Google Forms are great: they’re dead simple to build, and they can be accessed on the web via Google and (through the use of <embed> code) any other website as well.  Support for email publishing is great, and Google Forms work seamlessly with Google Docs spreadsheets.  It’s been my experience that within small and mid-sized businesses that are already using Google Apps, the internal use of Google forms has become routine.

What’s interesting, though, is that you tend to see them being used much less often out there in the wilds of the public internet.

That’s because Google Forms have one major weakness: unlike within the Google Apps ecosystem, public submissions are completely anonymous – so there’s no way check against users submitting multiple responses to the same form.  Granted, it’s not an easy technical problem: browser cookies are one option, but users can always delete them. Comparing the IP address of each submission against those of previous submissions?  That’s not a perfect solution either: consumer ISPs typically issue dynamic IP addresses, multiple legitimate users could be sharing the same internet connection, and lastly, there are, as always, privacy concerns.

And that’s just the technical side of the issue – from a PR perspective, of course Google has to be very careful about being perceived as being in the business of anything remotely resembling the tracking of users out there on the public web.  Still, it’s hard to imagine why Google hasn’t yet implemented a transparent, user opt-in system to prevent multiple public Google Forms submissions (even if it might reduce the number or submissions).

In the meantime, for all the <embed> code and URL access, Google Forms is essentially crippled as a public web service.

OK, so that’s the web – what about Google Forms sent via email to a private finite set of known respondents?  Here, the privacy issues (both real and perceived) are much reduced – and technically speaking, identifying data could easily and securely be embedded within the ‘Submit’ link contained within each email – but yet, even privately emailed Google Forms responses are completely anonymous (and therefore uncontrolled) as well.  As a result, a Google Forms email survey subject could ‘game the system’ by clicking on the ‘Submit’ link in their single email any number of times.

Conclusion   As a public web service, Google Forms has great potential – but addressing the unique/multiple submission issue would involve technical challenges, privacy concerns, and a potential for third party misuse that are clearly beyond Google’s comfort level.  As a result, any serious use of Google Forms remains limited to within the Google Apps platform.

Sure, a nod has been made towards the public use of the service (Google URLs, <embed> codes, email distribution) – but it seems that Google’s comfortable with letting Google Forms remain merely a Google Apps value-add.

In the meantime, here’s a completely anonymous (and therefore completely meaningless!) Google Forms survey for you.

Vote early, vote often!

Briefly and simply, Facebook Timeline is amazing!

What launched globally this week, Facebook now affords anyone to post one’s complete life stream in chronological order. With that the ueber-popular social network introduces a powerful new form to feed back and forward one’s entire live story in one fell swoop.

Think your teenage 1978 Miss America picks alongside your favorite cheesy 80s movie flicks side by side your current day Philip Glass CD collection. All neatly timelined in chronological order and interspersed with plenty *foursquared* bars and clubs revealing exactly when, where and who you’ve been hanging out with over the years.

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It was my birthday this weekend. Thanks everyone for your kind and warm wishes.

Turns out, it was actually my first truly Facebook-centric celebration – a social media-powered birthday if you will.

This might not necessarily be anything new to you, but I had never had a birthday were Facebook wall posts took center stage.

Be that personal calls, emails, or postcards arriving in the mail (remember those?), wall posts from Facebook friends way outnumbered any other forms of traditional greetings I received this time around.

From New York to Berlin back to LA, friends apparently pay notice to Facebook’s able birthday alert system. True to social media’s promise, incoming wall posts even made for a bit of a reunion with some of the folks I hadn’t been in touch with in years.

Old fashioned me, I did respond to each and every post. Not even sure if that’s the proper etiquette and instead a single *bulk* mille grazie reply post would have done?

Who knows? Despite its success – social media is still relatively new. So is Facebook’s personal wall concept. (Hey, my car is older than that). And as the social powerhouse continues to introduce new features and capabilities, rules around Facebook usage will likely stay equally in flux.

So, let’s see what shape and form Facebook will take in years to come, as it continues to grow into what seems to have already turned into our central e-greetings hub.

Just back from a trip to Germany, while over there I ended up in several serendipitous conversations about our increasing embrace of technology to help organize and memorize our everyday lives.

From the many appointments and conversations to ad-hoc thought streams, new log-ins, phone numbers or email addresses, we increasingly love to tether ourselves to nearby hardware and software managing our lifes’ personal and professional data streams – preferably instantly and on the go.

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I have a few  friends who’ve had ID chips implanted in their expensive purebred pets over the years.  I’d always thought of it as a vaguely creepy, almost comically yuppie thing to do – until we found ourselves having to do just that in order to legally bring our cat (of somewhat more humble animal shelter rescue origins) with us when we moved here to Berlin.

Since the chip in question is only about the size of a grain of rice and is completely undetectable lying somewhere under the loose skin behind his neck, I had completely forgotten about it.

Until I noticed the uniforms worn by the wait staff at a trendy Berlin café I was at the other day, that is…

QR code  Originally developed on Japanese automobile assembly lines to keep track of individual parts, QR code represents the state of the art in bar code technology, and is capable of storing textual information much more densely than the old-school vertical bar codes found on your groceries.  With the advent of high-quality smartphone cameras and QR code-scanning mobile apps, the square pixelated images have started showing up in print ads, billboards, catalogs, and signs everywhere, as consumer-facing businesses have co-opted the technology for marketing purposes.

Technical takeaway?  QR code makes the transfer of a small but meaningful amount of data from a physical object to a machine over the air possible.

User experience takeaway? Your cellphone is learning to read.

All well and good – but seeing these codes plastered across uniforms worn by humans rather than on inanimate physical objects – well, it reminded me a little bit of that chip inside our cat.

After thinking it over a bit, though, I think it’s just an example of technology as fashion statement – like simulated “shark fin” car antennas, merely an affectation more about conveying a certain level of affluence and technological hipness than anything having to do with actual functionality.

That would make the whole thing a bit silly, wouldn’t it?  Still, less silly than the alternative: imagine patrons actually trying to use these codes, frantically pointing their smartphone cameras at the backs of waiters and waitresses as they quickly pass by, hard at work in a busy café – all in an effort to get the menu or website URL onto their mobile devices.

That, to me, would be not only silly, but a little sad, too – and might just be what too much technology would look a little something like.

Some people are really bothered by imperfect grammar.  Other people can’t stand the sight of people chewing gum.  I don’t share either of those particular pet peeves, but there is something that really gets under my skin: usability-challenged software.

Which brings me to Microsoft Outlook, an application a lot of us spend the better part of our adult waking hours using (I know – kinda sad).  While setting an Out of Office message on the 2010 Mac version the other day, I was struck once again by how even a simple operation can be made needlessly limited and confusing.

In Outlook, the sending of auto-reply messages to internal and external senders is independently configurable – well, sort of.  See the “Send replies outside my company to:” checkbox to the left?  It’s greyed out unless the user has first selected “Send out of office messages“.  In other words, the assumption has been made that nobody could ever possibly need to auto-reply to an external sender if they weren’t already auto-replying to internal senders.

Two things…

• First of all, what a curious and arbitrary assumption to make.  Imagine you’re a worker who typically gets a lot of external email traffic, but those emails need to go unanswered while you work against deadline on an important internal project that demands routine and timely internal email.  Now imagine that as a courtesy to your clients, you’d like to send them an auto-reply for a day or two until the deadline is past.  Not an unreasonable scenario – and just the thing for an enterprise email client that allows independent external and internal auto-replies, right?  Well, with Outlook you’re still out of luck.  Memo to designers: before you impose an operational hierarchy on the user, make sure there’s a reason for it.
• And how about at least clearly naming the options as implemented?  Would it have been too much trouble to correctly label the  “Send Out of Office messages” option “Send Out of Office messages inside my company“?  That would provide a helpful hint to all the harried office workers out there that the options towards the bottom still need to be checked and filled out before heading out on that vacation.  And another thing: if you take the trouble to inform the user that external senders will only receive one auto-reply, why not display whether or not the same is true regarding email coming from internal senders?

How big a deal is this in the grand scheme of things?  OK, not too big – but maybe this kind bothers me only because it’s so unnecessary.  I mean, here’s the thing:  software development, like math, is hard.  The folks creating these applications are highly intelligent.  Why is it that all too often (this is by no means limited to Microsoft, by the way) the easy things – the ‘low hanging fruit’ of simple usability considerations – are overlooked by engineers?

It’s even more difficult to explain in the face of abundant evidence that when a product does get usability right (dropbox and iOS come to mind), it turns out to be not only good for users, but good for business as well (for more on that, see our recent post on Sony and Apple).

Google+ has been around for a few months now, and while the company is keeping typically quiet regarding the hard numbers, most web traffic analysts estimate that as of November of this year, something north of 50 million users will have created Google+ profiles.

How many of those users are actually active on the service, though, is another story: in our (admittedly anecdotal) experience, a lot of these initially enthusiastic early adapters have tapered off on their Google+ usage pretty dramatically (and even if every single one of these 50 million users were still highly active, that’s still only a 10th of Facebook’s user base).

Inertia?  …strongly in Facebook’s favor.

What’s a scrappy little upstart like Google to do?

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Here we are. You and I, plus another 6,999,999,998 more people. Today statistically we’ve reached the 7 billion population mark. What matters now is what is next.

As part of my Deutsche Telekom responsibilities, I recently took part in helping to shape what has become the 7 Billion Actions campaign under the auspices of the United Nations Population Fund - an innovative campaign that is building awareness around the opportunities and challenges of a world of seven billion.

As an individual as much as a representative of a large, multi-national communications provider, population-relevant issues and causes matter to me probably as much as they do to you.

To that end, the social media team at the UNFPA sent along the following tips how everyone across the social graph and blogosphere can help contribute to the cause:

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It was reported recently that Sony Pictures is in final negotiations to bring Walter Isaacson’s soon-to-be-published (and much anticipated) Steve Jobs biography to the big screen.  To anyone who’s followed the consumer electronics market even casually, the irony is hard to miss: it’s hard to think of anywhere Steve Jobs (and his relentless focus on user experience) appears to have been less understood than at Sony.

Armed with concepts such as “Engineers remain the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry“, CEO Howard Stringer as led the company through recent years in which too many new Sony products were incompatible, user-unfriendly, and/or simply misguided.  The results?  Tremendous losses (3.1 billion US for the fiscal year ending March 2010), a decidedly unsafe-for-the-workplace Onion news clip that’s been viewed almost 5 million times on youtube alone (in fairness, Apple’s received the Onion treatment as well), and lastly, a near complete loss of brand value in regards to consumer electronics and innovation – this for the company that gave us the Walkman.

Despite having had its lunch so thoroughly eaten by Apple, though, Sony still doesn’t appear to quite get it: “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US”, Stringer claimed in a 2009 interview.  The logic behind this spin almost works, if one ignores the fact that Apple itself is perhaps the poster child for closed ‘ walled garden’ system design (iTunes, anyone?).  No, a stubborn attachment to proprietary technologies such as ATRAC and the Memory Stick was not the primary cause behind the current sad state of affairs at Sony (although it almost surely contributed).  Instead, a more constructive place to look would be towards the products themselves – towards the utility, value, and user experience they offer.

As it turns out,  maybe engineers aren’t “the movie stars of the electronics industry”, maybe they’re just the engineers of the electronics industry – and if there is anyone deserving of being put on a pedestal, maybe it’s the consumer.

That’s perhaps at the core of Steve Jobs’ professional legacy.  As to regard for the consumer over at Sony, just the fact that Stringer is quoted above using the term ‘electronics industry’ rather than the more common (and accurate) term ‘consumer electronics industry’ is perhaps telling.

Here’s hoping that if he’s still at Sony in a few years when his Steve Jobs movie finally comes out, Sir Stringer watches it closely.

Shortly before moving to Europe, it occurred to me that although I was about to (very happily, by the way) cancel my AT&T cellular account, it would be a good idea to still maintain a US phone number.  What I needed was a number that would a) cost nothing, b) go straight to voice mail, and c) allow me easy access to any messages via email and/or a web interface.

Enter Google Voice – good on all three counts.  One potential problem, though: since (at least so far) Google Voice is designed to be merely a phone management/aggregation service rather than a standalone (Skype-like) internet telephony solution, it’s not possible to create a Google Voice account without tying it to an already existing traditional (i.e. land line or cellular) phone number.

Would my Google-based voice mail solution continue to work after the AT&T number I created it with ceased to exist  a few days later?  Luckily, yes.  Granted, if I want to, say, record a new outgoing message, I have to temporarily tie my account to additional (working) US phone number to do it – but even if that’s a bit of a hack, it’s not too inconvenient, given how useful it’s been to have a US number (albeit voice mail only).

So far, the Google Voice service has been limited to the US, though – so for making calls back to the states, I’ve had to rely on Skype.  While Skype works great (from both my computer and my iPhone), in the interest of simplicity I wouldn’t mind getting my transatlantic phone solutions (incoming and outgoing) all under one roof, though – which is why the recent news of the imminent rollout of Google Voice in Europe (announced during a surprise appearance by Google’s Jens Redmer at the European Pirate Summit conference in Köln) was of interest.

Redmer gave no indication of when the service might launch over here, but he did mention that Google is already testing Google Voice internally – so one would have to assume the technology is pretty much there.  What he did cite as a potential holdup were the various European legislative hurdles Google would have to overcome.  This is not surprising – what’s interesting about the timing of all this, though, is that the EU is expected to decide on whether to allow Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype in the next week or two.  Whether or not the Skype ruling and the Google Voice announcement are merely coincidental, it’ll be interesting to see if and/or how the two affect each other – especially given that (until Microsoft’s acquisition goes through, at least) Skype is a European company.