OAuth - Bridge between functionality and privacy

Imagine someone telling you they've created an itinerary mapping application that you can use to plan your vacation and it utilises your google calendar to help with which dates you need to be where, however in order to use it you need to handover your google username and password? No!

In a time where everything is personal but still privacy is high on the chain of command (Twitter doesnt allow you to private message someone that isnt following you and Facebook doesnt allow you to write on walls of people that you aren't friends with) there exists a door between convenience for a user to gain functionality and maintaining security.

This door is called OAuth.

Google for Business; Data Capture, Emailing, Marketing Analysis

Starting a business is costly, but wireframing your business or putting the necessary web-based components in place can be extremely cheap, like shoe-string cheap. Like all you perhaps really need to pay for that professional web-component look and feel is your own domain name! That is under US10.00 cheap. Got mine from namecheap.

Google allows you to have all the best things that a typical large scale company has (with a shoe-string budget). No, I dont have a fully implemented business model to reference you to, but that's what this blog is about. Its about noting the things that I've discovered on my way towards creating a Web2.0 company. Here are some things to consider:

Meet and Market Business Through Twitter.

I hate to sound like I'm selling marketing services but if there's one thing that I know all too well its that without marketing, any business interest or product, no matter how good, will only be known by the owner/creator. There's definately no two ways about it, marketing is a must.

Twitter's search functionality cannot be under-estimated.

First of all, you get to use real-time updates to find out what people are tweeting about and you can identify which individual is tweeting about the keywords you have searched for.

Secondly, after identifying those individuals, sending them an email to introduce your website, blog or services are great for the next step. It may seem a bit forward, it may not. That is actually how some marketing companies make use of twitter.

It is true that posting tweets are similar to posting status messages inside facebook, except facebook doesnt allow you to search the status messages that are posted on their platform beyond you only seeing what was said by someone you already know.

Twitter not only makes it easy to generate new leads, but gaining access to those individuals and integrating with your already existent systems become so much easier based on their published API.

The Plan
Feed my Blog Labels/Tags to Twitter Search.
Then message those twitter users that were returned from the twitter search with a tinyurl hotlink to my blog.

UPDATE! - Okay, well I wont even write a new post or inform you on how I've implemented, suffice it to say, I encountered this blog and it does as much of what I need to do!

Here's to making Social Media work for you.
Cheers

Auto Follow and Tweet At someone (Part II) from Google Form

Following up from Part I it would seem pointless if all that cool effort of acknowledging your new member via an automated tweet with their name goes unnoticed by the new user! This is however possible if your twitter account pushes alot of tweets, therefore a tweet going unnoticed is possible.

One of the workarounds I've thought about is to tweet @JohnDoe as well as to automatically start following JohnDoe on twitter. That definately improves the odds of him seeing that you've tweeted at him, acknowledging his presence to your online community.

Auto Tweet a welcome message!

At some point, everyone wants to gain more growth and create a community behind their organisation. Nothing like letting your newcomers feel welcomed by tweeting their presence on your twitter channel and signing them up to your mailing list via a google signup form.
 
So someone finally comes across your blog, website or even facebook page! Wow, great now that you've gotten this lead, how can you get them to signup for joining your community and ensuring they enjoy the process?

Google Docs and Twitter.

So I needed to create a supporting framework between twitter and google spreadsheet. The aim was a google spreadsheet with pre-populated data that would automatically output tweets.

This I personally believe to be very useful as students can follow a particular twitter channel in my project and it will reinforce concepts that they have learnt by pushing daily tweets that are subject specific.

I'm not sure what to actually show you as the result but I will explain the concept.

Lets say you have a spreadsheet with History dates (I hated history, but Im just saying!).
What would be done is that all the necessary historical events that happened would each be summarised as a 120character tweet (twitter uses the other 20 for ids). Now each day a tweet would go out automatically from google docs more specifically, google spreadsheet.

The entire thing is nothing shy of a thing of beauty and very useful. Personally, I'm happy.
Check out our website and follow one of our subjects to see exactly what you get as the end result.

Thanks to Martin over at JISC RSC Mashe for sharing his ideas.

Google Docs, something everyone should know!

As a consultant I'm all to familiar with the need of business owners to get feedback from their customers. Incidentally, not only business owners but every one at some point in time need to get feedback. A website developer that needs a contact us page or a sign up page, a student that's doing a project and needs responses.

Here are some more specific examples.

Facebook Like Button on Google Site

This is the time of social media, when tweets and facebook rule so I definately needed to incorporate the much needed "like" button from facebook that seems to be such an easy way of associating persons that like a product or company, with their own facebook account.

With google sites, this couldnt have been an easier process

All I had to do was the following

SpreadSheet Formula Vs JavaScript

Problem: I need to copy a spreadsheet formula in google docs down to other rows when a new form is submitted.

Solution: Create formula Cell c2 = b2 + a2
              Delete (shall I say it louder? DELETE all other rows below this row (row 2 in which u entered the formula)
            Then like magic, whenever any other forms are submitted, the formula will automatically copy itself down into the other rows. Of course, remember to use your absolute ($) expression etc depending on what you want to do.

Solution 2: Write a JavaScript file that reads the input from your spreadsheet, does the calculation and assign it to a variable. Then manually set the script to run each time a form is submitted (just google for google docs triggers).

I think I'll come back to this post and put up a nice and nifty little documentation with images and such.

Cheers.

The beginning... thanks google

Firstly, let me start by saying google is easily the greatest invention. Single Sign_On is super great not just only because of the integration between your gmail (goodbye outlook), calendar (goodbye phone calendar and outlook) but also because google keeps acquiring more and more great products e.g. Blogger!

Btw, I live in Jamaica and I got an automated voice call from google with my verification code. I hate to sound like a noob but dude this is just really super officially easily the most effective strategy I've ever seen a company that want to convince others that it is interested in real development have. I'm convinced. I'm a believer.

Anyways I've started really using google apps and GAS (google apps script, which is really javascript, just like fbml- facebook mark up language is really html) and its been nothing short of refreshing and amazing.

Very simple to use and intuitive, I think I can literally count how many word, excel or presentation documents I have stored on any local machine. I do keep files backed up on my external though, wouldnt be wise to leave everything in the cloud after all, I dont work at or for google and I'm not paying them so I cant demand anything back, none the less, something tells me they are safe so long as I again, back them up.


So I'm prototyping an educational tool, and google seems really big on education (after all that's how they got started in the first place). Hopefully it will definately help my country to excel even the more in academia as well as the caribbean region. I'd however really love to see this whole thing have an entire community behind it, filled with educators, innovators/programmers as well as students who keep demanding more from technology.

As weezy would say... ""here I go!"


Cheers.