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During my first week at uni I posted about how I thought it was really cool that York were considering moving email, calendar and collaboration services to the cloud; EC3.

Tim pointed out on my original post today that the proposal was totally rejected, which is confirmed by the university’s own page:

The recommendation was that cloud computing services should not be taken up as a means of delivering central email, calendaring or instant messaging services for the University. The main factors contributing to this recommendation were concerns around issues of data protection, privacy, security and contractual arrangements.

They dumped it? The March 2009 issue of Keynotes (I’m a bit behind on this news, then) leads with:

The Cloud Computing project which has seen extensive work both within and without the Computing Service, and which has attracted much attention, has now concluded. The Project Team, writing on page 6, give an overview of the reasons to reject the use of cloud computing services at this time, a decision which, judging by the results of the extensive user consultation, will attract both disappointment and relief from amongst our users.

I’m disappointed. But not for me, for everybody else. The vast majority (80, 90%) of my friends use the university’s webmail service to get their email. I’ve posted about it before, and why it sucks. Because it looks like this. It’s 2010, and we’re still dealing with webmail that looks like that? Webmail that shows only fifty messages at a time and doesn’t group conversations? As we know, most users leave the default checkboxes, don’t bother to configure things and don’t dive into options. Sure, you can forward your email to a different, personal, even Gmail account. Do most people? Of course not.

It’s a shame. When I first arrived at York, that flyer gave me hope that things might be different here. I’d grown up in a world where my school used an ancient version of Internet Explorer and blocked access to Google’s Gmail & Microsoft’s Hotmail. But it’s fine, because now I can see this university is just like any, and every, other corporation. Ah well.

Addendum

Tom, last year’s (2008–2009) YUSU President, comments via Twitter:

I was part of that consultation last year. Their reasons are compelling – data protection and research privacy being the big two

That’s good to hear, as I trust Tom’s opinion over that of an IT department that I’ve never met.

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block make a good point on the gdgt podcast, one that made me stop and think:

• I think the tell will be a year from now, how many people at Google are running Chrome OS as their primary, or say sole, operating system at work. And I think that that number will actually be relatively low. I think that most people will still be running a more fully functioning install of Linux.
• I don’t think you could develop code in Chrome OS.
• There isn’t really a good, at least that I’ve heard of, a good web-based IDE, web-based code developing. You can’t substitute a terminal in the browser.

I’ve seen nothing so far that makes me want to get rid of TextMate (my text editor of choice on the Mac). But like I’ve said (somewhere, possibly on Twitter?) before, there’s nothing to stop this from being a secondary machine.

Listen to it »

Just in case you nonbelievers don’t think Google Chrome OS is going to change anything, take a look at this:

As a second computer (laptop), there’s no reason this can’t take over the world.

After looking at it more accurately (my 80 most used pieces of software), 63% of what I do today could happen on Google Chrome OS with no change to my habits whatsoever.

I’m a big fan of making pretty maps, so when I thought up an idea yesterday morning, I had to see it through. For those who weren’t aware, last Thursday was exam results day for loads of kids all over the country, the day they found out where they’d be going to university. More than a few announced this via Twitter (as you do these days, I guess); and as they were copying and pasting from “the results site”, they were fairly easy to find.

So I stitched together a Google map of the UK, and set to work putting the points on a map; it made sense to do it by hand seeing as the sample size wasn’t massive. And here’s the result (click through for a massive version if you really feel like breaking your browser and my Amazon S3 account):

For reference, the blue dots map number of undergraduates against location. Both maps should be scaled sort of properly (there’s the same amount of red as there is blue, if my Maths hasn’t failed me). It was interesting to see how the many more results came from the universities in the middle the country when compared to their size.

And as though that wasn’t enough, I went and made you a Wordle of what subjects people are studying:

Oh, and I don’t claim that any of this is 100% certified guaranteed scientifically accurate™. It was just a fun little project for the day. My messy data’s available as a .csv should you wish to inspect it.

Google provide an API to create pretty graphs and charts. Along with that API, they provide a little information on how granular your data should be, which looks something like this:

Google also own Feedburner, and they provide the pretty (and very, very detailed) graph shown below. Can you see where I’m going with this?

I took the photo below as a bit of a joke (hey, Vaio stickers are a joke… right?) but it’s interesting to have a record of the "old" Google Reader which was on my screen at the time. When it recently changed, I remember quite a few people complaining at how the layout seemed less intuitive; now, of course, I’d easily vote for the new, cleaner look.

Sometimes, I guess you just have to get through a few days or weeks of your users complaining at change – especially in this fairly new space of constantly evolving online software. And other times, the change isn’t so great and your users might actually have valid concerns (hey, Facebook, look over here).

Well… I made it to the University of York, and survived Freshers’ Week; making my way through two fire alarms, a few dozen pints of Guinness and more free Dominos pizza than I care to remember.

The newsy-thing that came up today is the flyer that’s displayed to the right – UoY’s Computing Services are asking for people’s opinions on migrating the University email and calendar setup to Google Apps for Education or Microsoft’s Live@Edu. This is huge for me. Not only is it a fairly large (thousands of students) organisation considering migrating to the cloud within the next couple of years, they’re actively soliciting opinions from students. I’m so pleased to see things heading in this direction.

The URL on the flyer requires a University of York login.

Also: Oh God, I hope I don’t piss people off by posting this… ;]

I’m really into my Google Maps at the moment. With the amount I’m using it, it’s easily my favourite Google service, except maybe Gmail. Or Reader. Or Analytics. Screw it, they’re all brilliant.

The latest creation comes from a service called map a list, which Lifehacker played with a month ago. I couldn’t think of a decent use for it myself, but someone pointed out that it would be fantastic for mapping customers who have signed up their details with a company. A massive advantage is that a business owner can immediately see whether handing out leaflets or flyers has had the intended effect. It works really nicely: link it to your Google account, select a spreadsheet to pull data from, link columns in the spreadsheet to address fields and… boom!

Here’s the service containing a bit of post code data (and with hindsight, I could have used it for my earlier post on mapping friends). Love it.

I’m not doing much to counter the theory that there is too much free time in the world. Spent half an hour this evening going through my address book to create a Google Map of people I know, so without saying any more:

To be honest I am a little disappointed in how concentrated the pointers are around the UK. To clarify this map, it’s populated by people who I know well enough to know where their permanent address is. Not that I’m inviting myself to stay or anything…

How data changes over time is starting to really interest me – things like, for example, how listening habits can be graphed year by year to see changes, or the fantastic TweetStats, which gives a whole bunch of numbers and pretty bar charts. I would be very interested in recreating this map in four years time, or maybe even ten years time, and seeing what has changed.

Hope I haven’t forgotten anyone this time round.