave any comments/feedback about the plugin below.

Just wanted to take this moment to thank StumbleUpon (SU) for helping me to discover thousands of hmm-inspiring pages. I doubt many readers haven’t at least tried SU and I’ve found a good amount of material to write about here using the service.

Whether or not you like serendipitous surfing, SU helps you explore (possibly) unchartered web waters. That’s a good thing.

Google tried to copy, comes up short
For those using the Google Toolbar, in April of this year they released a similar stumbling-type feature as an add-on button by clicking the dice icon which hasn’t caught on yet. Perhaps because there is more to SU than stumbling sites. You can form and/or participate in groups. I started the Blogs ‘R Us group at SU years ago and it now has over 1,400 members. Conversely with the Google toolbar all you can do is bookmark the page.

One strength of the Google Toolbar over SU is the ability to create your own button add-ons, so it would be possible to add more SU social-type features. Would be nice to see StumbleUpon add some sort of API/plugin structure to their toolbar.

History
Back on January 18, 2004 I joined the site StumbleUpon, then a Canadian startup, today owned by eBay. Unlike Skype which has less synergy with eBay, you’d expect StumbleUpon would have more auction-related functionality. Stumble auctions button at least? Not yet. Also missing is the ability to add Stumble-thru to your own site. Matt created a random posts Wordpress plugin but that’s not related to the page you’re on (there’s a good idea for an improved SU-type Wordpress plugin).

After taking nearly four years to thumbs up 2,500 pages, I’m reflecting on how I’m still using Stumbleupon today. Customer (yes, I sent them a few bones for sponsorship, have you?) longevity is one of the greatest compliments for any product/service. I know a lot of webmasters like SU because they get extra traffic from people stumbling their pages, but the wave of webmasters and bloggers selfishly filling SU with too many subpar blog posts has damaged the quality of the service somewhat over the last year. No offense to bloggers who use SU non-selfishly, but I liked using SU better when it wasn’t used by as many bloggers, when it wasn’t part of eBay.

With that said, the good still outweighs the bad with this service. Thank you again, Stumbleupon.

Update 3:45pm PST: After an hour or so of dice button pushing in the Google toolbar I reached this screen:

That’s right, there’s a limit to the number of dice searches in the Google Toolbar. I’ve reached a wall with keywords in StumbleUpon before, but that’s never happened with the “all” category.

G.ho.st stands for Global Hosted Operating SysTem and is one of the more ambitious computer in a browser window options I’ve checked out to date. Registration and use of G.ho.st is free and comes with 3 GB of space. You’ll need to confirm your email address before being able to login.

G.ho.st looks like a desktop and has similar functionality except one major downside: everything happens in a browser window. While the maximized browser is about as stripped down as one can get, I still feel like I’m working in a box. It just doesn’t feel right to me. What about you?

Other Annoyances include:

- the g.ho.st browser is really a proxy to other websites and thus some sites don’t display properly, including this blog and any other that blocks hotlinking through proxies.
- the URL in the browser window not changing when I clicked on pages which negated the use of copy/paste of the location bar, something I use frequently

Remember FTP in Windows Explorer
One neat thing I discovered while using g.ho.st — or rather rediscovered because I keep forgetting that the functionality is there — is the ease by which you can use FTP in Windows Explorer. Hold down the Microsoft key and press the E key to launch Windows Explorer. Then type:

ftp://YOUR_G.Ho.st_username@g.ho.st

After entering in your G.ho.st password you will be able to drag and drop files from your real desktop to your virtual one. Try this with your web hosting FTP account. It’s a handy way to use a basic FTP editor when you’re on a Windows box without any other kind of FTP, but beware that passwords are passed in plain text. Use web folders instead if you’d like a secure connection.

In summary, G.ho.st reminded me what features I like and use on the desktop and how a virtual desktop doesn’t give me enough reasons to use regularly at this time. Maybe in the future when the quirks are worked out and we can move outside the confines of a browser. I’m curious what readers think of G.ho.st and virtual desktops in general?

This morning’s reading led me to pcmag.com and I noticed the McAfee SiteAdvisor (Hmm SiteAdvisor review grade: B+) label turn from green (good) to yellow (warning). I right clicked and looked at the site details to find the following:

After entering our e-mail address on this site, we received 28 e-mails per week. We had some difficulty unsubscribing.

28 e-mails in a week? That’s extreme, I wonder if the SiteAdvisor bot got caught in some kind of loop? Seems like I get a bunch of those E-Week emails (rarely do I read them, do you?) which I’m pretty sure originate from the Ziff Davis / PC Mag camp. I used to be a fan of PC Mag but one too many ads and questionable renewal tactics sent me packing. Still have a subscription to their download utility service which at 20 bones a year for all utility downloads is a good deal versus $7.97 per download.

Several reviewers in the SiteAdvisor comments indicate that these emails are opt-in and that it can be hard to unsubscribe is confirmed. I don’t see many yellow label warnings for bigger, established sites like pcmag.com. Have you seen other bigger sites with yellow or (gasp) red labels?

On a somewhat related note, our blogging group has been waiting awhile for SiteAdvisor to kick out a report for vtoreality.com. Anybody know how long this process actually takes? That site remains stuck in the gray (not yet rated) status which in some cases makes me as wary as seeing yellow. Every site older than a couple years we operate including Hmm that I checked is showing green. Might want to check your sites and see if you’re green, not so mellow yellow or dead red.

Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

Onetime.im — in beta as of this writing — is a Firefox add-on that allows you to chat using multiple Instant Messaging networks. Support will be “available soon” for AOL, ICQ and Yahoo. Note the domain, .IM which stands for the Isle of Man. A bit of a developing trend in the instant messaging area I learned with others including meebo.im, web.im (Yahoo), pidgin.im (formerly GAIM), portal.im, coccinella.im and imo.im. At nic.im you can register tdavid.im for 45 pounds a year. td.im is available for a whopping 495 pounds a year! Pass on both accounts.

Perhaps Oneteam.im biggest competitor in the browser space meebo has the all important dot com where oneteam.com leads to a foreign website that isn’t related. Major bummer. Suggestion #1: use an .im domain name where you actually own the dot com. Most people are going to associate your business with .com, not .im.

Oneteam requires registration which was trouble-free and accepted the + in my email address. They might consider adding OpenID.

You’ll be sent a standard validation link email. After clicking through it’s time to login. My first login on a test Windows XP SP 2 box was met with the unfortunate message:

Suggestion #2: fix this error message. I wasn’t too concerned because the email address given on the review request was from process-one.net, so I connected the dots, but some (many?) new users will be put off by this message. Once logged in a gigantic window opens that I immediately resized.

Suggestion #3: keep IM windows small like the Skype UI and respectful of screen real estate. From here my experience with Oneteam.im was mostly downhill. It doesn’t feel like much more than a prototype in its current form and I decided to list the things it needs to become a complete and usable beta. But before getting to that, I invited a friend of mine, Lestat, to check it out and see if he drew similar conclusions. Here’s a bit of our conversation inside a oneteam.im chatroom.

More suggestions for Oneteam.im
One of the first things I do with sites is update my profile. I like to change the default avatar image — usually something nondescript — with a picture. That leads to suggestion #4:

#4: Fix the avatar upload function with the profile. I tried uploading an avatar picture in JPG and GIF format. Neither was accepted. I was able to update my profile.

#5: Make it a lot easier to add a contacts from the oneteam.im chatroom. With a right mouseclick there should be an option to easily add the contact and yet there isn’t. When you click on the add new contact button in the upper left corner, the two options are Jabber or MSN but nothing for Oneteam? I asked my friend to try adding my Jabber ID and he said it didn’t work. The easiest part of using an IM service should be adding existing and new contacts.

Adding insult to injury, as part of the review I was given contact details to add (an email), but no instructions how to add the contact. Was this a Jabber ID? Or MSN? Those are the only two gateways currently supported as of my review.

#6: Turn off the sounds on the Oneteam.im chatroom by default. While you can easily click on the gears and uncheck the box, that ding sound whenever somebody types a new message in the channel gets old fast. Just start with sounds disabled.

#7: On the Mac OS X Firefox, Oneteam.im tells me I need to use Firefox. Huh?

#8: All new windows launches should open with buttons visible. Some default window sizes don’t contain all the form elements visible on initial load. For example, when I load the add contact window I have to expand the window to see the ‘add’ and ‘cancel’ buttons.

#9: 12 browser validation errors. Lestat took this screenshot using the Firefox add-on Firebug on his Windows XP SP 2 machine:

Overall thoughts
I’m not going to leave a grade for Oneteam.im in its present condition as of this writing like I would with other reviews. It’s just way too early to grade in its condition. Besides looking for suggestions to improve their interface, they mention Meebo and I’d say Oneteam has a long way to go to be as simple to get into as Meebo. They might have some cool features once you get connected, but if it’s not fast and easy to jump into, people will move along and try one of the other zillion IM solutions out there. I realize the browser IM space isn’t too crowded yet, but the IM space in general certainly is. I wish Oneteam.im luck as even if they fix all the things I mention, they still have a lot of work ahead of them to get noticed.

A final suggestion and I mean this positively not as a slam: perhaps it would be better to blend the Oneteam.im feature into another less crowded space.

Hmmcast #116 mp4

Day 3 of the navel gazing continues and this time I’m really digging the dirt by sharing what’s happening in my garden. Warning: there is some serious birds and bees action happening in today’s Hmmcast. Safe for work? Yes, but barely! Watch out for the poison ivy!

Mentioned in the Hmmcast
- The Firefox add-on Search Status new version 1.19 is useful for seeing the rankings of not only your own sites but third party sites for Google (green), Alexa (blue) and now Compete (fuschia) too.

- Viva Pinata

Behind Hmmcast #116
Today’s episode didn’t didn’t quite make the 4:20pm launch time although the timestamp reads 4:20 for continuity, just FYI. I’ll be updating with a third party video viewer (Google Video or YouTube) as soon as that is processed. In the meantime, you can download the mp4 with the link at the top of the post.

Being opening day for baseball here in Seattle, I’ve collected some links for fellow fans below.

Last year the Mariners lost the season opener 5-4, but I’m picking them to win today and the total score will be more than 8.5 runs which is the Vegas spread. The game starts at 2:30pm PST.

Seattle Mariners toolbar
Official Mariners toolbar (Firefox or IE)

Widgets, Gadgets and more
Y! widget (Windows or Mac): MLB baseball scores
Dashboard Widget (Mac): MLB Themed News Widget
Google homepage modules: MLB Scoreboard

Digg style social sites
Ballhype Seattle Mariners [RSS]

Pick sports games for fun (free virtual gaming)
PicksPal
Sportsinteractive

Mariners baseball history
Mariners uniforms and logos from 1977-present

Blogs and RSS coverage
Seattle Times Mariners Blog including this post on the Vegas odds that Seattle will win 78 games this year. I predict that the Mariners will win 85 games this year and be a serious contender in the AL West.
MLB.com Seattle Mariners RSS feed

other Mariners-related links
Missing something cool Mariners fans can add for FREE to their desktops or websites online or to learn more about the team and history? Please add in the comments below. I’ll continue to update this post throughout opening day.

Hmmcast #89 mp4

ShootIt Y! Widget, Ammo Pak 8

The computer version of the stress ball?

Saw Jyte at TechCrunch today, signed up and found with its OpenID registration structure easy to jump into. I’d like to see more sites using OpenID. You just sign up with your OpenID and start agreeing (thumbs up) or disagreeing (thumbs down) on claims made by others.

A claim is something you believe to be true and others can either agree or disagree.

You can also create your own claims, add comments about other claims, give and receive “cred” as well as the all important ability to embed claims in your blog/website so others can agree/disagree using an IFRAME:

Unfortunately the text gets cut off on longer claims.

This gave me a good opportunity to set this site up as my primary login URL for OpenID and myOpenID provides good instructions how to do that. ‘TDavid’ was already taken at MyOpenID but ‘TD’ was available when usually it’s the other way around, go figure.

Here’s another Jyte claim I made:

Looks nice embedded in a post, doesn’t it? Bookmarked.

Update 2/21/07 5:32am PST: I noticed in the RSS by email (Feedblitz) the IFRAME embeds do not work, so those who read in email didn’t see these in this morning’s email.