Equals Drummond

The Personal Cloud, Take 3: Thomas Vander Wal's Personal InfoCloud

Posted on 2/14/2011 by Drummond Reed

When I first heard the term “personal cloud” from Mark Plakias at C3, I knew it sounded vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t until I started this series of blog posts that Kaliya Hamlin (Identitywoman) reminded me that Thomas Vander Wal named his blog Personal InfoCloud some years ago. Instantly I recalled the dinner that Kaliya and Thomas and I had in Washington D.C. a few years ago wheree he explained his vision for a personal information cloud, and how it was a superset of what the VRM community has been calling a personal data store.

In retrospect, I am quite sure this was one reason a subconscious bell rang for me when the term “personal cloud” came up again. And, reading recent posts from Thomas’ blog, including one about lessons to be learned from Yahoo’s threat to close Delicious, I point to it as even more evidence that the term works well for expressing what we all mean by this collection of personal data and relationships that will become the hub of your digital life.

Speaking of hubs, that reminds me of yet another pioneer thinker in this space: Jon Udell and his concept of hosted lifebits. As Jon puts it in a 2007 blog post:

Today my digital assets are spread out all over the place. Some are on various websites that I control, and a lot more that I don’t. Others are on various local hard disks that I control, and a lot more that I don’t. It’s become really clear to me that I’d be willing to pay for the service of consolidating all this stuff, syndicating it to wherever it’s needed, and guaranteeing its availability throughout — and indeed beyond — my lifetime.

Jon also recognized that in 2007 the idea was still before its time:

Although this notion of a hosted lifebits service seems inevitable in the long run, it’s not at all clear how we’ll get there. The need is not yet apparent to most people, though it will increasingly become apparent. The technical aspects are somewhat challenging, but the social and business aspects are even more challenging.

I strongly agree with Jon that it’s the social and business aspects that are the most challenging. I think the breakthrough success of social networking and messaging services like Facebook and Twitter have made the social half of the challenge tractable. Which leaves the business challenge: one that I (and many others) are hard at work on right now.

Posted in Personal Cloud, Personal Data Ecosystem, Personal Data Server, Personal Data Service, Personal Data Store | 2 Comments

The Personal Cloud, Take 2

Posted on 2/12/2011 by Drummond Reed

There’s been a wonderful discussion of “personal cloud” on the VRM mailing list this week. So far feedback is running about 80% positive on the term. But if there’s one point on which everyone has consensus, it’s that our collective “inside baseball” opinions really don’t matter. What counts is how the average Internet citizen reacts to it.

So let me tell you this story.

Last night I had dinner with a friend, Claude Golden, an attorney at Boeing and husband of my oldest son’s Seattle Waldorf School teacher. We got to talking about personal finance programs, and I explained why, after more than a decade of using Quicken, I had switched to Mint.

When I explained to him that you actually give Mint all your personal banking usernames and passwords, Claude was stunned — as most people usually are (I certainly was when I first heard about Mint). But when I told him that Intuit, the company behind Quicken, turned around and bought Mint for $170 million less than two years after it was founded, Claude understood why I had decided that I could trust Mint with my personal banking credentials. (I’ve never looked back, by the way — Mint is saving me at least a few hours each month in personal financial management time, and in my time-choked life, that’s priceless.)

When looked at in that light, suddenly it was obvious to Claude why people would want to do their personal financial management “in the cloud”. It eliminates the whole hassle of downloading all the data to a personal computer, doing the “management”, then uploading right back up to the cloud for backup because the data is too valuable to just keep locally anyway. (I explained to Claude that when Intuit first came out with an online backup service for Quicken data, I never purchased anything so fast in my life. It cost a whopping $9.99 a year — I would have paid ten times that to rid myself of the hassle of constantly backing up a decade’s worth of Quicken data.)

With Mint, the data never needs to come “down from the cloud” at all. In fact, with the right trustee, it’s actually safer in the cloud than it ever was on my hard drive. When you think about it, that’s been true of money for decades. Be reasonably diligent in choosing a bank, and your personal funds will be far safer there than under your mattress.

And infinitely more useful.

So, as the light bulb went on for Claude about why he might want to be using Mint, I took the opportunity and just casually slipped in: “Yeah, Mint is just the first step. Pretty soon you’ll have your own personal cloud.”

Claude shot me a look. “Oh, sure, I get it. A place for all my data. Stored safely in the cloud. Where all my devices can get it. Is that what you’re building?”

Bingo.

But the story’s not over. After dinner we drove to where our mutual friend, Alex LaVilla, was having an art opening at the Nalanda West Center for American Buddhism in Fremont (the wonderfully funky Seattle neighborhood just north of the ship canal between Lake Union and Puget Sound). Alex was the inaugural artist for a new series of spiritual art shows at Nalanda West.

As I walked in, I spotted Alex talking with a Buddhist monk who I assumed worked with Nalanda. As I came over to say hi, Alex introduced me to Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. Since Alex knows I’m in the Internet industry, by way of introduction he said, “Dzogchen tweets all the time. Sometimes he sends entire poems.” Dzogchen smiled as my eyes went wide — my image of a modern Buddhist monk doing cartwheels in my head. Alex then turned to Dzogchen and said, “Drummond works on all kinds of cool Internet stuff.” Which of course caused Dzogchen to turn to me with a warm smile and look of great anticipation. “Yes?”

Now here was the real litmus test. I decide to take it head on. I answered in just two words:

“Personal clouds.”

He face lit up like a candle. “Really?” But it was what happened next that really floored me.

Alex — who had never heard those words out of my mouth — immediately turned to Dzogchen and said, “Yeah — you know how those Microsoft commercials are always saying, ‘Take it to the cloud’?” Dzogchen nodded. “It’s just like that, only it’s all your stuff. Your files, your photos, your credit card records, your tweets — all your personal information — you can have it in your own cloud. And you control who gets what.”

Now it was Dzogchen’s turn for his eyes to go wide. “Wow. When can I get one?”

Bingo.

*****

Okay, so it’s only incidental evidence from an audience sample of two, but so far field testing of “personal cloud” is showing a light-bulb velocity I rarely see in tech marketing. Even “desktop publishing” didn’t register this fast when Aldus first started using it in 1984.

So I did a little further digging and found this August 6 2009 blog post from Chuck Hollis, VP Global Marketing CTO at EMC, called I Want My Personal Cloud. Excerpt:

So much of the cloud discussion is pointed at businesses — what about us as individuals?

And — yes — there’s a potential type of cloud that I think we’ll all want.

A personal information cloud.

He goes on to explain:

We’re all pretty comfortable using cloud-like services in our personal lives. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr — the list goes on and on.

But I’d offer that there’s a better potential model out there — and someone is going to get to it sooner than later.

As a simple example, imagine I have 1,000 personal photographs. There are a few that I don’t mind sharing publicly, others that I want to restrict to different categories of people I know (of course, my relationship with these people change over time), and — of course — a few photographs that I really don’t want floating around anywhere, period.

He then dives into what he believes are the three essential features of personal clouds: 1) control, 2) convenience, 3) permanent archive. Compare that to this list of the essential features of personal data stores that was compiled at the last Internet Identity Workshop.

Chuck’s post acknowledges that the idea started with Storagezilla’s August 4 2009 post entitled The Personal Cloud, which in turn quotes Decho Veep of Product Management Charles Fitzgerald at BusinessCloud9 saying:

…there’s no reason why every device can’t be backed up automatically to the Cloud. The Cloud world will start to refine and segment itself and one of the segments will be the Personal Cloud. This will be a repository for personal information that enables you to organise and access. It’s inevitable that we will reach the point where we move our personal information away from a device and out into the Cloud.

But as we look five years out, we need to be able to manage that Cloud. We have information scattered on a increasingly large number of sources. Facebook is now the biggest photo hosting service in the world, but they throw away the originals you upload. Having a Personal Cloud will allow you to keep the originals, but share them out. The most important thing about the Personal Cloud is that it will be personal. Fundamentally the data is your data and you need to be in control of it.

So neither the idea nor the term “personal cloud” is really new — all of this was 18 months ago. And the VRM community has been talking about personal data stores since 2004.

But, as with almost everything in tech, it’s all about timing. The Personal Data Ecosystem hadn’t formed yet. And, in my personal opinion, the technologies that can actually implement the personal control that all these authors agree will be necessary for personal clouds wasn’t there yet (hint: Internet identity is only the start). For example, Jeremie Miller hadn’t created the Locker Project or Telehash protocol yet, nor his new company Sing.ly based on it, which just won best-in-show at the O’Reilly Strata Conference Startup Showcase.

So maybe it’s finally time to seed personal clouds for real.

Posted in General, Personal Cloud, Personal Data Ecosystem, Personal Data Server, Personal Data Service, Personal Data Store | 2 Comments

You wanna see what killer technical support looks like?

Posted on 2/10/2011 by Drummond Reed

It’s when you send a three line email and within 24 hours you get a reply back like this:

TextExpander Support

Hi Drummond,

Regarding a), we do hear from users occasionally with this issue, although nothing has changed or is different with 3.2.3 than previous versions, so I am surprised to hear that the problem arose only after updating. I wonder if the order of items starting up at login has something to do with it.

In general it indicates that while you haven’t been typing, your system has found other uses for the RAM that TextExpander was occupying, and has swapped TextExpander out to virtual memory on the hard drive. When you begin typing again, the initial key-press forces the system to load TextExpander back into main memory, which causes a short delay. The system decides TextExpander is taking too long to respond, and goes on to process the next key without telling TextExpander about it. Finally TextExpander finishes loading, and the first key completes processing.

In some cases, people have sent in diagnostic logs capturing the problem, and we have been able to suggest changes that fix the problem. In other cases, nothing could be determined.

If you’d like to try to diagnose this issue:
1 – Open TextExpander and in its Help menu, select “Enable Logging” and “Enable Detailed Logging”
2 – Continue your normal typing, pausing, etc. until the character swapping occurs
3 – Open the Console application, which should be located in your Applications / Utilities folder.
4 – In the “All Messages” part of the Console, select the past several minutes of messages from all applications, Copy them, then Paste them into an email message to us. That is, we want console messages that will show what was happening in the minutes or seconds that you were not typing, plus the TextExpander messages that should have appeared when you did start typing again.

Then be sure to turn “Detailed Logging” and “Logging” back off afterwards as it generates a huge number of console messages.

Regarding b), we have heard from two other users a similar report of getting whatever is on the clipboard instead of the snippet, but we haven’t been able to duplicate the problem here. If you can capture this issue using Detailed Logging as well, we might be able to figure out what is going on.

Thanks for using TextExpander from Smile!

Regards,
Brian
TextExpander support
textexpander@smilesoftware.com
http://www.smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/

Now that’s the kind of service that wants to make you shout from the rooftops (or the digital equivalent: blog it, tweet it, and tell all your social networking friends).

Do I love TextExpander? As I said in my reply email, “I never want to have to live without this product on any device I use for the rest of my life.”

Case closed. I will be a Smile Software customer for life.

Posted in Customer Service, Reputation | 2 Comments

The Personal Cloud

Posted on 2/7/2011 by Drummond Reed

The hallmark of a rapidly growing new space is new terminology. Craig Burton goes so far as to posit that the growth of the space will be constrained until it has a lexicon that successfully incorporates its key concepts.

All of which applies in spades to the personal data ecosystem. As this space grows, it must clearly describe how it differs from other related spaces, including social networking, user-centric/federated identity, mobile computing, and cloud computing.

It must also explain how it delivers the infrastructure necessary for new business models and services, such as Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) or quantified self applications (also called lifelogs or personal metrics).

At the Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) last week, there were two sessions on CRM and VRM. Both required giving the audience a brief summary of the basic idea of VRM as “the inverse of CRM” where the customer has their own relationship management system that is the peer of the vendor’s.

David Siegel popularized the concept of this system in his book Pull, calling it the personal data locker. If you haven’t seen his Personal Data Locker Vision video, he just released it for public access – I recommend it.

For its part, the VRM community has long referred to this system as the personal data store or PDS. However I blogged last fall about the key problem with the term “personal data store” for many audiences: it suggests all your personal data is in fact stored there, like money in a bank, when in fact a PDS may only be a dashboard to personal data stored anywhere on the net.

For that reason I began using the terms personal data server and personal data service. But the marketer in me still harbors the suspicion that none of these are what will ultimately survive in the market.

Why? They don’t follow the marketer’s equivalent of the developer’s rule about the simplest thing that could possible work. Examples:

Desktop publishing added just one word to the existing concept of “publishing” to describe this new category. (And within months it was further simplified to DTP).
Web server and web page added just one word to the well-known concepts of “server” and “page” to describe this new form of Internet hypertext (note that the term “hypertext” itself never made it into the general market lexicon — too complex).
Browser is an even more severe example. Although the Wikipedia-sanctioned term is web browser, in everyday usage in the market it’s been smooshed down to just one word — “browser” — the same way facsimile machine was smooshed down to just one word — “fax“.
Cloud computing is the most recent example of adding just one word to describe the key distinguishing characteristic of a new space: the fact that the data was no longer on a local device under local control.

Who would have thought that the idea of network-based computing would come to be defined by the adjective “cloud”? But in fact the choice of the term “cloud” illustrates the dictum that it doesn’t actually matter what the distinguishing modifier for a new category is. It only matters that it:

Is unique in the context in which it is being applied.
Captures the essence of what distinguishes the new category.
Is simple and evocative enough to catch on.

Okay, now let’s return to the question of the concept at the core of the personal data ecosystem. By these measures, neither “personal data store”, “personal data server”, nor “personal data service” are good candidates for the go-to-market lexicon because:

They are too long.
They don’t adequately isolate the key distinguishing characteristic of what makes the personal data ecosystem new. In other words, it’s not personal data that’s new. It’s the way in which personal data and relationship are managed, controlled, and shared.

Now, fast forward to the final session at C3 entitled “The Age of the Individual: From CRM to VRM”. When the VRM’rs on the panel first explained the concept of the personal data store, Mark Plakias, VP Strategy and Design at Orange Labs in San Francisco, immediately referred to it as the personal cloud. Although I’d heard the term a few times before, Mark’s usage suddenly rang true for me. He was referring to everything that the VRM community has traditionally defined a PDS as encompassing, plus personal storage, backup, connectivity, and other options that will clearly be part of the overall value proposition as the concept goes to market.

A little Google searching this weekend showed that a number of vendors including Iomega and Tonido are already using the term for cloud storage of personal data assets. And last May Forrester analyst Frank Gillette predicated that the personal cloud will replace the traditional personal computing OS.

That all seems to fit. But what I particularly like about personal cloud is:

It meets the simplest thing that could possible work test by taking what is now a well-known concept (“the cloud” as popularized by Microsoft’s “To the cloud” TV campaign and many other vendors) and distinguishing it with just one word that explains why this is different: personal.
It suggests the concepts of server, service, and storage all in one word.
It is neutral as to whether you operate this cloud yourself or use a fourth-party provider.
It naturally captures the idea that your personal data may either be stored in your personal cloud or linked to your personal cloud — either is fine.
It still has enough of a location-based metaphor that an individual can envision “moving their personal cloud from one provider to another”.
It suggests the value of personal data assets beyond just managing or sharing them — for example that you will have personal cloud apps to which you grant permission to use your personal cloud data just like you have mobile apps to which you give permission to access your location data.

So — in the interests of advancing the lexicon for all of us who want to see the personal data ecosystem space grow — I’m reaching out for feedback about personal cloud as one of our anchor terms.

Posted in General, Personal Cloud, Personal Data Ecosystem, Personal Data Server, Personal Data Service, Personal Data Store, Social Web | 24 Comments

Perfection vs. Mastery

Posted on 2/2/2011 by Drummond Reed

This isn’t a retweet so much as a “reblog” of Sarah Allen’s post about perfection vs. mastery and the 5 minute video there (originally from Abhishek Parolkar). It’s very moving.

Posted in Blogging | Leave a comment

Walter Murch on Why 3D Won't Last

Posted on 1/25/2011 by Drummond Reed

Roger Ebert’s journal has an outstanding letter from film editor Walter Murch that makes a rock-hard case as to why 3D is a film fad that will fade (let alone catch on on TVs).

As much as I loved Avatar, I fully agree. (So does my wife — 3D gives her headaches.)

(Props to Phil Windley’s tweet.)

Posted in Movies | Leave a comment

Conversational Commerce Conference Feb 2-3

Posted on 1/23/2011 by Drummond Reed

With my focus on the intersection of VRM and the Personal Data Ecosystem, I’ll be at the first Conversation Commerce Conference February 2-3 in San Francisco. See you there.

Posted in Personal Data Ecosystem, VRM | Leave a comment

I am so ready to get rid of these

Posted on 1/19/2011 by Drummond Reed

I have used Akismet blog spam filtering on this blog for several years now, but at least one or two blog spams get through every day and generate an email like the following:

A new comment on the post #365 “True Data Portability” is waiting for your approval
http://www.equalsdrummond.name/?p=365

Author : Edmundo Bohne (IP: 200.141.202.162 , 200.141.202.162)
E-mail : Susie.R.Crowell@google.com
URL : http://www.dietplanstoloseweightfastnow.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=200.141.202.162
Comment:
It may sound weird but my browser doesn’t appear to be in a position to display your article rightly It looks like a whole chunk of if is not correctly displayed and the layout of the page doesn’t appear to be right. Are you able to confirm that this post has been setup for Opera?

The most annoying part is I CAN’T FILTER THEM OUT because it could be a legitimate comment coming through for approval, and of course that’s the proverbial wheat I can’t separate from the chaff. That’s also the reason I don’t turn off comments altogether — the value of the real comments outweighs the hassle of the spam.

Akismet likes to say, “Set it and forget it; Akismet gets smarter while you sleep.” God bless them, I know they are doing the best they can, but unfortunately the spammers appear to be winning; the rate of false negatives is rising.

There’s a better way to put an end to this nonsense once and for all — it just takes a completely different approach. That’s a key aspect of what I’m working on in the new startup. Keep a watch on this space — I promise I’ll post about it when it’s ready.

(In the meantime, if there are any WordPress plugin warriors who want to help deliver this solution as much as I do, ping me via my contact page and let’s talk.)

Posted in Blogging, Privacy | 1 Comment

Where Good Ideas Come From (Video)

Posted on 1/15/2011 by Drummond Reed

This four-minute video, about Steven Johnson‘s book of the same name, is so brilliantly illustrated that it would be worth watching for that reason alone.

But Steve’s underlying point that it illustrates — that when it comes to creativity, “chance favors the connected mind” — is so profound that it would take me an entire book to elaborate.

I hope someday I have time to write that book. I wish I just had the time to read Steve’s book. But right now I only have time to leave you this blog post.

(And leave credit for Joe Andrieu, who mentioned this video in an email to the VRM mailing list.)

Posted in Creativity, VRM | Tagged Joe Andrieu, Where Good Ideas Come From | Leave a comment

True Data Portability

Posted on 1/12/2011 by Drummond Reed

I’ve been on the board of Dataportability.org since its founding three years ago. The concept made quite a splash when it was first announced, but I knew that after the hype wore off would come all the hard work of making it real. And that’s where XDI would be needed.

Ever since then, I’ve watched the concept of Data Portability become somewhat of a buzzword with different companies and communities. As is often the case with buzzwords, actual understanding runs a mile wide and an inch deep.

Which is why this article from DP Communications Chair Alisa Leonard caught my eye: it goes right to the heart of defining what data portability really means. I especially like this quote:

It is important to first understand that true data portability puts the ultimate power of data control in the hands of the user, not the web application using that data.

She goes on to explain precisely why this means Facebook does not yet provide data portability:

Facebook has long fallen under scrutiny for having immense control over end user data. The development of Facebook Connect and the Open Graph API have been steps in the direction of data portability, but ultimately, Facebook continues to maintain, under their TOS, the last word on your data usage through an all-encompassing license to do what they wish with your data (including sub-license it to other entities).

What matters is that while they now allow more access to your data through the download feature, the Facebook TOS has not changed— meaning your data is still on their server and while you can download, you cannot remove your data entirely (if you wished to do so). This is data accessibility, not data portability.

I’d go one step further: companies and sites that provide true data portability will provide 100% programmatic access to the data that you store there. Which means you can do more than just remove/delete it. You can read it, write it, or move it somewhere else — all under your control, using the tool, program, or service of your choice.

That’s how email works today: I can read, write, delete, and move my email from my email provider completely under my control, not theirs. (The “moving” part is not actually something that most email provider’s support directly, i.e., you have to copy it from one provider and write it to another, which is anywhere from difficult to almost impossible.) But if you can do all these things, and you can do them easily without barriers — that’s true data portability.

Posted in Data Portability, XDI | Leave a comment

Why You Shouldn't Freak Out about NSTIC

Posted on 1/10/2011 by Drummond Reed

Kaliya Hamlin (aki IdentityWoman) has posted a superbly written and documented article on Fast Company about why no one should freak out about NSTIC (the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace).

If only all dialog about digital identity infrastructure could be that well grounded and reasoned.

There’s a good reason why Kaliya (along with Phil Windley and Doc Searls) runs the Internet Identity Workshop. Hopefully the NSTIC will start shining a light on the importance of what IIW has been producing the past six years.

And check out Kaliya’s work on the Personal Data Ecosystem while you’re at it. (NSTIC is only an opening act for the PDE.)

Posted in Identity Commons, Information cards, Open Identity Exchange, OpenID, Personal Data Ecosystem | Tagged Doc Searls, Kaliya Hamlin, NSTIC, Phil Windley | Leave a comment

Singular Focus in 2011

Posted on 1/5/2011 by Drummond Reed

I made only one New Year’s resolution this year: to maintain the singular focus necessary to succeed with a startup.

There’s no need to pontificate on that subject of focus when it comes to startups — it’s an industry cliche (see this post that breaks it all the way down to a mathematical analysis). But I’ve been an entrepreneur long enough to have learned it the hard way how unforgiving it can be when you digress.

So, if for the next few months you find I am slow (or even completely non-responsive) in email or Facebook or Twitter, or hard to reach via Skype or SMS or voice, or otherwise not able to assist in many endeavors I have actively supported — just know it is because I’m working on something I’d really like to see done right, since it embodies so much of what we have been working on together for the past decade.

I’d like to make it a Really Happy New Year.

Posted in Data Portability, Personal Data Ecosystem | 2 Comments

The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge

Posted on 12/15/2010 by Drummond Reed

The moment I read the name of that TechCrunch article by Devin Coldewey I was certain it would articulate the subliminal feeling I’ve been having ever since I bought my iPhone that I am committing less and less to memory and relying more and more on external stores. Devin does a wonderful job of explaining the danger this may represent.

I have a different perspective on what’s dangerous about this and what’s not. Freeing up the mind to do “the real work” has real benefits; I know how much it’s helping me right now.

But that’s a topic of another day (and this blog post is, as Devin describes in his article, a reminder for that day). For now, back to the day job.

Posted in Blogging, iPhone | 1 Comment

Personal Data Ecosystem podcasts

Posted on 12/9/2010 by Drummond Reed

Kaliya Hamlin and Aldo Castañeda have posted their first six podcasts about the emerging personal data ecosystem. If you want to watch this space, it’s a great way to do it.

Posted in Personal Data Ecosystem | Leave a comment

Finally, a truthful privacy policy

Posted on 12/9/2010 by Drummond Reed

For anyone who’ been dealing with Internet privacy, Dan Tynan’s The First Truly Honest Privacy Policy is a scream.

(Don’t tell anyone, but it’s much closer to the real truth than anyone really wants to admit.)

Posted in Blogging, Privacy | Leave a comment

127 Hours

Posted on 12/2/2010 by Drummond Reed

Don’t be put off by the appalling truth of the story! Danny Boyle is a genius, James Franco is terrific, and Aaron Ralston is more of a true hero than you could ever imagine. You will be so glad you saw this, and you will never forget it.

Posted in Movies | Leave a comment

The real de(tai)l

Posted on 12/2/2010 by Drummond Reed

Techcrunch had a link to this simply excellent blog post about the details behind the readability of Google Maps. It’s like a mini-Malcolm Gladwell essay devoted just to showing why it really is the details that make the difference when it comes to information architecture.

I’ve become a zealous convert to that point-of-view with my work on the XDI graph model. Here’s an example of just how much detail, nuance, and semantic power can be packed into the smallest of graph fragments. It’s taught me a world of lessons about why the semantic web is so complex (if you want a mind-boggling view of the world of description logic models — of which the entire W3C Semantic Web is just one branch — take a look at this page).

I’m a sucker for authors who have a talent for distilling out that complexity into explanations the average mortal can appreciate, and this blog post is a wonderful example.

Posted in Blogging, XDI | Leave a comment

Google Accounts Getting Easier

Posted on 11/15/2010 by Drummond Reed

I think Google is listening. I did a 3000+ word post last Christmas about the Google Account Problem. Now I’m pleased to report they’ve added Google Account Switching. I’m using it now, it works wonderfully, and it even works across Google Apps.

Thanks for listening, Google.

Posted in Accounts | Tagged Google | 2 Comments