Blogging

On most days, I put my hands on two to five new Web 2.0 products. I write up some of them, but pretty much forget about all of them by the time I wake up the next day. A few things do stick with me, though. Here’s a list of products I am actually still using, weeks or months after the initial review:

Chrome

Google’s new browser. Who needs it? If you have to ask, you haven’t used it. (See all our Chrome coverage.)

Why I like it: Very fast. Very stable.

Areas for improvement: Extension support! I would use Chrome full-time if I could import my favorite plugins, especially the password keeper Roboform. Also, Mac and Linux versions.

Evernote

This note-taking app has finally and completely replaced OneNote for me (it was a slow transition). It’s a great place to store all your thoughts. It has a good search feature and it’s good with photos — it even OCRs them in the background. Cool new feature: iPhone notes are now geo-encoded, and you can filter your display of notes by location. (Read the review from March.)

Why I like it: Fast, reliable, and synchronizes across my PCs, my iPhone, and the Web.

Areas for improvement: I would like it if the text editor were keystroke-compatible with Microsoft Word. Shortcut keys I’m used to don’t work in Evernote. It slows me down.

OtherInBox

Alternate inbox for BACN — the e-mail status updates you get from social services and commerce sites. (Read launch review from September 8.)

Why I like it: Can set up a new filter (actually a unique e-mail address) for a new service on the fly. Really does decrease load on my main inbox.

Areas for improvement: It’s still in private beta, and the features aren’t all built out yet (like receipt tracking). Could be faster.

Bonus: I just got 500 new invitations to the OtherInBox private beta for Webware readers. Get yours.

Tripit

A good place to collate all the planning data that goes into a vacation or business trip. I use it to create a printed itinerary before each of my trips, and I e-mail a copy to my family too, so they know where I am. Nothing that can’t be done with a calendar app or word processor, but it’s much faster with TripIt. (Read first take from September, 2007.)

Why I like it: Makes organizing trip info easier. Saves time.

Areas for improvement: Needs an iPhone app (the mobile Web site is nice, but isn’t fast enough when you need trip info ASAP). Also, could do better at parsing e-mail confirmations you get from non-mainstream sources,

Thwirl

Best desktop Twitter and Friendfeed client from the company that’s behind Seesmic, which I never use. Updated frequently with new features. (Read initial review from March.)

Why I like it: I use multiple nanoblog acocunts, and Twhirl does a great job of letting me see and write to all of them separately. Good support for photo uploads.

Areas for improvement: I would like the promised option for single-pane view of everything. Also a Ping.fm-like feature to post to multiple nanoblogs at once.

Extra: Dead to me

There are some products I used to love, but have (or want to) stop using. These apps, for example, are in the process of becoming dead to me:

NetVibes. A useful single-page aggregator, but it’s slow to load and the login screen is a pain to get through whenever your browser forgets your identity. I’m seriously thinking of switching over to iGoogle.

Trillian. The IM aggregation app still works, but it loads up almost as slowly as Outlook. No excuse for that. I’m in the process of switching over the Pidgin.

The rest is here:
What works: Five Web 2.0 products I still use

Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reported on Nokia’s buyout of the open source mobile OS Symbian, reviewed a “memory augmentation” service and a semantic search engine, and looked at what LinkedIn’s strategy tells us about the IPO market. On the trends side, we contributed our 2 cents to Yahoo’s board, investigated another Wikipedia controversy, analyzed the capacity of web 2.0 to bring about “change”, and explored the online video market.

Sponsored by:

Web Products

Nokia Acquires Symbian; Takes on Google’s Android

Nokia isn’t finished with its acquisition spree just yet. This week the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn’t already own and make the platform open source. Nokia clearly aims to challenge Android, the open source mobile operating system of Google. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says that it wants to create “the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications”.

See also: last100’s analysis and Setbacks for Google’s Android

Evernote Opens to All: Fantastic Promise, Disappointing Execution

The highly anticipated “memory augmentation” service Evernote opened to the public this week and you’ll probably want to check this service out just to see what it tries to do. We may change our minds after more lengthy testing, but so far this combination of a bookmarking, note taking and photo cataloging service with apps for the desktop, web and mobile - not to mention the Optical Character Recognition powered search - adds up to a whole lot of potential … and frustration.

Evri Beta Launches: Search Less - Understand More

Evri, a Paul Allen backed semantic search engine, launched into a limited beta this week. Evri was first shown publicly at the D6 conference. Evri’s CEO Neil Roseman likes to talk about Evri in terms of organizing content instead of calling it a search engine. At its core, however, Evri definitely is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.

Facebook Targets Chinese Market

Social networking site Facebook has launched a Chinese-language version of its web site. Users logging into the site from the Chinese mainland are now being redirected to zh-cn.facebook.com, where users can choose between a version in simplified or traditional Chinese.

See also: China’s Facebook Clones

LinkedIn and The Strange Case of The Disappearing (IPO) Market

Is LinkedIn worth $1bn? Yes. Why? Because Bain Capital says it is. The stock is not public, so you and I cannot trade it. The whole notion of the average punter trading tech stocks (or the average punter’s pension fund trading it on your behalf) seems rather quaint, from some bygone era. But why has the public market for tech stocks disappeared? Where has it disappeared to? Will it ever return? The LinkedIn financing offers some clues to these questions.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Yet Another Unsolicited Yahoo Turnaround Strategy - YAUYTS

Watching Yahoo’s decline is rather sad. It is the result of nothing more or less than creative destruction. Meeting that challenge head-on is incredibly tough. Very, very few companies make the transition. IBM, led by Lou Gerstner, met the challenge of the PC era in his epic turnaround (described in the book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance). Microsoft has struggled mightily to remain relevant in the Web era and they are as smart and driven as it gets. What’s so incredible is seeing the speed of these transitions - to see a big successful Web start-up like Yahoo marginalized by technology shifts.

Our Kids Are Failing - And It’s All Wikipedia’s Fault!

Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. This week news broke out in Scotland about how the internet was to blame for Scotland’s failing exam pass rates. According to the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC), Wikipedia, among other sources, was cited as the reason as to why the students were failing. Is this a case of the internet making us stupid? Or do students just need to learn how to use the new research tools of the web a little more appropriately?

Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change

In April, Umair Haque posted a manifesto on his blog on the Harvard Business Publishing web site where he called for today’s investors and start-ups to start building applications to “change the world” instead of just making apps that make money. He challenged Silicon Valley to find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and then pledged that he would help by providing free consulting. Recently, he revisited this topic…

YouTube Continues to Destroy All Competitors in Declining Video Market

YouTube’s huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that’s up 26% from it’s May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.) In April we reported that YouTube’s dominance in online video was bigger than Google’s dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

See also: The Top 40 Online Video Producers in May - This List Might Surprise You

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

See the original post:
Weekly Wrapup, 23-27 June 2008