Web Things Considered

Steve Rubel adds his thoughts on Windows Live Favorites. I echo these criticisms along with my earlier post.

I ended up trying Favorites out just for grins. Man, what a pain. First I had to install the MSN toolbar (another disappointing MS tool) and jump through some other hoops. Then, to use it, you have to keep an explorer bar open, which I don’t like doing. Then you have competing favorites tools (builtin and Windows Live) that aren’t connected at all, which is kind of weird. All in all, a frustrating experience and one I wouldn’t recommend to anyone else.

I’ve been reading and hearing great things about Pandora. One co-worker referred to it as “ear crack” and I can definitely see why. It’s fun to plugin you’re favorite artists and songs and see what’s related. A nice legal way to listen to music.

It snowed here a bit in Portland yesterday, so attendance is pretty light at work, and it feels pretty relaxed. But, it seems things are falling apart all over the place on the web. TypePad is having all sorts of problems lately, Del.icio.us is having issues, and Bloglines is moving and their servers are down for a few hours. It makes it really hard to slack when your favorite tools are offline.

Update
It must be contagious. Salesforce.com has also had issues .

Update 2
Fortunately, Bloglines came back up fine. Though, I’d have to disagree with Michael Arrington about their service. It’s not very fast. They still haven’t fixed the problem with subscribing to the Feedburner feed for this site and getting the wordpress feed on my server instead, and I’ve heard nothing back in over a week since they turned the issue over to their engineers. However, Bloglines is still the best online reader that I’ve tried so far, so I’m sticking with it for now.

As we reach the end of the year, many people are coming out with top 10 lists for this and that. It was exciting to see this week that NetworthIQ was included as #6 in the list of Top 10 Innovative Web 2.0 Applications of 2005. This article made the Digg home page and the del.icio.us/popular page, resulting in a surge of traffic and registrations at the site.

In the spirit of trying to be more positive about Microsoft on this site, I came across this list of “cool” .Net products/companies by Dan’l Lewin (via Scoble). I’ve only heard of a couple of them, but will be checking the others out. There’s also an intersting list of reasons for choosing .Net at the end of the article. I’m sure the open source crowd will have something to say about that.

But, there was one glaring omission. NetworthIQ was missing from the list :-).

This is a reference post for wikis (and other collaboration tools) that I need to check out:

• Basecamp (already using)
• Confluence
• Central Desktop
• Jotspot [Hosted]
• Social Text [Hosted]
• Stikipad [Hosted]
• WikiSpaces [Hosted]
• PBwiki [Hosted]
• Zimbra
• Perspective [.Net]
• FlexWiki [.Net]
• MediaWiki [PHP]
• DokuWiki [PHP]
• TikiWiki [PHP]
• PmWiki [PHP]
• Twiki [Perl]
• Kwiki [Perl]
• trac [Python]
• Zwiki [Python]

Update:
WikiMatrix looks at these too.

This is a reference post for me so that I can keep track of online calendar tools I’m interested in looking at.

• Kiko
• CalendarHub
• Planzo
• Hula
• Trumba
• Zimbra
• AirSet
• 30 boxes
• HipCal
• SpongeCell

Update
TechCrunch takes a look at these too.

Final Update

Not much need for this list anymore.  Google Calendar wins.  I generally root for the small guy, but it just didn’t work out this time.

As of today, I am now using the big three email betas: Gmail, Windows Live Mail Beta, and Yahoo! Mail Beta. I have entirely too many email accounts, but it’s interesting using the different clients. I’ve been using Gmail heavily for a couple months, I just switched to the Yahoo! mail beta last week, and to the Winodws Live Mail Beta today. I’ll spend some time analyzing the three over the next few weeks and see which one comes out on top. First impressions are that the Gmail is great, Yahoo! rocks, and Windows Live Mail needs some work.

I hate sounding so negative all the time about Microsoft stuff, as I’m currently working with the .Net technology stack. So, I’m going to try to find some positive Microsoft stuff to talk about as well. I don’t have anything against Microsoft really, but the other guys are just doing a better job right now. I can tell you that Windows Live Mail is still better than Verizon’s webmail product. See, positive already.

The other night we had an eye emergency in the family, and I desperately needed the phone number for the Oregon Eye Specialists. As you probably know, I use FireFox. Well, guess what happens when you go to that site in FireFox? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. Just a blank blue screen. No alternate content, just blank (Yes, Flash is installed). In my haste I went back to Google to track down the phone number. Later, I gave it a try in IE, and what do you know, it worked. Now if this isn’t the ultimate irony that an eye doctor has a completely flash-based movie (I won’t dignify it by calling it a site), that’s almost completely inaccessible by most definitions, I don’t know what is.

I think someone needs to educate whomever developed this flash movie. Get a clue! For a site that very easily could have site-impaired users, using alternate browsers, it’s unacceptable. Not to mention the search engine traffic they’re missing out on with this design. I don’t even want to think about how much the clinic paid for this site.

Start by reading more of Molly, Andy Clarke, and spending some time at the W3C’s web accessibility site.

Let me start off by saying this Windows Live branding is dumb. I mean, I guess it presents some consistency. But, like with Windows Live Local, it sounds like a tag line for the evening news, not a web app.

So anyway, I was reading over at Dare’s blog about the release of Windows Live Favorites and the associated toolbar. I thought it might be interesting to try out. But, it’s entirely IE specific. Bleh. Considering this “Live” strategy is about hosted services, I see no reason, other than the fact that Microsoft makes IE, to not support other browsers. I only use IE when I have to to test sites, so this is certainly no reason to switch back. I’ll stick with del.icio.us and the firefox extension for now.

Just to recap online bookmark services/tools that I’ve tried or attempted to try:

• Del.icio.us with FireFox extension: Thumbs up.
• Flock (which integrates with Del.icio.us): Thumbs down.
• Windows Live Favorites: Thumbs down.

I haven’t tried any of the other Del.icio.us-alikes, like Furl, My Web, etc. Does anybody prefer one of these or a different service that works well with FireFox? I’d be curious to take a look.