I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I have come to prefer Chrome as my favorite browser, but there was no Roboform integration, and I just can’t survive without Roboform (a password manager, but also a way to manage all sorts of sensitive information and keep it encrypted). As of April 14, Roboform has a Chrome adapter now too. That means it now works with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, iPhone/IPod Touch, and Android and Chrome (see full list).

I store everything in Roboform even though it costs money, because:

1. It’s convenient: one click and I’m logged in
2. It’s encrypted and password protected
3. All information is available from all compatible browsers and directly from the Roboform interface as well
4. It’s available offline

Offline support is important to me because I use it to store all kinds of information that I want encrypted, but which doesn’t necessarily pertain to online services. So I like that available even when I’m offline but, say, need my bank info to make a call to my bank.
Until now, Roboform for Chrome has only been available in the online version (which is similar to KeePass and other online password storage solutions). As of a couple of weeks ago, there is now an alpha version of the full Roboform toolbar.
Of course, it comes with all the warnings for alpha products, but I’ve been using it for a week or so and no serious problems. On one website, I used Roboform to fill a form and got a popup saying Roboform had become unresponsive, did I want to stop it? I clicked yes, but in fact nothing bad happened. It correctly filled and submitted the form and Roboform was still available on subsequent pages.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this!

When I first heard about ChaCha I was amazed: I can text in a question and get an answer in two minutes. I was amazed because sometimes in the course of my research, I have questions that take days to answer or that I can’t answer at all. Imagine getting that down to two minutes. Then I thought maybe they don’t have God-like omniscience and maybe, just maybe, they aren’t set up to do archival research on sixteenth-century Geneva. Maybe you need to focus on simpler questions, more modern questions.

At Pubcon, someone mentioned that you can use the AdWords search preview tool if you want to see where you rank for a given search term without interference from personalized search (if logged into a Google account) or geo-targetting (always on based on your IP number which is sent to Google with every request). This cool tool also lets you see what search results (and ads) you would get in various geographical regions.

So I thought I would do a somewhat whimsical search and searched on bowling deaths. The choice isn’t arbitrary. I usually rank #1 for that search, but I was curious to find out whether that was true even if Google didn’t know who or where I was. And sure enough, there I was, still #1. But ChaCha came up as the number two result with a clear and succinct answer that looked suspiciously familiar. To the question "How many deaths are caused annually by bowling," the ChaCha expert answered

On average there are four bowling deaths due to bowling or bowling equipment each year. Natural deaths while bowling do not count.

Sure enough, the "source" cited was none other than my article. The problem is, my article is satire. The point of the article, to the extent that there was one, was to highlight the idiotic ways in which journalists use statistics, often failing to understand the importance of sample size, significance (as determined by chi-square and such) and so forth.

That article gets a lot of mentions in forums, almost always with a "heh heh" after it. ChaCha is unique in treating it as fact. So I guess that’s the downside of getting answers in two minutes. Maybe I just guessed right in my satirical article? Nah. ChaCha cites its sources, in this case, it’s my very own analysis death rates from bowling.

I wonder how many other examples one could find. Are you a ChaCha user? Have you gotten any tragically bad ChaCha answers? If so, add a comment and tell us about it. I sure hope you weren’t asking for directions!

New Twitter Retweet Function — Does the Length of Your Username Still Matter?

In times of yore, like last month, having a long username was a liability for getting "retweeted" because your Twitter nickname counted toward the character count in the retweet (which sounds like something Elmer Fudd would say to the troops do if being overrun by superior forces: Retweet! Retweet!). Twitter has recently added new functionality that makes the length of the username irrelevant, but I’m somewhat sorry they did. I think that this is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.

Under the new system, if I retweet something, it appears to my followers as if they’re suddently following that person. In my profile picture appearing in their stream, but the person I retweeted appearing out of nowhere in their stream. This is in theory good for the the person who wrote the original post, but not necessarily.

• From the end reader perspective. I find this confusing. Suddenly people I don’t know are appearing in my stream. Maybe I’m just not used to it, but I don’t particularly like that. On the plus side, I have instant one-click access to the original author’s information.
• From the retweeter’s perspective. I lose my identity. I may want to share something, but I may want my followers to know that it’s from me. On the plus side, I don’t have to edit a post down to fit into the 140-char limit.
• From the original author’s perspective. You might think there’s no downside here. Suddenly, there you are with your picture and everything in the stream of everyone who follows your beloved retweeter. The downside here is that you’ve mostly lost the benefits of social proof and the value of a retweet as a personal recommendation.

The last point bears some further comment. Let’s say I’m an author hoping to reach potential readers of my forthcoming book via Twitter (see Twitter for writers). I’m now injected picture and all into the user’s stream, which has to be better, right?

The problem is that the challenge is not in being available to the largest number of people, but in actually finding a way to cut through the noise. I delete at least half of my non-spam emails unopened and read at best 20% of what appears in my Twitter stream. And I follow very few people. I think the numbers are worse with someone who follows 200 or 2000 people. I tend to skim for the people I really want to read. More and more, Twitter applications let me filter into user lists, topic lists, and all sorts of things. So though I will always read something if it has @simplytheresa’s smiling face, on most days, I skip most people in my stream unless I’m in a serious procrastination mode. And to be clear, I’m not skipping people I actively dislike, because obviously I’m not following those people. I’m skipping anyone that I don’t really really really want to read, some days anyone who isn’t my wife. In other words, when
I’m skimming, it’s a whitelist algorithm, not a blacklist. I’m looking for people I actively want to read. If I’m not looking for you, you don’t get read. So if you someone retweets you with the native Twitter function, that means you. I don’t know you and I won’t read you.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen with the native Twitter. Most people use some third-party application to tweet from and that functionality is not included in most of them yet, though I suspect it will be soon. And then the next question is whether or not it will be widely adopted. I suspect it will.

So that leads to the important question: how can you get people to retweet old-style? In short, there’s not much you can do to positively encourage it. The best you can do is remove obstacles. Above all, that means making sure that your message stands on it’s own and doesn’t need editing to be retweeted.

Again, consider an author who wants to get the word out about his book, in part using Twitter. So if you’re giving a book reading, for example, that you announce on Twitter, you want your fans to be able to pass that on to their friends, which they will usually do with a "retweet". The old and still standard format is to take your message and copy it into their message and add "RT @yourname[space]".

Thankfully for Robert Louis Stevenson, he wasn’t trying to sell books in the Twitter era. By the time he leaves enough space for retweeting, he’s used up 25 characters, 18% of his total allotement. So he can’t tweet this 140 character message

I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8:30pm @ Moe’s in Berkeley

Because it would become

RT @RobertLouisStevenson I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8

Homer, on the other hand, would have it made.

RT @Homer I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Iliad this month – Dec 12, 7pm @ Book Passages, Corte Madera; Dec 14, 8pm at Moe’s in Berkeley

If at all possible, Robert Louis Stevenson would have wanted to get on Twitter day one to reserve RLS or at least RLStevenson. Regardless of the name, when composing a tweet that he wants retweeted, RLS would want to know his retweetable character count. The easy way to do this is to simply compose the post as a retweet, and then lop of the RT @RobertLouisStevenson part. Beyond that, people will do what they do and it remains to be seen whether the new interface features will overcome established practice. As I say, I suspect they will, and you’ll just have to live with it.

What do you think of the new Twitter Retweet function? Add a comment with your thumbs up or thumbs down.

I am not an early adopter of new modes of communication, except email. I still don’t really use a cell phone even though reception is improving in my area. I never did get on MySpace. But I have had some great reconnections on Facebook, and lately I’ve been dipping my toes in Twitter. But to some extent, Twitter is a fog in my mind and I’ve been trying to figure out what I like and why I do what I do there and to try to write it down to make sense of if all. This is Part I: Practice, which includes how I use Twitter, why I follow people, why I block people. In Part II: Theory, I try to wrap my head around what I see as the four modes of Twitter that you can’t get wrong.

How I Use Twitter

First off, don’t follow me. If you don’t already have my phone number and email address, you’ll probably be disappointed by my Twitter stream, and even if you do know me well enough to have those things, you still might be disappointed. If you’re thinking of unfollowing me, go ahead. It won’t hurt my feelings. I don’t stay on topic unless the topic is "random thoughts that cross Tom’s mind". I see my audience as my wife, some friends, and strangely, myself. My Twitter stream is a bit of a diary — a cool link, a random thought, a quote I like, a local event. I don’t expect to have an army followers and I’m not trying to build up a Twitter empire that I can leverage to get you to buy my açai berry treatment for flatulence. Just recently, I found out that a local non-profit that I think does great stuff is in rough financial shape (Yosemite Assocation). I tweeted in hopes that my few followers would retweet my donation reminder to their many followers and get some money rolling in. Other than that one time, I’ve never wanted anyone other than a handful for friends to follow me and I only follow a few people who are not friends.

Who I follow is another matter. If you’re trying to use Twitter to connect, here’s how I do things. I’m just one guy, perhaps completely atypical of the average Twitter user, but if you are looking to create a Twitter empire that includes me, you might want to read this.

Why I Might Just Block You

In a word: spam. At first it was a complete mystery why people who don’t know me would follow me. How were they finding me? As near as I can tell, most of them have alerts for some keyword and they habitually follow anyone who triggers their alerts. Some of these people trigger on words relating to Yosemite. That’s fine. I expect they’ll be fundamentally disappointed and unfollow me eventually because, as noted above, I do not stay on topic, but that’s their decision. I certainly don’t hold it against them and some people don’t mind a low signal to noise ratio. If that’s you, welcome aboard.

When I do hold it against them is when they clearly don’t even read the update that triggers the alert. For example, after Ben Bernanke said the economy could recover in late 2009, I said that a pterodactyl could attack New York. A spammer who triggers on New York started following me. At the height of it’s absurdity, I mentioned "browns" as in non-native brown trout that are eating native frogs in Sierra lakes and I immediately got followed by someone who Twitters about the Cleveland Browns. Of course, this didn’t help his brand because I thought "What a [expletive deleted] idiot". I block these people and can see that eventually Twitter will need real spam filters.

Why I Will Follow You

A lot of people are marketing via Twitter and some outright are spamming. I suppose that’s their right, but you have to know how to do it.

Personally, I like to only follow as many people as I can read, so at a certain point, if I follow more people, I have to get rid of some. Second, if I follow you, it’s because I want to follow you and not because I care, at least initially, whether you follow me back. I’m not interesting to 99.9999% of the planet and I’m certainly not interesting to everyone that I find interesting. I don’t expect you to reciprocate just because I follow you and, frankly, I probably won’t reciprocate just because you follow me. You have to be interesting in some way and here’s what makes you interesting to me:

• You are a friend of mine or perhaps my wife. If you were in town and didn’t call me would I be bummed? If yes, then I probably do want to know that you’re enjoying your morning tea or are frustrated at work and all the little details of your life that I’m otherwise missing. Thanks for being better about keeping your friends in the loop than I am. If you’re not my friend and you tweet about everything that passes between your lips, I won’t follow you.
• You are inherently interesting even to strangers. Maybe I don’t know you, but you’re just plain funny like Tim Siedel, aka @badbanana or you have a high percentage of your tweets on topics I care about. I’m interested in hiking and wildflowers in Yosemite, so I follow several Yosemite Twitterers I don’t know.
• You engage. If you have no @replies, you had better stay on topic (like SkiingExaminer, who does engage a lot, but I would follow him either way because he sticks to skiing. No posts about his morning cup of Joe there). The importance of engagement surprised me. I didn’t really see it until I started thinking more carefully about my behavior. I enjoyed Mike Linder’s presence on Twitter, so we started trading @replies. Then I finally hunted him down and cornered him at his workplace. I’m glad I did. Nice guy. And he said he was glad I did too, but would I please lower my weapon.
• You update occasionally rather than constantly. I’m not sure what my limit is, but if you update more than 10 times per day over the long term, I’m probably going to unfollow you unless you’re fricken brilliant. If you’re updating every fifteen minutes, you must be bringing me closer to enlightenment, riches or ice cream with every update.

One last comment on auto-responders. Somehow, you may have decided that you should send a welcome message to everyone who follows you. I find that getting an automatic message from a computer is a sweet and wonderful experience.

I sometimes find myself on public hotspots at a hotel or airport or what have you. And sometimes, the reason I’m online is because I have to pay a bill or do some other sort of business. I know that on an open network, I’m putting myself at risk and it always makes me really queasy and I’ve been wondering what the best way to handle it is.
Is Hotspot Shield the solution to surfing on public wifi? » »

I just discovered Google Charts. I’d never heard of it before, but I’m the sort of person who reads an article and scans for numbers and flips for charts, so this seemed pretty cool. Essentially, it’s an API that lets you create a chart with a simple URL.
See sample charts from Google Charts » »

I’ve been experimenting more with Gmail after my disappointing Zimbra experience (I haven’t totally written Zimbra off though, I’m just letting it mature in the cask for a while – the ultimate winner will be the first to allow offline use of Contacts and provide reliable contact synchronization). Anyway, aside from Gmail not having a decent way to delete a message without get kicked back to the message list (instead of just going to the next message like every other email client on the planet, there is also the annoying fact that in Gmail there’s no button to just view messages with no label. In their wisdom, the Google people no doubt think that I’ll be using their wonderful search engine to just search and find the messages I want and locate the relevant message. But as the great Donald Rumsfeld said, there are known unknowns (I can search for those) and unknown unknowns like the credit card bill that I totally forgot about and which I could search for if I knew I had forgotten about it, but then I wouldn’t have forgotten about it and wouldn’t need to search for it now would I?

So the way you find emails that have fallen through the cracks in Gmail is simple, but os so cumbersome. You have to do a negative search for every label you use. That is, you look for messages not labelled Labe1 and not labelled Label2 and so on. There’s no way around this.

If you do this more than once, typing in all your labels in the arcane syntax Gmail uses gets old. So what I’ve done is simply create a shortcut, which you can do quite easily and it works up until you add a new label, but then it’s just a simple matter of editing the bookmark.

So first, you have a full syntax and a compact syntax and, as far as I can tell, the compact syntax does not work with multi-word labels. So if you have Gmail labels with spaces in them, you have to use the full syntax and substitute hyphens for spaces.

So let’s say you have the following labels:

1. Label1
2. Label2
3. Label Three
4. Label Four

First, we want to exclude all messages that have those labels. To exclude a labeled message from your search, you use the -label: operator.

For the single-word labels, we’ll use the short syntax. This allows you to group terms within curly braces without repeating the “-label:” qualifier. So it looks like this in your Gmail search box

-label:{Label1 Label2}

Simple as that. Now for the multi-word labels, in theory as I read the instructions, I merely need to add quotes around the terms, and they should work within the curly braces. Not so for me. If you create a filter and look at the test search, that’s not how it does it either. So based on that, what I found worked for Label Three and Label Four was:

-label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

So the entire search, with both single-word labels and multi-word labels, looks like this

-label:{Label1 Label2} -label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

Now, that will create a URL that looks like this

http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/-label%3A%7BLabel1+Label2%7D+-label%3ALabel-Three+-label%3ALabel-Four

Now you can save this as a bookmark or shortcut and instantly access your unlabeled Gmail messages. Sometimes Gmail will add a zx parameter to your URL that looks like zx=afeoasdxou3swf that is just a random string so that if your ISP is caching data, it will see this as a unique URL and won’t give you cached data for Gmail. Since this effectively creates a single-use URL, if that appears in your URL when you do your search, you should edit it out before saving the bookmark.

Note that if a message has two labels and you are only excluding one of those, the message will still show up in your search. So if you have something labeled Label1 and Label5, and you use the search above, it will still show up in your results.

Also, sometimes a conversation that is labeled shows up unless you relabel the entire conversation, because one message is unlabeled or is still in the Inbox or whatever. If you select the whole conversation in the list view and label it, that takes care of that issue.

I’ve been on a long quest for an email client that I like. Granted, my wish list ranged from simple (must not crash constantly) to less simple (synch address books with online account). Despite high resource usage and some interface shortcomings, I think the new version of Yahoo! Zimbra is it. Finally, something to get me out of Thunderbird instability hell! For me, at least, this is a Thunderbird killer. Well, I thought this was a Thunderbird killer until a zillion problems with Zimbra surfaced.
What's so great about Zimbra? Read on » »

I would say the thing that drives me nuts the most about Gmail, is the fact that every time you delete a message, you’re kicked back out to the message list. Google, taking a page from Microsoft, has decided to do your thinking for you and take this option off the table because you really shouldn’t delete emails. But if I know I will never want that message again, I delete it. And am stuck back out at the message list. This, more than anything has stopped me from adopting Gmail.

It turns out there is a ‘Delete’ and go to next conversation Greasemonkey script that will do just what I’m looking for, but recent Gmail upgrades broke that script. So out of luck again. [Update, June 22, 2009: this script has been fixed. Check it out.]

Over at JimsTips.com, Jim suggests using Gmail Keyboard shortcuts (Gmail Help article) deleting with the # key, which does kick you back to the message list and then using the ‘k’ key to move to the next message and the ‘o’ or <enter> key to open the message. The thing I dislike about that is that it is three page loads when it should be two (in other words, why do I have to see that damn message list?).

So my similarly kludgey, but somewhat more elegant solution (or maybe not) is to:

• Turn on keyboard shortcuts (in Settings -> General).
• Create a label named ‘Delete’ (or ‘aaDelete’ if you want to be sure it is at the top of your label list).
• When reading a message, type ‘l’ (that’s a lower-case L) to bring up the label list.
• Hit the downarrow key once to select my top aaDelete label at the top of my list
• Hit the ‘k’ key to move to the next message.
• When I’m all done, I can view the messages deleted aaDelete and select and delete them all.

Yeah, stupid, crappy, cumbersome way to do it. I know. Tell Google.

Now if only they would come up with a proper way to view all unlabeled messages, but my solution to that is reasonably workable, if a bit cumbersome.

Arrghhhh! You go to look at your gmail with Thunderbird (or Shredder if you’re running the TB3 beta) and it just spins and spins and hangs up and you can no longer access your email via Thunderbird. I’ve had this happen with several versions of Thunderbird and I thought I’d tried everything – kill the account and reinstall, try a new profile, etc etc. Nothing worked.

This last time, I also got the message

The current command did not succeed… The mail server responded: No messages match. (Failure).”

Finally, that let me find an answer at MozillaZine and Google Groups. I had never seen this suggested before and it’s so easy.

• Put the cursor over the Inbox in the offending account and right click (Windows) and select “Properties”
  

  Mailbox Properties

• Then just click the Rebuild Index button
  

  Mailbox Properties Dialog

I wish I had known that a couple years ago!