I am learning TONS here on the 23 THINGS site, but it's done
for my productivity!
As far as having a customized home—or “start” page— I chose My Yahoo! because I have already been a Yahoo user for many years. It only seemed natural to organize something that would actually be useful for me.
MySpace Countdowns
I couldn't get the recommended countdown clock to work, though I tried several times to cut and paste the html code, so I found my one and customized it from a MySpace code and I like it much better.
The Google calendar looked pretty easy to use, and even though it is newer and has drag-and-drop editing, I don't go into Gmail often enough to warrant the usage. I guess Google is sticking their collective software wherever they can these days, and I'm not sure if the absolute diversification is working for them? The older version YAHOO calendar looks more like the email that I currently use, and since I already use that, it makes more sense to go to the "familiar." According to the article, YAHOO has an update already in the works.
I started to watch the Scrybe video and I felt like I was on the phone with one of the tech guys from Norton/Symantec. I had to go to YouTube to see a larger version of the actual video overview just to understand what was being said and discovered the video was created over two years ago in Oct. 2006. It all looks very slick and if it works, then the potential is phenomenal-- however even on their own website it says "Scrybe is temporarily not accepting more direct beta invitation requests" which tells me that it's not really up and running at this point! All the endorsements seem to be for the hope that it will do all the wonderful things it promises. (Kind of like our politicians!) Now here it is March 2009 and is Scrybe actually functional?
I'm not much of a list maker, so those tools hold no interest for me-- but I did look at the article on productivity tools and discovered that I had already used Google Docs and Spreadsheets in a sharing capacity with a statewide committee I am on. We were able to edit the same document even though we all live in different parts of the state. Now THAT was productive! As for the other apps and resources, some were overlaps of things we've already seen, and some are SO new and foreign, that I'll only have time to explore them when I'm retired. By then, I'm sure something else will have come along.
all have some potential for use in my personal life and in my work life, now that I know about them. I can't wait to show this to my husband, who refuses to buy the Microsoft Office Suite of products for his home computer. When he sends me a $%&*#@#@!~^%#@#!MSWorks doc, NOW I can convert it to Word.
Zamzar may be good for patrons too, who often bring in their own flyers or homework they started on another computer somewhere else and with a different app, but need to finish up on the library's computers. I'm not crazy about the commercial pop-up ads, but if it could cut down on the disappointed looks, the "what am I going to do's?" as well as the "oh-no's!" then it's definitely worth a try...
