it…out

I decided to give a few web-based apps and services a try lately and I am completely and forerver hooked…until I find something I like more. 

pandora
Lindsey told me about pandora quite a while back.  I’ve found it’s a great avenue for discovering new music you like, in addition to enjoying music with which you are already familiar.  In the few weeks I’ve been using it, I’ve discovered more new songs and artists than I ever did plunking around on iTunes or listening to the radio or watching Fuse.  Pandora is part of the ambitious Music Genome Project, and I have to say, all that fancy genome stuff really works.  I fire it up almost every day.

goowy
This weekend while catching up on Inside the Net podcasts, we found out about goowy, which looks like it has the potential to be a really good flash-based web desktop.  The email aggregation for multiple accounts is a nice idea that hopefully arrives soon, and the soon-to-be-implemented IM will be great.  The widgets/applets/minis they offer are my favorite so far.  There are widgets that give access to popular podcasts, and instead of downloading the podcast to my computer, a media player launches within goowy and streams the podcast.  And like their parent sites, the flickr and del.icio.us widgets are great timesinks — I particularly like the page preview that the del.icio.us widget provides.

Goowy also offer a desktop app that I just installed tonight.  It should be interesting where they go with this.

bloglines
Bloglines has been around forever, and I’ve been kicking myself for not setting up an account sooner.  After reading Nicole’s post about setting hers up, I decided to give it a go.  Though I waited several weeks to actually do so.  Using bloglines is much more convenient than using sage as I don’t need to set up feeds on each computer, and the UI jives with my expectations much more than google reader does.  The LiveLines extension for Firefox is the real icing on the RSS cake.  It will atomatically add feeds to blogines, sage, and/or Firefox live bookmarks.  It is also rumored to make your whites whiter and brights brighter.

writely
I haven’t had a lot of time to test out writely yet, but as far as web-based word processors are concerned, this is definitely the man in form.  It has all the basic word processor features and will save in HTML, RTF, and doc formats.  Not too shabby.

All of these together with gmail/gtalk really make a compelling case of never getting off the couch/chair/bog.