Feedable

 

Feedable is a nice online news aggregator. As well as having your own feeds, it also provides information on hot topics of conversation in a variety of subjects.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing it out.

Tags: feedable, steve+rubel

Google and iRows

From TechCrunch:

Google Takes Out Ajax Spreadsheet iRows

A popular Hebrew blog is reporting that the two founders of Israeli startup iRows have been hired by Google. Along with ZohoSheet and NumSum, iRows is one of a few online Ajax spreadsheets that competes with Google’s own Excel-clone. The blog reports that the founders will retain the intellectual property in iRows, but that the site will be shut down.

If this is accurate, the deal is a mirror of the Google-Gtalkr deal from May 2006, where the founders, brothers Wes and Dudley Carr, joined Google and agreed to close the site down.

This is a shame. iRows was one of the best online spreadsheets out there. Now there are fewer choices for people, and that’s bad.

[tags]irows, google, techcrunch[/tags]

Google Docs, and Zoho

What was Writely is now Google Docs. Sigh. They’ve combined it with the spreadsheet package, so they are available from the same screen – the homepage being effectively a file manager when you log in.

One criticism of Google when they buy things is that they don’t bother to integrate them properly with everything else – think Blogger, and until recently, Picasa. But with Writely, sorry, Google Docs, they have got rid of the nice Writely green and orange look and the end result is just really dull. I suppose it means that Gmail, Calendar and the two productivity apps all now share the same interface.

In other news on the online productivity front, the Zoho suite of online productivity apps now only needs on sign-in per application. Before, if I used Writer, and then needed to go into Sheet, I would have to log in twice. No more. Good stuff.

ajaxTunes

ajaxTunes is the latest in the line of web based desktop replacement services from Michael Robertson.

It claims to be:

…a web-based media player that lets you play, pause, forward and rewind high-quality streaming music straight from the Internet on any computer. Try ajaxTunes immediately, it has been preloaded with a demo account containing more than 25 songs encoded at 192kbps from different albums and a great mix of playlists from select artists. Or, create your own music locker and choose from over 40,000 songs to create your personal playlists. ajaxTunes is a fully interactive application that will allow you to connect to hours of music, FREE.

To be honest, I am still not sure how it works. It says later on you can use something called www.sideload.com to add your own music to your portable library. This seems to be a step on from the other ajaxLaunch stuff which didn’t offer the chance of hosting files – they had to be saved on your PC or USB key – albeit via a third party.

It doesn’t seem to offer the ability to play music saved locally, which is a shame.

[tags]ajaxtunes[/tags]

The Problem with Digg

Is this sort of thing:

If you’ve ever wanted to play any of the Civilization games by Sid Meire, but were not look to shell out the cash for it, check out FreeCiv. This free GNU alternative to the popular series is just as good and just as fun.

This game can be played alone of against anyone over the internet.

Download it today! (for free of course!)

read more | digg story

As well as getting on the front page, this also gets deposited in the RSS feed. I mean, who on earth hasn’t heard of FreeCiv? The issue with having a situation where stories that appear on the front page brings with it some sort of kudos is that people will deliberately post in order to get there – and presumably there is some “you digg my posts, I’ll dig yours” going on too.

This story just isn’t news to anyone.

Google Calendar

Is now apparently live, here. Too slow to access at the moment though.

Mike Arrington has a review, I’ll do one when I can get it.

[tags]google, google calendar[/tags]

Remember The Milk

The Museum of Modern Betas has issued a list of the ‘biggest’ beta services out there, as measured by the number of times they have been bookmarked in del.icio.us. One of the ones it points out, that I hadn’t come across before, was Remember the Milk, an online to-do list manager.

It really good! You can have to-dos in Personal, Study or Work categories, and then tag them individually too. You can send tasks to other people, or share them all. Creating tasks is dead easy – just typing the title into a box – and then you can customise it, like setting reminders, priorities and adding notes, as much as you want to afterwards.

I had previously been using Backpack to manage my to-dos, but I will definitely be giving Remember the Milk a tryout for the next few weeks.

As usual with these services, they have a blog and a forum. The other cog in the machine of Web2.0 support, the documentation wiki, isn’t evident though!

[tags]Remember the Milk[/tags]

Eyespot

The latest announcement from Michael Robertson’s Ajaxlaunch is eyespot – an online AJAXy video editing service. Sounds cool, though I don’t have any video clips to hand to try it out on.

Seems a departure from the other Ajaxlaunch stuff though, and it doesn’t fit in with the style of the other apps.

[tags]eyespot[/tags]

Zoho

Zoho looks like it offers some interesting online applications, the word processor looks especially good as is an alternative for those who can’t get Writely accounts at the moment because of the post Google purchase embargo on new users.

[tags]zoho[/tags]

To Digg, or not to Digg?

Well, it’s certainly a question. When I load up my RSS aggregator (currently Bloglines – though this could change when the UK finally gets the new Newsgator look) there are always new Digg entries. When I leave it for a few hours, the limit of 200 news posts is nearly always reached.

Now, one of the criticisms, if it can be called that, of the use of the internet and technologies like RSS is that it can result in information overload. I’d generally disagree with this, but with Digg, I am afraid it’s true. The site is a victim of its own success – it’s nice to look at, easy to use and boasts some great features. But it just produces too much stuff – I can’t be faffed even to skim the feed sometimes. And then, when you see something you actually like, you can’t even read it because the so-called ‘Digg effect’ has rendered the site in question unusuable due to server pressure.

That’s why I probably still pay more attention to Slashdot that Digg. Slashdot doesn’t produce the number of posts that Digg does, largely because it has a proper focus in terms of subject matter and it has some sort of an editoral focus too – in that you know which way most of those who use and post to it lean on many issues.

As a completely non-scientific comparison, Digg has 3.909 subscribers on Bloglines, compared to Slashdot’s 66,089. There are bound to be many reasons to explain some of the difference, but I would say Digg has a lot of catching up to do.

One site I have never got round to using at all is the Tech Memeorandum. Perhaps I should subscribe and give it a go.

[tags]digg, slashdot, memeorandum[/tags]