Web 2.0

Remember The Milk

The Museum of Modern Betas has issued a list of the ‘biggest’ beta services out there, as measured by the number of times they have been bookmarked in del.icio.us. One of the ones it points out, that I hadn’t come across before, was Remember the Milk, an online to-do list manager.

It really good! You can have to-dos in Personal, Study or Work categories, and then tag them individually too. You can send tasks to other people, or share them all. Creating tasks is dead easy – just typing the title into a box – and then you can customise it, like setting reminders, priorities and adding notes, as much as you want to afterwards.

I had previously been using Backpack to manage my to-dos, but I will definitely be giving Remember the Milk a tryout for the next few weeks.

As usual with these services, they have a blog and a forum. The other cog in the machine of Web2.0 support, the documentation wiki, isn’t evident though!

[tags]Remember the Milk[/tags]

Eyespot

The latest announcement from Michael Robertson’s Ajaxlaunch is eyespot – an online AJAXy video editing service. Sounds cool, though I don’t have any video clips to hand to try it out on.

Seems a departure from the other Ajaxlaunch stuff though, and it doesn’t fit in with the style of the other apps.

[tags]eyespot[/tags]

Zoho

Zoho looks like it offers some interesting online applications, the word processor looks especially good as is an alternative for those who can’t get Writely accounts at the moment because of the post Google purchase embargo on new users.

[tags]zoho[/tags]

To Digg, or not to Digg?

Well, it’s certainly a question. When I load up my RSS aggregator (currently Bloglines – though this could change when the UK finally gets the new Newsgator look) there are always new Digg entries. When I leave it for a few hours, the limit of 200 news posts is nearly always reached.

Now, one of the criticisms, if it can be called that, of the use of the internet and technologies like RSS is that it can result in information overload. I’d generally disagree with this, but with Digg, I am afraid it’s true. The site is a victim of its own success – it’s nice to look at, easy to use and boasts some great features. But it just produces too much stuff – I can’t be faffed even to skim the feed sometimes. And then, when you see something you actually like, you can’t even read it because the so-called ‘Digg effect’ has rendered the site in question unusuable due to server pressure.

That’s why I probably still pay more attention to Slashdot that Digg. Slashdot doesn’t produce the number of posts that Digg does, largely because it has a proper focus in terms of subject matter and it has some sort of an editoral focus too – in that you know which way most of those who use and post to it lean on many issues.

As a completely non-scientific comparison, Digg has 3.909 subscribers on Bloglines, compared to Slashdot’s 66,089. There are bound to be many reasons to explain some of the difference, but I would say Digg has a lot of catching up to do.

One site I have never got round to using at all is the Tech Memeorandum. Perhaps I should subscribe and give it a go.

[tags]digg, slashdot, memeorandum[/tags]

ajaxWrite

There is a bit of a buzz around ajaxWrite, a new Web2.0 word processor, like Writely. Much of the buzz is around the fact that the guy reponsible for it is Michael Robertson who was previously behind Linspire, the user friendly Linux distro.

The first thing to say about it is that, at the moment, it is bloody slow. I guess part of the reason for that is the big demand on the servers at the moment as everyone tries out the new toy. People like me, then.

So what’s it like? It’s ok. It’s made to look like a desktop app, rather than the friendly colours of Writely and other AJAXy sites like that. It deliberatley sets out to take on Microsoft Word, in fact Microsoft Office according to the blurb on the pre-loaded document:

The look, feel, and functionality of Microsoft Word in a AJAX platform. This means you can load it in seconds from a web browser.

Did we mention it’s free? That’s right.

Microsoft Office Professional 2007 – $499

AjaxWrite – $0

Erm, ok. Well, for a start, there’s a little bit of a difference between what Office does as a whole and what AjaxWrite does. Even if ajaxWrite was the best word processor ever designed, it still wouldn’t be comparable, would it? What a bizaare claim to make.

ajaxWrite

Feature wise, it’s ok – better than Writely. It can open .doc files, and save them too, as well as PDFs which is great. However, it looks to me like you can only save files to a local disk – you can’t save them online or share them with others. This is a straight competitor to a desktop word processor.

One of my pet hates with software is non compliance with standards – especially on keyboard shortcuts. ajaxWrite meddles with the standards – like making bold text a ctrol-shift-b rather than just ctrl-b as normal. It’s all academic, anyway, as I couldn’t get any of them in any combination to work this evening.

In all honesty, I don’t like it. If you don’t want to use MS stuff, use OpenOffice.org, or AbiWord (both of which are just as free as ajaxWrite) or even WordPerfect or StarOffice if you don’t mind paying. ajaxWrite claims to have the functionality of Word, but it doesn’t come close – nor indeed to OOo Writer, and what’s worse it seems to me to fail to take advantage of providing a WP service online.

Update: the Office rather than Word comparison, according to this post, is because other parts of an office suite will be released in time. Ah yes, if I had read the post on Michael Robertson’s blog that I linked to above properly, I would have known that. So, that’s that cleared up then. Sorry, all.

Load more posts!