David’s Software Development Blog
Simply install GNOME Gmail in your Linux distro and change the Mail Reader in System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications:
If you use Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10) or earlier you need to download the GNOME Gmail .deb but in Natty Narwhal (11.04) you can install it directly from the unsupported universe repository.
I’ve realized a long time ago that my personal web diary in in Swedish – 2good.nu – has been obsoleted by my Facebook account. Same with the diary for our first-born child. I didn’t even start a blog for our second child.
This is quite OK, as my home-made web diary software – even rewritten in Zend Framework – will never have the same features as Facebook. There are no comments, photo uploads, likes, mentions of friends, etc, that the existing social networks already implement.
Of course I also have a Twitter account, @davideriksson, that complements this blog with mostly English-language updates regarding software development and related topics. I actually use Google Buzz for sharing some stuff with friends, and it is also connected to my Twitter account.
I never use my Orkut account so let’s ignore that. Should I mention my LinkedIn account? By its nature it is almost purely for my professional relations.
Now comes Google+ and I will give it a try as soon as they accept the invitation I have. Should I spend/waste my time on yet another social network, connected to more or less the same people?
What I want is to publish stuff (blog posts, links, photos, videos, status updates) in one place, and have it reach the desired target group (or Social Cicle, in Google+ speak). Something like Diaspora sounds like a good idea, but it is not click-and-play and does it integrate with the other social networks mentioned previously? I’m not so sure.
Ideally I publish something on Facebook and it ends up in the corresponding social circles in Google+, and the other way around.
Another solution would to be that I publish everything from my personal site, and it pushes it to the corresponding systems. Maybe I have to implement photo upload after all? And build an Android client? No, I should not have to.
A better solution would be that a single social network is my “main” one and it provides an API that I can use to share data to other social networks. Maybe Google+ is that social network, but it does not have a public API yet. I still have to build stuff, but integrating systems is much more fun than implementing photo upload… 🙂
To see what others publish I realize that I still need to connect to each social network, but I’m probably curious enough!