Google

There are a number of different authentication methods available for integrating with Google Apps. These include OpenID, OAuth and SAML amongst others. At a first glance, it's not always entirely clear on the differences between them and when you may wish to use one over another. Here's a brief overview which hopefully makes this a bit clearer.

OpenID

On Tuesday September 22nd, 2009 (tomorrow) I'll be giving a lightening talk at Seattle NetTuesday on free tools that nonprofit organizations can use to develope and execute a listening strategy to enhance their use of social media and the web.

If you haven't heard yet, Microsoft and Yahoo! have inked a 10 year deal to partner on search and advertising.  You can learn more about the details of the deal, which I won't go into here.  If the deal is approved by regulators, we could see changes in Yahoo and Bing search and advertising early next year, from the sound of it.

I have spent considerable time over the last year or so trying to get my data and systems set up to have email, contacts and calendars available both online and offline on both my main computer, my mobile device and online as a guest user on others computers. All the while keeping my inbox clean from spam and bulk mail, contacts synchronized and access my preferred user-interfaces and applications. I've recently been able to get this pretty close to perfect. In this article I will describe the technologies I use and how I've configured them to achieve this.

Hardware & Software

In Developing A Personal Email Management Strategy I discussed the sorting, filtering and processing of the seemingly endless flow of email I receive. Recently, I took the plunge and converted my non work email to IMAP in preparation for converting work email to the same. The goal is to be able to see important direct email on my iPhone without seeing all the list traffic, commercial communications and other solicited bulk email

First, Some History

Google Aps For Your Domain) for different types email traffic, travel@ for example for when i signed up for travel related services and lists, buy@ for commercial email and receipts after making purchases. This made sorting and filtering the incoming email really easy, just set up a message filter in Thunderbird based on the To: address. But all of these email addresses were just aliases delivering the mail to my primary account. Thus when checking email on the iPhone, sifting through all the solicited bulk email for the personal messages was like finding a needle in a hay stack.

Gmail offline is finally here! As per my message on twitter; It's fast – even better than Gmail online. Faster than desktop apps. The internet revolution is here! You'll need to enable Gmail "Experimental features" first. I've forgotten how to do this, but I think it's in the admin "cpanel" for Google Apps for Your Domain. I'm not sure about Google-proper Gmail. Once you have that;

1. go to Settings (in Gmail)
2. then Labs

Google has announced their web browser Chrome. Many are excited while others remain skeptical. Currently I'm both; but a recent discovery has swayed me towards skeptical. Here's why.

Google is announcing Friend Connect tonight, a service advertised to "help website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors." Friend Connect employs OpenID and oAuth which is a good start, but how it puts them together is lacking vision and, disturbingly, may raise significant privacy concerns.

After a couple months of development. The google appliance module is now published on drupal.org! This module allows drupal developers and site administrators to plug into google's enterprise search offerings (the GoogleMini and the Google Search Appliance). I've written a little how-to and announcement on my personal site entitled Google Appliance Integration with Drupal It is currently in beta, so any lucky google appliance users out there, please bang on it! Thanks, J

Surf Canyon, one of my favorite search add-ons to improve Google search, auto-updated today - reminding me that I've been meaning to share this for the Way We Work. Basically, Surf Canyon helps you find information deep within the search results. As you search in Google (or Yahoo or MSN), the results you click go on to train Surf Canyon to find links more relevant to what you are looking for. In the case of the example image below, searching for the Media Mover module in Google, I am able to quickly find the Drupal Video Group as well, pulled in from page 3. Surf Canyon works with Firefox (and Internet Explorer, if you must).