Gears availability for Google Docs seemed like a logical extension for the productivity applications Google provides, but getting it in place took some time. That time arrived.

Though not as attention getting as the Virgin and Google to Mars news, or as fictional, the Docs with Gears move provides more ammunition to the Google versus Microsoft battle. Even though Internet access via wireless connections seems ubiquitous, there are places like airplanes where Microsoft Office and similar desktop software have an advantage.

Offline access for Google Docs began a controlled rollout, as disclosed on the Google Docs blog. English language-only support arrived first, with a promise for additional supported languages in the future.

This offline access is limited in scope within Google Docs as well. Only word processing received initial support for editing or writing documents. There is no offline access to spreadsheets or presentations yet.

The utility of having documents keep in sync makes Google Docs much more useful. Once reconnected after offline work, all of the editing goes right back into the computing cloud, saved on Google’s servers.

Since Google tends to update products on a rolling basis every two to three months, we’re going to guess offline spreadsheet support via Gears will rollout this summer.

Super Tuesday occupies the candidates in 24 states today. Early primaries have knocked several candidates out of both races, with the remaining ones fighting it out on the biggest primary day in US history.

While we’re tempted to rant about being left out of the primary fun in Kentucky (seriously, Iowa and New Hampshire always get to go first, what nitwit made that decision?), other little areas of interest bear watching.

Like this Google Docs blog post about Reuters and their poll charts. In polling ahead of Super Tuesday, Reuters tapped Google Docs to generate those charts.

“We didn’t do anything special to help Reuters do this, in fact, we came across this by chance just watching the results on their site,” Google’s Jonathan Rochelle said.

Also of interest: the Google/Twitter map of Super Tuesday results.

The ability to set margins is a big one – college professors may not even accept papers that don’t have the proper amount of white space around the edges, and Google has been trying hard to hook students at various universities.

Next comes the ability to print page numbers, and this is important for the same reason.  Google can give colleges all the software it wants, but if the stuff would cause students to receive lower grades, they’ll find something else to use.

Finally, users of Google Docs will be able to choose landscape or portrait page orientation, and pick between legal, letter, and A4 paper sizes.

These features won’t solve the problem of anonymity that Google Docs is facing.  Still, on the Official Google Docs Blog, David Kuettel writes, "[W]e’re happy to announce that for those of you with a need, Google documents can now come out to play.  Right out of your printer and on to your desk, or your boss’s desk, or your teacher’s folder, or your client’s briefcase…printed documents are here."

A survey of 600 people by research firm NPD found little awareness of web-based alternatives to the Microsoft Office juggernaut that occupies space on millions of desktops around the world.

Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Watch said 73.2 percent of those surveyed never heard of or tried an online productivity suite. Another 20.8 percent heard of them, but haven’t tried them.

That adds up to an uncomfortable 94 percent of the sample group. Though Wilcox called Google Docs the "most visible" of web-based alternatives to Office, we feel that misses the truly relevant issue:

Google doesn’t advertise its products heavily.

Other than targeted campaigns for AdWords, Analytics, or Apps, it’s impossible to recall Google touting its services beyond the niche Internet media, and that usually comes through a blog post.

Sometimes Google extends its favor to hand-picked media outlets that can be counted on to write favorably of a product, but other times news emerges in one place, bubbles up through blogs, and maybe receives notice in mainstream media.

When Google does advertise, they tend to do so in the relevant search results for that service. Search for ‘site analytics’, and Google Analytics gets the premium position at the top of the search results, in the ad box.

If people aren’t diving in to Google Docs, it’s more of a lack of awareness than anything else. Let’s see Google do an Ask.com style ad campaign for Docs and see what happens.

Social networking, and social media specifically, have been painted as the new marketing landscape for businesses to engage with their communities of customers wherever they congregate.

In my view, we’re starting to hit a ceiling of discussion versus execution and practicality.

I believe that we’ve theorized enough. There is certainly no shortage of “experts” who can point to “why” Social Media should work for business and improved communications, however, there IS a shortage of people showing others “exactly” how to do it, how to measure it specifically, and which tools of the trade work most effectively for individual campaigns.

It’s time to divide the market of Social Media experts so that we can grow as a group of doers, not just thinkers.

While I will always look to the future to help others evolve, I will also share what I learn and what it means to PR, marketing, sales, and business branding. This way the information can be analyzed and redeployed within – specific to the goals and culture of the company and the team.

Jonathan Crow of ThinkFree recently conducted “The Great Social Experiment” where he tested and practiced the art of social networking as a strategy for helping his company join the conversation and in turn, evaluate its business implications for doing so. The goal was to examine whether his engagement would increase both ThinkFree’s and his professional network, gain market intelligence both on product as well as the industry as a whole, and expand the company’s market outreach.

Basically, Crow, like many other marketing professionals, are trying to find out how Social Media can help businesses grow and whether or not conversations have real world business benefits. A side note, I would add, is that I wonder if his participation also affected and contributed to his personal brand.

Now, ThinkFree is an interesting company to profile because at the end of the day, it compete s against Microsoft Office, Google Docs, as well as other hot Web 2.0 companies. No easy task indeed.

ThinkFree offers an online/offline office suite that is completely compatible with MS Office. The company also created a Social Network of its own, ThinkFree Docs, which is basically a community built around discovering and sharing documents and building a network around content and content creators.

His first step was to jump in.

Crow targeted the following networks:

ThinkFree Docs?
digg
del.icio.us?
Facebook?
Pownce?
Technorati?
Reddit?
Twitter?
Jaiku?
Newsvine?
Flickr?
Plaxo Pulse?
StumbleUpon?
Yahoo!360?
MySpace?
Friendster?
LinkedIn?
hi5?
orkut

While some of Crow’s targets are right on, others are secondary or even tertiary for accomplishing his goals – just by knowing the culture of each community from experience. However, this is his experiment, so what he learns is important to everyone else who may or may not have jumped in yet and to what extent each community applies (or doesn’t) to their business. He represents many who are actively seeking ways to engage and/or how.

Crow points out, “It feels like I just went into a single’s bar and shouted, ‘will somebody be my friend!’”

He continues, “Who is listening and are we talking in an echo chamber? The answer has been a little mixed. Yes, I have met new people, and am having new conversations. Is it as much as I was expecting or hoping for? No. But the lesson I am taking away from this is that if you do want to build new contacts that can help you, and that you can help, it takes time. Social networks are not a magic formula…Like in the outside world, it takes time to get to know people and develop relationships that can lead to meaningful action. I guess I fell into the trap of looking at these resources as a commodification of friendship. And, we really need to break out of that mentality – myself included.”

Jonathan’s observation is perhaps one of the most common realizations of any good and optimistic marketer. And, this is exactly the point where the Social Media market and its practitioners start to fragment.

Jonathan however, is already a lot further along than most. He’s engaging and writing about his experience. He’s calling out to others to examine his participation and to offer advice, insight, and feedback so that he can engage more effectively.

Many companies and Social Media consultants dramatically underestimate the resources, time, dedication, and passion it takes to engage and cultivate relationships across multiple communities. It’s just not the same for any two networks.

However, Jonathan participated and contributed to the communities he wished to engage genuinely. He did not sit on the sidelines; he shared, learned, observed, and also emerged with real world feedback.

For example, in part three of his series, Crow discusses the different classifications of social networks he observed during his experiment and offered advice for business professionals looking to also jump in.

Aggregators
These pull together feeds from other profiles and sites, keep track of what you and your contacts are doing. Great examples of this are: Flock (as I mentioned already), Plaxo, and Pownce. Somewhat Frank has a great list.

Connectors
These sites connect people, groups, networks, make suggestions based on profile information. The best example is LinkedIn, but obviously Facebook, and MySpace.

Feeders
These sites feed data that is then used in other sites. Typically media based, examples would be YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, iLike and ThinkFree Docs.

Publishers
These “sites” are where people come for their entertainment or information. Twitter, Jaiku, and obviously YouTube, ThinkFree Docs, Flickr, etc.

His advice:

1. Start with the sites that best do contacts.

2. Connect with others. Expand your network

3. Get your aggregator sites going.

4. Publish away. Get involved. Don’t spam!

Crow’s experiment continues and it is both a looking glass into real world obstacles and a crystal ball that will reveal where true opportunities reside and in turn, will define and shape realistic expectations and associated metrics.

Crow summarized, “In the end my expectation of social networking bringing thousands of friends and generating enormous buzz was obviously misplaced. What I found is that it requires just as much effort (maybe even more) as blogging, newsletters, and traditional PR tools (such as email;), but as a marketing manager you need your company to be included in the conversation wherever that conversation occurs. Increasingly those conversations are happening in social networks. It is not an either or proposition. You have to go through traditional channels and these new tools.”

Jonathan is not alone. He has many peers who are wondering what to do and to evaluate if their engagement is on track.

He believes that there’s something in this story for everyone, and I think he’s right.

Therefore, Crow has created a roundtable of those active in the Social Media landscape to offer feedback, commentary, constructive criticism, and advice for the good of all marketing. Those joining the conversation are Chris Brogan, Aaron Brazell, Cathryn Hrudicka, Doug Haslam, and me.

The discussion will be based on several questions posed by Jonathan:

1. Did I devote enough time to the exercise? More to the point, where should social networking be placed in terms of marketing priorities? Does this change for companies that are more or less mature?

2. How should we be judging the outcomes from social networking activities? Are there tools you recommend?

3. Is social networking the right tool for the tests I created? Are my expectations of social networking in line with what it can do? What is social networking best geared to address?

4. How much of getting social networking to work is the contacts you bring with you? How aggressive should one be in reaching out to new contacts? Should I, for instance, try to befriend Chris Anderson even after I have composed a note meant to appeal to what he is interested in?

5. How can I build better mechanisms into the framework to increase feedback?

You can follow the conversation here.

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Still, the latest stats from Compete show that Docs is having some pretty good growth over the last 13 months. It’s also good to see that both Docs and Spreadsheets are equally popular, which probably means they share a savvy userbase that uses both products significantly, and not just occasional dabblers in one or the other.

Chech out Compete’s post, where they also talk about the evening out of average minutes per user on both apps over the last year.

(via Richard MacManus)

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What you will see is a search box as well as recent documents – word processing, spreadsheets, or presentations – below it. You can also navigate through your different folders in this stripped-down version of Docs (which might make a decent Google gadget, too).

What you specifically can’t do at this point is view every file type. Next to presentations that are listed you’ll see the text “Not available for view.” (The sparse Google help file on the subject says you can view them on the iPhone, though.) However, spreadsheets and word processing documents are listed for mobile view. Opening a text document results in the page being displayed normally. Try to open a spreadsheet, and you are offered to view it as HTML or download it as XLS (Excel).

The HTML view of spreadsheets is a specially formatted display mode, shown above. By default it only lists a single column, but then allows you to click through to the next column or jump straight to a specific cell (if you know its coordinates). You can also list the contents of just a single row, which is then displayed vertically instead of horizontally. As is the case with the word processing docs view, actual editing of content does not seem possible.

[Thanks Duncan Fairley!]

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Granted, no one needs to be writing a report, or even a lengthy email, on a mobile device.  But it wouldn’t hurt to give users the option of creating bits of text, or at least editing existing ones.  Also, Greg Sterling discovered that spreadsheets “rendered somewhat awkwardly for me,” and “you cannot access presentations.”

As products go, this is rather half-baked, and as Google products go . . . well, it’s almost embarrassing.  It’s not even as if Google Docs for mobile had “leaked” – there’s a post about its launch on the Official Google Docs Blog.

Zach Lloyd, a software engineer, acknowledges the shortcomings, and would-be users will be glad to see the words “yet” and “for now” appear frequently.  And to their credit, it sounds as if Lloyd and other Googlers have made quite a bit of progress to even reach the current point.

They’ll hopefully whip Google Docs for mobile into better shape soon.  But in its current state, the service’s usefulness seems limited.

The Adobe Max conference is underway, with Adobe’s acquisition of Buzzword via a deal to purchase its parent company, Virtual Ubiquity. That firm built Buzzword on Adobe’s Flex platform, and it runs in Flash.

Buzzword is doling out invites to try out the service. TechCrunch writer Erick Schonfeld tempered enthusiasm by noting a few of Buzzword’s current and correctable shortcomings:

Buzzword

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-adobe-scribble-online-docs-products-2007-10/feed 2 http://www.webpronews.com/google-docs-has-privacy-problems-2007-09 http://www.webpronews.com/google-docs-has-privacy-problems-2007-09#comments Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:24:53 +0000 Navneet Kaushal http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40527 Just 2 days ago, Google Docs's Presentation functionality was launched. ]]> Just 2 days ago, Google Docs’s Presentation functionality was launched.

Philip Lenssen through a post called “Google Privacy Problems Introduced Through Presentations” says that this feature “introduced a privacy vulnerability for Google Accounts”.

"Using a straightforward hack discovered by TomHTML (which I can detail once Google security got some time to tackle the message they got from us, if they consider it a problem indeed), you can use Google’s Presentations service to grab the name/ Gmail email address of people visiting your website… without them confirming that they want to share their name/ email with you, or share the fact they’re visiting your site! Note this only works when the visitor is also signed in to their Google Account, but other than that requires no special programming capabilities (it may or may not work in every context/ with every browser)."

Another funny complaint was posted by Achille who said:

"I emailed mysef a PowerPoint file this morning, every 30 minutes I keep getting the same document added to my account, it’s stuck in a loop of some kind and it’s broken."

Anyway, after all the problems, the same discussion group posted a message saying,

"Update: Google informed me that the bug is fixed. My tests show this seems to be the case indeed – I can’t reproduce the privacy vulnerability anymore."

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