There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day. I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by? So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web: Bloglines I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off. Del.icio.us I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon. FeedBurner I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page. Flickr I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect. Measuremap The Measure Map blog analytics → Read More
An all new Yahoo Maps launches tonight at 9 pm PST. I spoke with Paul Levine, the General Manager of Local, Jeremy Kreitler, a Senior Product Manager of Maps and Local, and Diana Vincent, a PR Manager, earlier today about Yahoo Maps. Unlike Google and Microsoft maps, Yahoo has chosen to use Flash over AJAX in building its new service, and they’ve added new features that are not found anywhere else. They’ve also done some things to reduce the hassle of creating, sharing and printing maps online. It’s built with on the new MacroMedia Flex platform for flash, something we’ve been hearing a lot about lately. Key Features Because Yahoo Maps is a flash application, it avoids the need for page refreshes changes are made to the page. A simple drag and drop module on the top right lets users move around easily (even easier than the great Google drag method). There are multiple ways to zoom into and out of a map, including using the scroll wheel on the mouse, or the page up/down buttons on the keyboard. The arrow keyboard keys also allow for scrolling off-screen to new areas. There is excellent integration wth Yahoo Local businesses. Once a map is pulled up, a quick search, such as “pizza” pulls up all local restaurants. A click shows more information, and options to add it to the driving directions itinerary. And this is cool – they allow multipoint directions, something Google and Microsoft don’t have.. add as many stops as you need, in the order you want, and Yahoo Maps will calculate driving directions for the whole trip. This could be really useful when house hunting, for instance. Simply add all of the addresses and get an itinerary. And as you edit the map by moving, adding things, etc., the URL in the browser bar self updates so that it can be copied and pasted at any time. This is something that really bugs me about Google Maps – the need to click a link to get a permanent URL. Yahoo’s solved that with some cool javascript coding. Because Yahoo Maps is built on Flash, the “back button” on the browser still works (a problem with AJAX applications). At any time you can back up into older maps and the URL also rewinds. Yahoo Maps requires the installation of Flash 7 or greater. 90% of U.S. and European computers → Read More
