Solo Technology

I spend a lot of time looking at various web sites and web based applications and generally like what I see. The true test, however, is which ones “stick” and have me coming back weeks or months later. That’s a lot smaller list than what you might surmise from reading the last year or so of this blog.

Lately I find myself using more computers than typical and, as a result, more and varied browsers. At the day job, our focus is largely on IE so I try to spend most of day there for development and testing as well. As a result, I’ve become weary of constantly setting new bookmarks up on every browser’s toolbar. Netvibes and their “Bookmarks” and “del.icio.us” modules solve that problem nicely.

Additionally, Netvibes also does a great job of monitoring more than one Gmail account at a time. Speaking of daily browser destinations, Gmail is one. Both directly and via Google for Your Domain.

In a sense, Netvibes is my online dashboard. It either shows me what I want to see, or has links to it.

Since I’ve mentioned Google, another daily stop on the web trail would be my feed reader of choice: Google Reader. I’ve tried a lot of readers, there are some really nice clients out there. I have to have a web based one though and right now GReader is my favorite. I also like to stop by my “custom” Megite page once or twice a day and see what bubbles up.

For task tracking I’m still using Tracks for the less detailed task list and project tracking. [side note: I'm back to paper for the in-depth detailed tracking. It's quicker, easier and more portable. Future article topic...] It gets a bit dodgy in IE, so I have to keep that in mind. Works in a pinch though.

All my instant messaging is done via Meebo. Often via my own Meebo Desktop application, but that’s still web based.

There you have it. My daily/oft-used web apps. There are many many more that I use, don’t get me wrong. But these are the ones that I’m at daily, multiple times (if not constantly).

4 Responses to “Daily Browser Destinations”

1. Daisyhead on January 14th, 2007 5:49 pm
   

   Meebo appears to be a web-based Trillian of sorts. I’m wondering what the advantage would be to use this over a program like Trillian.

   Another web-based application/website I can’t live without is Feedburner, which I see you already use and for fun, LastFM.

2. Chris on January 14th, 2007 6:27 pm
   

   The main advantage to meebo over trillian (or gaim, or miranda) is that there’s no need to install it on every machine you use. I use a bunch of machines at home and at work and for me.. that’s a huge plus!

   LastFM rocks (I’m HandySolo there too). The Pandora / Last.fm mashup http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/ is one I probably should’ve included in my list… maybe not a daily visit, but certainly a frequent one.

3. gavin from meebo on January 15th, 2007 11:08 pm
   

   Chris, exactly! meebo is great because there is no download required! Thanks for checking out meebo.

   gavin
   the meebo team

4. amanda on January 23rd, 2007 8:51 am
   

   Check out the new embedded version of Kool IM.

   http://www.koolim.com

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