Maintaining and promoting your various online personas can be a challenge. As Charles wrote recently, there are a variety of options for managing many online identities, and yesterday one of them, GizaPage, which I wrote about back in May, released several new features.
You may recall that GizaPage has a different take than other similar services. Where most either pull or aggregate your content into their own interface, GizaPage’s tab format gives folks the ability to view all of your profiles in their natural context. While I found the initial release to be thoughtfully done, some of the new options make it a much more compelling option.
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I firmly believe that any to-do or task management system will fail if creating tasks is too difficult. For me, the key is getting them out of my stream of consciousness and into a system that I trust, where I know they’ll be when need them, as quickly as possible.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about my task manager of choice, Toodledo, is the ubiquity of its data entry points. I can enter tasks by email, through a handy Firefox extension, through Twitter, Jott, and more. So I was jazzed to see the availability of a new gadget for Gmail that lets me enter and monitor my tasks right from my email provider of choice.
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As we come to rely more and more on web-based applications and services, we’ve all probably had an instance when our favorite experienced some sort of outage. While I think we are generally patient with brief hiccups and such, what would happen if a web service you relied on was down for 16 hours? How should the developers handle the situation?
In what has to be a developer’s worst nightmare, last week a “perfect storm” of events led to just that for task management service Toodledo. Thankfully, after what I am sure was a very long day for the Toodledo team, they were able to bring things back online and with no data loss.
As a user of Toodledo, I was impressed with the outstanding job they did not only recovering our data but for the way they communicated with us during what was really an unthinkable situation. Was it an inconvenience to be without the service? Absolutely it was. But in what really should be a case study in how to respond to such an experience, the folks at Toodledo provided frequent updates and explanations during the outage and a thorough debrief after the fact.
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I’ve written in the past about the handy features of bookkeeping and tax preparation service Outright. Its easy-to-use interface and integration with other apps make it almost a no-brainer for small business that aren’t satisfied with their existing accounting process.
As we’re at the midyear point, now is a good time to evaluate how prepared you are for tax preparation, rather than wait for year end. To sweeten the deal a bit, the folks at Outright have partnered with Network Solutions to offer a free domain name and business profile page for one year to new signups. The promotion runs through until the end of July.
If you don’t already have a web presence, this might be a great way to get yourself online, and to get the bookkeeping and tax preparation benefits of Outright. Just register as normal with Outright and they’ll send you the details on how to get your domain name. It is estimated that 50 percent to 60 percent of small businesses do not yet have an online presence; offers like this can give people the ability to take the plunge and move their business to the web.
What I really like about this offer is that it is very much in the spirit of the Small Business Web movement that I think is tremendously important for the long-term success of web services. While not an integration move, it shows how service providers can work together to bring a real benefit to their small business users. I’ve watched these interactions and relationships develop online and am thrilled to see real benefits coming out of these partnerships.
Is your business online? Could you use a free domain name?
One of the more interesting, and challenging, things about following web apps is how quickly new features and functionality can be added. A review is like a snapshot and represents our impressions for that particular time period. But web apps are almost like living and breathing entities, and the hosted SaaS model allows for rapid-fire updates.
For example, since I last reviewed group collaboration service MemberHub back in April, it has already added some nifty functionality, including Photo Albums and Whiteboards, and has also revamped its pricing model.
The new features bring the same thoughtful implementation but no-nonsense feel that I liked my first go-round. Photos can be grouped together logically, and the upload process allows for multiple file uploads. The albums maintain the same permission-based access that is a big part of the entire product.
I’ve always been a fan of shared document or whiteboard collaboration, so I was glad to see this introduced. While it lacks the powerful comparison features of the whiteboards included with Basecamp or Backpack, it does have versioning functionality and an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor.
In addition to the new features, MemberHub now offers a tiered pricing model based on number of hubs and unique members. For most groups, I imagine the changes will make MemberHub a more cost-effective option. A free starter hub is still an option to get started or to give things a test run.
I was impressed with MemberHub back in April; these new features make it an even more compelling option.
How do you collaborate with your group?
Do you ever want to peek over the shoulder of your web site visitors to see how they move about and navigate? As site owners, we often make assumptions as to how people are getting to particular pages or using particular functionality. Armed with pages and pages of analytics statistics we focus on what people are viewing or searching for.
Sometimes, though, there is no substitute for just watching how people interact and use your site to really understand your users’ behavior. Usability and testing tool Clixpy hopes to make that possible.
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If you’re like me, you’ve got personal web profiles scattered all across the web. Each time I register with a new service, another one is created, and each is a glimpse into my online activities.
One of the challenges is that the connections I’ve made through one service have a hard time finding me on the others. GizaPage, a new service launching in beta today, hopes to make that process easier.
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Like many of us, I spend a lot of time on the web and come across a staggering number of interesting things. In Clearing The Cache I pull out some of my favorites and share them with you here.
Need to get your music fix? Try Pandora for BlackBerry or Slacker for BlackBerry; both offer outstanding radio services.
Last week I wrote a brief snippet about gwabbit for BlackBerry as a means to easily capture contact info from your emails, but you may want to also take a look at Anagram’s BlackBerry offering as well.
Spend a lot of time on your BlackBerry? Our friends atjkOnTheRun can help you find out if you affinity has reached the level of addiction.
SimpleHelp offers up a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up Google Sync for Blackberry.
Finally, I just love Nicholas Bate and his hilarious ongoing series of posts documenting the species known as Homo Berriens:
“Accentuated fingers enable small keyboards to be adroitly managed at speed while simultaneously executing other activities such as eating cereal, walking the dog or sky-diving.”
