Honestly, I’m not sure what the hell “web 2.0″ even means (although there are definitions from Tim O’Reilly and Wikipedia and an article about how it’s just hype). I could talk about the browser is the new desktop, the web is the new o.s. Instead, I’m simply going to say that I need new tools to manage my information.
I’ve been an Outlook addict for years, but it’s a huge beast that takes forever to load. That’s just not very efficient if I only need to glance at a calendar. I’m also tired of having to click in eight different places just to change the due date on a task. I don’t use Outlook for e-mail, and I don’t have a lot of appointments, so it’s mainly a to-do manager for me at this point. If I fall behind and need to reschedule a dozen tasks, I want to do it quickly.
Also, I’ve developed another crazy impulse to really learn and use linux as a day-to-day operating system. Outlook is the main anchor that ties me to Windows, so I started looking for ways to get away from Outlook. I wanted to move to a system that was platform independent.
These criteria led me to Remember the Milk, which has really changed the way I work. RTM is a web-based task manager that has a lot of the features I wished Outlook had. It also has features that I didn’t even know I wanted Outlook to have, like multiple lists.
For calendar functions, I switched to Google Calendar. I now have the calendar at my fingertips, thanks to a gadget for Google Desktop. Logically, I had to try out Gmail next. (With all these Google services, I sometimes wonder if I’m not just trading one evil empire for another.)
I haven’t really gotten into Gmail yet, but I can already see how it’s just a better way to handle e-mail. Never deleting anything, efficient search, and tagging messages. We don’t use the Internet like we did in 1992, so why are we still handling e-mail the same way?
The next application I wanted to replace is my reference manager, which keeps track of important and interesting scientific papers. It’s also indispensable for writing papers because it automagically formats your references. I’m never going to get this functionality in linux; it’s one of the things that will demand I boot into Windows and run Word and EndNote.
But I did find a better way to manage a library of articles: Connotea, which is to EndNote what RTM is to Outlook. Put another way, the desktop applications are slow and clunky; the web-apps are slick and intuitive. They work much more like your brain works, much more naturally. They work the way you want them to instead of forcing you to learn how to use them.
If that’s what “web 2.0″ means, then I’m all for it. The downside, of course, is that my Internet connect has become the syringe in my arm, and I can’t get a damn thing done without it.
P.S. I haven’t found a decent replacement for the Outlook address book. I want something that is basically RTM for contacts. I also am not terribly interested in auto-update services like Plaxo. I can conceive of how to roll-my-own, and it shouldn’t be terribly difficult. I just don’t have the time to learn AJAX and Ruby-on-Rails, the software technologies to make it truly “web 2.0″. Any suggestions?
