Foustland

Google has, with a high buzz and limited peek approach, raised the bar on how to launch a product with Google+ (G+). Since the July 1 curtain opening, I have been awaiting the email from G+ telling me that I can dig in. That email never arrived, so I took to poking around on the Twitter and found the GooglePlusTweet group, which serves as a hitching post between G+ users with invites and others who don't. The admin of this tweet list does a good job of announcing when the magical invite button shows up, and when it isn't. So one day, when the door was opened, I mowed through the list of tweets and found a user who was offering invites. I sent him my gmail address, and, he requested that I follow and friend him. So I did that, and got my invite notification from G+.

I did what many before me have done, after a short setting up of my profile and connecting things, I started stalking the famous people who have G+, people, yes Mark Zuckerberg has an account, as does Tom Anderson, who seems to be loving G+. After a little of that, I sarted poking around for some familiar faces, and started creating some Circles.

Circles are the key to the social organization, and organization is something that Google does pretty well. Circles makes it easy to pile a bunch of people who you feel share something, like family members, friends, acquaintances... into little groups. Aimed at giving users the an easy way to share your little digital bits with as many as everyone, with public posts, to specifying that you only want members of a certain circle to see what you are putting out there.

The stream is where you post your thoughts, photos, videos, inks, locations. Just like the facebook wall, but integration of your circles makes it easy to share your family tree history with your family, your night out videos with those who were with you, and breaking news of the city square take over as a public stream. A business focused G+ version is supposedly in the works for Google Apps users which will create an easy method for business using Google Apps to encourage collaboration, sharing, and all those big catch phrases. The Stream sits somewhere between twitter and tumblr and is even being replaced as the blogging platform by Kevin Rose from the Screen Savers (and some other things) redirected his blog address to land on his public feed.

Photos are a big part of our lives, and G+ which integrates Picasa Web Albums turns your mobile phone camera into an instant cloud feeder by automatically posting the photos to your account with the Google photo service when you tie in your mobile phone with the G+ app. The auto upload is configurable, so if you don't want anything to upload, you can switch it off. if you want videos and photos to upload, you can do that too. The other day, there was a bomb scare right outside the building where I spend weekdays, and I was able to give the live cloud publish of photos a try on my DroidX with the G+ app installed.

Every photo I shot was magically beamed up where I was able to quickly and easily post some of the better shots to my public feed. I could have just as easily posted a collections of up to 8 pics to any or all of my circles. See how this integration and organization works?

Sparks is sort of a bookmarking thing, that lets you search, save, and share (or not) various interest areas, like cycling, recipes, sports cars, comics, robotics, soccer, movies, Android, gardening and fashion. I don't know how this particular collection of interest categories was figured though. Either way you can check out these categories, and some collection of articles comes up on the screen.

The Hangout is a group video chat that allows up to 8 people to stare into the webcam of their computers, or front facing mobile phone camera and, you know, hang out. Until a few more of my friends are able and willing to enter G+ I don't see myself hanging out here much. But I do see the "hey, neat" factor in hangout. With FB partnering with Skype for a video chat tool, it is easy to see that face to face communication through video is easier than ever.

There is a Huddle option on the mobile G+ app, but I haven't used it, and don't see how it differs from hangout.  Maybe only for mobile???  I may look into this more in the future.  

I find the freshness of G+ to be a big part why I enjoy it so much. The minimal interface (something that Google is good at), and ease of use, and integration of necessary social tools makes me really like Google+. I also like the promise of it as a social business tool. It is hard to guess whether G+ will put Facebook into a similar situation where MySpace is currently sitting. But more than in the past, with launches for Buzz and Wave, the exclusive small launch that made me "want in" more than it ever did for the other social things. Now that I am in, I will be passing on invites as I can because even with the recent influx of accounts (myself included) it is still kind of a lonely place.  When you get in, give the ol' view account as tool, that lets you see what other people see when they visit your page.  Key to this is Circles.  Have fun.

Lately I have found myself reaching for some cloud based multimedia tools from Aviary for editing of pictures, recording a voice over, making some beats, and just playing around and having fun.  That's not to dismiss the high quality tools and features each of their application line-up, it is in fact as powerful under the hood, as it is immersive and intuitive.  So let's take a look at each of the applications and see how they stack up. 

First let's check out just what Aviary is offering.  All of their applications are named after a bird theme, which I find cool.  And it looks like their graphics department has taken some logo branding clues from the folks over at Mozilla.  The logos are shiny and cute either way.  So what about the tools?  Well, on the visual side you have the following: Phoenix Image Editor, Raven Vector Editor, Falcon Image Markup, Toucan, Swatch Editor, Peacock Effects Editor, and Toucan Screen Capture.  On the Audio side Aviary gives you: Myna Audio Editor, and Roc Music Creator.  That's a pretty solid group of tools.  This post is going to look at the visual tools with a future post checking out the audio side of Aviary tools.

First, let's talk about the backbone of the Aviary world, which is their user manager/social media thingamabob.  Yep, you do have to create a user account to get the most out of Aviary's tools, but you can play around with them without setting anything up.  An account will give you the ability to save your work, manage the licensing and privacy issues of your works, and even see what other members of the Aviary community are creating.  You can even create derivative works from your own and other users public files.  Remixing, mashing-up, and sharing all together in this world.  If that's not enough, there are even community groups you can join and create, friends to be made, and other accounts like Soundcloud, Twitter, Google, and Facebook that you can link to your Aviary account so you can get the word out to everyone you know, showing off what you just created.  There are a bunch of other features in there as well, like tutorials, forums, creation discovery.  A well thought out account interface, possibly one of the best I have seen and worked with.  

To get at your things, and even other peoples things, you start off in the dashboard.  This gives you a glimpse at recent and popular creations and activities.  To see what just you have created there is a "Your Creations" page that shows all of your projects that you have saved.  In addition the what you may have created, each file, ending with a .egg extension, displays different versions of a file you may have going, as well as all of the derivations that are out there from you or the community.   

There is a lot going on behind the scenes in Aviary.  As a result, I have found that some of the creation icons on my screen can get a bit flaky and either not display, or take a little time to respond to commands (you can play audio selections right from the file browser without opening them).  A minor distraction, but most of the work you, or I , are going to be doing is within the applications anyway.  So now the breakdown.

Phoenix

A big bunch of people use Photoshop for image editing.  I tend to use Gimp myself.  So the first thing I wonder is whether Aviary is looking to compete with Adobe full on.  I doubt that the power users of Photoshop are going to discard their prized toolset to play around with a Beta cloud app, at least for production work.  But what about the coffee shop web designers, or the busy mom wanting to clean up some photos before shipping them into Facebook?  Well, that is more the crowd that I see checking out Phoenix (and the whole Aviary suite).  The tool set is fairly standard with various selection, brush, shape, interactions, colors.  The learning curve for anyone who has ever edited a photo before will be pretty small.  In addition to the tools, Phoenix has the usual set of filters, although I haven't had much luck getting them to do much of what I would expect.  There aren't a lot of variables (if any) that you can tweak to get a desired effect.  The image correcting tools that fix things like levels and brightness & contrast are nice though, and they offer a live preview.

The cool thing about Phoenix that I just noticed is that it plays well with it's sister applications Raven and Peacock.  So if you want to add a vector based element you just add a Raven layer, and if you want to throw some crazy effects, way beyond what the on-board filters can offer, just add a Phoenix layer.  Each one will launch the respective application, and you can tweak things there, and round trip it back into your Phoenix image.  Pretty cool!

Raven

I am not a big vector based illustrator.  I am happy pushing pixels around in image editing programs, but when it comes to vector based work, I most of the time just get frustrated.  With that said, Raven is a fairly approachable vector tool.  You can draw lines, add colors, move lines around, probably even put text to a path (whatever that is).  Seriously, the common theme with aviary tools seems to be approachability.   Just fooling around in Raven for a couple of minutes, and I am sort of getting how vector based graphics can be kind of fun.  Especially since it interacts so well with Phoenix.  I wonder if Illustrator and Photoshop can send layers back and forth?  

The ease of use has me hooked, so I plan to start using Raven a lot more to cook up some fun graphics down the line.  Thanks for making it fun for me to create Aviary!  

Falcon

If marking up an image is your thing, Falcon should be right up your alley.  What is image mark up you ask?  Well, you take a picture, mark funny things on it like "FAIL", or "can i has cheezburger", toss in an arrow or circle around the funny part of the picture and that's about it.  Falcon does all of those things, and it does them pretty well.  Like this Picture of Elvis that I quickly made.  See how funny marking up an image can be?  

Now I am sure that there are a million other things you can do with image markup, like point an arrow at a crack in the sidewalk that you can send to your town council, or put a box around a picture of the dent in your car that you can ship over to your insurance company.  But that sort of stuff just isn't fun, so I figure the majority of the use of Falcon will be (at least for me) to poke fun at someone else's expense.

Toucan

Now, this tool for creating color samples is a real game changer for me.  I fight all day with colors, especially when I want to make a new set of colors for a website, or a video.  I have used web based color selection tools, and even the color selectors found in imaging applications, but all have fallen short in letting me really lock in a set of colors easily, see them on a screen together, and even tweak the set all at the same time.  Toucan fixes all of those problems.  

The interface starts with a selection of three colors, and places them in equidistant relationship with each other on a color wheel.  You have the ability to change that relationship to a number of different settings that provide gradations of varying degrees.  In other words, you have a bunch of control over the way your color palette comes out.  You also have the option of adding new color swatches to your palette.  

The best part for me is that I have the ability to save palettes for future use or reference.  From a designer perspective, this is great.  Of course all of the colors have the usual alpha/numeric ways to recreate them, RGB, CMYK, Hex... which lets you go from Toucan into your favorite design program to plop a color down.  The real sleeper of the Aviary collection of imaging tools, Toucan has a lot going for it that makes creating and selecting colors a breeze.

Peacock

Now there are some limitations I referred to in Phoenix, such as the limited tool set for effects and the like.  Well, Peacock is where all of this functionality hangs out.  Best of all, it can be used in concert with Phoenix and Raven to give original, cool, crazy effects to the images you produce in those tools.

I have to be honest here, this is the tool I have used the very least, so I won't try to go into much of an explanation on how to use it.  Even if I had used it a lot, I don't know that I would be very helpful at describing it, since it is such a massive application, with nearly endless features and methods for applying effects to images.  The best way I can describe Peacock is that it is a component based tool that lets you plug a variety of different effect generators and the like into a patchwork of craziness.  I compare the way this tool works with old analog synths that required the user to patch the various oscillators, filters, LFOs... together with patch cords, or in a more modern sense, like the wildly popular Max/MSP which works in the same fashion.

I am not sure how I was able to get the Elvis picture here to do what it did, but I like it, and it was all done within Peacock.  I used basically one effect on the image, but you could add a nearly endless array of effects and generators to images.

So to sum up this extremely long post, Aviary has put together a rather impressive suite of tools for using cloud powered number crunching to create any manner of images (and audio too, as I plan to get into in a future post).  The applications play nice with each other.  By making the different files interact across the different apps Aviary has developed a workflow that doesn't seem like interaction was an afterthought.  Now each of the applications are labeled as Beta so there is always the inherent issues that can pop up as a result like slow processing, and faults within the Flash environment that each of these apps sits in (something I learned about using the Music Creator app).  I failed to mention that the Aviary HTML5 photo editor is also available.  While these tools might not be giving Adobe a full on run for their base of professional designers (right now) I see a decent, well thought out set of tools that I personally find myself turning to more and more.  I eagerly await more goodies coming out of Aviary in the future (hello, Video Editor).

There has been a lot of chatter around the internet here, here, and even here, look for yourself, about whether Google will be announcing a social network to potentially compete with the likes of Facebook.  I don't have anything groundbreaking to report on this front, but in a quick search today, I did notice something that popped one of those a-ha thoughts into my head.  

Google does a great job tracking things.  This is evident in a number of ways.  First, have you ever noticed that shortly after you visit a shopping site, you start to see ads for that site on other web pages and sites?  They may not be all Google ads, but I have noticed this a lot lately.   You can learn more about this here

Second, (and this is the part that made me go hmmmm...) is a lesser known view of your Google account (if'n you have one) called Google Social - (note, you do need to be logged into a Google account to see this link or refer to the image above).  Google Social is a view of your social net within the Googleverse, i.e. it provides a view of who and how you are connected to other Google users who you have in your address book.  In fact, one of the ways you can view this data is through the tab called - wait for it - Social Circle.  This view shows your address book contacts who are tied into Google accounts, and the various ways you have interacted with them, such as by Chat, Picasa Web Albums,  bloggers blogs, and other places outside the Googleverse like their own URLs, Twitter, and Flickr.

So it is evident that like Facebook, Google is keeping track of who you, as a Google user, interact with and how.  At least within the framework of the Googleverse.  

Does this mean that Google is about to launch a social network to compete with all of their other social networks, including Google Wave and Buzz, and Orkut, not to mention the big hitters out there in the likes of Facebook, Twitter?  Who knows, surely not me right now.  

UPDATE:

I also noticed a little feature in the side menu of a Google Search that lets a searcher take a look at results within their social, er, circle.  Just expand the More Search Tools at the bottom of the sidebar, and select Social.  There you will see what others in your circle of not just friends, but also (apparently) within sites you regularly visit, are saying about what you just searched for.  

I know that this is a far cry from any sort of social network, but I really find this sort of thing interesting and way more useful than the witty banter found on Facebook.  Targeted search results based on direct connections.  I going to let that sink in for a bit and wait until Google I/O to see if this sort of thing is packed up in a neat little tool possibly called Circles.