Category Archives: Internet Tools

Remember The Milk Synergies – Improving Your Task Management with Jott, Gmail, iPhones, and more

Posted on June 14, 2008 by Ben Parr| Leave a comment

I love synergies in my products. I like it that I can take dates sent to my Gmail and copy them into my Google Calendar. This time, I want to tell you about a few of my favorite synergies with Remember the Milk, perhaps my favorite of all Internet Tools.

If you’re unfamiliar with Remember the Milk, check out the Internet Tools Wiki article on it. Or just know that it’s an online to-do and task management system.

Here’s a few of the many ways to improve your use of Remember the Milk via synergies:

  • Gmail: Via a Firefox extension, you can install Remember the Milk into your Gmail. You visit your Gmail all the time, so it makes sense to put your calendar and to-do list system on the same platform. You can copy links from your Gmail into RtM, update tasks, or connect with your mail contacts.
  • Jott: By far my favorite synergy with Remember the Milk. Call Jott, tell them you want to Jott to Remember the Milk, and then add a task by voice to your to-do list. You can even specify the time and date, and thus get a reminder without ever looking on a computer. A lifesaver, especially when you’re on the road.
  • Twitter: If you are a big Twitter user, then this is for you. Send Twitter a direct message with your task and the time/date and it’ll appear in your RtM task list.
  • Google Maps: It’s long been integrated with Remember the Milk. Add a location to your Remember the Milk and then you can use RtM to map out where you have to go during the day.
  • Google Gears: Going to be in a place without Internet? Want to use Remember the Milk offline? Then just install Google Gears and you’ll be set!
  • Google Calendar: Google Calendar and Remember the Milk have a lot of similarities, so it makes sense that they can work together. Send your RtM tasks into your Google Calendar so you can see everything in one interface.
  • iPhone/iPod Touch: Warning: this service costs a little money, but is well worth it if you’re an iPhone user. You gain a very clean interface for adding and managing tasks while on-the-go
  • Blackberry: Again, it costs money, but MilkSync is the Blackberry version of Remember the Milk and is worth every cent. Plus the people at RtM are awesome, and why wouldn’t you want to support them?

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Posted in Internet Tools, Productivity, Synergies

FriendFeed Blog Comments – Challenging Disqus and all blog commenting

Posted on June 7, 2008 by Ben Parr| 1 Comment

(update: FriendFeed comments work again. I think there’s a time delay.)






So if you scroll down (on individual posts), you’re going to find something new: FriendFeed comments appear on my blog! FriendFeed, the rapidly rising lifestreaming service, allows you to comment on any item that comes through FriendFeed. Some blog posts and twitter comments can have 50+ comments, and that number is rapidly rising as more and more people sign up for FriendFeed.

Well today I stumbled upon this post on FriendFeed by Chris Pirillo that he had added FriendFeed comments to his blog via a WordPress plugin by Glenn Slaven

Glenn, thank you.

Now as you can see, any comments on this post (or any post) via FriendFeed will appear under my normal Disqus comments. Plus, you can post to FriendFeed via my blog. Disqus, a customizable and dynamic blog commenting software, is what I use to run comments on my blog currently and I couldn’t be happier.

But with FriendFeed comments on blogs, I wonder: Could it compete with Disqus? And then I wondered: Could this be the start of something bigger?

First on Disqus: One of Disqus’s main advantages is that you can track the comments of someone you like across multiple blogs. Another is that it can help build community around comments via a “community page” hosted on disqus’s servers.

My argument is that FriendFeed performs both of those functions better. You can track a person’s comments on blog posts via FriendFeed. Hell, you can track a person’s Disqus comments via your FriendFeed too. Now that those comments appear on blog pages, everyone can see them too! A person doesn’t even have to join FriendFeed, already a more popular service than Disqus, to see what a person they like is saying on not only blogs, but on YouTubes, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s far more dynamic of a tracking system than Disqus.

The second, on community: You can build community around FriendFeed. You can encourage people to visit your FriendFeed blog posts (it’s real simple to give a link that only shows your FriendFeed blog posts) and to comment via FriendFeed OR the blog. I may very well make FriendFeed my “message boards,” so to speak.

Of course, you have to sign up for FriendFeed to comment via FriendFeed, which of course makes regular commenting much easier to use. But as more and more use FriendFeed, you’re going to see more and more people comment via FriendFeed rather than Disqus, WordPress, or any other commenting system. That could be bad news for Disqus, but good news for the rest of us.

As more people install this plug-in and integrate FriendFeed comments into their blogs, there may very well be a dynamic shift in how FriendFeed is used and perceived. Hell, this could be the beginning of a movement that makes FriendFeed mainstream. This grants FriendFeed more exposure and leaves people who are not currently part of the FriendFeed universe with a desire to be heard (one that can only be fed by joining FriendFeed.


FriendFeed comments on blogs is a game changer, people.

- Ben
(By the way, I encourage you to comment on this blog via FriendFeed and then to follow me!)

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Posted in Internet Tools, Social Media, Tech

Youniverse.com – How Social and Dating Websites Should Work (or at least a step in the right direction)

Posted on June 5, 2008 by Ben Parr| 7 Comments

Youniverse.com




I usually talk about internet tools for business, but they also should be made and used for pleasure and personal fun. And by analyzing these types of tools, we can learn more about what works and what doesn’t for online business as well.

This time, let’s talk about the most popular of personal pleasure tools: dating websites. Whether it’s because we don’t need them, don’t want to be seen as needing them, or are just horribly annoyed by them, they have become one of the mysterious creatures of the internet. eHarmony for those looking for a serious relationship. OkCupid for those looking for something simple and free. Adult FriendFinder for the horny guys who can’t get any the traditional way.

Okay, okay, I’m getting off topic. Let’s talk about Youniverse now.

Youniverse is a bare-bones dating/social meeting service. I say bare-bones because some of the major functionality of a dating service (like the inability to select sexual preference) is missing.

Despite that, however, Youniverse gets several things right. First of all, it creates an interesting and engaging quiz and personality profiling system. Instead of answering dreary and dreadfully similar personality and love quizzes, youniverse spices it up with image surveys, which allow you to choose images to represent your thoughts and feelings.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a very visual person, and it was actually fun to go through some of the great images they have for their quizzes.

The rest of youniverse you can imagine: match you up with people similar to you, browse other profiles, ask people you don’t know out on dates and seem creepy in the process. But imagini, which built youniverse, has taken a step in the right direction.

But hell, they have a ton to do. OkCupid works as a system because there’s a neverending series of quizzes and questions made by users that narrows down the choices of “potential” dates little by little. Youniverse simply doesn’t have enough questions to do that. Allowing for user-created quizzes and for more of the general features of a dating and social meeting website will do youniverse good.

Youniverse received mostly unnoticed coverage on Mashable and Techcrunch today. I think Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch does get it right when he says that imagini hasn’t launched a true dating site. But the potential is there and I think the “imageDNA” model may very well be copied by other dating services and even other businesses. When you ask your audience to participate with your website, it has to be engaging. Visuals (so long as they load fast) are central to that march.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to visit my Youniverse profile, though I have this feeling I’m going to regret ever posting a link to it on my blog.

- Ben

Your thoughts? Is Youniverse really any different than other dating site?

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Posted in Innovation, Internet Tools

18 Key Firefox Extensions That Improve Online Productivity

Posted on June 2, 2008 by Ben Parr| 4 Comments

I’m shocked companies still use Internet Explorer as their standard browser for business. I’m not about to go into a rant about how Firefox is more secure or how it wins in the speed tests, but if those reasons haven’t convinced you to switch your browser or your company’s browser to Firefox, then I have one more reason:


Productivity

Just THINK about how many hours you spend every day, every week, every year of your life at a web browser. Almost literally every minute you are on a computer. That’s a lot of hours, and that’s a lot of time that’s wasted by inefficient hand motions, loading times, and bad habits.

These extensions below help solve those problems and making browsing the internet more useful. Period. If you’re the head of a company and reading this, I’d require that these extensions be installed on every computer and your people trained in their use. Two hours of training is going to turn into hundreds of hours of saved time.

I’ve come up with a list of 18 Firefox extensions that perform a variety of uses. I went for a breadth of extensions that covered many facets of your browsing experience, from email to search. There’s tons of others that do a great job helping you gather information and accomplish tasks faster, but these stand out of the crowd.

I’ve categorized the list for easier browsing!
So without further ado, 18 Key Firefox Extension that Improve Online Productivity:

General Functionality Improvements

  • 1) DownthemAll:

    • Have a page of images or powerpoints you want to put on your computer, but don’t want to click and save them all? Want to just grab the Mp3s from a webpage? DownthemAll can do it in one swift motion. Grab a group of images for your future use with one or two clicks.

    Why it improves productivity: Allows you to download many items at once, thus saving time.

  • 2) Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer:

    • Bookmark Synchonizer allows you to access your bookmarks from everywhere. If you have a different computer at work than you do at home, this is an absolute must. Anytime you add a site to your bookmarks at work, it adds it to your home computer. In addition, you can access your bookmarks from ANY computer. Never leave home without your favorite websites.

    Why it improves productivity: Bookmarks can be transferred to work, personal, or public computers with absolute ease, allowing you to access all of your important websites from anywhere.

  • 3) InterClue:

    • Preview links before you click them. The moment you hover over a link, you’ll know what website the link directs to, how many words/characters are on the page, be offered a preview and statistics on the site, and have the ability to email or copy the link. It has even more features you can add as well.

    Why it improves productivity: Allows you to preview links before clicking. Knowing the source of links allows you to skip needless link clicking to find information. Also great at gathering information.

  • 4) Text Link:

    • You’ll find, especially on message boards, that people will post links but not make them hyperlinks (aka make them clickable). Text link fixes that. Double click on any URL, and it’ll take you there. Very simple, very effective.

    Why it improves productivity: No need to copy and paste links ever again.

  • 5) FireGestures:

    • Firefox takes on new meaning with FireGestures. With some mouse commands, you can do everything from open new tabs to opening scrollable tab menus to printing pages. Right click and move the mouse up and down and the page reloads. Hold down left click and then press right click and you’re taken to the next tab. Hold down right click and scroll the mouse wheel down and a list of all your tabs appears in a simple pop-up. With the ability to create your own gestures and commands, your browsing experience becomes not only faster, but smarter.

    Why it improves productivity: Removes needless clicking. Once you get the hang of it, browsing goes by in a flash. By far the best way to browse in Firefox.

    Continue reading →

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Posted in Internet Tools, Productivity