Indispensible Web 2.0 Sites
Web sites
that are helpful when you don’t have access to your normal set of applications
By John Brandon
For the
mobile user, life revolves around Outlook and Microsoft Office. No, really: if
your laptop is the sun, it’s likely that these two Microsoft tools are the
revolving planets. Outlook is the primary e-mail conduit most of us use to
connect with colleagues and friend. And, if you type up a document or run a
presentation without using Microsoft Office you are probably a Linux user (or
just like to be different). Sure, there’s quite a few OpenOffice users out there, and Yahoo! Mail or Gmail are
increasingly popular, but the Microsoft dominance in business productivity apps
has continued unabated for decades.
But, what’
this? There’s a slight odor of change, a glimmer of mobile metamorphosis that
even Redmond can sense. Web 2.0 (or, the semantic Web, or just – useful Web
sites) is a revolution against the desktop, a new dependence on the Web, and a
communal convergence. It’s essentially a
new (excuse the term) outlook on how to get work done. Instead of running a
presentation in Windows Vista using
PowerPoint, you can run it in ThinkFree as a
slideshow that anyone can watch, even if they don’t own Microsoft Office, and
even if they watching it from Spain. For e-mail, instead of downloading all of
your messages, new e-mail systems on the Web allow you to store all of your
messages online. When a massive 1GB attachment arrives, you can forward it in a
second – because you never really downloaded it locally anyway (thank you
Google!). And, many smaller and highly useful sites – such as Weebly and Driveway.com – offer a specific service that can
help you be productive with no desktop software to install.
Gmail.com
Google’s e-mail client is a smart alternative to Outlook: attachments arrive as
links you can choose to download. Instead of using folders, you can mark
messages with a label and then easily search for the labels or click them in
neatly categorized groups. Messages are automatically grouped into threads that
show the conversation, all linked together into one long message string. The
only negative for mobile users is that your e-mail archive is not accessible
when you are not online, although you can save individual messages to your
local PC. Storage for e-mail is practically unlimited – running almost 3GB today, which is plenty for most users, especially once you
start deleted messages from months ago that contain large attachments. Yahoo!
just announced unlimited storage for Yahoo! Mail, which means Google may follow
suit soon enough. What Gmail lacks, surprisingly, is a more powerful search.
You can easily find messages by text and label, but it’s impossible to find
“all messages with attachments over 1MB” or messages that contain any
attachment at all. In Outlook, it takes one click to see messages sorted by
size or attachment. Labels require some adjustment in your thinking as well.
It’s easy to search by labels, but you have to mark each new message with a
label – something that is easy to forget – instead of just dragging it to a
folder. Filters can help here: if you know a message with a certain subject or
from a particular sender should always get categorized, you can apply a filter
automatically.
Yahoo! Go 2.0
For those who are used to complex searches on the
desktop, Yahoo! Go provides all the functionality you would expect – but
without having to remember search strings. The mobile client works on your cell
phone. If you type a location, such as London, you can see search results, photos form that location, maps, and other info.
Adding an extra search term, such as shopping, will give you a more unified
listing of shops in that area with truncated listings for the phone and
address. For sports fans, Yahoo! Go provides much more
power on a mobile phone that other options such as Google of Ask.com. It uses a
predictive technology, so when you type “Arsenal Scores” it won’t give you any
search results for the term “arsenal” but only for the football team. There’s
an option to add a team to Yahoo! Go so you can follow those sports
scores. Widgets are another real boon
for mobile searches: you can add news feeds from the BBC, geographic locations,
sports news, and technology updates.
MSN Live
MSN Live has steadily grown from a simple “point of entry” to the Web into a
thriving community site – there are now gadgets available for almost any topic,
from movie listing to your area to maps you can embed right on the home page.
Originally, some of the RSS (real simple syndication) feeds were limited but
there’s now a way to add your own or search through a fairly substantial
library. Of course, where Live.com excels the most is in integration with
existing Microsoft products. You can view your Hotmail mail directly from
within Live.com, or use the updated Live Mail service as well. You can also see
your Live Messenger contacts and send them instant messages from within the Live portal. An integrated search hovers just above all of
the gadgets, mail, and instant messaging options for quick access to Web
search. There’s also good integration with Microsoft’s floundering Spaces
blogging service.
ThinkFree.com
Microsoft Office users will appreciate several features built-in to ThinkFree, a free application suite that runs entirely on
the Web. There’s a spreadsheet, presentation and word processing program that
mirror Excel, PowerPoint and Word, respectively. In Calc, Many of the calculations you already
know will work, such as the sum of all cells. In the word processing app,
called Docs, a familiar red line denotes a misspelled word. You can right-click
to select the correct spelling – and ThinkFree even
supports custom dictionaries. The Show program, like all the tools in ThinkFree, allows you to invite collaborators to not only
see the presentation, but edit the contents. A new offline component means you
can store and edit all of your documents offline – when you are not near a
hotspot or home wireless access. ThinkFree has all
the toolbars you would expect, including options for changing fonts, adding
lines, and importing clipart. Where it falls a bit short is in usability – only
because it mirrors the features found in older versions of Microsoft Office.
(In some ways, Docs looks like the older Microsoft WordPad.) That means, if you
are used to the new interface in Office 2007, ThinkFree
will seem like a major step back in time.
Weebly.com
Some think of Web site creation as the purview of
designers and developers. Weebly.com is a simplified tool for the rest of us to
create a full-blown Web site with integrated maps, blog postings, links to other sites and features that would be difficult to
program using Dreamweaver, or design with Adobe Illustrator. The interface
works just like a blog in that you can pick a design template, and then
drag-and-drop the features you want onto the Web site – such as a news section
or map. Then, you can easily add new content using the Weebly
interface. It’s all fairly stripped down – there’s no support for blogging
widgets that add streaming music or advertising, for example, and the design
templates are not too extensive. But, Weebly.com hosts the site for free, so
it’s a good way to at least get an online presence for a business or start a
blog that you use to communicate with your business associates. And, when you
are ready to use an HTML authoring tool and add enhancements to your site and
adjust the design, you can export the entire site as a Zip file and then edit
the source files.
Blinksale.com
Billing and accounting are time-consuming tasks that most mobile users do not
do on the road – we just don’t have access to corporate networks, or don’t
trust a public hotspot to transmit financial data. Blinksale.com is a
streamlined invoicing application that runs on the Web and lets you create
simple invoices. For example, if you normally run Quickbooks
at the office, you can at least create an invoice to bill a client until you
are able to get back to the office. It’s also a great way to track your
expenses and invoices when you get mobile for later posting into a corporate
accounting tool. As with any good Web 2.0 application, Blinksale
allows you to tag invoices with a term that you can use for searching later.
For example, you can tag invoices for specific clients, or with a keyword, and
then search for invoices using that tag. And, although it’s not exactly a
social networking system with two-way conversations, Blinksale
does let you send bill reminders and thank you notes. You can also set up
recurring invoices and see a running total of all outstanding invoices. Of
course, you won’t see the detailed profit and loss statements, quarterly
reports, and other accounting features found in Quickbooks,
and the invoice templates are limited compared to what you can do with a
desktop tool such as Microsoft Small Business Accounting.
Driveway.com
Many Web 2.0 sites offer a way to send a large file attachment through the
Internet instead of your e-mail client. Sites such as YouSendIt.com work fine,
and even offer premium packages for a monthly fee. Driveway.com is a bit
different in that you can upload a file for your own personal storage and
retrieval. You don’t actually have to e-mail the file to anyone – once you
upload a photo collection, video, or business documents to the site, you can
just bookmark the link to retrieve the files later. Driveway also goes farther
than other e-mail replacement tools such as MailBigFile.com in that you can
send a word processing document and then collaboratively edit the document
within Driveway. Individual files can be as much as 500MB, so Driveway could
work well as a simple back-up tool. You can create a Zip file for all of your
laptop documents, and then upload them to the site for safe-keeping.
TimeXchange.net
Another difficult task for those who are traveling on business or tend to work
mostly away from the home office is time keeping. There’s usually the
“official” method – which might be an enterprise system that runs on a secure
server – and a paper method for mobile works. TimeXchange.net is a powerful
time-reporting tool that contractors, freelancers, or employees can use to post
their hours, and that managers can use to track the tem reporting for team
members. Because ti is online, it doesn’t matter
where the team member is, what computer they are using, or if they are connected
to a corporate network. Time-sheet approval is a simple and intuitive process
that runs entirely on the Web, and you can generate time sheet reports and
print them for approval through the proper channels. TimeXchange.net is perhaps bit controversial
because it is so powerful and useable, that managers may be inclined to use it
instead of a more cumbersome time reporting system that ties into other
corporate systems.
Zoho Panner
From one of the first Web 2.0 developers comes a
simple to-do list manager that actually works: you can easily add new
categories and tasks, then track their completion and share your results with
other users. Tasks can be tagged for easier searching months from now when you
forgot all about a business project, and you can add attachments and notes to
individual tasks for more detailed explanations. The reminder system works
through e-mail so you can set up a task and then get an automatic reminder. You
can even upload images and link them to tasks. For example, if you are working
on a Web site, you can upload a thumbnail of how the site looks currently, and
track the progress you have made. Zoho Planner has a simple interface – almost too simple in
that it lacks the colorful attributes of Plaxo.com or the Microsoft Outlook
task manager, so you might not feel compelled to constantly visit your task
manager when the application is just black text on a white background that is
not too customizable.
Box.net
Storage and back-up if often the last thing mobile users are thinking about –
right after surfing the Web, checking e-mail, and playing the latest
multiplayer online game. Box.net takes the tedium out of archiving because it
is such a streamlined program with multiple levels of Box.net memberships, a
system where you can send files by e-mail to upload@box.net, and use the
Box.net interface entirely in the browser instead of using a desktop
application. Of course, you can also use Box.net to upload an
entire music collection o videos, and then download them to another
computer as a transfer system, or send Word documents to a friend or business
associate who just clicks on a Web link to download the file. Box.net works
differently from Driveway.com in that it provides greater depth – such as
multi-file uploads – for a small subscription fee. An enterprise version even
supports file encryption and shared storage.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn.com is a well-known contact manager and “work for hire” system – once
you register, you can connect with 12 million of other professionals all over
the world who might be looking for your services, or just connect with an
associate or long-lost friend. The job listings are extensive and detailed.
But, for a mobile worker on a time crunch, there’s another reason to consider
LinkedIn: it has an extensive support community, so you can post a question and
get detailed responses back from experts – many of whom are just trying to be
helpful to show you they know the subject matter, in part because they want to
be hired. An example is: if you are deciding what kind of Web site or blog to
start, you can post a question in the Q & A section. Posting an inquiry
usually leads to a handful of replies with an hour or two. In some ways, this
expert forum is the “hidden gem” feature that makes LinkedIn so powerful and worth
exploring. The forums are grouped by business categories, such as marketing or
finance. And, if you do get an excellent response, you can then inquire about
having that person assist you with a project.
Conclusion
For the most part, the Web has transformed from its origins as a marketing and
retail portal to an excellent way to stay productive when you are getting
mobile. With millions of new laptop owners looking for a way to move from the
desktop the Web every day, more and more useful sites are becoming available to
address specific needs – such as accounting and time management. One tip for
finding a useful site is just to search for the term in Google or Yahoo! along
the “Web 2.0” – a new site is sure to pop up that can help you get your work
done with nothing more than a laptop and the Internet.