What about useful web 2.0 services?

There has been a lot about web 2.0 services lately. They are often very attractive but honestly it is seldom they add very much value to your day to day life. But some do! Here is my list of services that I actually use:

Gmail: Use it daily and it has even replaced Mail on my Powerbook. I have some mail-addresses that forwards to it and I use its pop-account funtion that can fetch mail from other mail accounts. It is fast and easy to use, and with labels it is convenient to collect all your mail.

Grou.ps: An interesting group service. Haven’t used it that much but it puts up some very nice features since it allow import of material. Such as your external blog, pictures from flickr and even your settings and members from yahoo groups.

Wikipedia: A wonderful service that represents the beauty of Internet. With a widget I can access it directly form my dashboard and don’t even have to open a browser.

LinkedIn: Maybe not a web 2.0 service (or whatever that really is?) but it offers a great way to stay in contact with your friends as your get updates as soon someone updates their profile. You can follow if they change job without being in contact with them, What I miss is a kind of address book layout with groups and contact information more accessible.

Videos?: I am honestly not that much into all those time consuming services such as youtube, dabble, metacafe and others, but of course they are amazing services that add value to many people and that’s why I mention them. And lot of friends send links to movies that “force” me to go there and watch.

Slideshare: Great service to share and find slideshows. Either you care share your own in a convenient way that makes it hard to just copy or you can find slideshows about interesting topics.

Flickr: I use it to share my pictures because it is fun to get comments from others when you enjoy taking pictures. But I can also share private pictures to friends and family, and at the same time have an online backup of all my pictures.

Social Bookmarking: I have a Del.icio.us account that I use for different reasons. With firefox you can replace the inbuilt bookmark function with Del.icio.us. This gives you an online backup and it also helps you to categories it with tags (keywords). Magnolia is another service with a better looking interface. A nice way to use these services is as a search engine. You get results ranked by how many who have bookmarked them. Of course you will get popular sites first but isn’t that what you mostly are looking for, good sites that others would recommend?

Meebo: A service I am not in fact using but that I will use if I am away from my computer. You can with it use all your IMs, such as AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo and MSN.

Ning: Communities are still hot and here is one to use create a social network around a topic. A nice service I would use if I had more time but I seldom have time to just chat around (don’t ask where I get time from writing this post).

Calendar Sync: Syncing calendars can be a hassle especially if you use a Mac. I finally found a way to do it using iFreeBusy.com to which one I automatically from iCal can upload my calendars, then Google Calendar can sync it from there. It works great. An other similair service is Calendarhub.com but you cannot sync private calendars with Google.

News: there are a couple of really good news services today. I use BusinessWeek Online Alerts – News Digest, that give me news that fits a couple of keywords. Another is of Google Alers that works similair but gather the news from many more sources. I get both of these delivered to my mailbox but now on everyday basis. I use Vienna, an open source RSS feed reader where I collect RSS feeds from various news papers, blogs and sites.

There is though one thing that I am not that satisified with when it comes to web 2.0. The first thing is the hype around it, the other are the names of the services. They are so hard to remember. A web service can you manage with a bookmark, but another thing that I will bring up in another post are open source software for your computer that have started to have really strange names and finding them among your other softwares and remembering what they do are difficult.