Plaxo Would Be Great…. If It Actually Worked

The idea behind the Plaxo 3.0 (Beta) is one that has value – a hub that syncs all of your online address books, calendars etc.

However, it only works sometimes. By downloading the provided software for your client, you can sync with Outlook and Thunderbird (contacts only), but with Web properties, it’s really hit or miss.

My Windows Live Hotmail sync point seems to work fine almost all of the time, but the Google sync point, which only syncs calendar and contacts (one way), does work half the time, and my Yahoo sync point has been in the process of synchronizing for 15 hours now. The only sync points that are 100% reliable are the desktop mail clients.

I realize the nature of Web 2.0 services are that they are perpetually in beta, but in this case, one the core features simply isn’t anywhere near reliable in a production environment. That’s more like alpha to me.

Yahoo Is Trying To Herd Too Many Cats

Mark Evans says Yahoo’s Smorgasbord is the Problem. And he’s right.

If Yahoo is going to survive on its own, then it must stop trying to be all things to all people.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Mark Evans, Web 2.0, Internet

What’s in it for the user?

Clemenza was right | Coop’s Corner : A Blog from Charlie Cooper – CNET News.com: With all the concerns about shareholder value and who will corner the Web advertising market, there isn’t much talk of what it means for the users of Yahoo’s various properties and services, including high profile ones such as Flickr.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, CNet, Charles Cooper, AOL, mergers, Web 2.0, Microsoft, Fred Wilson, News Corp.

Does RSS take the fun out of Web surfing?

It took me a while to fully take advantage of RSS feeds. For a while I was never completely satisfied with any of the readers available, be it on the Web or desktop, and I often found many sites did not necessarily have their feeds properly configured.

I finally settled on using My Yahoo! as my RSS launch point. I could categorize feeds into different pages and access it on any computer. However I recently found the site to be a little buggy and in some cases the feeds would not properly update, even though I knew the site was putting up new content by the hour.

I found myself going back to my bookmarks or simply typing in the URL to see of my favourite sites / blogs had been updated – not the most efficient method. This led me to once again look for a desktop client or Web service that I liked. I finally settled on Google Reader, having not tried it out in a while.

Now I’m zooming through nearly 200 RSS feeds spanning categories such as national news, Web 2.0 bloggers, auto racing and photography. It’s very efficient and I can easily bookmark, share or star content to read later.

But is it too efficient?

RSS feeds through Google Reader allows to me monitor a lot of information very quickly, but no longer am I am exploring the Web sites I used to so frequently. I am getting my information in simple fonts with the occasional image – no sidebars or peripheral content to take me off in a new tangent.

In my quest to streamline my information gathering, am I taking the fun out of my daily Web experience, and more importantly, am I missing out on new ideas?

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Reader, media, news, RSS, Web 2.0, Web surfing, Yahoo