Online shared intelligence

A friend asked me if I was planning to get an iPad. I started answering “I haven’t decided yet” and then, without even an inflection on my voice, before ending the sentence I added to it “why I will buy it”. In other words, the decision to buy it is already there, I will just need to think of a valid justification. Further, the decision is there because I have a lot of speculative reasons to buy it, but still the purchase will be compulsive. Hats off to Apple for getting me in this unconditional purchase mode… So, I thought, let’s commit to this blog the reasons I can think of at this time, and get back to check the accuracy of my predictions in four months.

The MiFi is not a revolutionary concept, or a totally new product. But I tell you, it will revolutionize the way people like me work. Constant connectivity in a computer with true computer ergonomics is now a reality

Call me 1.0, but…

Most users of enterprise social networking / collaboration complain about the chasm between common desktop documents and on-line content; let’s face it, most Rich Text Editors (RTE’s) used by Enterprise Collaboration products are anything but “Rich”, and people who learned everything they know about computers through Office don’t get along with Textile either. As a result, RTE’s and/or Textile irritate the heck out of most users.

From what I hear, most collaboration vendors are trying to tackle this problem, some by making the desktop edition even more proprietary (guess who), others by trying to improve RTE’s. Well, there is another vendor, one that doesn’t have a collaboration platform of its own, whose product (Evernote) is quite relevant to this issue…

GTD (Short for David Allen’s book title Getting Things Done), is not only a book, it’s also a hugely adopted personal productivity methodology, a cult phenomenon, a tag in del.icio.us with 58,000+ entries, a favorite posting subject for bloggers (how original of me), and the subject of multiple software and online solutions, both open source and proprietary.

But GTD is also a naked emperor of sorts: chronicles of failed adoptions are pretty much as common (or more) as discussions of GTD itself. Typical postings about it go as follows:

So, another day went by, and I am still trying to recover from the mess I described in my last post, about upgrading to Apple OS X Leopard (or was it Leper?) 10.5.2. I have by now gone through the typical curve Stress vs. Time, that goes from suspended disbelief (I am sure this is something minor) to the oh shit moment, to increasing exasperation caudes by the idiocy of brands and the power of the large corporations (that component seems to always be there), to gradual understanding of the causes of the problem, and finally to the sweet and sour process of fixing the mess, with increasing confidence, and (I never did, and I will never do it again) some level of realization of the personal responsibility in the disaster.

 So, I am fixing the problem. Not out of the water yet, but a few things I have learned:

Let me state very clearly that it is not my intention to pick up a zeallot fight. I am NOT a hacker, I am not an expert, just your regular user who has found a couple applications he/she depends on, and uses them regularly. I expect thousands of such users to be in the same situation as I am now, and thus I decided to share my experiences.

I use a quad-processor Mac G5, 2.5 Gb memory, Quadro 4500 Video Card driving two Cinema 30 inch monitors. The machine has 750 Gb internal disk, plus 4 Tb of external disks. Not a low end system, not one that can “barely run” the OS. Further, with OS X 10.4 the machine was a screamer, running Aperture with thousand of pictures of 20 Mb each, and at the same time flying through three or four other simultaneous heavy-load programs like Photoshop.

So, one day Safari breaks.