This is funny. Coastr is aiming to be the del.icio.us of beers. Yes, beermarking. From their site:
“Coastr is an experiment in social networking for beer snobs (meant as a compliment, of course!). The basic idea is for you to create a list of your favorite beers, and to connect you with other people with similar tastes. And those connections will help you discover interesting new brews that you might have not known about before. “Social beermarking”, if you will.”
This is nice. Now soon we will have ajax powered cricket marking or maybe some Web 2.0 drinking. The point here howeveris that how web 2.0 applications are branching away from the early adopter crowd. This brings into my mind my Technology and World Change class where the prof showed us a graph which had a S-curve and showcased the different categories of individuals who adapt a technology fast and those who dont. This is exactly what is happening now. Look at Connotea for researchers and clinicians or Postgenomic for life science blogs. Both of these show how web 2.0 can be used for audiences outside the normal geeky ones. Or look at Carspace, a network for car enthusiasts or Cingo and Minti, soon to be launched family 2.0 services.
What task can you not accomplish online today. Bookmarks, editing and storing docs, storing music and yea keeping passwords in your google inbox. If so many tasks can be accomplished online, why is building an online calendar that integrates easily with whatever you do be so tough. 30boxes has shown that it can be done. I found these lines from their blog.
“One of our key features is the ability to enter an event simply, in one line, and have it appear on you calendar. Enough of the overly complicated event entry boxes! What if I just want to put “lunch with mom tomorrow, noon”. Do I really need to pick repeating, or time zone, or url, or description?”
This is what everyone wants. Software that adapts to our needs. Mistakes can be edited later but atleast getting the stuff inside is not a problem. I was really hoping that gmail would introduce an online calendar. You get an email from someone saying that meeting on monday and immediately gmail would add that into your calendar. 30boxes does just that. You forward an email and it would add those dates to your calendar. Why not introduce the same thing for cellphones. It sure can be done.
Sharing is another great feature of 30boxes. Other applications require you to mark what to share and with whom. 30boxes shares just everything unless you say its private. Saves a lot of time. Plus you can see your buddy’s calendar. Who knows, by looking at your buddy’s calendar you might realize that there is a big concert in town which you would want to attend. Its a really cool feature. Seriously, lets applaud 30boxes for the work that they have done.
Hi everyone. Thanks for all your comments. I have now shifted my blog to Zimeejax. Please visit there from now on. I would be taking this blog offline soon.
The blog stays where it was and will remain here forever. I figured out that neither do I have the money for hosting, nor do I have sufficient amount of visitors to start a new blog.
I have signed up for BlogMad.net which is some kind of website to increase your traffic. Its still in beta but allows signups. It helps increase traffic to your blog by the same amount that you view other blogs. In other words, you read more, you get more. Looks pretty nifty, lets see how it works when it launches. When you signup you get some free credits which you can later use to increase traffic. Sign up here.
How many of us have always wanted to publish our own book. Most of us. With the internet around, people say books are no longer the sole provider of knowledge. Agreed, but reading a hardcover book is always different than clicking links and searching. Most of us would prefer to read a book than search information over the internet even today.
This is exactly what Blurb.com does. You can publish your own blog, cookbook, travelbook for posterity. Simply download their software and preview the book online and then just order for publishing. The prices are not too high. So, hurry up and grab their service before its too late. These guys are still in beta.
This had to happen. After being a MS supporter for so long, all I wanted was an invite to the Office Live Beta. As luck would have it, my friend got in and I couldnt. So sad that is. Anyways, he passed me a couple of screenshots and promised that he would pass me an invite if he ever got one. This is what he had to say.
Contrary to what its name might suggest, the beta version of Microsoft Office Live is not an online version of productivity tools Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Instead, this hosted suite provides small businesses (with a staff of 10 or fewer) with tools to build and host a Web site, manage contacts and share projects. For free, the Basic service provides a company with a domain name registration, hosting and email, along with Web design tools and reports on site traffic. At the moment only US residents can participate in this beta program. Once you sign in a screen opens which demands a domain name. There is no way past this screen however. Office Live integrates quite beautifully with Outlook, Project and other MS products.
Its 5 am here and my friend can only reveal so much. I will post a detailed review later on. Screenshots are available at Flickr
All I can say is that with so much control over what you can and cannot do..MS still SUCKS…
Ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking tool. There are other sites that do the same thing for you. Ma.gnolia is currently under a private beta and you can provide your email address to request an invitation.
I have tried a lot of bookmarking sites but gave up on all of them because instead of making my finding easier they made it more difficult since I had to login, add each URL and specify tags. Ma.gnolia however is a little different. There is a bookmark which can be used on a browser to instantly add a URL to your list and it also specifies tags according to your previous tags as well as other ones. If you need to add or delete any tag, you still need to log in and update. The other thing is that the interface is very clean and easy to use. No ads, I hate ads btw, easy additions with no complex menus. The best part is that if you search for a particular tag, you get results based on not only your bookmarks but also results from other users, depending on whether or not they have made their bookmarks public or not. Most users will ofcourse make their bookmarks public since its no big deal to share them anyways.
As of now Ma.gnolia looks good. Lets see how it goes.
Some guys at fourio.com did the laborious job to map all great, innovative Web 2.0 applications on a Google Maps page – where they were created.
This isnt too surprising or is it. Most of the Web 2.0 that we see today is coming from US east and West coast. Most of the startups are from US too. Well, US has normally been the pioneer in internet technology. But hey comeon, why are there no innovations from Europe or for that matter any other country. I am sure there are a lot of skillful coders elsewhere.
The inbuilt chat in gmail that we all are waiting for is finally live. My friend logged onto to her gmail and found the chat box just below the contacts link. When she hovered the cursor above her contacts she noticed a small window open up that had 2 options, mail or invite to chat. She invited me to chat and it was way cool to chat like this.
The whole thing is uncluttered and functions damn well. The bad thing is that Google is rolling out this feature slowly. Not all accounts have the feature yet. I do not have it. Why they did this is unknown but I am sure that by Monday all of us should have it. I am posting a screenshot that I took of it. Take a look for urself.
hey. am amrt aka withoutfear, without fear.
last week around this time, anshul introduced me to AJAX through www.gtalkr.com. AJAX is basically Asychronous JavaScript And XML. It is basically a web technique which combines XHTML/HTML, CSS, XML, the ECMAScript implementations like JavaScript and JScript and the XMLHTTPREQUEST object, to create interactive web applications.
GTALR.com is a really nice integration of Google Talk (essential google services), YouTube, Flikr and newsfeeds.
Probing around the net, I came across another interesting AJAX site www.backpackit.com which sells it as an organizer – is quite effective and nice.
Something which I am going to tryout the next 2 weeks!
