If you haven't noticed in your Google Inbox recently, there is a new feature that popped up in there.  It's called Google Buzz.  What is it?  It essentially takes the best of real time update technologies and integrates in with most of Google's core group of software.  I'm not going to break down the ins and outs of Buzz.  But what I will do is talk about two features that I find the most attractive.  One's bringing an old favorite Google App of mine back to the forefront, the other is just stroking my ego.

So let's start with my ego first!  Awhile ago I talked about the '@' symbol and how it's become the mainstream mode to reply to or address other people or systems in communication.  Flash forward to today.  If you notice above, the comments show the '@' symbol used to address another Buzz user.  Even better, once you type the '@' symbol and another letter, a dynamic list of your Buzz friends and Gmail Contacts pop up for you to choose from.  If you are a developer building a new app, especially one that hinges on social interactions, you will have to include this feature to be successful.

Okay, the next feature that changes the game is the simple integration across all of Google's Apps and Buzz.  My Google Profile has been filled out for a couple of years and for last year I've been wondering why.  Buzz now pushed the Google Profile to the forefront.  More importantly for me, however, is the massive integration with Google Reader.  If you've been around here recently, you know my love for Google Reader.  I have friends in Gmail that use Gooogle Reader, but they never show up in Google Reader correctly when they share stories.  Buzz not only takes care of that, but also brings in Buzz users in to the Google Reader application.  This makes picking up shared items that my peers curate much, much easier.

Now, Google Buzz is not without its drawbacks.  Everyone's been complaining about privacy, but I'm starting to get bothered by the massive drag it brings to my Gmail.  I'm an Inbox Zero cult follower and seeing new Buzz pumped in at an amazing rate is starting grate my nerves.  I hope they follow through on pushing it out as a separate app.  The folks at Google are already iterating changes, so if they are going to make a change, it will be fast.  That said, Buzz is a great addition to my set of apps from Google I use.  Not because of the app itself, but because it makes my other apps better.

A couple of different developments cropped up in the last couple of months that's pulled me away from the blog.  One of them was a job change.  The company I'm working on a contract to hire basis is great and I've had the opportunity to learn many things in my short time there.  I do PHP programming and I had the opportunity to freshen up on PHPDoc.  PHPDoc is a documentation standard much like JavaDoc where you can comment code and drop in identifiers to help with the status of a certain function or class.  One of the identifiers is '@todo.'  After working with the history of the '@' symbol and how it relates in context, especially with GTD,  I came to realize how much this 5 character identifier has affected my life.

The '@todo' identifier states one thing clearly:  The following information is what's left or what's next to do.  It can be compared to the @NextAction context in GTD.  Once that action is completed, there may be another one next and subsequently a '@todo' identifier with that information will be listed.  The difference between that and GTD is that it's left in the code.  But, with a good IDE or a simple awk command, you can compile the list of @todo's for a project thus returning it to a GTD like state.

I'm the kind of person who's insane attention to detail will leave me always uncovering a rock or looking at a problem from all perspectives.  Some people call this being a pefectionist.  One of the major problems with being a perefectionist is that they will refine and tweak themselves into never getting anything done.  Analysis through paralysis is a common phrase for the problem.   And yes, I have that problem.

As some of you may know, a couple of years ago I hit rock bottom in paralysis and have somehow climbed my way step by step by implementing the GTD mehtod (as well as making other life changes).  The perfectionist in me still lives.  The initial mind dump and inbox organization took me about 3 days.  One of the hardest things to do while implementing the methodology was not being sure I was doing it right.  The common voice of the perfectionist.

So I'm slowly learning ot become an almost-perfectionist.  I still do my tweaks and twinges, but set a time limit before sending the product off.  Whenever I do so, there's that voice that doubts whether or not I've done right.  Even when I use a time limit, it reaches out and pulls me down to make sure I double check and triple check everything.  It's going to be with me forever.

Last month, an 'ah-ha' moment came.  And no I'm not talking about jumping up and singing 'Take on Me.'   What I'm talking about is when I started brushing up on PHPDoc, I realized that the '@todo' was the trademark for the perfectionist.  I can roll some code out but appease the perefectionist in me with the simple 5 letter incantonation.  The code is out and I can always come back to it to tweak and twinge.

I've accepted the fact that I will never be happy with my work.  I've also accepted that I will always find something wrong with it and attempt to fix it on the spot.  But with the '@todo' action I can drop the noted fix and move on.  I feel much more relieved and am producing more now that I've left @todo's not only in my code, but also in my other projects, my friends, my family, and my life.

While I was going through the twitter round up, I couldn't help but notice that the semantics used to address other tweeps include the @ symbol.  That got me thinking about how the @ symbol shows up not only on some web services, but also email, blog comments, and even in the Getting Things Done methodology.  I also recalled someone saying that the German name translated to "monkey tail" instead of the widely used "commercial at."  After some research, I discovered where the ubiquitous nature of the @ symbol symbol fits and where it potentially could grow.

To get a good handle on the @ symbol, we need to look back and see where it came from.  Not much is known of the exact time it showed up, but different theories all point to the @ symbol used to represent something more efficiently.  An Italian merchant used it to give it a name for a certain quantity of jar stuff.  Another story is that monks used it to combine the word at to one letter.  How verifiable each origin is seem irrelevant.  The point is that the @ symbol makes things more efficient.

The @ key showed up on the typewriter then IBM keyboard.  It's called commercial at because of what accounting institutions use it for.  It's in the ASCII set.  What's even crazier are the names.  A monkey tail and elephant trunk and the like.  Some countries call it another animal.    There's always some lore for the @ symbol.  There is a special meaning between languages.

The @ symbol took on another meaning in 1972 when Ray Tomlinson used it for the very first email address.  He was looking for something to point a message to a machine.  Since the @ symbol literally meant at or commercial at, it seemed like a logical placement.  So he fired up some code and thus began the use of the @ symbol in electronic communications.

Today we see the @ symbol used in a couple of different communication contexts.  We of course use it for the email address.  But now we can use it for comment replies in message boards.  We can use it when we designate a user on a machine.  In some other cases, it can be used to address others individually in email messages to groups.  More importantly we can see its use blowing up on Twitter.

When I mentioned contexts, it opened the door to the @ symbol's use in the Getting Things Done methodology.  David Allen created GTD as a task management/productivity system.  Part of what he preaches is the use of a Next Action list.  With each list you can group actions to locations and other objects.  The system is agile enough to account for multiple lists of actions designated by a noun.  He suggests the @ symbol for these special lists while organizing so it can show up first in the folder listing on a computer.

The great thing is the suggestion also helps marry the @ symbol with the context with which it precedes. Now you can have lists for @Home or @Office or @Phone if you need to call somebody.  While originally it was a listing workaround, now the @ symbol has more an integral role for context definitions on GTD.

We are beginning to see patterns develop at how the @ symbol is taking on a powerful role in communication.  We are seeing the @ symbol used to tie context not only to locations, but also to people.  Where in GTD you have a location, now with Twitter or email addresses you have a person.  The use of the @ symbol is becoming a gray area of distinction between a person and a place.  The  word after the @ symbol is the noun.

Now you can see where the action or verb takes place.  In GTD you have an action to do at a place or context, now you can send a message or 'tweet' to a person.  When you're responding to someone else that drops a comment in a blog post, you are responding @ the user.   When you see a tweet pop up and you are compelled to respond, you type out @ and the user name to respond to their post.  What does this mean?

This paradigm shift of acting on a noun shows the idea of a context is more prevalent than ever.  The lines have blurred between machines and people.  There is a singular unifying context for people now.  Because of that, there is more consistent applications across different media and communication.  What this roots down to is better organization for social organization.  I can email guy@aplace.com or just twitter @guyplace or note in my system to call @gplace in my @Communication list.

The more use that comes from it, the more common it will be.  Even Twitter founder and CEO Ev Williams talked about how the @user response wasn't in the design of Twitter to begin with but that it naturally bubbled up from the community use.  The paradigm naturally evolves to what we are most comfortable using.  In Twitter Ev saw that and responded by giving it more meaning within the Twitter ecosystem.

Where can this take us in the future?  Perhaps there will be a time where a service will be attached to a user on the domain.  So if you email me at mike@hoketronics.net, you may actually send it as email@mike.hochanadel@hoketronics.net.   Or if I'm not there it could be forwarded to twitter@mike.hochanadel@hoketronics.net, or phone@ or facebook@ or myspace@ and so on and so forth.

My initial thoughts lead me to what the open ID folks are doing (save that for another research post), but I'm not sure if they've incorporated this simple,  powerful, and  NATURAL paradigm of using to the @ symbol to address nouns.  Hopefully they will.  But what we can see is that the use of the @ symbol to address nouns will grow stronger and will almost become subconscious.  What great leaps and bounds we have come from a silly little monkey tail.