Sunday, August 27, 2006

Some Web 2.0 stuff..

Few Web 2.0 things, which I started following in last few weeks. Techcrunch is one of the best tech news site I have found in the recent times. It is sort of one stop shop for all the tech and web 2.0 related news. The content is very concise and complete. It’s always good to browse through happenings around in the tech industry. Digg is another news site. Though I heard of it few years back, but newer used to follow things over there. In the last few weeks I have started reading through the stories at Digg. Like Tech crunch, even this is sort of one stop shop for tech news. Most of the times, the stories in Techcrunch and Digg do overlap. But Digg gives a different taste. The commentary going around is good to read.

Few more handy Web 2.0 utilities which I started using in the last few weeks. Guess what? All are from Google. Calendar , Reader and Writely. The altruistic Google has been generous as like ever before. As I always write, they are showering best of the collaboration and personal management utilities, all as SaaS and for free. The usability, the UI, the features and the functionalities, all unmatched compare to any commercial desktop tools. Of course there are quite a number of limitations compare to desktop tool some because this tools run from browser. But the best all this tools have is the Web 2.0 community related features. You can share the calendar, you can view others calendar across the globe, you can create the documents in writely, share them, co-author the a document by multiple people, maintain versions, blog them, publish them as HTML and PDF and what not. The Google Reader is an excellent RSS feed aggregator. Initially I was big fan of My Yahoo. It was very easy to subscribe the feeds and collate them at one place. Easy one page snapshot of all the feeds. Easy to customize the interface. However, you cannot read the original stories for this feeds in the same page. Got to open it in the new window or so. With Google Reader its damn easy to read through the whole feed. At least for those who publish the whole story or article in the feeds. TechCrunch is one and most of the blogs at Blogger do publish the whole article in the feed. So its quick to scan through the whole story without switching the tabs. However what I miss in Google Reader is to see all the feeds in one page, in one view something like My Yahoo. Probably there is a way you can do it. Let me explore in the coming days. For time being I am using both My Yahoo and Reader. Of Course one can look for the elaborate reviews of these tools on Internet and blogsphere.

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