Michelle who was on my trip had her photos on flickr and my friend Brian in Betahouse used flickr. So, I decided to give it a shot. I love it and wouldnt switch back.

Price

Flickr and Google charge differently for their service. Flickr is $24.99 for all you can eat. Google charges you depending on how many GB you want to have. They apply this storage across all google services you use. 10 gb on Google costs $20 per year. I may not use more than 10 gb in my first year with flickr, but eventually I probably will.

Features

Flickr is much more social than google web albums. It’s more of a community. As far as features, flickr is the market leader. Google may get a good foothold with PicasaWeb, but flickr is number one in this space.

Flickr just added stats. Now I can see how many people are looking at my photos and which ones they are looking at. How cool is that?

I don’t want to make this a long rant, but I was interested by my inclination to pay more for all-you-can-eat when with all likelyhood, I could have saved my 4.99, if I was just looking for someone to host pictures online.

What would you do?

In addition, the Mozy client for mac is a resource hog. When it prepares the files to send, it renders your computer unusable. Im pretty sure it’s not necessary to slow your computer to a crawl to back up.

Thus, I withdraw my endorsement of Mozy. Even with Time Machine on your mac, an off-site backup of your data is highly recommended. I’ll try out a few options and make a recommendation.

Here’s the gist:
BUG: An open source, web-enabled, modular software + hardware platform.

Whaaaaa? let me rephrase that. BUG is lego for tech geeks. You can swap in and swap out different components to make the BUG be what you want it to be. GPS, motion sensors, touch screen LCD. These guys are trying to make the ultimate consumer / prosumer customizable device.

Possible applications:
When is the last time you thought about reprogramming your GPS to take pictures every 100 ft you travel. With a BUG, you “could” do that. The interesting thing for me will be when other people figure out cool things to do. I’m great at following walk-throughs on how to do cool things, but I’m not going to hack into a BUG to build my own custom devices. I want a device that will turn on my favorite music when I walk from room to room. Or start the coffee pot when I start to wake up.

The BUG could be the beginning of a revolution towards end-user built hardware devices. These will enrich and empower our lives in ways we have not thought of yet. It’s a great start. I don’t think the BUG is that revolution quite yet. Let’s wait and see when it comes out at the end of this year.

Simplify the message. Cut to the core and get rid of the excess. One memorable example of an idea designed to stick is poisoned halloween candy. This is an urban legend that seems to spread (now by email) every Halloween. This hoax has been around for 30 years. Talk about sticky!

It’s always easier said than done, but there are some great examples and a bunch of tips in Made To Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Have you read the book? I’d love to hear what you think.

Shovebox is great name, because that’s what the app is. It’s a box that you shove stuff in to. It competes in the same class of apps as Yojimbo and Eagle Filer. The Shovebox approach is to have a little box in the menu bar like you see below:

When you want to add something, drag and drop it to the box. Organize your notes and clippings later. Shovebox allows you to dump your brain when you get a thought or see something interesting. This allows you to focus on the activity at hand.

Basically, I use shovebox to store “stuff” and Actiontastic to store “things I need to do”. Shovebox is a great addition to my arsenal. I had been toying with Yojimbo, but couldn’t find a reason to justify the $40. $25 for Shovebox is easier to swallow.

Things I’d love to be able to store in Shovebox

• Passwords (integration with keychain)
• Serial Numbers
• Web archive from firefox (only works w/ Safari now)

I was reading a review by Robby on Rails about Highrise. One of the responders, Will had this to say about 37 Signals:

It doesn’t make sense to me. On the web (2.0) the mantra is integration, and yet here we have a single company releases compartmentalized applications that are an ideal extension of one another.

Will hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t have said it better.

I want to use Highrise as the contact manager for Basecamp. Why have contacts in Highrise and Basecamp? Why have Highrise tasks and Basecamp to-dos? What is the real difference between a “case” and a “milestone” or “project”. The lack of integration between the 37 Signals apps is shameful. Its as if they were all developed by separate companies! What is the benefit to me to use Basecamp and Highrise? I might as well be using Basecamp and Plaxo or Project (yuck!) and Outlook.

Don’t even get me started on what a pain it is that I can’t sync my contacts to my Mac address book (open APIs dont create applications, people do). 37 Signals should fix this stuff before I stop shooting my mouth off and start building a team to do it right! Anyone with me?

I met a guy named Roberto Mateu, who is working as an intern for Virtual Ubiquity, the company that makes Buzzword. Some of the people behind Buzzword have been doing productivity apps for as long as there were computers (Lotus). Roberto was able to snag me a preview of the application.

The first thing you notice about Buzzword is how nice it looks. The developers used a grey theme. This brings the focus on to the white page, and what you’re writing. The other UI element is the menu bar. It’s hard to show in pictures but Virtual Ubiquity went with sliding menus. You click on the area in which you’re interested and all the options are displayed. This is similar to Microsoft’s ribbon interface in Office 2007. Buzzword has fewer features than Word 2007, so naturally the interface is lacking the confusion and clutter of Word.

Another nice thing about buzzword is the anti-aliasing on the text. This makes it really easy to read. The way buzzword handles wrapping around images is pretty cool too. Basically, you add an image from your desktop and dump it in the document. You can then drag it around and the text will automatically wrap. This is something tough to do in a non-flash (AIR) based word processor. Being visually stunning and good at layout are minor features for success. If buzzword wants to make a dent in this market, they either need to be acquired by a larger player or acquire spreadsheet and presentation technology to provide a suite of integrated tools.

What’s exciting about buzzword is they are building on Adobe’s AIR platform. They are on the cutting edge of online apps. To update existing apps to do what buzzword can do easily would most likely require a total rewrite! Keep your eyes peeled on their site for a public beta

More shots:

Visual comparison to leading platform specific word processors