Okay well I hope it’s going to be great, but still I’m finding that using Social Media is a great way to organize people and share ideas and items. Myself and two other Social Media junkies, Neal Wiser and Phil Baumann are tossing around the idea to start a podcast for a small side project we’re doing together. This is still very much in the planning stages, because we only decided to do something last night. What struck me and gave me inspiration to write this post is how I’m using Social Media and cloud computing to get things off the ground (sorry for the pun).

There are a few tools that I’m using that hit a chord with me this morning.

First off Twitter. This is the main avenue of communication between the 3 of us (that and Skype too). Direct messages are a life saver and much easier than writing short emails to each other. I’m currently using Seesmic Desktop which really keeps my Tweeting in order and helps me organize this project and my life in general.

Second, I’m using a service called Dropbox to host files that we want to share amongst the three of us. This allowed me this morning to share an mp3 of a preliminary intro to the podcast with the other two members. Very neat.

Third, Google Docs. Google is a great resource, especially their Google Docs application. It allows us to collaborate in real time. A must for getting a project together.

Fourth, Delicious. Delicious is a social bookmarking cloud program/site that allows you to easily bookmark stories and sites that you want to go back to later and even share. This will be indispensable for sharing links to the stories we talk about in the show.

Fifth, Evernote. This is my brain online. Any Web page or online article I want to read or keep and read later goes in here. I couldn’t live without it.

Sixth, Facebook. This Social Media platform allows for Pages, we have an A2SM page (not too impressive yet) that will allow us to build a community around the blog and podcast. Very helpful and neat.

These are just a few of the items in the Social Media universe that I’m using to start this project. Do you use any of them? I’d like to hear what you have to say. Post your thoughts in the comments below.

On the Google posted a video on its YouTube Channel a very creative ad to appeal to the college crowd. In the ad a boy uses Google Docs to draft a note to ask a girl he met in French 101 out on a date. He uses the social sharing features to enlist the help of his friends in drafting the note. It’s a very cute demonstration of how Google Docs can be used for collaboration.

In the most recent issue of Wired magazine, there is a rather lengthy article on Google and the US government’s fear of the search giant. The main question that arises is whether or not Google is Evil. Their mantra is “Don’t Be Evil,” but is the 11 year old company sticking to this slogan? I want to hear what you have to say leave your thoughts in the comments.

Recently Google screwed up. The search giant found a bug that shared unshared documents in Google’s famed Google Docs with others. According to their figures only affected 0.05% of users, the the implications are huge for the idea of putting everything in the cloud.

Dear Google Docs user,

We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.

To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually. For your reference, we’ve listed below the documents identified as being affected.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. We want to assure you that we are treating this issue with the highest priority.

The Google Docs Team

Granted there is an inherent risk to putting your documents online, but a snafu like this could have cost companies using the Google “operating system” tons of money.

The draw to using the Cloud for computing is simple. You can access your documents and files from anywhere in a “secure maner.” Now Google says it’s fixed the problem, but should we trust that it won’t happen again? I’m not so sure.

What are your thoughts. Post them in the comments.

Mozilla Labs has released a new code editor that is in the “Cloud.” Very neat. Check out the video below:

Image: CNET

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.