new products everywhere :D

since i've had a little more downtime than usual, i've had a chance to check out a few of the really cool products that are floating around on the web. i guess i'd been pretty focused on the projects i was working on while at microsoft and google; somehow, i had missed a bunch of innovative things happening on the web - the blogosphere, for example :O

the first thing i played with today was bloglines. i may be biased since the only other aggregator i'd used was a .net app called sharpreader, but i think bloglines is great. it gives me the exact features i need and has some extra ones too. i can now quickly browse the feeds i'm interested in and "clip" entries that i find interesting for future reference. plus, the entire system is on the web so all of your feeds and clips are available from any terminal. if this weren't cool enough, they also provide firefox plug-ins that are really neat like the bloglines toolkit and livelines. the toolkit has a ton of "nice to have" functionality and integrates very smoothly with the browser. meanwhile, livelines just makes your life easier when browsing and subscribing to feeds.

next, i checked out del.icio.us. again, very cool stuff. basically, del.icio.us allows users to tag websites (kind of like providing your own meta data for a site) and these tags are shared with all other users. together, the community is able to create tag topics which someone can then browse by and retrieve all sites marked with that particular tag. as a bonus, your bookmarks are now portable since they are stored on del.icio.us' servers. there seemed to be a cool feature called the inbox where you could monitor new entries for specific tags, but i couldn't get it to work - maybe it's still in progress. nevertheless, i think this app has potential for a lot of interesting scenarios.

finally, i just finished playing with technorati. searching through blogs is neat, but the real power is that technorati is indexing in realtime. as in, as soon as a post goes up, you can see it in search results. then, they also have a feature called "watchlists." they let you specify a url or keywords that you want to monitor and then they create a rss feed that aggregates and republishes links to entries that match the supplied address or terms - it's like a continuously updated, saved search. i see they also announced a tagging feature, but i don't see it integrated into the main user experience yet; i'm sure they are working on it. a little twist here is that instead of having users tag pages, they seem to be having blog owners tagging their own pages using the tag.

i also spent some time playing with flickr (as i mentioned in a previous post :)), pluck, rojo and filangy. filangy seems to be invite only for now, so if you really want to check it out, leave me a comment or e-mail me.

i'm sure lots of people out there are playing with these products as well. what do you think about these nifty tools?