Mostly caught up on life now, will resume blogging soon. Definitely looking forward to it.

I’m looking forward to recording more video at events with family and friends coming up this summer.

Here’s the video I threw together tonight from footage my brother and I recorded last year:
Un Truco Increíble

(mostly in Spanish because it’s for our Chilean friends)

The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle. The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers.

For those wondering “what’s the difference between this and Facebook?”, this is a big part of the answer, probably the most important part in the long run. Think back to AOL’s heyday- they had a messaging system that allowed you to communicate between AOL users, but eventually opened up email with which anyone from any email provider could communicate. It’s definitely harder to do the latter, but I think it’s always worth trying.

Things I like about Buzz:
- No 140-character limit, but collapsible posts. I’ve never liked twitter’s 140-character constraint.. I think it goes about solving the problem in the wrong way. It also makes people sound like idiots when trying to fit longer statements in.
- No shortened URLs (like tinyurl or bit.ly). These are bad for so many reasons that have been well-documented by others already, so I won’t bother. I’m much less interested in clicking on a link if I don’t know where it goes.
- Open APIs! See http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/. Full PSHB support, enclosures, and social graph API. I’m hoping to play with these soon. (Something I found recently: you can find information about your google social graph here: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social). I’m very excited about the salmon protocol (syncing comments between blog posts and sites like Buzz). More about open APIs here.
- Gmail integration prevents me from having another place to check.

Things I don’t like:
- Delivering replies to your inbox should definitely be a setting, possibly opt-in.
- The “turn this off” link should be easier to find (it’s at the bottom of gmail)
- Contacts and privacy are confusing, and for some people the gmail integration won’t make sense at all.
- Youtube embeds seem to be stripped from imported feeds.
- The mobile stuff seems like it needs another revision.

We used this internally for a long time, and it’s a lot better there. Internally, everyone is on gmail anyway, and you aren’t as concerned with privacy, since communication tends to be very open. I’ve been finding that it’s a very good replacement for the discussion lists that are still used heavily.

I think it’ll be a while before we really know how this all pans out in the wild, though.

I, too, have major problems with twitter’s character limit and generally prefer email to phone calls. It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time.

I’m of course biased, but I really liked the Google ad. It was simple, clever and very human.

It’s also really easy to parody, as Slate has done well:

(via)