Highrise & Piknic, more great web tools
I am including this picture of a blooming cherry tree to remind me that it is spring. It struggled to make it to 40 degrees Fahrenheit here in Roanoke once again today.
I saw another article that reminded me how powerful the web is becoming as a tool.
The article, "You've Got Webmail," talks about the advance in features in free webmail clients. I am a big fan of the free Google apps for you domain so I probably don't agree with all the conclusions of the article, but I do have to admit that both Yahoo mail and AIM mail have a very neat feature which lets you drag and drop emails into folders that you have set up on the mail server. It is a feature that I love about Mac OS X mail.
The good news is that both free email and email that you pay for is becoming very reliable. I use a combination of both. I have an account with Webmail.us where I used to work. They do an exceptional job of keeping spam away from you. In fact our real estate agency, Bluewater GMAC Real Estate, uses Webmail's services. The only other other email service that I use that does as good a job on spam is Google and their gmail. I do prefer the IMAP based services of Webmail which lets you create folders on the server to hold copies of your email. Gmail operates slightly differently with their archive feature.
While webmail clients are great, the real advances I see on the web are the new products like Highrise from 37signals and the Piknic photo editing software. It allows you to do many of the basic photo editing tasks on the web.
HIghrise is a tool that I wish had been around in the days when I worked at Apple. We used Salesforce.com for lead tracking and account management. It is one of those sales tools that some folks love but which I seriously doubt actually improves the sales ability of good sales reps. Apple management used it mainly to convince themselves that the sales people were working and not partying. I actually think Salesforce.com is a great tool for people who think they know how to do sales, but probably don't. There are plenty of pseudo sales and sales management experts out there, but that is a topic for another day.
Highrise is something that I plan to use in my real estate career. Highrise is simple contact and task management that I believe will work great as a follow-up tool for real estate clients. I also plan to use Realty Juggler which might overlap a little with Highrise but looks to have some features that I can use.
It is actually amazing how much work you can get done in a browser these days. I rarely use anything for writing other than Google Docs these days. Being able to do things in a browser has kept me from having to switch over to the Windows world. I recently wrote about that in "Surviving, maybe even thriving with my Mac."
While the web can be a powerful tool, the British have identified a new problem with the web. It's called "Wilfing," or "surfing the web without any real purpose."
Wilfing on the web, the new British pastime...
The lure of pop-up sites and flashing online adverts is, it seems, too appealing to resist for many internet users. Almost a quarter of those surveyed said they spent 30% or more of their internet time wilfing - the equivalent of spending an entire working day every fortnight pointlessly jumping between random pages.
The article goes on to say that young people are more likely to Wilf. In fact those of us over 55 are three times less likely to do so than those under twenty-five.
Well I not going to go much farther on this line of thought, but it is pretty easy to draw the conclusion that the older folks might be more focused on getting something done.
Of course I am an old guy who, as one friend has said, failed miserably at retirement. For the record I do own some Webmail.us stock which does not diminish the quality of the services that they provide.
Well time for some sleep now that our after mid-night thunderstorm is over. We need the rain so there will be no complaining on my part. I hope we get as nice a sunrise as we had on Monday.
