user agent

A while back I wrote a post called my favorite web services, and I thought I would revisit it in the spirit of end-of-the-year (or decade I suppose) lists. However, the notion of “web” services has gotten blurrier and blurrier, so this time I decided to make this list more generally about my digital life and the various tools I use.

New since the last round…

Evernote: I once called this the best free application there is, and I’ll stand by that. I use it for everything imaginable. I take snapshots of whiteboards at work and save them in Evernote, and they become searchable. I use the iPhone app on the bus to quickly jot down the little ideas and inspirations I have. I do the same while driving, except I use the voice note feature. I forward useful emails – or snippets of emails – from local mailing lists like Urban Daddy and K & L Wines to my Evernote email alias. And lots lots more. I can’t believe all of this costs me nothing.

Dropbox: I work with a user experience designer who’s based in Israel and a development team based in Romania, and Dropbox has become absolutely essential to me. I keep all my current projects in a Dropbox folder on my Mac, which looks and behaves like any other local folder except that it syncs with a folder on the Dropbox website, plus a folder on my Israeli colleague’s computer, and one on my home computer, one on my iPhone, etc. So I’ll work on a file during my workday, and – with the time difference – my colleague in Israel takes over after I leave for the day. We can do this without changing our normal way of working.

Things: A basic to-do list app for Mac (desktop) and iPhone. I haven’t found the perfect to-do list manager yet – they’re either over-engineered or overly simplistic – but Things is pretty good.

Instapaper: One of those ideas that’s so simple, it’s amazing that no one did it before. Then again, its utility is very narrow and specific. I use it like this: I read my twitters on the bus ride to work, over a spotty 3G connection. Within any given tweet I might see a link to something that sounds interesting. I usually don’t want to read web pages on the bus, on my phone because of the slow connection, and also because I want to get through a day’s worth of my friends’ tweets in 40 minutes. So I just send the interesting links to Instapaper where they wait for me to read them later.

Twitter: I kept my distance from Twitter for a while and dismissed it as something that seemed trival, noisy and pointless. I was wrong, and I admit it.

Facebook: I’ve changed my tune about Facebook too. Now that no one seems to “poke” me much anymore, and I’m not constantly being challenged to quizzes, I find myself spending a lot more time on Facebook. I use it mainly for the news feed – to stay connected with friends.

Still awesome…

Google: I use Google for pretty much everything now it seems. Just today, we were ordering prints of some photos from Shutterfly Smug Mug, and we had a choice of matte, glossy and something called “lustre.” Unable to find a definition on the Shutterfly website, my wife asked me, “What’s ‘lustre?’” So I Googled ‘matte vs. glossy vs. lustre’ and immediately found the answer in the first search result. If a piece of information exists, then you can be pretty sure that someone has put it on a website somewhere, and Google can take you right to it. That is all.

Google Groups: This was essential during our wedding planning last year. The members of our group included me, my wife (then fiancee) and a couple of family members who were helping us with the planning. Whenever one of us would email one of our vendors, we would CC our Google Group’s email alias (groupname@googlegroups.com), and everyone in the group would receive a copy of the email. More importantly, the whole thread was recorded and available to all of us on the web.

G Reader: Blogs are supposedly on their way out (I don’t see it), but G Reader is still a big part of my daily web travels.

Delicious: I use Twitter and G Reader to discover things. I send the good things to Instapaper, which is kind of like short term memory. Delicious, then, is like long term memory. If something seems good enough that I think I might want to refer back to it a year from now, or share it with someone down the road, then I save it as a Delicious bookmark.

Wordpress: It’s just an amazing blogging platform. This year I customized a new theme. I also added Facebook Connect login, plus social sharing (at the bottom of each post), related posts (in my RSS feed only), Google Sitemaps support, and more. Each of these things took me about 10 minutes, thanks to the community of Wordpress devotees out there making the platform better and better every day.

Yahoo Pipes: I use it mostly to aggregate and filter RSS feeds, which I can then consume or republish. Check out my Bay Area food events Twitter feed to see an example: FoodFeed SF. It’s made up of a dozen or so RSS feeds, aggregated and filtered (to remove duplicates and irrelevant posts) then sent to Twitter via Twitterfeed.

Plaxo: I use it to keep my local address book and calendars synced with Gmail and my iPhone. Love it.

Pandora: Great music a click away, and the iPhone app is awesome too. I hook it up to my stereo and rock out. Also a great place to discover new artists.

Yelp: I rarely contribute anymore, but I still use Yelp all the time – especially the iPhone app. It’s effectively my Yellow Pages to San Francisco. I can find things near me, read reviews and then call businesses with one click.

Standing by…

Foursquare: I love the idea of Foursquare, but I haven’t carved out the time to start using it. I’ve been known to dis it and dismiss it like I once did with Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t want to eat my words again, so I’ll just say it hasn’t found its place in my digital life yet.

Also, tumblr, posterous, ommwriter

Awesome but not for me…

12 Seconds: I’m using this as an example, but I could just as easily use Ustream, Qik, Blip, YouTube or even my own employer – Kyte. Online video has arrived, and there are a lot of amazing tools out there. The mobile apps are especially exciting to me. I’m just not really a video guy. I don’t like to talk into a webcam or see myself on the screen. Just too introverted I guess.

What the hell is wrong with Nokia? It’s as if they got together as a company, identified all they ways their software could suck, and then aimed for the bottom.

I’ve been using some of the latest Nokia handsets at work for a few weeks now. The N97, for example, is awesome on paper. Big, high-resolution touch-screen display. Decent amount of memory, power, battery life. 5 megapixel camera – with a flash even. In person, Nokia’s handsets are still nicely styled – a good size, weight and form factor. But man oh man, the user experience of these devices has me shaking my head every time I try to do anything.

The touch screen doesn’t really work. The phone prompts me 50 times every time I need a network connection. And take today. I fired up my N97 Mini and it prompted me, “Do you want to check for software updates?”

Sure, I thought, and tapped the on-screen button to continue.

Then a dialog: “There’s an important software update for your phone.”

Cool. Go on… [tap].

A message. “Go to http://www.nokia.com/softwareupdate in your browser”

Wait, a message? I can’t just download and install the update using my phone?

OK, that seems dumb, but I fire up the browser and struggle my way through typing out the URL. Which takes me to a web page (not a mobile web page) that has a horizontal scrolling iframe containing all the Nokia handsets. I’m supposed to find my handset model, but I can’t operate the scrollbar/iframe using my N97.

Don’t ask me why I even bother pressing forward at this point, but eventually I find a search box, and I enter “N97 Mini” which brings up an image of my phone.

I click on the image, and I see the following message:

Nokia Software Updater can be used with most Nokia devices listed above and need only be downloaded once.

Requires: Windows Vista or XP, USB cable to connect your device to your PC.

Then a button to download a 23 MB .exe file.

WTF? I have to use a special app installed on a Windows machine (I’m a Mac user) to update the software on my phone? You couldn’t have told me about five steps earlier in this process?

I updated one of my two Macbook Pros to Snow Leopard yesterday, and although the official price tag for the new OS is only $29, the real cost is a bit higher. For one thing, I was running older versions of a couple of apps – specifically FontExplorer and Parallels – that are not compatible with Snow Leopard.

There’s also an opportunity cost, since the install itself took about an hour, and then I had to spend several more hours troubleshooting and fine-tuning to get everything to work satisfactorily.

So, here’s my breakdown…

Right now I’m running trial versions of the latest FontExplorer (which also doesn’t work with Snow Leopard) and Parallels 4 (which does). I may switch to FontAgent Pro and VMware, but this wouldn’t change my final price by much.

I’m not thrilled about all this, and I’m not going to upgrade my other Mac for now.

What if the company that made your computer forced you to use only their web browser and email application? (Remember, Microsoft was prosecuted for less than this). What if that company could dictate what software – of any type – other companies were allowed to make for your computer, what you were allowed to install and where you could buy it? What if these restrictions were only vaguely defined, then enforced in a totally ad-hoc way, on a case-by-case basis – after the software was already built?

Obviously that would be crazy, and obviously I’m talking about the iPhone.

After a week of high-profile App Store snafus (Google Voice, Ninja Words), there’s a bona fide Apple backlash a-brewin’. Leading the charge are the likes of Michael Arrington and Om Malik, who have each made a very public point of ditching their iPhones, and Jason Calacanis who wrote an epic 5-part case against apple. Last week’s hubbub was even enough to warrant a response from Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of product marketing.

The iTunes App Store process is broken in all kinds of ways, but few people question its basic premise: an app for almost anything, and a distribution model that (a number of hiccups notwithstanding) guarantees big bucks for Apple and gives developers access to a high-profile storefront. It’s proven to be such a cash cow that everybody is getting on the app store bandwagon. There’s the Android Market, Blackberry App World, Nokia’s Ovi Store, the Sony Ericsson Application Shop, plus stores from carriers like Vodafone, Verizon and who knows how many others. The game has changed. It’s all about mobile apps now.

Think about it though. In today’s web-powered world, imagine if you had to install a special app on your computer to use Facebook, plus another one for Twitter, another for YouTube, another for getting weather reports, another for checking your stock portfolio, etc. Multiply this situation by all the different mobile operating systems and form factors, and it’s essentially the same problem that has plagued mobile from the beginning. On the positive side I suppose, there’s no shortage of work for mobile developers when there are a half dozen different Facebook apps that need to be made.

Chris Messina posted a fantastic and provocative piece on his blog last week entitled Steve Jobs Hates the App Store wherein he argues that “the iPhone has always been about the web” and that:

…development for the iPhone platform is a distraction. It’s taking our eyes off the ball, and ignoring the bigger shift that’s happening beneath our feet. Developing iPhone apps now means postponing a better and more capable web until later, because so much energy is fixated on the cool whiz-bang effects in the iPhone platform that just haven’t been implemented in browsers… yet.

It’s like going back to the days of the CD-ROM, before the web as we know it existed.

Messina sees the future, and the future is the web. The only things he sees standing between the anachronistic, walled-garden, app-store-filled present and the glorious web-powered future are a good discovery paradigm (he compares the iTunes App Store to the “Yahoo! directory phase” of the web) and current browser limitations (e.g. Safari for iPhone can’t talk to the iPhone’s GPS or accelerometer).

I would argue, however, that the web has already given us a much more powerful discovery paradigm than iTunes. It’s called Google (there’s also Amazon and BestBuy and all the other places you shop for software, music, etc. online).

I would also argue that a third big missing piece is a business model. The most reliable way to make money from iPhone apps is to charge a one-time fee for downloading them. Ad-supported apps don’t pay for themselves, and Apple doesn’t yet support a subscription model (or maybe they do – various sources conflict).

Once the app store bubble pops and we move to web apps, the one-time fee model will have to go away. Mobile ads will probably be a bigger market by then, but it still won’t be enough to support most services. So SaaS will probably become the dominant business model for mobile web apps. Many could be sold as value-adds to existing (desktop) web services. The death of the one-time fee model would be OK with developers, but Apple would lose their 30% cut. They’re bound to resist and push back against any big shift toward web apps, but resistance will prove futile.

Which brings me to my final point, and the title of this post.

Despite all the hullabaloo over Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice iPhone app, Google themselves took it in stride. And it seems they might simply relaunch Google Voice as a web app.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist told the Mobilebeat Conference last month that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in the future. He suggested it wouldn’t be cost effective for Google to support all the different native mobile platforms – from iPhone to Blackberry to Windows Mobile and all the flavors of Nokia. In his words:

“What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers. Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning. We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

In a nutshell, Chrome for mobile is why Android will win. The Google Chrome mission statement is tailor-made for mobile. This bit in particular resonated with me:

To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff – the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Nowhere is it more important for browsers to “get out of your way” than on small screens. When Google makes a mobile browser powerful enough to run real applications, then native mobile apps will die a merciful death. And what would constitute “powerful enough?”

• The browser would have to talk to native device functions like the camera, accelerometer and GPS
• The browser “chrome” (pun intended) would have to almost completely disappear in favor of the application currently running.
• Irrelevant browser functions would ideally go away (e.g. the browser’s main menu gets overtaken by the web app’s main menu).
• The browser would have to retain user and session information better than today’s mobile browsers do
• The browser would have to have to be faster, more stable and basically feel “smoother” in the way it performs

Two parting thoughts:

First, there will always be a place for native apps. Games and other apps that don’t require any connectivity, and that involve a more “immersive” experience will probably always be better as fully-native apps. But 90% of the apps in the iTunes store are really web apps in disguise.

Second, borrowing from Winston Churchill, I’ll say the iPhone is the worst phone out there, except for all the others I’ve tried. Seriously though, I really like my iPhone, and I’m happy with the apps I’ve installed. I’m not giving these up anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean I think this paradigm makes sense.

Remember CD-ROMs? Remember how cool they were and how for a brief moment in the early 90s it seemed every possible thing was being CD-ROMified – from children’s books to topo maps to baseball cards? CD-ROMs were briefly so cool that people would pay $200 a pop for the latest and greatest titles. Then they became so ubiquitous that you’d get them as giveaways and even in your junk mail. Then after just a few years, the Web came along, and most CD-ROMs suddenly made no sense at all.

So what does this have to do with iPhone apps? Well…

1. There are a whole bunch of iPhone apps that are really just repackaged websites and don’t make a lot of sense as apps.
2. There are a whole bunch of apps that everyone would dismiss as pointless and annoying if they weren’t wrapped in an iPhone.
3. iPhone apps have a stupidly limited distribution model.

I want to focus on #3. The idea that our mobile phones are small personal computers is still somewhat novel. Other than the simplest of games, we’ve never been able to install software on our phones before, and so the App Store is a little like going from Communist Prague to the Las Vegas strip – except we still have a dictator (albeit a benevolent one) called Apple.

If Apple or any other company tried to exercise complete control over what people could install on their computers they way they do with the iPhone, the reddit kids would go absolutely bananas. Having just arrived from behind the iron curtain, however, we think the App Store is like the best candy store ever.

But people don’t really want one company to dictate what they can install on their phones, even if it’s Apple. There’s no reason Apple should be able to force me to keep the Yahoo! “Stocks” app on my phone, or prevent me from installing a pair of virtual iBoobs (somewhat NSFW). And developers – not to mention companies – would love it if they didn’t have to deal with the whole iTunes Connect process in order to make their apps available to you.

Here’s a hypothetical example: If there’s a problem with the New York Times website, or they want to add a new feature, they have complete freedom to make any changes they want. Not so with the New York Times iPhone App. First they have to find a developer who knows the iPhone platform – a much smaller labor pool than that of web developers. Then, once the work is done, they have to submit it to Apple and wait. Usually about two weeks. And there’s no guarantee that Apple will accept it into the iTunes store. If Apple doesn’t like the way the New York Times has decided to, say, monetize the app by displaying ads, then the New York Times has no choice but to change it, re-submit and wait again. There’s no way the New York Times can make their app available to you outside the iTunes store (jailbroken phones excepted).

Now you might say the New York Times makes no sense as an iPhone App, but why should Apple get to make this decision for the market?

Apple has a huge advantage right now, not just because of their head start. Their SDK is light years beyond anything I’ve seen from Nokia/Symbian, Palm, RIM or J2ME. Apple provides better tools and guidance than anyone else for creating amazing, beautiful, elegant apps. Philosophically, Apple looks at the phone differently than those traditional players do, and this is Apple’s real advantage. They see the phone as a software client first and an extension of the phone company second (and the latter as a kind of necessary evil at that). Android is the only other platform that looks at the phone this way, but at some point in the not too distant future, this is just what phones will be.

When you think of the iPhone as just another computing platform, then it doesn’t make sense for Apple to hold a monopoly on distributing software for it. The iTunes store might always be the best and easiest place to get apps for your iPhone, and Apple surely loves their 30% cut, but someday nothing will prevent people from selling you their apps by way of their websites or Amazon or even in the form of… gasp… CD-ROMs from old-school retailers. Count on it happening sooner rather than later.

Apple always has impecable timing, and they will probably open things up right around the time that Nokia’s new app store comes online.

The purpose of the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines (requires login) is to help developers create well-designed experiences for the iPhone that also measure up to Apple’s reputation and high standards. The guidelines drive toward a consistency, and to this end they encourage developers to take advantage of a sizeable library of existing components.

Somewhat understandably, they don’t say much about branding… beyond this warning:

Branding is most effective when it is subtle and understated. People use your iPhone application to get things done or to be entertained; they don’t want to feel as if they’re being forced to watch an advertisement. Therefore, you should strive to incorporate your brand’s colors or images in a refined, unobtrusive way. For example, you might use a custom color scheme in views and controls.

Apple wants your application to be a friendly sibling to its core iPhone applications:

The user interfaces of iPhone applications are characterized by beautiful images and lush color. As an application designer, you want to fit into this environment by providing an aesthetically pleasing user interface.

It boils down to the question of how much to use the building blocks that Apple provides vs. whether to invent your own. And the answer is not straightforward. To help designers frame their decisions around this problem, Apple identifies three different application styles:

• Productivity Applications – enabling users to organize or interact with information
• Utility Applications – performing a basic task and requiring little user input
• Immersive Applications – a full-screen, visually rich environment (mainly games)

From Apple’s perspective, the launch icon and the loading (i.e. splash) screen provide sufficient branding opportunities for most applications. Putting aside games (and other “immersive” apps), most iPhone apps are satisfied to take this approach, and most iPhone apps look very “standard” in their use of colors, icons and other elements. But even within what could be described as “refined” and “unobtrusive” there is a range of possibilities.

Most applications (like these examples from Yelp and TwitterFon) have little more than a custom-colored navigation bar, with standard text:

Some applications use a custom typographical image in the navigation bar:

Although, this often reverts to plain text or goes away altogether on screens that require a dynamic title:

A few applications use an image for the entire area of the navigation bar, but it can look a little funny when combined with standard-looking navigation and control buttons:

Beyond the navigation bar, most applications use the basic iPhone styles, icons and controls for the main screen content, although many apps apply some custom colors, fonts and other minor style elements. Nonetheless, these apps still feel “Apple” in the way they look and behave. Only a few apps abandon the Apple guidelines altogether in favor of a branded experience.

In the thumbnails below, the Quantum of Solace app limited its branding to a custom color palette, whereas Lil’ Wayne went stone gangsta on the guidelines (click thumbnails to enlarge):

This is where the lines are fuzzy. Within the Lil’ Wayne app, there’s quite a bit you can do, so in some ways it would qualify as a “productivity” application, but it’s probably more appropriately positioned as “immersive.” Transforming your friends into Lil’ Wayne is a game, of sorts.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that when it comes to branded third-party applications, the iPhone does not differ philosophically from regular Mac OS (or Windows for that matter). Outside of games and other immersive apps, Apple probably prefers that developers work within the Apple styleguide, and for the most part this works to everyone’s advantage. It’s problematic when a standard component – like a dialog box – looks and behaves differently from one app to another.

The desktop operating systems have established themselves firmly enough that most developers happily eschew non-standard branded “skins” for Mac or Windows apps. But iPhone apps are trendy right now in the way that Web 1.0 used to be, and guidelines or not, it’s a bit like the Wild West.

Raven Zachary posted recently about Apple’s new criteria for application acceptance, where he noted that there are now more fart apps than sudoku apps for iPhone. These appeared in the app store only after some conflict and controversy, with Apple initially refusing this genre due to “limited utility.” Apple ultimately loosened its standards, however, and lo! your iPhone can now pass gas.

I agree with Raven’s contention that “limited utility” is not really a good reason for Apple to reject applications, and I also understand the philosophical argument for complete openness (let the market decide). But criteria or not, it is certainly true that there are some really dumb apps available from the iTunes store.

I’m not talking about the fart apps. These aren’t my thing, but I can think of a few people in my circle of friends who probably own one. I think the dumbest genres of apps in the iTunes store are (in no particular order)…

Top 100… These apps simply list the top 100 of something (like “100 words almost everyone confuses and misuses”). Some of them, like the “100 Greatest Metal Songs” allow you to buy tracks from the iTunes store. That’s it.

Picture of the day – Just what it sounds like, these apps send you a picture a day. Some of them have a theme (like “space pictures”) but some of them are just some dude sending you pictures he likes.

Mind reading and fortune telling – The iPhone app version of mind reading and fortune telling is just like the real-world version… a fraudulent waste of time and money, or perhaps a harmless and supposedly fun waste of time and money. Either way, enjoy!

Dial So-and-so – One-touch dialing is a good idea for an iPhone app, but an app (and a dollar) per phone number? Come on people.

Hello Governor – This isn’t really a genre, but there’s an app in the iTunes store that just says “Hello, Governor!” in a British accent. That’s it. Seriously?

I suppose everyone has a right to try to cash in on the iPhone app craze, and the market will decide if these genres really deserve a place in the iTunes store. It’s akin to spam in a way, however, because the cost of distribution is nil. From the perspective of any enterprising developer, there’s no reason not to spin out as much garbage as possible if you can get it onto the shelves.

Philosophically, I don’t like the idea of a centrally-controlled marketplace, but in practice it doesn’t seem to be hurting the proliferation of great apps or completely preventing the useless (IMO) ones.

I could almost go so far as to say that Evernote is the best free app period, iPhone or otherwise. In Evernote’s case, it’s iPhone app and otherwise, seeing as it also works via a desktop app (both Windows and Mac OS), Firefox add-on, regular web, mobile web and email.

Evernote has many fans, many vocal fans, so I suppose I’m just joining the choir, but it’s a choir worth joining. At the same time, when I’ve sung the praises of Evernote to my friends and colleagues, I’ve struggled to articulate exactly what it’s good for. There are so many possible uses of Evernote, and I’ve only scratched the surface. Here’s what I use it for…

• Organizing my wine list. I take a snapshot of each label with my iPhone or grab the description from the K & L Wines website (the best wine shop in SF, with an amazing website to boot). Evernote can read text in the images(!), so the labels are searchable.
• Taking notes in meetings. Afterwards, my notes are tagged and searchable, and because Evernote syncs, my notes are immediately accessible across all my devices.
• Keeping track of ideas. When I think of something I want to blog about, I’ll create a note in Evernote and tag it accordingly. Then I’ll build on it over time, adding more notes and often a few bookmarks and things clipped from web pages.
• Planning a vacation. Leading up to my recent trip to New Zealand, I scribbled a rough itinerary down in my notebook, snapped a picture of it and saved it into Evernote. Even my sloppy handwriting was (mostly) searchable. Then, as I booked various activities and intra-country trips, I clipped the important bits (contact info, dates, confirmation numbers) from their webpages and saved these too. As I travelled, all of this was at my fingertips.
• Local business info. I use Evernote to store the contact info, menus and other info germane to the businesses I use – or want to.
• Recipes. I’ll grab a recipe off Epicurious or even snap a picture of a page in one of my cookbooks, and then I’ll access it at my girlfriend’s house – on my iPhone or her laptop – to make us dinner (her kitchen is much nicer than mine).
• Whiteboards. Snapping pictures of a cluttered whiteboard after a meeting is nothing new, but when you do it with Evernote, your scrawlings are searchable!
• Business cards. Who needs a fancy card scanner when you can snap a picture of a business card and save it into Evernote? Better integration with Address Book would be nice.
• House hunting. I can take a picture of a house I see and/or the agent’s contact info (on the sign). Once it’s in Evernote, I can map it (Google maps) with one click, and the note is geo-tagged with the location (if I allow this on my iPhone).

There are lots of possibilities, like auto-forwarding your email to Evernote and dragging all your PDFs into it, and all kinds of other uses like those mentioned here.

Apparently, Evernote has been around a while, beginning with a desktop app. The iPhone app is where it hit its stride. It’s reported more than half of its half million users interact with it via their iPhone. I’m not sure I would have embraced it without iPhone support.

OK, I’m done rhapsodizing.

There are a handful of things I wish Evernote did better, but the only big thing on my wishlist is better offline support.

Like a party guest who insists on staying long after the alcohol is gone, the music is done, and I’ve dozed off on my couch… YouTube, Weather and Stocks should go away from my iPhone if I say so.

But of course, I can’t get rid of them.

Since the launch of the App Store, there’s really no reason for these to live among the “native” iPhone apps like iPod or Safari. There are many would-be YouTubes out there, and many more peers of Yahoo Weather and Yahoo Finance that I might prefer over the ones that Apple has chosen for me.

Sure, I don’t mind if Apple suggests a few apps to me by pre-installing them by default, but there’s really no reason I should be stuck with Yahoo Finance when I’d rather use Bloomberg or Morningstar.

For now, short of jailbreaking my phone, I have to settle for relegating these to the bottom of the list.

But again… why?

As a user experience guy, one of the things I do for my job is try out every new web service that comes along. Most of them don’t really stick, and some I avoid simply because of god-awful naming. I’m talking about you, Frrvrr. Seriously, the Web 2.0 Company Name Generator could have done way better. Anyway, the following is the shortlist of the services I actually get value out of on an almost daily basis…

del.icio.us
There’s too much good stuff on the Internetz. I find a handful of things every day that I don’t have time to read right away. I also read a lot of good stuff that I know I’ll want to find later or refer back to. Enter del.icio.us. I must have a couple thousand URLs bookmarked in there now, but I never have trouble finding them. The social component is a nice value-add, but del.icio.us would still be essential to my Internet survival without it. My only complaint is the lack of support for multi-word tags. Commas would have been a better choice than spaces as a delineator.

I discovered Plaxo a few years back when I was trying to consolidate and clean up a few different address books. It was good then, and it’s awesome now. With hooks into Gmail, Google Calendar, Yahoo Mail and Calendar and LinkedIn, plus a sync tool for Mac OS, Plaxo is the keystone of my personal information management. Recently they added a social networking suite of features called “Pulse,” which makes sense, but I have no use for it myself. I’m not sure what it does that, say, LinkedIn doesn’t already handle for me.

I used to alternate pretty much equally between Pandora and Last.fm, but eventually I found myself using Pandora more and more and Last.fm less and less. Pandora just picks better music. Last.fm is a social network, but all I’m interested in is a steady stream of good tunes. I’m sensing a pattern here, three apps with social networking components I don’t use. I’m an introverted person. Case in point I suppose. Last.fm uses collaborative filtering – the opinions of your friends and peers – to choose music it thinks you’ll like. Pandora uses a proprietary algorithm based on an editorial analysis of hundreds of attributes of each song. What’s more, Pandora learns from your own consumption of the music it plays and gets better and better.

Maybe I’m not so anti-social after all. I started using LinkedIn as a way of keeping tabs on people I worked with in the past, especially as they moved and changed jobs. Beyond that, I used it occasionally to help friends find jobs and to recruit people to work for me. Recently, they launched an “Answers” feature, where people post questions and the community responds. I’ve asked a few questions myself and gotten useful answers, and I enjoy browsing the pool of other people’s questions.

I don’t know the exact ratio of good luck to good thinking responsible for the wonderful world called Yelp, but they’ve managed to create something incredibly useful and utterly addictive. The various ways to connect and communicate with other people are especially engaging. You can rate other people’s reviews along several dimensions (useful, funny, cool) and send each other quick little compliments that are then displayed for all to see. Add talk threads, a local events calendar and a host of other useful features – all wrapped in a smart and efficient UI.

Wikipedia
My route to Wikipedia usually begins with a Google search for some obscure tidbit of trivia. A few hyperlinks later and I’m hopelessly hooked, and I can kiss an hour of work goodbye.

Specifically Google Reader and Google Analytics. I used to use Bloglines to follow my feeds, but I switched to Google Reader because it’s able to keep track of exactly what posts I’ve read (and not read). Simple as that. As for Google Analytics, I get a darn good analytics app for free, and Google gets some data about my website and my visitors that it couldn’t get any other way. Win win.

The engine that powers this blog. It just keeps getting better and better, and it’s free. The WP community gives you help when you need it, and they’re always cranking out new ways to extend the core software. Code is poetry indeed.

Notably absent from my favorites are a few very popular services. People tout these all the time, and some of my friends give me dumbfounded looks when they find out I’m not a fan of…

• Twitter – I just don’t feel any need to get constant up-to-the-minute updates about anyone, and I have no interest in keeping anyone that updated about me.
• Facebook – I hate how Facebook forces you to spam everyone. Imagine ordering a cup of coffee at Starbucks and having to order drinks for everyone else in the store in order to pick yours up. I am, however, totally addicted to Facebook’s new Boggle-like game called Prolific.
• Flickr – I’m actually a fan of Flickr, but I’m a casual and infrequent photographer at best. Also, I can’t stand the pressure to come up with witty captions for everything.
• Technorati – I use Google. Rubel was right. Enough said.
• Last.fm – See Pandora, above.

Finally, there are a number of services that really intrigue me and have great possibilities. They are doing interesting things, adding value to the web and pushing it in the right directions. They just don’t fulfill a frequent or persistent need of mine, so I don’t have any compelling reason to use them on a regular basis.

• Ning – New-ish venture from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. An application platform that promises, “Create Your Own Social Network For Anything.” I have friends who think it’s the bomb diggity, but I’ve only scratched the surface of it myself.
• Dapper – A web service that enables you to turn any website into an API. It’s pretty slick, and it’s tools like this that are pushing us ever closer to a truly semantic web.
• Yahoo Pipes – This is a preview for how basic software engineering will be done in the future. Oooh the future.
• Freebase – More semantic fun. A database of “the world’s information,” drawn from large open (structured) data sets.

I know this list might seem pretty random. I’ve failed to even mention quite a number of notable services, many of which I have used and enjoyed to some extent. They just haven’t graduated to the level of the things that benefit me every day.