The Calendar Labs include the ability add a background image to your calendar, display the next upcoming meeting, a gadget to quickly jump forward or backward to a specific date, and much more.

We’ve created five tutorial videos to show you how enable, configure and use the new Google Calendar Labs.  Enjoy!

- Susan Cline (susanbcline.com)

Google Wave was created by the guys who brought the world Google Maps down under in Google Australia. Google Wave attempts to combine project management software, email and instant messaging into one real time web based application. The user interface looks in many ways like your Gmail inbox with a lot more bells and whistles. There is your contacts, your inbox messages and then your Waves. The layout is adjustable and can be as complicated or as simple as the user would like. A Wave is essentially the body of the message much like standard email that people are used to today. What is very different about waves though, is their wiki style editing, drag and drop contacts, the ability to drag and drop pictures and other attachments right into the message and the ability to embed the wave in blog posts and other pages. This is just scratching the surface but is the immediate benefits and capabilities of this application. The wiki style editing allows others to make inline comments anywhere in the message and the users can see the words as they type them. It is absolutely real-” time communication in it’s dead simplest form. Another great feature is the “playback mode” where any user can playback the entire wave in case any part of the discussion was missed. It is very hard to explain what Google Wave is and what it can do because its such an interesting re imagination of the way we communicate via the web. It really needs to be seen to truly understand it’s implications.

What is truly remarkable about this application is that Google is going to make it open source and let the developer community have a go with it. This openness will foster innovation and expand the possibilities of this application. What many developers can take advantage of is the fact that Google Wave allows for extensions and the few that were demonstrated were impressive. Extensions are exactly how they sound, for instance there is the Twave extension. It brings twitter to the wave and allows you to embed tweets right in any wave much like a contact. The user can also respond and tweet right from the Google Wave interface. It can be expected that a Facebook extension will be one of the first created and I expect there will be many by the time this gets officially released towards the end of this year. This is really how the iPhone took off with the app store creating and endless supply of extensions that infinitely extend the possibilities of the application.

The implications of Google Wave on business, education and collaboration could be limitless. This real time collaboration tool can be also used as a project management tool and if all goes well one day will be something many people will not be able to live without. While there are a lot of web based applications like Google Docs out there that allow for collaboration on documents, Google Wave brings it all together so it can live in one single place. Add to that the power of Google search and you have one flexible application. It will be interesting to see, as Google Wave matures, what happens to the Google Apps suite.

This app represents Google’s support of HTML 5 and how that this new standard will be the engine that drives the future of the internet and computing. Google Wave represents the best or at least the best promises of HTML 5 and where that can lead the internet world. One major stumbling block will be Internet Explorer and it’s reign over a vast majority (70% plus) of the business world. It took Microsoft over ten years to get compliant with HTML 4.1 and CSS 2.x with the release of Internet Explorer 8. This Microsoft browser was released this year and is already outdated as it is the only browser that has no support for HTML 5 (safari 4, Firefox 3.5, Opera and Chrome all have support). Microsoft has promised to support HTML 5 down the road but seeing that Google is their major competitor it is hard to trust that this will happen anytime soon. I certainly hope that teh adoption rate and the development community will in some way force Microsofts hand, only time will tell.

There is a whole bunch of hype and a lot to live up to for Google Wave. Google has a pretty good track record so one has to assume that in many ways Google Wave will deliver. Of course the first realease will be buggy and probably not have all the features just yet but that will be covered up by the nice beta tag that is sure to live under the Google Wave logo for years to come or at least until the buisness community wants in on it.

Learn More About Google Wave: http://wave.google.com/

I have had more then one instance over the past month or so in which several people asked me what twitter was all about and what it all means to them. With twitter’s recent push into the main stream via an ample amount of news story, the world of tweeting is the hot subject. According to wikipedia “twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length.” At this point some of you just may be scratching your head and thinking to yourself ‘yea so what’. To put this all plainly tweets are short messages and usually no more then two sentences. They can contain links to any thing on the internet or just be simple observations of the day.

My first adventures in twittering where met with a skeptical eye and initially I felt it was just another foolish way for a way too plugged in culture to track each others every move. Seeing that this could be another ‘get off my lawn’ moment in my life in which I don’t get these crazy kids I decided to investigate.  So I signed up for an account tweeted once and poked around. I felt that I was justified in my initial sweeping generalities and didn’t go back to my twitter world for a good month. On my second adventure in twitter land something finally clicked and everything I had thought about twitter was dead wrong. With the help of a site like wefollow.com and the tweetdeck adobe air application I began to understand the true power of twitter.

On one hand it is a silly way to quickly blurt out whatever is on your mind however useless and quaint it may be. But on the other hand it is a powerful tool that can facilitate unique information communities  and allows for fascinating global conversations. Just like with most things, you get what you want to take from it. Twitter is a powerful collaboration tool and an absolute necessity in any infojunkys pantheon of tools. The ability to share articles, links, tools and what not to a community of strangers pulled together by a single interest in a concise, quick manner is the side of twitter that I most enjoy. For me I can keep track of all tweets on the subject of elearning or instructional design or tech and even offer my own bit of knowledge to the discussion. Twitter is fast becoming one of those must have tools for any business or person trying to get ahead in this technological world of ours. Check out our tweets @pressplaysol for various helpful tidbits of information that can help you and your company.

Google has released a new Apps Status Dashboard page. “This page offers performance information for Google Apps services. Unless otherwise noted, this status information applies to consumer services as well as services for organizations using Google Apps.” If you are noticing any strange or persistant errors with your Apps you should check this dashboard page for updates. Apps with a clean bill of health have a green check box, apps with issues are maked with a ‘i’ icon. Click the icon to get more information about the issue.

The new hot term on the web right now is “cloud computing”.  It has quickly replaced the phrases “information superhighway”, “cyberspace” and even “web 2.0″.  The definition that makes the most sense to me:

Cloud computing is the use of a 3rd party service to perform computing needs on a publicly accessable IP basis. Cloud computing services are usually performed in consolidated Data Centers to keep costs low while improving overall utilization (servepath.com).

I’ve collected the following resources to help you learn more about cloud computing.

• “What is Cloud Computing” – Interviews from Web 2.0 Expo
• “Cloud Computing in Plain English – Fun cartoon explanation of Cloud Computing
• Video explaining “Cloud Computing” from Explainingcomputers.com
• How Stuff Works – Cloud Computing – Good Explanatory Article