My new blog

So I’ve finally gotten off my lazy butt and created a new blog. Rose and I will both be blogging at http://roseandsnail.com. If you’re subscribed on my FeedBurner feed, it should already be picking up my new entries over there. If not, head on over and get on my new feed!

See you there 🙂

Weewar.com? Advance Wars online!

Heard about Weewar through some of my feeds and got invited to their beta today! So many great ideas in there 🙂 Best parts:

• It’s turn based and it saves its state so you can play a long running game
• You can play multiple games at the same time and have them saved in different states
• You can play with up to 6 players
• You can view a replay of the game afterwards to see what happened
• Other people can watch games in action as observers

Here’s a screenshot of the game in action, but you can basically just show up to watch games live at http://weewar.com/ (click on the “view game” links in the Weewar live ticker)

I’m not sure how many invites I have, but if you want one, drop me a comment!

Me @ F8

Hey, I was on news.com again 🙂 (no no, this isn’t like last time)

Haiping (a long time colleague of mine and now an engineer at Facebook) is standing behind me. I wonder why they didn’t get our names to add to the picture caption.

Goodbye Plaxo!

Well, it’s been 2 years and almost 3 months since I joined Plaxo and this Friday I’ll be moving on. Over the past two years, we’ve done a ton of stuff at Plaxo, including:

• Launched the Plaxo-AIM integration
• Shipped the Plaxo Toolbar for Thunderbird
• Had Plaxo join the Mac faithful
• Got on Verizon’s deck for mobile sync
• Released a new version of Plaxo WAP access
• Integrated with Comcast
• Expiremented on Plaxo Labs
• Built Plaxo 3.0

I’ve really enjoyed my time at Plaxo – I’ve learned a lot, shipped a ton of product, and worked with amazing people. 😀

As for my next gig, I’ll be joining my good friend Terry over at Tagged. There’s a ton of stuff to do over there – and since they’re in PHP/Java, I can probably jump in and do some coding too :). Lunch 2.0 up in SF here we come!

So… should I continue writing my blog here at Plaxoed? I suppose it is past tense, so it could fit as I move on after Plaxo. What do you guys think?

Now that's what I call broadband!

In my new condo up in San Francisco, we got fliers to sign up for a high speed internet service called Webpass that claimed synchronous 45Mbps for about $30 / month if you pre-pay annually. Too good to be true? Well, I got it setup, paid $350 for the year, and here’s what speedtest.net says:

And that’s through a Linksys router. When I hook up my computer straight to the tap it’s even faster!

The technician told me that what they’re doing is dropping a T3 line straight to the building and all the residents signed up for the service are sharing it. He told me there are currently only about 20 people from my building signed up, so that means I’m probably getting a T3 all to myself most of the time. San Francisco rocks!

Lunch 2.0 in the SF Chronicle today!

Sweet.

For more info, head on over to http://www.lunch20.com. Everyone’s invited, we’ve got a few events coming up: one next week and one in June.

Also, if you’d like to host an event, contact me 😀

Quick Plaxo update

Whew, there’s a whole lot of stuff going on at Plaxo. Here’s a recap:

• We launched LinkedIn import to Plaxo – People have been asking us to do some integration with LinkedIn for a long time; we’ve finally gotten around to starting that work. Hopefully it’ll be even tighter soon! (btw, there’s a Lunch 2.0 @ LinkedIn next week, RSVP and come on by for free food!)
• Got Plaxo working for Thunderbird 2.0
• Launced Plaxo Labs, where we’ve got a whole bunch of new stuff for people to check out.
• Our Comcast partnership was announced! Yes, that’s right, we are going to be powering the address book for Comcast. (btw, if you’re currently a Plaxo member and a Comcast High Speed Internet subscriber, you can get Plaxo Premium for free by going here)

One of my personal favorite labs features is Plaxo Search. Basically, you sign-in (check “Remember me on this computer” if you’re on a personal machine) and you get a Google-like interface to search for anything you have in your Plaxo account. You can also hook it up to your browser’s search box in the top right (if you have IE7 or Firefox). It looks like this:

Give it a try; it’s the fastest way to get access to your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes by far!

I'm in a college textbook!

Pete’s sister was taking a business communications class and one day, he turned to me and said that I was in her textbook and they were talking about me in lecture. Nice! I wonder what they had to say 🙂

She’s visiting Pete this weekend and she brought the book along. It’s called Business Communication, Building Critical Skills, and it’s written by Kitty O. Locker (of Ohio State booooo :p ) and Stephen Kyo Kaczmarek.

It’s only a quick reference in the book, but I am curious to know when people are discussing my story in class. If you’re a professor or if you’re a student in a class about this stuff, let me know; I’m always happy to discuss these things 🙂

Your Outlook calendar or Mac Address Book on your dumbphone

On the Plaxo front, we’re testing out an early release of Plaxo Mobile 3.0, a new WAP access product (direct link). Built on WAP 2.0/XHTML, this app allows you to get access to all your Plaxo contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes from the web browser on your mobile phone. If you already have a Plaxo account and you can’t wait, just point your mobile browser to http://labs.plaxo.com/mobile.

This means you can sync your Outlook, Mac, Thunderbird, or Yahoo! address books to Plaxo and then access it on your mobile phone. (Well, you’ll still have to pay for wireless internet charges, but come’on, don’t you have an unlimited data plan on your cell phone by now?)

If you’ve got questions, run into trouble while trying it out, or want to give feedback, please feel free to contact me, join our Google Group, or e-mail the team at labs-mobile@plaxo.com.

Back to GMail…

After using Yahoo Mail Beta for over a year, and Windows Live Mail for a little bit before that, I’ve decided to switch back to GMail.

I had some trouble with GMail almost two years ago and I decided to try out Windows Live Mail Beta (new at that time). I then had some trouble with Windows Live Mail and got an invite to Yahoo Mail Beta, so I switched over to that.

Lately, I’ve been having trouble with Yahoo Mail Beta so I looked around again to find the best webmail solution and it does certainly seem that GMail is the front runner. Here’s how GMail won me over:

• Conversation view. Always use it in Outlook, been trying to manage without it in Yahoo! Mail for a while. Suprisingly, I can’t seem to find it on any other webmail offering (am I missing a setting somewhere?)
• POP Access and Forwarding. Note to Yahoo: I’m not going to pay you $20/year for a feature that other services offer for free.
• Ability to manage all my e-mail addresses in one place. You can set it up so that all e-mail goes to one GMail account and you can even set it so that replies look like they’re coming from whatever e-mail address you want.
• Performance. Yahoo Mail Beta is unbearably slow on my computer now. The new AIM Mail Beta doesn’t feel much better (sorry Rose!)
• Desktop notifier. No need to keep a browser window open anymore! Especially when Firefox seems to take up 200MB of memory with Yahoo Mail Beta loaded…

While some of the webmail solutions have some of these features I’ve just listed, only GMail seems to have them all.