Kate Allen, Alternate Realities

This is a side note but I had to share. I googled myself today to see what shows up. I’ve done this before but for some reason, today’s search hit me in a strange and profound way. I felt as if I stepped into a Star Trek episode and could view all of the others who are me out there in their realities. (Remember when Riker hit a hole in the space-time continuum and had to close the hole but not before he saw all of the paths he could have taken). I guess it’s because I’ve been particularly reflective lately, re-assessing my life goals and direction.
Today’s search brought up Kate Allen, the head of Amnesty International (UK); Kate Allen, professional athlete (Australia); Kate Allen, BBC radio announcer (UK); Kate Allen, author (US, I think). The weird thing is that I worked in the aid world in the past, had aspiration to be a professional athlete (my brother was one), and am writing a book on Web 2.0. OK, so radio announcer wasn’t something I ever aspired to but you get the point. I felt this weird telescoping effect upon reading about all of the other Kate(s) out there, doing important and exciting things with their lives. My name but not my deeds. In any case, I do wish them every success. Love the name!

Battelle’s search for the perfect Web 2.0 conference tagline

I read with interest John Battelle’s request in a recent post about his search for a tagline for the upcoming November Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. His idea is Year of the Disruption, a title which for him highlights how much disruption and shake out the IT industry has before it as the Web 2.0 revolution continues to fundamentally alter the way applications and the web are served up to the user. In thinking about Web 2.0 and how it is affecting the everyday user or business, I find that sadly, as Battelle points out we’re still in the beginning innings of Web 2.0, there still isn’t enough disruption. For example, I am consulting for a small business here in the DC metro area and the ideas and advances offered by Web 2.0 -Web as a platform- aren’t even a twinkle in the IT manager or COO’s eyes. Online anything, even here in DC, isn’t something that they are plugged into and are without an idea about how to leverage any of these new technologies. And part of it is because they haven’t heard of them and don’t know where to find out about them.

I’m hoping that this small business will leapfrog past the traditional, incredibly expensive, intermediate steps that many smaller businesses have had to make to achieve security, scalability, and efficiencies. Instead, I hope to see them move forward and consider newer technologies, like online storage. But these are thoughts for tomorrow’s post.

But back to John Battelle’s search for a tagline. Web 2.0 is still in its infancy with an exciting and brilliant future that still has not made it into any type of mainstream consciousness or trend. But it will. So what tagline will do?

Will 30boxes be the answer?

I’ve been bouncing around between hipcal and calendarhub for the past month now. Neither really do it for me as a solid addition to my franklin covey planner although I really hoped they would. Calendarhub has a great event addition UI but it doesn’t support tasks. Everything is an event, a narrowing of features that I do not understand. Why would I want to track my events separate from my tasks? And I can’t tell you how satisifying it is to click on the task completion box on hipcal, knowing that I’d gotten through my tasks for a day. And I like the color coding for each type of task/effort that hipcal offers. But hipcal’s task addition UI doesn’t really work me because of the date options which are either “no specified date” or today’s date, which isn’t parsed like calendarhub’s between month, day, and year. And the group calendar function still has a long way to go on hipcal. I know, it’s beta. But I’m so ready for an online task and event manager. But from what I’ve read, 30boxes seems to understand the concept behind what I’m looking for in an online calendar and task manager tool. They’re launching their beta today so their site is not available. I continue to search for the perfect tool. I know it’s possible.

What’s happened to Yahoo’s beta email?

I’ve been working with the new Yahoo beta email since it first launched a few months ago. Originally, I loved the beta version and it certainly is still better than the original yahoo email, in many ways. I like all of my emails on one page, rather than having to scroll through hundreds of pages to browse for an email, the drag and drop feature is extremely useful, and the tabs are a great new feature to Yahoo’s mail. And I’ve recently been consulting with a client whose “low rent” webmail client has got to be the buggiest and most painful email client it has ever been my misfortune to use (xo.com) so yahoo continues to be my webmail client of choice.

But the effectiveness of yahoo’s beta mail client is declining. I could almost understand the delay while the folders load but now there is a lag in response when I do anything. When I highlight text, click on a feature, button, folder, etc, I can’t tell if it properly executed due the response delay. It’s gotten worse and is becoming pretty frustrating. I hope that Yahoo turns it around and starts to improve the client, rather than let it continue to degrade.

Yahoo’s new beta email rocks!

Have you checked out Yahoo’s new (beta) mail UI? I love it! All of my email in one pane- no more scrolling through pages and pages to find an old email. Drag and drop to different folders. Standard RSS feed with a hilarious disclaimer when looking to add other RSS feeds: “you were expecting the Taj Mahal or something?” with the explanation that more functionality is one its way. I’ve used Yahoo in both Firefox and IE and the functionality is the same, with spell check, the WYSIWYG editor robust in each browser. It has really changed my experience in using webmail and all for the positive. They have also added a tab feature so you can easily click back and forth between a folder and several open emails. I love the tab as it helps me view several of my related emails at the same time and you can work away in one and then quickly reference the other. Bravo bravo bravo to Yahoo for its upgrade. The version rocks. Yahoo now has flickr.com, del.icio.us, and this great web client. You should check it out if you haven’t seen it. You’ll be glad you did

Yahoo buys del.icio.us

Yahoo bought del.icio.us this week. I use del.icio.us at home, at my various clients’ office, and on the road. It’s a great social bookmarking site that allows a user to bookmark favorite or just plain useful pages for later reference. I used to spend unnecessary time to track down a page I had visited the day, week or month before, sometimes unsuccessfully even after an hour or so of searching.

I find this news startling because Yahoo also bought flickr.com this year. Flickr.com is a site that I and my family use to share photographs of our family and trips. I love it and couldn’t live without it now. It allows my mother, father and other family members who live far away to share in the everyday and special moments in my life. They write and call always asking for more photos.
Yahoo has acquired two sites I use constantly and value in my everyday life, both personally and professionally. This causes me to wonder: Where is Yahoo going by acquiring these outstanding Web2.0 sites? This is something I’d like to look into further. They have chosen extremely wisely, in my estimation, in their acquisitions.