I see myself using more and more online services. As the Internet is maturing, online services are changing into more simple and smart software. There is now a real advantage of using an online application versus a desktop one. The web announced years early is finally showing up. I’ve compiled a list of some of my favourite online services I use on a daily basis. Most geeks surely know most of them, but they are good enough to mention again.
Reddit — the online tech news site. Each news is rated in a collaborative way. If enough people vote for a news, it appears on the front page. Very useful for checking what’s worth reading on the web.
del.icio.us — the collaborative bookmarking service. Pretty similar to Reddit.com but dedicated to bookmarking. Tags are used to categorize the content. Using this service will remove the need of syncing your bookmarks between computer systems.
Flickr — the photo sharing service. Pretty well done. It has grown from a simple cameraphone photo sharing to a more wider scope. You can now share and organize your photo sets right from your browser. Your photos can also be reach from a permanent URL that you can use to linking photos right from your web site thus avoiding duplicates.
LinkedIn — the innovative online address book and more. It helps you to build a network of people. Pretty well done and useful to keep track of your business contacts. It can helps you to find real job opportunities. Lots of people are moving to it and it’s good to be on that network.
Bloglines — the online RSS feed reader, pretty much like Google Reader.
Tada Lists — the online “todo” list management service, very simple and easy to use. Made by the guys behind Ruby on Rails. The application is limited but useful enough for many use. The company has also put online more complete services like Basecamp, an online project management service.
Technorati — the blog referencer service. Useful to find blogs about any specific topic. It’s an essential site to be on to help you drive traffic to your web site. Blog readers would prefer to use it rather than pure Google searching.
Google services as a whole — actually Google lead that innovation in online services and I guess they have some good stuff in reserve for the future. Just to name a few of my favourites: GMail, Google Groups, Google Maps and most recent Google Base, a database service and Google Analytics, a complete statistic service for your web site.
Recently though, I discovered another one: Writely — a very impressive word processor, fully online. It’s impressive in the sense that this kind of app has been the holy grail of all “network” companies like Sun. Now, it’s coming to reality. Writely is very well done and sure not a toy, check this out:
- Truly useable and fast.
- Import and export Word and PDF files.
- Built-in sharing, publishing and collaboration.
- Automatic saving and versionning.
- No desktop dependencies.
- … a real pleasure to work with!
Like online mail services, casual users will find it more useable than the desktop Word. I don’t know if Microsoft initially planned to make “Word for the Web” but this one really worth the try.
