new internet tools
Shorter URLs:
NotLong lets you create a simple URL as an alias for a long hard-to-remember one. For instance, the place I go to get drivers for my laptop is
... I can now get there by going to http://laptopdrivers.notlong.com. If there's a site you always have trouble remembering, create an alias that makes more sense. It's free.
More email options:
Apparently Google's new Gmail service scared Yahoo - Yahoo Mail just changed their setup to allow 100MB of storage and individual emails of up to 10MB... good for those large picture transfers and such. Hell - this is good for just backing up important stuff... just mail it to yourself. It's not like Google is going to go out of business ever, and Yahoo's probably got years of life left.
P2P meets social networking:
CleverCactus' share is like a cross between Friendster and Kazaa... you do peer-to-peer file-sharing, but the only people who have access are the ones who are in your social networking group: friends, friends of friends, etc.
Of course, you've got the 'six degrees of separation' phenomenon, and the resulting statistical likelihood that somewhere down the line a friend of a friend of an etc will do something stupid, but for small groups (especially collaborative projects, I'd guess) this sounds like a great tool.
NotLong lets you create a simple URL as an alias for a long hard-to-remember one. For instance, the place I go to get drivers for my laptop is
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_modItemList.jsp?
ProductMenu_0=Portables&ProductMenu_1=Satellite&ProductMenu_2=19187
6&x=23&y=11&BV_SessionID=%40%40%40%402107676275.1087008724%40%40%40%40
&BV_EngineID=cccdadcljmgkdkecgfkceghdgngdglk.0&moid=191876&smoid=true
&ct=DL&ListType=Model
... I can now get there by going to http://laptopdrivers.notlong.com. If there's a site you always have trouble remembering, create an alias that makes more sense. It's free.
More email options:
Apparently Google's new Gmail service scared Yahoo - Yahoo Mail just changed their setup to allow 100MB of storage and individual emails of up to 10MB... good for those large picture transfers and such. Hell - this is good for just backing up important stuff... just mail it to yourself. It's not like Google is going to go out of business ever, and Yahoo's probably got years of life left.
P2P meets social networking:
CleverCactus' share is like a cross between Friendster and Kazaa... you do peer-to-peer file-sharing, but the only people who have access are the ones who are in your social networking group: friends, friends of friends, etc.
With share, you can make your files or folders available to an individual or a group of people without the complexity of maintaining multiple password protected websites or FTP sites. Users will only see those files or folders that you have shared with them: clevercactus share ensures that none of your files are available to people outside of your network.
As a user, you can also browse all of the files and folders your family, friends or co-workers have made available to you, making it simple to choose what you want. If you are not sure who has the file, a search will return results from all of the people you know.
Of course, you've got the 'six degrees of separation' phenomenon, and the resulting statistical likelihood that somewhere down the line a friend of a friend of an etc will do something stupid, but for small groups (especially collaborative projects, I'd guess) this sounds like a great tool.
1 Comments:
I wonder sometimes if this trend will continue - if Google, whose primary job is the ordering and categorization of information, won't eventually become the model for The Next Big Thing after the internet. For years I've found some difficulty using the 'mailbox' model to sort my email - one email sometimes belongs in 5 different folders. It makes more sense to just dump it all in one place, and use search capabilities to create persistent virtual folders, windows into your datasphere.
Google already (unobtrusively) owns the company that hosts this site. Now they've got the best free email offerings ever - room to store all your mail (basically offsite backup), the best search tool around to dig through it... suppose that sometime in the future they decide to revive the free webspace idea (ala the Xoom & Geocities fiascos), and apply their core competencies to that?
It's probably never going to happen, but you could extrapolate that line out to a future where we don't need huge hard drives anymore... boot Knoppix from a CD, access everything important to you online, store everything online... our data could be 'out there', along with many of the tools to manipulate it.
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