Tag Archives: Web 2.0

Xoopit For Gmail

One of the things that I love about Gmail is that its so packed with features that it seems I’m always learning something cool about it. Archiving emails, labels, secure connections, filters, forwarding… I’m always learning new cool stuff about my inbox. That’s pretty hip, in my humble estimation.

This morning I found out about a new tool that makes Gmail even more cool. Ever the curious web junkie, I had to try it out. Its called Xoopit, and it’s a service and Firefox plugin that makes it easy to find all images, videos and files sent to you. Gmail already has awesome search capability, so why do you need this. Well, because Xoopit makes it easier and more fun. It displays the images within your inbox in a bar at the top of Gmail. If you search with Xoopit, you’re only searching for emails with attachments. Its kind of like Facebook for your inbox. Crazy, right?

They’re in beta right now, with a limited number of invites. As soon as I have invites to offer I’ll update this article with a link. In the meantime check out the Xoopit website.

Internet Music

I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately. In Rainbows is still in heavy rotation, and I still strongly recommend it. I’ve been listening to a lot of internet radio, too. There are a couple of cool options that I thought I’d share here.

Last.fm has been a favorite for a while. You can type the name of a band in, and it’ll play a stream of music within that same genre. Pretty cool, really. Pandora is very similar but you can also enter a song name to generate a playlist. Between these two I like Last.fm more, but for some reason I’ve been listening to Pandora more recently. I’ll correct that straight away.

So that’s all fine and good, but when you want to hear a specific song neither of these are great options because while you can pick a genre that you like, you can’t pick the specific song. What to do? YouTube. I realized that this was possible when B-Dub linked to Young Folks on his site (not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me previously, seems obvious now). The thing that’s cool about this is that its legal (as long as you don’t download it), and literally anything you can think of is there.

Lately I’ve been doing this a lot because I don’t know enough about the band to know whether or not I want to buy the CD, but I really like one song. One quick note, these are links to the music videos, but I haven’t bothered to watch the vids, I’m just here for the tunage. Okay, so here’s my list: Hysteria, The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret, Young Folks, Lazy Eye, Take Me Out and Perfect. I probably need to buy a couple of these CD’s.

Dear internet, you’re the best. Is there anything you can’t do?

Web 2.0 Pres

I’ve been doing some research on the 2008 Presidential candidates lately. One thing that has struck me is that most of them have a MySpace page. I haven’t looked at all of the candidates yet, but so far I’ve only found one candidate that does not have a MySpace page. I almost like him more for not jumping on the bandwagon (but he’ll have to do more than that to earn my vote).

That strikes me as funny. Surely no one believes that these people actually use MySpace. I suppose they see it as a means of connecting with younger voters. I guess its good that they’re looking for ways to get people involved, but its still pretty interesting to me.

Secure Gmail

Do you use Gmail? You know how when you log in its a secure connection, but then when you get to your mailbox its NOT secure? That always bugged me, but I didn’t think there was anything to be done about it. Yahoo is the same way, you log in over a secure page, but then when you access your email its not secure.

Just this morning I learned the solution. You can work with all of your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Documents through a secure internet connection. And it won’t cost you a cent.

You just have to update your links to include https://.

I don’t think Yahoo & Microsoft (Hotmail) even offer this with their premium accounts. All of the webmail providers keep increasing the account storage capacity thinking that will win new clients. Having a secure connection is more important to me than infinite capacity.

Way to go Google, keep up the great work.

Web 2.0verload

I’m slowly working through my site redesign, and there are so many options that its a little overwhelming. I don’t mean that I want everything under the sun on my website, quite the contrary. There are some things that I’ve seen on other blogs that I’d like to implement on mine. Like, moblogging, and social bookmarking, and a photo gallery. I have systematically figured out how to do everything that I want to do, and in the process I have discovered literally dozens of other possibilities.

Over the past two years the web has taken a step forward in terms of usability and connecting people. And, with new web tools like AJAX and Ruby on Rails, sites are starting to work more intuitively rather than the user having to learn how to get through each site. But as part of all of this new technology there are so many options that its difficult to know which to choose.

Take, for example, social bookmarking. I bookmark my favorite sites in a public place, so that I can retrieve them from any computer that has web access, and I can share them. Plus, I can see the bookmarks that everyone else thinks are cool and/or valuable. That’s a great idea, right? Well here are a few:

Hmm, that kinda makes it tough to know which one to use. Okay, scratch that. We’ll move on to social news sites. I think a story is cool, so I post it to the site. A bunch of other people agree with me, and that article gets bumped to the front page so everyone sees it. Again, what a brilliant idea.

This isn’t getting any easier. And the choices just go on and on and on. Photo sharing sites, audio sharing sites, podcasting, playlists, blogrings, tag clouds…

Yesterday I spent a few minutes finding a way of sharing what I’ve been listening to on my iPod, so that it just shows up on my blog automatically, and within a five minute time span I found several options. I turned off the computer, I couldn’t handle another choice.

I love that the web is becoming more interactive, and that it is becoming even easier to share, find and use information. But now that all of this new technology has become available, its going to take some time for standards to evolve. I’m a pretty technical guy, and even I think there are too many choices right now.