Tuesday, July 14, 2009

A quest for simplicity, that was not so simple.

Oh what a productive non-productive day i've had.

You see i should have been studying, or writing and of course cleaning the house. I also have at least two loads of washing to get done and a massive pile of ironing to do as well.

But you would be able to tell by the stubble i am forming that clean or ironed cloth's aren't really on my agenda at the moment.



WEB-Watch:

A Report on Streamlining your useage:



Now i like many prolific web users have more web identities than you can shake a stick at. Now happily it's not more than i have friends, but it might not be far off.

Now a problem arrose in recent day's after i made myself a new "business" email account.

I made it with the hope that i would use it for some future entrepreneurial venture, blogging unification, or whatever.

With 2 iGoogle Account's it started to get messy checking my new Work Email and still using Google Reader in another Tab.

So i asked myself, and then google search, is there a way of viewing more than one email service from the same place.

Now i'm aware Gmail can harvest an entire email account and then recieve that account in a Gmail account but i didnt want that. I wanted them seperate.

So first off my search led me to Fuser.Com

Now Fuser sounded very promising. It can read every email account out there, feed's your twitter and even myspace and Facebook. Unfortunatly it's only a beta. IE it's not finished yet. I tried in vain but i couldn't get any of my 3 email accounts to work with it.

But i kept the account anyway as i think it will be useful in future.


My Search then eventually took me to a technology blog website that led me to "Pageonce".

This Interesting service allows you to view all your inboxes but not emails, to sort your social networking service's such as twitter, facebook, myspace, youtube, lastfm and others in the same place, and tonnes of other feature's i don't have a need for such as banks, travel companies and utilities.

The idea behind it is that you can view all the activities of your web actions in one place. However for the moment it seems it only shows you whats happening and doesn't let you control them all.

I for one like this service, although i may explore the concept further and seek it's cousin's for an better experiance. As far as i can tell there are other's but i haven't found them yet.


The next one was Iminta.

A interesting service that allows you to view all the internet activities of your friends in one live stream. So if they Digg or suggest a blog to follow you can see it, if they tweet you see it, if they update their status you see it. And the same the other way around.

You can also limit what certain groups of freinds see, and whether or not some of your information is public.

This shows promise, although it require's sending those pesky request emails to people. And i hate sending those!




The Death of my social networking.


Now as a prolific internet user i joined a good few things over the years.

Adult dating site's usually forget you once you never fully activate your accounts by paying, so that's not really a nuisance.

However normal social networking site's you don't use can be.

Somewhere in the ether of the internet is another Profile with your name and email that you don't look after. It may be out of date and seriously neglected. It may look like you have no friends or whatever.

Hence i got rid of some of my profiles. 3 of them basically.

I removed accounts from the following social networking websites:

Tagged
Netlog
Nimble

Tagged had an interesting match system but i never actually made a new friend or potential partner of the obosite sex from it, so i decided to get rid of it.

Netlog is a rapidly expanding website but frankly i had no use for it and none of my friends are on it.

Nimble was supposidly the next big thing in social networking but it really isn't when facebook changed it's tack and is now the ONLY place to be.




Now Bebo also is languishing in decline. I only use it to talk to 1 of my friends. A dire state of affairs but the truth. But i won't get rid of it just yet. Too fond of the memories.

It also is rather good. It has everything everyone else has, it also has good navigation and can stream your facebook and Twitter posts, but not your actual feeds of everyone you know on those websites. It also has band page's which have a rather basic music player. But when myspace is the most popular and successful place to be a BAND there's less of a point to it.

BUT I'M KEEPING MY BEBO!!!





Q-Rated:

Iusethis.com has now opened my eye's to what the world is using on their computers.


This meant i went on a bit of a mad spree of downloading of things i thought would be very useful.

I could list them but there's little point. I havent reviewed them all yet.


But what do i use you may ask:

Well for the internet i use Google Chrome.

In recent weeks my Media playing needs are fulfilled by Window's media player but i am also a large user of iTunes.

I do have Winamp and Real player, but they languish unused...


As for other toy's i use Google Picasa for pictures. But i will be product testing "GIMP" over the next few days. It stands for some software thing but i can't help think of those feckless masochists in latex or leather balaclava's with zips on the mouth. It's supposidly an open source software similar to Photoshop, so i'll give it a bash.


I also use TweetDeck. Twitter is good, but i can use this to update more regularly and to sort people's tweets by groups and colums as well as seeing my @replies and Direct message's all in the same place. It also has inbuilt tweetpic compatability to save on opening a webpage or another tab. It's trends are a bit shite though, it doesn't give you the live feed of the trend the same way the Twitter webstite does, i'm still hoping this will change.


LastFM. Okay so no one actually see's what i listen to, but i like the ability to know what i listen to and how much. I always have it on the go.


Windows Live Messenger. AKA MSN to those who have been using it as long as me. 6 Faithful years i think, at this rate. It's essential!


Winds of change:

I just got Firefox 3.5 and i have to say i may start using it more often. For ease in the use of my several accounts i may use it for one email while i use chrome normally. But also for it's toolbar functions and other applications. I will road test all of them but i think using all these added tools may improve and add to my internet usage the way i want it to be.


The same may be said for Opera Widgets. I have yet to fully test all Opera has to offer but i may also bend that way...

Unfortunatly it's Unite Service is a 1 account per copy of the browser affair. Which in my mind is a croc of shit. It means i can't access all that stuff using an opera browser from college computers. Which is what i would love to do with it. But security and so on means for now, such a thing can't happen.

But i may put Opera Mini on my INQ1.




I through, the support service's offered by INQ have discovered that i can add ANY java based Application or game to my INQ1. So i will definetly be trying out a lot of toys on my phone in future. Stay tuned for more in that regard!






Sorry for the nerd out, but it's what i was up to today. And unfortunatly there will be A LOT more to come...

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