Google acquires JotSpot

Hah! Now this is an acquisition that I'm really excited about....
Google just acquired Jotspot!

The Acquisition FAQ is available in Jotspot's website.

Jotspot is a company that provides a collaboration platform that is hinged on the concept of wiki. It's a very welcome addition to Google's growing arsenal of web applications for office and collaboration.

If this doesn't send the message loud enough that Google is serious in the web-native Office, i don't know what will.

[update: added a brief summary bout Jotspot]

Lesson #1

In migrating your gmail identity.

Autoforwarding.

My currently active Gmail handle has been with me for a while now, but i use it merely for professional / formal correspondences. So the way I did it is to set up my multiple email accounts in emelgeek to be able to send using my (mark.gamis) identity. I then setup the latter's (mark.gamis) email forwarding to forward everything to emelgeek.

Then when i decided to start dumping my emelgeek account, i also set it up to forward everything to mark.gamis. But i forgot to turn off the forwarding settings in my mark.gamis account, so in turn i have set both inboxes to forward to each other. TF!

Now that answers the question that has been bugging my mind: Why on earth did people stop emailing me on the day that i decided to change handle? I was starting to think that changing handle was a bad idea... Sigh. I feel like an ass.

Pumpkin Sam

From Halloween 2006

emelgeek

It was originally emelgee, a derivative of my name's initials (Mark L. Gamis = MLG ="em" "el" "gee")
then Jasmin added playful twist to it - emelgeek, to somehow describe my then starting enthusiasm in technology. I think it was on her phonebook -- when i first saw emelgeek.

So emelgeek stuck, and became sort of my universal handle.

But things change, and sometimes you want to leave things behind and just move on. Nikki said in our conversation this morning (thru google talk, using my new handle of course, :P )
"sayang yung 'emelgeek' :P"

He was right, pero oh well.

The new handle? nothing could be more boring: my firstname and lastname separated by a dot.
(jumping in the bandwagon?) .

It's just my first day and it's not easy. The first thing i did was invite people again to my google talk. Nikki (of course) was one of the first to respond. But nothing can be more virtually depressing than an empty Gmail inbox and very few green dots on your Google talk friends list.

Anyway, why the change? Hmm. I was trying to think of something less destructive than deleting this blog (which is, btw, bound to be transformed anyway, when i have made the necessary things in transferring my blog) which is what i'm always tempted to do whenever things are not doing right..

But it's just hard to find the guts to delete a blog with posts that dates back to 2003. It's a part of my life's online history now, and it just didn't feel right deleting it.

So what's the next best thing to do? Create a new blog, select a new handle. Drop the old one.

How sure am i that this won't screw up my online identity for a while? 0%. Change has always been difficult. And no matter how much it sucks, it has to happen anyway.

So there, my little (but incomplete -- i feel so sleepy) story about my handle.

I will certainly miss it like hell, but it has to go... bye emelgeek. :) hello, boring handle.

A Story

Image from Gaping Void

Last...

There are wrong things thatI wish I never did,
and there are things I did that I wish were never wrong.