The end of the calendar year is fast approaching, the days are short, and it seems a natural time to look back – and forward. As a web worker, I try to take stock of how I’m doing at least once a year, and think about what I might want to change in the upcoming year.
One useful framework for this is to ask yourself four simple questions:
- What’s your service?
- Who do you sell to?
- What are your opportunities?
- What are your challenges?
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There are plenty of time-tracking applications out there; we’ve reviewed more than a few over the years. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no innovation left in the field. Case in point: BubbleTimer, which wants to make tracking your time into an effective time-management tool rather than focusing solely on billable hours.
There are a couple of key features involved in this makeover. First is the utter simplicity of the product: if you ever did those “fill in the bubble with a No. 2 pencil” tests in school, you can use the BubbleTimer timesheet (and without getting graphite dust on your fingers, too). After you set up your activities, you just click to record time in 15-minute intervals.
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If you’re like most web workers, Google is pretty pervasive in your online life. But how about your physical life – you know, the one full of atoms rather than bits? Well, if you’d like a little bit of Google to stick on your laptop or keyboard, the Gmail team has a deal for you. Just send a stamp (or an IRC, if you’re out of the country) to
Send me some Gmail stickers already
P.O. Box 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420
And you’ll get back a set of vinyl stickers, including a glittery Gmail icon and (probably more useful) a sheet of keyboard stickers showing the various Gmail shortcuts. Who knows how long supplies last, but if you want a stocking stuffer for a geek in your life, go for it.
Remember the good old days when all you had to worry about was .com? (Well, and .org, .net, and .edu for special cases). Long gone, of course. Today a new top-level domain, .tel, is opening up for sale. The launch is being run by Telnic, though you should be able to buy .tel domains through a variety of registrars.
The twist on .tel is that it’s designed to store information directly in DNS records, rather than being hooked up to a web site. You can see how this works in their simulator; the basic idea is that you store information like your address and your IM contacts right in the DNS record, and anyone can do a lookup on your .tel domain to find them. With specialized applications, this information can be pulled right into your address book.
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As we covered last week, free services I Want Sandy and Stikkit are closing shortly, joining a growing list of Web 2.0 free-to-consumer startups that have shuttered their sites. It’s not just the little guys that are going out of business, either: Google Lively is set to become the latest failed experiment from the search behemoth later this year.
While just a few data points don’t make up a trend, it does seem likely that we haven’t seen the last closures. Services start up in a burst of optimism, then hit the cold hard wall of needing to pay for servers and bandwidth. The tightening of venture capital and the decline of online advertising have been covered elsewhere: other factors that will make it tough for free eternal-beta Web 2.0 startups to stay in business. But how is the savvy web worker to cope?
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We’re written about Tactile CRM a couple of times in the past – they’re an excellent choice in the starter CRM market, for people who need some sort of customer relations management product but who don’t want to be overwhelmed by complexity. Now they’re released version 2 of the application, adding new features while still staying easy to use.
The new version concentrates on adding pervasive support for tagging, but there are some other changes too. Merging contacts and leads together will further simplify things, and increasing the limits on some of their plans is a welcome move. If you sign up for a free trial account with the code WWD, they’ll enter you in a drawing for a free year’s subscription as well.
We’ve looked at freelance outsourcing and crowdsourcing sites in the past – places like 99 Designs for graphics work or Elance for programming and other fields. Generally speaking, it seems that most web workers in our audience view these sites as a threat, encouraging rate cutting and spec work (depending on the site).
But it seems unlikely that the trend of global outsourcing is going to go away any time soon, or that sites which enable it will go out of business. As a result, it’s probably smart for web workers to learn what’s out there, and to figure out how to deal with it. A pair of recent columns from Dan Appleman survey the programming side of this trend. Appleman’s conclusion flies in the face of the accepted wisdom: though he sees the greatest benefit to businesses, he adds “but U.S. workers who are smart, professional and keep their eyes open can find good opportunities as well.”
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The annual Thanksgiving holiday in the US is coming up next week – and a lot of web workers are preparing to take some downtime away from their computers as a result. Before you go, though, why not take a few minutes to participate in our annual thread of thanks?
There’s been a lot of doom and gloom recently in the news, but for at least some of us, web working remains a bright spot in the landscape. I’m certainly thankful that my own work allows me to skip the daily commute (and not even venture outside on days when the weather is below freezing), and that I have the chance to work with interesting people worldwide on a daily basis.
What about you? What makes you thankful about web work? Share your highlights in the comments!
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
