Gspace: Great New Feature March 24, 2007
Posted by theexpress in email, web 2.0.add a comment
Just about everyone I know who uses Gmail has the same comment on the amount of space available: there is too much to use. It is not necessarily a complaint, but it raises a good question. What is there to do with all of this space? Three gig isn’t too much for most things, but for an email account, it has plenty of space for even the most intrepid spammers.
Well, I was browsing digg this morning in school and came across this article, but since I was still in class, there wasn’t much I could do with ten minutes left in the period. The first and – in my opinion – best featured item in the article is the Gspace feature which completely blew my mind. It is basically a way to utilize all of your Gmail space with things other than countless emails.
I’m certain that many have felt the same as me sometime, as I have sent countless emails to myself containing papers and projects that I need to complete. Well, this kind of takes out the middle man when doing this. You basically just install the program in Firefox and set it up with your Gmail account. After this, you upload your documents, music, pictures, videos, etc. and after transfer on Gspace, an email is sent to Gmail containing the files you’ve uploaded.
I would have to say my only problem with the files being sent to Gmail is that each file gets a separate email, even if you upload a few at a time. It’s a minor inconvenience, though, considering that for the most part, needs will be limited to one file, and as long as they are all properly labeled, you can just keep them all in one place.
After my initial excitement, I began to think that, for the most part, this wasn’t going 
to save me much more time than just emailing the files from Thunderbird, but then I stumbled over what I consider its killer application. I sent a few songs through Gspace to see what I could do with them when they made it over and had a pleasant surprise. When clicking on the email with the song in it, there were two options: download or play. Well, naturally, I selected play and this player came up, conveniently playing my song quickly and without hassle, but what else would you expect from Google.
Overall, the feature has enormous potential to utilize some of that Gmail space. If anyone else has been using this, feel free to comment with some tips or tricks that I haven’t mentioned or discovered yet; I’ll be very interested to hear them.
Twitter: A Phenomenon? March 19, 2007
Posted by theexpress in rant, web 2.0.add a comment
No need to re-introduce myself. You and me both know that this blog is about as dead as they come, apart from the comletely inactive ones. WordPress has changed a lot since a year ago when I updated regularly, but besides a years extra knowledge, I am pretty much the same.
But, never the one for formalities, I’d rather get to business. Just because my posts are often months apart from one another, it does not mean that I’ve been living under a rock for all of this time. True, I have fallen out of the loops and circles that I once actively participated in a while back, but I still keep track of everything Web 2.0 (does anyone even use that phrase anymore, besides those outside of it). Because of my lack of contribution to the web and active participation in everything I could lay eyes on, I began to develop a clear head above the flurry of web activity. Don’t get me wrong, I love diggnation as much as the next guy, but my previous praises and condemnations have changed over the time.
Where, you may ask, am I going with this? Well, as I scan through my Google Reader, more and more often these days, I hear all of this buzz around Twitter. I admit, it looks kind of cool for a minute, but what is the point to it. Yeah, its cool that Tom from Baltimore just ordered a pizza 15 seconds ago…wait, no it’s not. Why would one want to know the mundane of another persons life when they have their own boring-ness to deal with. Not often does anything interesting come up on the title. Just looking at the front page now, there are two people updating their blogs, and one person eating. Not quite the jet set we have on this website.
And for those who claim it helps keep in contact with friends, I would liken that to looking your friends number up in the phonebook every time you call them, even though you have it programmed right in your cell. Your just going through a clunky middle man that serves no good. Yes, I am usually one for pointless web apps that dont serve much of a purpose (see my former praises of librarious), but this has crossed the line for me.
P.S. I am not a member of the Twitter community, so if there is some kind of killer app to it that I was too blind to see, please tell me. I wont be embarassed or upset, rather I’ll be happy that something with this much buzz is actually worth its weight.
Tracking the Traffic April 2, 2006
Posted by theexpress in internet, web 2.0.add a comment
I was curious to how some of the current Web services are doing in terms of traffic, and I stumbled across Alexaholic, a service built to do just that. It is a site built to track some of the top sites in terms of traffic per day. You can compare up to five of your favorite sites and see who is performing the best. You could also compare similar or competing sites and see who is winning out. However, if you site is not in the top 100,000 in terms of traffic, you wont see you site or blog there.
After having more fun with various other websites, I thought I’d take a look at the matchups that Alexaholic has already. They compared the top trafficed web sites on the Internet: Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. The sites started out vey far apart because it tracks back a few years, but as one can see, the gap has closed and Google is number one.
As you can see, one can get wrapped up in comparing web site traffic. Everyone must go out, compare websites, and find out the most fascinating results. If you’ve ever thought one website outshined another, and it turns out that you were way off, let me know about it.
Web 2.0’s Highlights March 7, 2006
Posted by theexpress in blog, internet, open source, social, web 2.0.5 comments
I try not to post too much to what others say around the web, especially when it involves the collective term Web 2.0, but I found this picture, and it really puts the internet around us in perspective. The Web 2.0 term has been around for quite a while now, and most of the web buzz has been around it. There is no specific grounds for it, but it just refers to the new breed of websites out there that have a more interactive approach to the internet. Just looking through this picture, one can probably see that they are more involved with the new web that they would think.
I find it amazing that in this short time, we have all become so attached to not only the internet that has been around for ten years, but Web 2.0 in specific.
I briefly counted through the web sites that I am a part of or have been to, and with only looking at a fraction of the picture, I recognized dozens of them. Even those that have never really heard of Web 2.0 have probably been to some of the more popular sites like Wikipedia, Skype, and our beloved WordPress. The new web connects us in a way never before done. Years ago, the world seemed so much bigger, but now, you can say that you were talking to someone halfway around the world without batting an eye. This picture is just an example of how we all opened up around the world (which could be another post in itself) and how our lives have changed through the internet. There is a link here from the artist’s flickr page and it has some of the different sites linked on the picture.
