Check This Out

Google Calendar is finally out in beta, and the initial impression is that it looks nice.

The first thing that caught my eye was the “Quick Add”

Normally it can be a real pain to enter stuff into an electronic calendar because first you have to navigate to the right date, then navigateto the right time of day, then create a new entry, type in the information, and save the entry.

“Quick Add” is a bit different.

The example of what to fill in said “Dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow” - so I copied just that - and lo and behold - it made an entry for tomorrow at 7pm that said “Dinner with Michael”

How cool is that.

So I tested Quick Add a bit more.

• Dinner with michael the day after tomorrow: Didn’t work
• Dinner with Michael 2 days from now: Didn’t work
• Dinner with Michael 7 pm next friday: Worked
• Dinner with Michael in Boston 7pm Saturday: Worked - and it even captured Boston as the location for the event
• Dinner with Michael at Joe’s in Boston 7pm Saturday: Worked - and the Google Map that can be launched had all the Joe’s restaurants in Boston flagged
• Dinner with Michael at 100 Atlantic Ave Boston 7pm Saturday: Worked - And Google Maps marked the exact location

Printing works by generating a nice PDF that you can preview before printing.

You’re supposed to be able to create an event in your Google Calendar from a Gmail email, but I’m currently missing the “Create event” option from my “More Actions” dropdown box in Gmail

You can have several calendars with Google Calendar, and they can be either Shared or non-shared (Public or Private).

And you can even differenciate between two different forms of shared access. One is total access to the events inthe calendar, and the other is access to free time/ busy time information, but without the details about what exactly it is you’re doing.

You can also grant specific people access to you calendar, which is really handy if you want a team calendar, a family calendar or are going away on vacation; You can give your team mates, the rest of the family or your secretary access to your calendar.

I’m gonna take a good long look at all Google Calendar has to offer over the next few days, because it looks really promising.

Gratz goes out to Scott Jarkoff for pointing out that Google Calendar had become available.

Streamload is offering an API to interface to their storage service.

Kinda like the Amazon API for S3 - (but you can use the MediaMax API with even the free Streamload option [25 GB storage, download 500MB/mo, max filesize 25 MB])

You can use the API free for non-commercial applications, but you need to contact Streamload if you want to create a commercial application.

It’s REST based so it should be pretty straightforward to do in almost any programming environment.

Some time ago I registered to be considered beta tester for Wikio.

Today I got an email that said:

Bonjour,

Vous vous êtes inscrit comme bêta-testeur de Wikio, et nous vous en remercions.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but except for the url’s in the email and what apparently is a username/password combo I have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.

Yes, I took French in Highschool, and Yes once I even signed up for the Amazon France affiliate program by switching back and forth between the french version and the american version to make sure that I put the right things in the right fields - but beta-testing something that I haven’t spoken or read for more than 20 years is not going to happen.

Just makes me wonder where they got the impression that I’m French

Well, MyPickList got blogged by Stowe Boyd, and now they’ve been blogged again.

Originally I found out about MyPickList through Michael Arrington’s post

MyPickList is a new service in beta (or going into beta).

Essentially it’s a list of product recommendations - some of which you will earn a commission on if somebody purchase the product by means of your picklist.

I haven’t been invited to this beta yet, so my comments here are purely based on the very limited information found on the MyPickList site.

My initial thought was that this sounded like a cool way for bloggers to earn some revenue through their blogs through product recommendations.

Lots of blogs are currently monetized by Google AdSense.

Not because it necessarily is a very profitable way to monetize your content, but it’s simple, convenient and very low maintenance. Once you have your Google AdSense code integrated in your blog template, then you’re all set.

And I view MyPickList as a similar simple, convenient and low maintenance way of monetizing your blog.

Revenue in Google AdSense came from Google AdWords advertizers - revenue in MyPickList comes from various product merchants.

You could of course sign up for the affiliate programs (usually) offered by these product merchants, but it’s cumbersome and it could take ages before you reach the minimum payout threshold for each merchant.

Another downside is of course increased maintenance on your parts.

The clearest benefit to this would be increased commission percentages - as opposed to what can be earned through MyPickList.

MyPickList mentions the creation of Buddy Lists, where you can email your picklist to friends and family, and keep them updated whenever you add a new product recommendation.

Like I said, I haven’t been able to test MyPickList yet, but I do hope that they’ll implement this Buddy List functionality through double opt-in.

The reason this crossed my mind was because I never received a confirmation email when I signed up to be on the Beta notification email list. I was just subscribed, which means that anybody could sign up anybody for the Beta list without their consent.

So if this Budy List system is also implemented without double opt-in, then I forsee a very quick spam-death to MyPickList.

Gready and spam-happy individuals would flood their Buddy List with truckload of harvested emails.

Sure, MyPickList would just withhold their commission, but before they could do so all outgoing email would already have been blocked by the major blacklist services.

So I sincerely hope that the Buddy List feature is double opt-in.

This is definitely a service I would love to Beta test.