Who’s running your life?

Firefox has gone over the 500 million downloads mark! That’s a fantastic achievement for Mozilla, and their CEO recently got interviewed on the GigaOm show. In tribute, I’m getting together one of those text widget button bookmarks saying Firefox to put in the sidebar of this WordPress blog. I love the way that blogs let you express yourself and add another routine to your life. And it’s the internet running your life that I want to talk about…

I decided that I should have a try at moving everything in my life on to the internet, which I would usually run locally on a PC. What I mean by that is moving the operation of functions like email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, messaging, file storage (media – photos, music, videos) and of course blogging onto the internet, thus eliminating the need for software such as MS Office. I even managed to find a great set of tools for To Do lists and I discovered that Blogger makes an excellent Paste Bin for code snippets because you can post by email, as well as make it private and not worry about anyone else finding it.

The immediate problem I’ve come across is that I have no decent program yet for image editing such as for websites, and I found myself looking back to the local install of Gimp. I’m holding out for a porting of Photoshop onto Linux, an article appeared on Slashdot not so long ago about this. Also, whilst sharing music and videos is easy, editing and producing them is still far far away from being any good with a Web 2.0 program (if anyone knows one, PLEASE comment with it!). But the good news is I did find a lot of ways to move most core functions onto the internet.

Email, Documents and everything else I would usually do in Office all initially got taken over by Google’s Apps for me. Then in addition, for more advanced or professional looking projects, I used an account with Zoho, as it’s packed out with lots of fantastic features and forms an excellent Office suite. On a side note, please Yahoo! once you’ve sorted out this acquisition issue, can you please buy Zoho or at least affiliate! Those apps are fantastic for creating documents, but if you read my last post about document and data backup and storage, then I really suggest using Jungle Disk for data and Scribd for documents.

For project management I strongly recommend where Liquid Planner are going, as after an enjoyable learning curve I’ve come to realise where they’re taking computer assisted project management.

Media sharing and storage is really easy, there’s a ton of video upload sites – Youtube.com/Google Video and Stage6.com being my two favourites for videos.

I now exclusively listen to music streamed across the internet. I use Seeqpod.com all the time where I can create playlists and save them onto the account; but I have given SkreemR.com a go, and I really liked that too. These music services are great because I find myself either wanting to listen to a whole album as background noise while working, or wanting to just quickly find a track I’ve heard and save it for later; both of which are easy and possible with Seeqpod. The next step for these services will come when they port onto mp3 players that have inbuilt wifi like the iPod touch. I can’t WAIT for this to happen!

For photos sharing and storage, I use Facebook.com (personal and close friends) and Flickr.com (public) the most and find the simple rotation tools useful for quick snaps, but you’ll need a locally installed piece of software for editing to Photoshop level.

I really enjoyed what Remember the Milk has to offer consumers as a Gmail plugin that requires installation of an extension to good old Firefox. It creates an extra column on the right hand side of your Gmail inbox (where there’s usually relevant text ads) that shows all your tasks in a very simple to use and easy to glance at and understand To Do list. I’ve found it addictive, and have adopted it as the primary tool for managing my time. There’s also a plugin that fits into Google Calendar which I’m desperate to try but haven’t yet because it also uses text messaging to remind you about events and I’m worried about it potentially conflicting with the weekly text message repeats I am already running in Google Calendar. Google – hint hint, buy Remember The Milk!

Lastly, who can forget Netvibes.com and their fantastically simple way of tying most of the things I’ve mentioned (even Zoho) into one website. Netvibes is now my homepage, as it saves me a lot of time checking all the different sites that I’ve widgeted in there. It even lets you capture web comics! I really hate checking MySpace and Hotmail, as they’re both sites that I barely ever get contacted with, but sometimes I do and the message will be important and a real pain to miss. MySpace in particular has the most horrific browsing experience possible, so being able to just peek at Netvibes and see its status is a massive relief.

I’d really like a site such as Netvibes to work on making an online life a real possibility by continuing with their integration and accumulation of all the internet services that you might need to use into one page, or at least tabbed pages of widgets that almost feels like a WebOS like Orca. (Note: this is closing down and beta accounts have moved to StartForce)It’s just a case of learning how to get the best out of these WebOS’s, web apps and portals, figuring out which works best for you personally, and learning to overcome your reflex of using a locally installed piece of software.

I’m really getting excited about the potential that Web 2.0 seems to have, and the limit seems to be entrepreneurial imagination. The only concern is security; as if the password on your Netvibes (or WebOS) account is weak and someone gains access then they have access to all areas of your life. And ultimately, let’s face it, anything that you put onto the Internet is going to get picked up by everyone’s Big Brother and/or the Chinese.

I’ve just picked up on something called Yoics, and I’m going to go figure out what it is…

UPDATE: I had one of those nagging doubts in the back of my mind while writing this entry, and I kicked myself when I realised just now what super obvious and essential tool I missed – Meebo. In the same way I’ve switched entirely to Seeqpod for music, Meebo now runs all my instant messaging. I know Pidgin is great for having all the protocols, but it still requires an install: although kudos to the team for making it cross platform. Anyway, as you can see from the side bar —> I’m a very big fan of Meebo, and I use it every day. Meebo’s one of those free services that you’re so reliant upon that I’d definitely be prepared to pay for it.

Also, Stage6.com have announced that they’re closing down. Who’s going to replace them? Stage6 had the perfect compromise of speed and quality unlike most of its rivals.