Web apps I use

Following our conversation, Vladimir Oane raises the question: Who actually uses all these shiny new web apps (rounded corners and all)? He only uses a handful, and these have been around for some time or tend to come from giants like Google.

His question reminded me of this earlier post where Dan Berte wrote about web apps that didn’t work for him. Indeed, of the half dozen new projects that show up on Museum of Modern Betas every day, how many do we really need? They might be built to be bought; but, if it is indeed “the same million people” using all of them, how many will this million of us use?

The mainstream media is shaking its head at the cash-happiness at the top of the Web 2.0 pyramid.
(See The Skype hyper in The Economist’s Oct 4th edition:

“By buying Skype, the internet phenomenon of 2005, eBay started a
bubble. Google, with its purchase of YouTube, the cyber-star of 2006,
inflated it further. And Microsoft and Google now appear tempted to add
more froth by investing a silly sum in Facebook, the latest big thing.
All three—the internet telephone firm, the video site and the social
network—make almost no money. EBay’s disappointment with Skype is a
timely reminder of where this fad might lead.”)

As a first pass at an answer, I’ll tally my web app usage as well. Our position as
early, enthusiastic adopters in Eastern Europe is somewhat more
equidistant than adopters in the Valley. Without personally knowing too many of the
developers, we evaluate web apps quickly
and decide in the first few seconds whether we’ll use something or not.

What are the ones that I use?

1. del.icio.us – closing up on 1000 bookmarks. The problem? When I try to retrieve, as often as not I had actually just starred the post in Google Reader. Or done nothing at all to save the page. Google Web History usually kicks in as an emergency solution.
2. Flickr – essential to my peace of mind since my HDD died and took all of my photos with it
3. Google Video – mostly for the excellent content from the Googleplex
4. Google Notebook and Google Docs – for research support and collaborative document authoring with my team
5. Twitter – micro-social-networking
6. Stikkit - now used as a GTD inbox for anything web-related. I had high hopes for this app. It could have become my inbox to the internet – intelligently feeding my travels to Dopplr, my goals to 43things, etc. It now looks abandoned in favour of IWantSandy. (Guess what? I DON’T want Sandy. I want a more integrated Stikkit.)
7. LinkedIn – would use actively if I could set up customized RSS feeds for Questions on subjects I can authoritatively discuss
8. Facebook – mostly to keep in touch with the people I met at the Office 2.0 Conference
9. coComment - tracking comments posted on other blogs (though very dissapointed with its performance, I’m not aware of a better solution)
10. More recently, specific social networks such as Social Media Today
11. Tumblr – for a personal blog / journal
12. Mindmeister – almost any project I start these days begins as a mindmap. If I need to collaborate with anyone else, I’ll use Mindmeister to share mindmaps without forcing people to install software or to edit the map together in real time.
13. Dopplr – while I’m not yet enough of a frequent traveler to make this immensely useful, I’m quite enchanted with its simplicity and the most seamless integration I’ve ever seen.
14. iUseThis – voting for the Mac apps that we use. This has become my no. 1 destination when I need Mac software. Would love to see a similar proposition for web apps
15. Picnik – for my very occasional image editing needs, a simple and sweet solution.

I had great hope for these, but now only use very seldom:

• Last.fm – there’s just not enough of a support for classical music – let alone the contemporary classical that I listen most of the time.
• Plaxo 3.0 – I cancelled my Premium subscription to this very promising re-iteration of the rather spammy Plaxo. It’s supposed to be a solution to the Syncing problem. At the moment, it just doesn’t sync what I need.
• 43things – occasionally used to collect random goals.
• iGoogle – promising, but I’m quickly losing patience with how long it takes to load / switch tabs

A couple to which I never gave much of a chance:

• None of the social news sites. I need highly selective filters to counter information overload. I need to fight the “too much input, no output” syndrome. No way am I going to add lots more input.
• Pownce, Jaiku, Ziki
• MySpace – useless AND ugly.
• Joost – I have no use for watching pocker games.
• These are the ones I remember. The rest? Hmm….

I’ll follow up with a post on what’s missing in Web 2.0 apps.

Office 2.0 apps and usage in Romania

Last week, I was invited to talk about Office 2.0 applications on the IT&C show at the Money Channel. Their archive seems to lag 1-2 months behind their live show, so don’t hold your breath waiting to see the show :D

I took advantage of this opportunity to add to my understanding of apps in the Office 2.0 area that are being developed and used in Romania. Here’s a round-up of the people I talked to and our discussions:

• Mircea Goia put together a vey well-researched round-up of Web 2.0 presence in Romania on Read/Write Web. The article was written mid-June, so it is still fairly up-to-date. This was my starting point. His focus was mostly on social networks, while I was more interested in enterprise collaboration. Two of his apps fit my profile: Metromind’s BluoCMS and Soft32’s ZuluWriter. I contacted both of them. I also wrote to Mircea, who was very responsive… but, unfortunately, in a different timezone on the other side of the globe! I couldn’t get his input before the show, but look forward to discussing in the future.
• Vladimir Oane of Metromind was a joy to talk to – a wealth of ideas. We wondered why Romanian customers prefer paying a large amount up-front in order to own the product rather than going with a subscription-based model (even when the software they pay for will be outdated long before their investment pays off!). He insisted that the limiting factor in usage of Office 2.0 in Romania is culture, not technology – a point with which I fully agree. East European education methods and work ethics have been strongly individualistic and competitive for a long time. Collaboration has always been present, but more in the form or familism or cronyism (for ex. “suflatul la ore”) than in the form of open cooperation. However, “we build our tools, then they shape us“, (to quote a favorite Stowe Boyd theme). Our culture has been determined by the tools we have been encouraged and allowed to use, as much as by the assignments we have been given and the results we have been measured against. How quickly can culture cange when you introduce new tools? It is very likely to depend on how assignments and evaluation change, as well.
• Lucian Todea of ITNT/Soft32 has one of the more interesting projects around: ZuluWriter, an online word processor and document manager. Gotta love their homepage! Unfortunately, the project seems to be dormant at the moment. The functionality as hinted (not yet implemented) seems to be quite promising in the tagging and content sharing area.
• Zoltan Lorincz of Mindomo has the only fully-developed Office 2.0 application that I am aware of at the moment (in Romania, of course). He is based in Timisoara, and he openly told me he doesn’t expect Romanian client anytime soon. Mindomo is a (feature-rich) mindmapping application, and mindmapping itself is somewhat of a novelty to most Romanian corporate settings. A pity.

Office 2.0 – Mindmapping

I have been live mindmapping the session on MindMapping here. Later in the day I’ll try to upgrade to a pro account so I can actually embed it here, but for now, the MindMeister map is public.  MindMeister very generously made a gift a a pro membership to me… but WordPress flushes out the embed code when I try to place it here. If anyone has a solution, please let me know.

Enjoy!