Web 2.0 Stuff

So it has been awhile since I have posted and part of the reason is because much of the energy that I had been putting into blogging has gone into other Web 2.0 applications. Here are some of the interesting applications that I have started using over the last few months:

Over the summer my friend Rob invited me to join the Facebook revolution so I signed up not really expecting much in particular. Now I really enjoy using the application especially due to all of the 3rd party gadgets that are available to add into the site. I have used LinkedIn for a few years to manage my business connections, but I don't really like LinkedIn as much for personal friends. At this point I still think it is reasonable to manage two social networks one for business and one for friends, but it would be great if some of the widgets could span both networks. More on that later.

Dopplr is an interesting service that I signed up for a few months back but am only recently began actively using. The service is a way to share your travel plans with acquaintances so that you can meet up with people when you happen to be in the same city. I think that this is really more about passive communication in that instead of having to remember who lives where and start sending out emails, Dopplr will do the matching for us. Doppler recently added a Facebook application, which is great because duplicating my Facebook network would seem to be a little pointless. Next up, I would love to see Dopplr use OpenSocial to create a LinkedIn application.

Grand Central bills itself as the new way to use your phones. I am not sure about that, but it is a nice service that will allow people to dial a single number that will ring all of my phones at the same time so that I can choose the one that I want to answer. It also has some great features that allow callers in my address book to be treated in different ways based on my address book entries. The only problem that I have with the service is that everyone already has my mobile number and just uses that so it will be a bit of a pain to get all of my contacts to switch over to my Grand Central number, especially when my mobile number still works. Google recently purchased Grand Central so as a next step I would really like to see tighter integration between Grand Central and Gmail to manage all of my communications.