Visit flickr – notice anything different? Some updates to the styling and some new functionality. It’s also officially moved out of beta…to gamma. It would be so wrong of any web app to officially move out of beta – just wouldn’t be web 2.0. I’m liking the changes to the search and organisation links. Organizing photo’s is a bit easier to – made the whole site easier to use.
Google Trends. Nice app for stat whores and info gatherers. Compare search patterns for up to five search terms and see some pretty graphs and also how that search term is used locally and across the world. For example, look at the increase in the term Edinburgh around festival time. Also links to related news items if available. Great app.
Google Notebook. Another Google app which has just been launched – this allows you to link and clip web sites. Online research tool basically. Download an extension for Firefox to allow easy access to your one or many notebooks from the browser (IE also). From what I’ve used it’s fine – no rss or xml sharing of list though so it’s not yet a del.ici.ous rival. Wasn’t there a Google Bookmarks app as well? There was – which has tagging of sorts but not much sharing. Combine the two and you’ve got a far better app.
Google Calendar. Has become my full time calendar replacing 30boxes and Outlook. Easy to use, search and is integrated nicely with Google Mail. There are other more feature rich apps on the web but this meets all my needs.
If Google integrates mail, calendar, notebook and some sort of to-do then it would be a perfect online organiser. Hopefully it’s only a matter of time. The apps (apart from to-do) are all there but have the feel of separate applications that are not well integrated. A wee bit of Ajax magic would soon sort that.