Other things to consider are.. Reserve anything with the name of your app included (e.g. twitter don’t allow users to create urls that include “twitter”). Reserve as many urls for authentication methods as possible, I only included a couple here, oauth and openid.

Here’s a published google doc, and a csv file, text, and xls.

1. Get Spotify
2. Create a playlist to share
3. Make sure your title includes the #mondayMix hashtag and your Twitter @username
4. Right-click on the playlist and select “Copy HTTP Link” (this is the bit you’re going to share)
5. Share it on Twitter, say something like “check out my #mondayMix, hope it gets you all going! http://is.gd/1Kefj”
6. The best bit – find other people’s #mondayMix’s by searching on Twitter

Here’s my playlist, it’s optimistically summer themed!

So because all my RSS would be being aggregated in one place I’ve always been put off, I’ve spent a long time putting my life online, and to be restricted in this didn’t make sense to me.

When Google Reader appeared a while back as always I tried it out, I’m an early adopter and I like to play with Betas, for fun and sometimes to learn from them. It’s like a tiny window on the future.. But I was disappointed with this initial offering. It was clunky and bloated, didn’t have the freedoms I wanted and it wasn’t always clear what you were reading. I did start using it, but not for long, it just didn’t occur to me to check it. I usually browse by having lots of tabs saved in a set with Sessionsaver which i periodically refresh. Well every 5 minutes or so all day!

Having all these tabs open meant I just forgot to check the reader. However, I had Sage installed as a plugin for Firefox, so I decided I’d take the convenient aggregated feed that the Google Reader offers of all the feeds you’ve loaded and load that into there. So I had all my feeds online (when I remembered to check it) and it was a very simple matter of just loading one feed into any desktop app i happened to have, wherever I was.

Convenient right? Well actually this didn’t work out either. It must have been a light Obsessive Disorder that took hold of me because I hated the fact that the items in my Google Reader weren’t being marked as read. Which bugged me! On top of that, again it was hard to tell when using this feed of feeds in Sage which articles were coming from where. Very frustrating.

So now I have a shiny new Google Reader to play with. All the same feeds are in there, and I’ve added a few more. I might remove Digg because it usually accounts for at least 3 quarters of the items in there and has the effect of diluting the rest. But that’s another article.. Aside from that I’m finding it a much more pleasurable experience, like the man says, it feels like an inbox for the web. And actually it looks like one too. I guess it just needs the spam and I’d feel right at home!

So my browsing patterns have changed. Now I wake up in the morning and refresh the reader (with “all items” selected) on my laptop before my journey to London. It has a great feature that loads more items as you get to the bottom of the page. It’s a never ending scroll, it doesn’t end! Which is good and bad. It means I never lose anything, but it also means that if left for a few days it becomes a giant list of things I don’t know yet. Which again brings on the Obsessive Disorder, I have to read it all, and it doesn’t end!

The other side effect is that I now end up with a LOT of tabs open to things I need to investigate or read in more detail. This is ok if I have some time or if I can read them there and then, but being on the train with a flaky-at-best internet connection, this often means I end up with a bunch of empty tabs. These I then refresh when I arrive at my destination and immediately I’m overwhelmed with information.

So is this a better way of browsing? It feels like it, but it has pitfalls. Added to the ones I describe is the lack of traditional browsing, hopping from one site to another. Have I created my own walled garden?

• They have deals with the record labels already
• They have a mechanism to transfer to a phone (iTunes)
• They have a very large userbase
• Profit on ringtones is higher than singles (and you could probably sell them for more)

The iTunes transfer may be the key to this working. It’s certainly a lot cheaper to operate as it bypasses the mobile phone operators.

So what’s missing? Well the Apple phone of course!

Just a prediction…

Pete invited me into Vox (here’s my page) which is essentially a hosted blog site much like Blogger or Live Journal. The difference is the way you interact with the community and your media.

The reason I call it the Flickr of blogging tools is because of the first impression I had; you basically have flickr, but instead of photos you have blog posts. I can’t explain it any simpler than that. You have similar privacy options, tagging, sets, groups.

Go check it out, I have a couple of beta invites still…

My friend Adam pointed me at this web based bug tracker:
http://www.tailshq.com/

And Ryan of DropSend is working on his new app, a marketing tool for newsletter owners:
http://www.heyamigo.net/

I’d sign up for both if you’re in the business of making or using webapps…

A couple of web widget.. erm, things.. have appeared. (are they webapps?). They essentially let you build, share and sell, small plugins (although i’m sure they’d hate me calling them that!) to sit on people’s websites..

WidgetBox, the web widget marketplace (placing itself as the big boy on the block)
http://www.widgetbox.com/

And then Jay has this going on:
http://www.snipperoo.com

Then sign up for mine too :)

This is my first app, completely independently. being built by myself and Nick.
http://www.pingbase.com/

update://

The day after i posted this i got an Odeo voicemail from Dan, the Tails developer…

But what if you’re selling Smart cars?

PingBase is a more efficient, modern and affordable car. A car designed for not only the driver but it’s environment and the cohabitants of that environment.

All these monitoring services certainly do their job, although I’ve not used them all, so what’s wrong with them?

1. The Price
   They are prohibitively expensive. usually charging around $10/month per domain or URL you want to monitor.
2. The Free Trial
   You might get a month for free or maybe longer but for a much lower level of service.
3. Access to data
   Few provide an API or even RSS, although around half offer multiple person notification lists of some sort.
4. They’re not designed for everyone
   Most are designed for web developers or large corporations, they ignore the needs of the majority of websites and their owners.

I think that last point may be the most important. Everybody and their fathers brothers have a website and they all need to know the uptime, or downtime of their sites. A persons blog is a very important thing. Some livelihoods are made from blogs as well as reputations built from them.

If your blog is down, you need to know! But you shouldn’t have to pay more than it costs you to have the website for that knowledge.

Enter PingBase, a modern website monitor built for you, your friends, your company or your rabbit.

If you want to monitor your blog, PingBase will do that, for free, forever. If you want more, then you can upgrade to the first level which will allow you to monitor 10 URLs for $15/month with the added bonus of receiving SMS (text messages) as well as email when your site goes down.

There is an FAQ that should answer more of your questions, and you can sign up to know when it’s launched from any page on the site.

I’m really excited to get this up and running, I’ve been looking forward to announcing it.. I know it’ll be a useful addition to many peoples online lives.

I consider us to be at Web 1.5, and that in itself is generous.

To compare it to mobile phone technology, Web 0.5 (web beta?) was analogue GSM, 1G, which then became digital, or 2G, then we added GPRS as an interim fix while we all waited for 3G. GPRS became known as 2.5G. it didn’t do a lot more, but maybe a bit quicker, ok and the pricing structure was a bit different… Maybe this isn’t the best analogy…

What I’m trying to say is this, isn’t the Web 2.0, as it’s being talked about now, our GPRS. It’s doing all the same stuff we’ve always known the web can do but a little bit quicker, or in this case prettier.

So I’m going to call it Web 1.5.

Web 2.0 for me is something different. The current state certainly doesn’t warrant a whole version increase.

Web 2.0 is psychological. This, as I will show, is true In all cases but refers to different things. Web 2.0 for a web developer is what we’re doing now. We’re using JavaScript, CSS and some backend integration to do clever data exchanges and then display them in a pretty way. Web 2.0 for a user is a whole different thing. If we consider web 1.0 to be the web as we have grown to know and love it, then surely the next “versionâ€? of that is going to be quite drastic?

Web 2.0 is what you may call Web 3.0. Actually I hate the numbering thing. Web 2.0 is something that may simply boil down to a single login. Simple eh? But what does that mean? The implications of this cover many subjects: privacy, customer relationships, trust, and ultimately data ownership. Ok maybe this is further off than Web 2.0, maybe this is going to have a new name! This is about remote living, entrusting your life to a virtual place, hard to fathom.

In real terms it means replacing most of the function of the traditional browser and logging in to your “browserâ€? whenever you use the internet (web?). I hate to say it, but the Microsoft Passport was a great idea! Although that’s not exactly what this is about, it was certainly a stepping stone across the river. Why not have the same login for all the tools you use on the Internet? I guess why not is because it means that one company could potentially own the access and storage of your data.

Obviously, this is just a small technical and political point to get over. The real problem is how do people make money out of this. Well that’s simple! They just keep doing what they always did, of course.

I think I’ve said far too much. Let me complete these (probably) highly contentious views in a later post. Web 2.0 will be exciting, I hope that I’m slightly right about how it will turn out :)