Dent This Carrot

I decided to start a series of posts talking about web sites and applications that I think are really cool…. but I don’t have a use for.

Post #1 – Scrybe

In this case, I should say, “don’t have a use for YET“. This app is still in Beta and has lots of potential!

Scrybe (or iScrybe, I can’t quite figure out which one is more appropriate) has very well done design of calendar and note taking functions. You are even able to work offline, a first for an online calendar as far as I’ve seen. As one might deduce from my blog, I’m a huge fan of 30Boxes, so it would take a lot to steer me away from my benchmark.

The Scrybe calendar has a great interface, making it easy to view day, week, month, or year on one screen. They also have lots of endorsements on their home page claiming how great the application is.

But (and you knew this was coming), here is where Scrybe falls down for me. No ical feed. I’m frequently mobile, which means I only have my trusty Crackberry in hand. Before I go anywhere, I sync my phone with my Mac iCal application which gets a feed from my online 30Boxes calendar. If things change during the day, I have both a mobile web app for 30Boxes or the ability to e-mail new appointments to my calendar.

The offline feature for Scrybe is cool and useful. I’d love to see 30Boxes take on this kind of function. Sometimes you have your laptop but no connection. With the offline option, no problem!

All in all…. cool, but just not quite there.

I found a somewhat interesting combined use of
Flagr and 30Boxes.

I have terrible short-term memory, and this might help me (every see Momento?). If you want to remember your whereabouts, add your Flagr RSS feed to your 30B calendar (if you find a ? mark after your name in the feed URL, remove it and the stuff to the right). Now when you post your current location from your mobile phone, it shows up right on your calendar on the day you posted it with the time. When you hover over a day “box” on 30B, you will see a list of the places you were on that day and the times you were there.

I think this is pretty cool. I know it will help me remember the “wheres” and “whens” of things I do.

I don’t know yet. Flagr is a social placemarking mash-up with Google Maps. You mark a spot and tell something about it. Cool, but who is going to use it? What would make me go to Flagr to search as opposed to somewhere else?

I’ve thought about one useful (there are probably more) application for this… Tracking a journey, vacation, whatever. You can post a phone-cam pic along with text about a location, so you could put in tags (perhaps in the description) of the order in which you visited each location. I’m invisioning something obsure for the search tag, then a number. Something like “NYCMAR06 1″, “NYCMAR06 2″, etc. I haven’t actually tried this yet to see if it would work, but its an idea.

What’s going to happen to all of the Google Maps mash-up sites if Google should decide to close the map API due to bandwidth costs? Companies are building their business models on this stuff. Is it smart?

33 resources for Online Storage [Listable]

I’m still scared of the whole “online storage” trend.  A server crashes, your shit is gone.  You forget where it is, your shit is gone.  The company goes belly-up because they couldn’t get enough Google Ad revenue to keep up the Mercedes payments, and your shit is gone.

On the other hand, if I lose my laptop, my shit is gone.  But I can back up my laptop.  What’s the point of online storage if you have to keep a copy on a local hard drive anyway?

I enjoy evaluating new Web 2.0 apps. I do this for my own personal use rather than in any professional capacity.

2 sites that I’ve spent some time looking at recently are SpongeCell and 30 Boxes. Both are calendar apps and both include “socialing” features. Both also have a cool parsing engine that turns plain text to calendar entries, like “Party at Andrew’s friday 7-9pm”. SpongeCell has the added feature of e-mailing entries to your calendar. I really like this feature because I travel a lot and don’t have internet access 100% of the time. I can enter a calendar entry in an email message on my Treo while on a plane, and it will get added to my calendar when I land and connect again.

I also have the added complexity of keeping my personal calendar on my Mac and my business calendar on my Windoze machine. Airset provides a “sync” function that I use to keep my personal and business calendars in sync.

My only complaint about SpongeCell at this point is the defaults used for entries. I would like to have reminders set automagically 15 minutes in advance of all appointments sent to my cell. Right now, after I make an entry, I have to edit it to set the reminder and the security level (to public to iCal can pick it up). OK, I do have one more complaint, there is no timezone support in the iCal .ICS file. So iCal gets confused on what timezone the appoinments are and the sync to my Treo alarms me 5 hours in advance of any entry.

30 Boxes has promise. It has a nice Ajax interface, as does Airset and SpongeCell. It also has a natural language entry like SpongeCell. What lacks is the offline entry ability (via email).

I think all of these services do what they do well and will improve with user feedback over time.

I like to write about web sites that I find useful. PBwiki is a free wiki hosting site that anyone can use to create a collaborative wiki. I don’t collaborate with anyone, so I just use it for myself to keep track of things. Its available to me anywhere I have an internet connection. I like it. (And I’m not just saying this because they bribed me). They also have a Premium service which gets you more space and features. I haven’t stepped up to that yet because I haven’t (yet) had a need.