At the end of last month, my debit card expired and until now, I hadn’t realised just how many online/subscription-based services I use which depend on that card number. Services which would stop working when the card expired. I must have spent the best part of a morning working out which services had my debit card details and then visiting each to update the number.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a service, like Gravatar, where I could enter my card details once and have that propagate to all the services that needed it? I see the major challenges facing a service like this as:

• Trust – it would be hard for a start-up to offer this, because who would trust their debit/credit card details with an organisation they’d never heard of
• Proliferation – tied into the first point. If, say, Paypal offered this, it would quickly gain traction because they’re a recognised brand
• Security – goes without saying. Any service that stores credit card numbers better be as secure as they come, especially if that data is being fed into other places. (And maybe that’s the showstopper?)

Perhaps Paypal is the answer, and if more services supported Paypal as a payment method, this would solve the problem – I could update my details there and have done with it.

Another key selling point [according to Microsoft]: if you choose to use Google Apps, your formatting may be screwed up when you inevitably have to work with others who are using Microsoft Office. When all else fails, turn to FUD.

This isn’t FUD.  When it comes to collaborating with Microsoft Office users, Google Apps (and Zoho Writer, for that matter) do screw around with formatting.

Like many people today, I’m looking for work, so I’m sending my CV/résumé out several times each week to recruitment agencies.  Most recruiters and job sites will insist on having CVs sent to them in Word format, so I have to export my document as a .doc file.

And there’s the problem: a document that looks fine in Google Docs can be all over the place when it’s saved as Word document. Inconsistent tab- and line-spacing; random hieroglyphic characters in place of bullet points; disobedient font sizing are just some of the problems I’ve encountered.

It would be great to be at a point where I could simply share a link to my CV with a recruiter, a job site or an HR department, but we’re not; Microsoft’s Office document formats are still what most businesses use today. My CV is usually my first means of introduction to a prospective employer, so there’s just no way I can afford for it to look untidy – it would be like turning up to a job interview with breakfast down my jacket.

If there’s one feature that cloud-based word processors absolutely must get right, it’s making sure that exporting to the most widely-used document format works faultlessly.

For time and again, the company has proven that despite all its talk, its offerings are as unreliable as those of any other service provider.

I do sympathise with Om and everyone else who has put their trust in Google to run their email, but we need a reality check here. Just because Google has seemingly infinite resources, it doesn’t make them immune from the kind of challenges that face IT departments in companies, large and small, all over the world.

Anyone who’s provided, implemented or supported IT services for any length of time will tell you that, no matter what risk mitigation/platform resilience measures you put in place; no matter how well you test your changes ahead of implementation; no matter how thorough your change review process, every now and then the technology will fail, something will screw up and service outages will occur.

As Om himself offered in one of his previous posts, following the last Gmail outage:

1. Get used to outages. Why? Scale forces history to repeat. As the Internet matures, we expect it to operate more smoothly, so outages make it look like you’re falling behind. But outages can also be a sign of that very maturation. Companies will learn to avoid them, then as the whole thing scales up and grows more complex, it will happen again. There will always be outages, inside the cloud and out.

I couldn’t have put better myself.

It’s obviously something that has bugged the guys at Facebook too, because they’ve recently tweaked their API to allow the Facebook Twitter app to post Tweets to your Facebook status! (You’ll need to be a Facebook member for that link to work, btw.)

Thanks to Blognation, via Twitter!

And I found that with the sidebar and subscription list collapsed (again, highlighted on the left), the scrollbar on the article pane (see right) had also collapsed, and was so thin that it was almost impossible to grab:

So, I tried IE7, to see if that had the same problem:

As you can see, it looks fine in IE, so the problem appears to be with Firefox. It’s a minor cosmetic bug, but I’m sure it’s something the Reader developers would want to fix.

I don’t have Opera or Safari for Windows installed, so can’t test with those browsers; nor do I own a Mac, so I can’t test whether this is specific to the Windows versions of Firefox, either. If you’re running another browser on a non-Windows hardware platform, maybe you can help.

At first, I thought I had simply clicked through on a previous screen without deselecting the two options I didn’t want, so I cancelled the install and started again. Same result – at no point was I asked if I want to deselect these optional extras, which means you can’t install Live Writer on its own.

The system requirements for Live Writer make no mention of Sign-In Assistant and Messenger being required components, so I can’t understand why they’re not optional. There’s no good reason I can think of for a legitimate application vendor to install stuff on my computer that I don’t want or need, and Microsoft really should know better.

Equally annoying (but, at least de-selectable) the 4 boxes for Mail, Toolbar, Photo Gallery and Family Safety are checked by default.

The new release does have some new features, like the ability to insert video and preview within a Live Writer dialogue:

Also included in this release is support for printing, which is a bit of a puzzle to me, but I guess someone might need to print out their blog posts, as well actually post them.

After going for so long without an update, it’s good to see another release (and not just a bug-fix, too,) so soon after the last one. Live Writer is easy to set up, easy to use and is still my blogging tool of choice. And, despite my mini-rant just now, I would highly recommend you check it out, if you haven’t already.

Hat-tip to Springnet, for the heads-up via Twitter.

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