fragility

Gmail
Something i’ve learned over my internet years was not to trust your e-mail to your ISP’s, specially in Portugal. The competition made me change my ISP and will probably make me change again. And sometimes, those e-mail services were not really good anyway. So the best thing is to use an e-mail service which will stay the same regardless of your home connection ISP. The best solution would be to have some really nice hosting at some really nice company, but since i currently can’t afford to spend that much on webhosting i have to use something else (my current webhosting is…well, not quite stable, but at least it’s free :D). So among the existent free e-mail services i believe gmail is the best. It’s stable, it has lots of storage space, it’s web interface is great, and the spam filter is awesome. I couldn’t ask for much more from a free service.

del.icio.us
I explained the reasons for using this one in a previous article.

Google Personalized Homepage
This one is a nice complement to del.icio.us. Why ? Although del.icio.us is a greta bookmarking service, you’re surely going to have A LOT of bookmarks. So when i want to access my main bookmarks (like the websites i’m listing here on this article), it’s nice to have a easier way to do it, and the bookmarks widget on the google personalized homepage it’s a nice way to do that. Also, i love that flickr nugget widget :)

Bloglines
Bloglines is my main feed reader. I’ve tried Liferea (before bloglines), and Google Reader (right when it appeared, and also later when it’s features improved), and also took a look at NetVibes and some others and i always came back to Bloglines. The advantages of an online feed reader are evident. Why i keep coming back to Bloglines ? Probably because i’m already too used to it, and don’t really see any advantages in changing to any of the others. And they manage to churn out some nice new features once in a while.

Destakes
This one is a nice portuguese feed provider, specially for last century websites like Disco Digital. I don’t really visit it, just use the feed services.

Flickr
I don’t have a camera, so i just like to view some pics once in a while. And the account is currently just to keep track of my favorites (man i really need to get a camera).

Twitter
I don’t really know why i use it. Honestly. It’s kinda fun, and at the same time it’s not. Maybe i’ll get tired of it sooner or later, maybe i won’t.
I got tired of it and deleted my account since i wrote the first draft of this article.

Last.fm
Last.fm is great. You can keep track of your listening habits, you can find lots of great music that you really like, you can keep track of shows in your area, and if you’re really into the social stuff it’s great to find people which listen to the same stuff as you do and share even more suggestions about artists and songs. It has it’s occasional hiccups, but it mostly works fine. And the integration with amaroK it’s just great.

Hi5
Well, i only really use this because almost everyone who uses this kind of services here in Portugal uses it. I don’t really go around “meeting new people” (maybe search for some friend of a friend), and it’s a nice way to keep track of most of my friends and what they’re up to (personally known and online ones). About the service itself, i can only say it’s a steaming pile of crap, but it’s been improving over time. It’s nothing more than a clone of other services of the same kind. It started out as a pure orkut clone, but it’s been assimilating features from myspace, and althought i never user facebook, according to something i read recently about facebook, looks like they’ve been assimilating features from it as well.

Myspace
No, i’m not really a social whore. Like i used to write on the about section when i started using it: “I’m just here for the music”. Myspace is the preferred way by underground bands to show their work (most of them don’t have a “webdesigner friend” or can’t afford a website), and it’s also a nice way to keep track of concerts and updates on their work. With time, “big artists” also started using it and they also release updates. Since i usually attend some “underground” music shows, this is THE way to stay updated about those.

If there’s one thing i like about these new “Web 2.0″ websites are the error pages.

In the meanwhile, i’m still trying to find out what’s really goin on with my laptop’s HDD. Since my external HDD is also dead, i still managed to get to a friend’s house yesterday and boot the damn thing and save the most important stuff to his computer. Now my old 450Mhz comes to my rescue ! However, i’m having some doubts that the problem is really in the HDD. The symptoms are…well…strange. More updates on that later.

Yeah, i’ve been dragged to twitter as well. It looks rather useless at first, but it has this magic: you can always know what your friends are, and have been up to, and let them know about you as well, even if you’re offline. And that’s the huge weakness in IM clients and the likes: you can have an away message, but you can’t really have an offline message.