I have updated and moved this post to Cheapskate Reviews. The revised post focuses more heavily on web apps that are better than Google’s alternatives, so a couple of the services that do not really compete with Google did not make the cut.
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Social News – Newsvine: There are a ton of social news sites out there catering to every different type of online community, and none of the best ones are owned by major corporations. That doesn’t keep their revolutionary democratization of media from being subverted. In general, according to this dude, Digg leads the pack in terms of popularity, but could eventually give way to Newsvine, which caters more to mainstream interests. Ultimately, it’s really about the user group you want associate with as you intake your news, and, as this post shows, Newsvine’s community does a better job promoting thoughtful, informative articles than Digg. If I want to waste time with random links, there’s always…
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Website Discovery – StumbleUpon: Reviewers tend to lump StumbleUpon with social news or social bookmarking, but it really falls between the two in its own unique niche of website discovery. Web developers invariably compare it favorably to the likes of Digg because it is better at feeding them traffic, but anyone looking for interesting daily news will be sorely disappointed by StumbleUpon. Similarly, StumbleUpon does not fare well in comparisons with social bookmarking. However, in the realm of discovering new websites and rating what’s already out there, StumbleUpon has no peer and no real competition that I’m aware of.
ConsumerSearch also recommends blog hosts (WordPress), online backup services (MozyHome) and job sites (SimplyHired), and there are dozens of other well-regarded web apps and services (Twitter, Pingg, Mint, Comic Space, AllRecipes) that do not really overlap with Google’s offerings.
great new look for the blog, Flood!
Nice post! And thanks for choosing Zoho under the Productivity category. Zoho Start is undergoing a revamp and you should be seeing a more better version soon
[...] tablet” is the way to go. With its powerful, desktop-like browser, you can quickly access a wide array of quality Web 2.0 services, making complaints about its third-party software irrelevant. Although development of third-party [...]
Having used Zoho a bit more since writing this post, I feel compelled to add that sorting and saving in Zoho Sheet need work. You can only sort by one column at a time (no secondary or tertiary sorts), and you do not have any control over how much Zoho selects when you are sorting more than one column of data. I’ve run into Zoho deciding to not select the last couple columns of data, sorting everything else, and then having to undo it all to start over.
Saving is also tricky sometimes. I’ve run into problems thinking it auto-saved (Save icon was dimmed) a document, but then finding later that a chunk of my changes had been lost. The auto-saves also don’t apply when you are going back to the “last saved” version. In other words, if you make one mistake that you can’t undo (very possible with the contorted sorting issues above), and you want to go back to the last saved version. Be prepared to go waaay back to the beginning of your session (or the last time you manually saved). I’ve gotten into the habit of manually saving often, but this feels like a step back five years or so, and definitely does not compare well with Google Docs’ saving-every-change-as-a-different-version approach.
Lifestreaming: Two excellent reviews of lifestreaming sites (1, 2) share the same top three: Socialthing!, Profilactic, and Friendfeed. Socialthing! is invite-only, so I only looked at Profilactic, which accesses more sites (Veoh and deviantART, among others), and Friendfeed, which has better integration (like automatically adding friends who are on both Friendfeed and Facebook). A bit more of a fan of quality than quantity, I’ll play around with Friendfeed for now, but any one of these three is probably the way to go for lifestreaming.
[...] files (photos) and minimize my interaction with the site. In some ways a continuation of my review of Web 2.0 services, here are the top options for supplanting Facebook’s [...]
[...] more powerful and intuitive layout, and a host of other blog-only features. I have already noted elsewhere that WordPress as the best option for blogging, and both ConsumerSearch and TopTenReviews agree. [...]
[...] Lightweight GNU/Linux Distros 2 02 2009 With tons of excellent online software, I find all I really need from my computer 90% of the time is the ability to connect to the [...]
[...] Minimalistic Lightweight GNU/Linux Distros 3 02 2009 With tons of excellent online software, I find all I really need from my computer 90% of the time is the ability to connect to the [...]