My Dad, Lynn Pearson, died in 1999. Oddly, however, I find many of the times (which seems to be a lot lately) I spend on social networking sites reminds me of him.  He would never have used Facebook, and definitely not Twitter; it took 3 years for me to get him on the Internet to start with…so I tried to think about why when I am on Facebook do I think about him.

The answer to me, is that Facebook, and to some extent Twitter and the rest of the networks I am on (see previous post about social overload), shows a curious cross-section of your life to this point. I have friends on my Facebook from all stages of my life: including friends from elementary school that I haven’t talked to in years, high school, college, old jobs etc. Most of them don’t know each other and don’t have anything in common except me. In some ways it really does feel like Six Degrees of Separation.

So the random quizzes and conversations that come up with this varied group, leads me to think about those different places in my life. I definitely hadn’t thought about Wesley and his “Why yes” taunting in years, or for that matter his Mustang he had in high school that he put on “5 Cars I’ve Owned,” or all the kids I knew at St. John’s Elementary School.  Maybe I am getting old, but I think it is awesome that new technology is allowing me to reminsence and interact with those people, and do it before I am 80.

In the end, maybe this blog isn’t about my technology or my dad, but rather the curious socialogical experiment that we are undertaking. The one in which an increasingly dispered populace with seeming less interconnectedness, is actually overcoming that distance virtually. Another reason an amazing time to be alive!

I am for free enterprise and if someone provides a superior product, then the market should reward them. Google certainly has responded to a market need, in a variety of niches, however, the more areas they go and the more data they suck into the huge data centers, the more they can abuse that power.

This has become of particular concern for me lately.

At my current position, I was running out of mail server space (we outsource it) and I am on two machines, and so IMAP made more sense for me than POP on each. But I couldn’t keep the messages on our server, so I looked around. GMail became my choice, simply because they allow FREE IMAP access and will store (currently) at least 6 GB of data. I have long used Yahoo for webmail, but they charge for IMAP. So I am now using GMail, happily, and didn’t even notice the outage the other day, because I don’t use the web interface AT ALL. Also, it does a Blackberry app, which is nice. My only question is, what does Google get out of this arrangement? I don’t use the web app, so never see the ads, so how are they going to monetize me?

The other area we are using Google now is for their spreadsheet app, because it was so much easier to share documents with others, than me building a new web app for some internal use (although it has given me a great chance to prototype different PHP/AJAX grid frameworks). They already had built some cool little AJAX toys into it, so let them deal with the hassle. But again, how will they monetize this in the future?

I can’t imagine they are just giving me all this bandwidth and disk space (regardless how cheap it is now), just out of some techy-altruism, there is a profit motive in there somewhere! My only conclusion I can reach is that the more I am dependent on them in any one arena, the more likely I am to use them in others and they have already figured out how to monetize many of those areas. So again, I ask, is really a “GOOG-opoly” any better than any other monopoly. We become so dependent on one company, that the opportunity for abuse, may just be too much to resist, regardless of the oft-professed “DO NO EVIL” mantra.

Anyway, currently I am playing with tools in the Yahoo User Interface, some little JavaScript widgets that help give your sites a little more Web 2.0 interactive flair.  I am not doing anything complicated, but wish I knew JavaScript better, but with learning C#/ASP and the MS-SQL, MySQL and PHP work, I don’t know that my brain could take in anymore.

Of course, if the wonderful people at WordPress would put out a Rich Text Editor like the one embedded in this blog editor my life would be simpler. One of the reasons I am working with the YUI is that version 2.3 has a rich text editor. I have tested out quite a few and can’t seem to, at least easily, get the right set of options configured in any of them. So far, YUI’s Editor has been the easiest to configure, but still missing an image upload option (at least that I have found yet).

Lastly, while I took a break from coding, I was looking at the Iowa Straw Poll results. I find these to be great money makers for the party that holds it, but of limited real value. However, because the media places value on them, so do the candidates, or is that the other way around? Anyhow, after watching a video the other day from Mike Huckabee, I was very impressed to see his  second place win.

I went over to his site and thought it looked pretty cool and they already had a YouTube video up of post-Straw Poll spin, in about an hour, that is pretty good. What surprised me was that it was running ColdFusion. I have never done any Coldfusion, but what I have seen of Scorpio, ColdFusion 8 (which maybe out of beta now), Adobe hasn’t abandoned it, and with the help of BlueDragon, it might actually hold some developer mindshare.

On a personal note, I thought Huckabee to be a very articulate speaker and well-reasoned thinker. Plus, he has a good personal story with the weight loss and the Baptist preacher background. I will say the most ironic thing about him is that his sons, one of whom got arrested last year, are all still relatively large, and here the Governor lost all this weight and wrote a book on it. I am not really surprised about one son, as I met him back in my College Republican days and I think we all knew the only way he was involved with the CR’s was because of his dad, kinda reminded me of Tommy Boy.

So guess there are my random thoughts for Saturday…have a good rest of your weekend.

I actually found the site from a review on some blog (I know it wasn’t TechCrunch, I looked) suggested by my RSS Reader, Rojo.com. It said it was a good shared calendar option for families that have lots to keep up with. Well, with Jacob working and Bri in marching band, I can never keep up with who is where. Luckily, Stacy does most all of this, but being the tech head I am, I thought if they could all put it in this calendar then I could see whenever, and wouldn’t have to ask 12 times a day.

Cozi has a few extra features, besides calendaring, like shopping list (which you can have texted to your phone – a cool feature), messaging and photo screensaver; but for me the calendar is the killer app. Even better because they have an Outlook plugin that allows me to sync me work calendar up with it, so if I have to be at a meeting, they can see.

It is free and even better, when I contacted them with questions, I got a response in 5 hours. I can’t get that kind of response time for most enterprise software that I am paying for. So if you have a family on the go, check out Cozi.com.

Now, outside of Wikipedia, I have yet to see how exactly this would be useful, and definitely have yet to see how people are using it in the enterprise; but in this case I think it could be a very good idea.

The site isn’t the best and the rich text editor needs work, but if it gets my not-all-tech-savvy family to post info, it must be doing something right.

If you are interested here is the Pearson family wiki.

(BTW, I am putting this in my Web 2.0 category – I am still somewhat undecided about what that is, is it the technology (RSS, Ajax, RIA) or is the community-stuff (Blogs, MySpace, Wikis)..feel free to give me your thoughts.)

The extension makes it so easy to right click, send the picture and edit it. Now if only we didn’t have to save and re-upload, but hey, much easier to use than launching Photoshop for every picture.