Organising Your Online Life

• Author: reemixx
• Filed under: Software, Technology
• Date: Apr 20,2008

Like many other web geeks, I’ve found myself using a whole bunch of web applications on a daily basis, such as Flickr, Twitter, Pownce, YouTube, Digg, and Last.fm, just to name a few. I also use Gmail for multiple email accounts, and have a bunch of RSS feeds to manage. This is all well and good, but it can get a little disorganised and inefficient when you’re using desktop clients for some of them, such as Twitterific for Twitter and NetNewsWire for RSS, and your web browser for others such as Flickr and YouTube. Plus there’s the need to check updates on multiple web-based social services constantly, for example, FaceBook, Twitter, Pownce, etc. Surely there’s a better way?!

Indeed there is. Several, in fact. It just depends on how you personally like to manage things.

Going Completely Web-Based

Over the past week, I’ve been experimenting with doing as much as I can inside the web browser. This not only has the benefit of being neater and easier to manage, but I’m running less desktop applications which means more CPU and RAM for the applications that really need it. When you’re using processor and RAM hungry applications like Photoshop and Aperture regularly, every little bit of juice helps.

Before the development of web based lifestreaming and social aggregation services like socialthing! and FriendFeed, we would have had no choice but to open each web app in a separate browser tab and check each of them individually. Lately, I’ve been using socialthing! to check and make posts to several web services at once, including Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and Flickr. Currently, there are only a limited number of services available on socialthing! as it is still in private beta, but it will soon support several other commonly used web services. By no means are socialthing! and FriendFeed the only lifestreaming service, however. There are also several others out there. What I like about socialthing! however is its ability to grab my friends from each web service itself rather than forcing me to add my friends manually. Not only that, but I’m able to make posts and respond to other people’s posts from inside socialthing! itself, so there’s no need to fire up each web service in my browser just to respond to someone. This makes the entire experiment of doing as much as I can inside my web browser possible.

For my RSS feeds, I’ve dropped NetNewsWire in favour of Google Reader which I can also access from within my browser. This has a couple of benefits; it’s one less application to run, and I’m now able to access and update my feeds from any computer anywhere at all. For my calendar, I’ve also dropped OSX’s iCal in favour of Google Calendar. The big plus here is being able to make updates and view upcoming events from anywhere and across multiple computers - something I couldn’t do before with iCal without having a .Mac account, or using something like iSynCal, which has its own set of problems.

I now also use my personalised iGoogle page. I’ve customised it so that I have all my Google apps visible on the page such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Reader. I can interact with all of these apps directly from my iGoogle page which is extremely handy.

Of course, there are some limitations to doing everything web-based. I regularly use two Gmail accounts; one for personal stuff, and one for work stuff. Due to the way Google does things, you’re only able to sign in with one Google ID at once. This means that if I were to use my email completely web-based and not with an email client, I would only be able to see incoming mail for one account. For this reason, and because I also have several other non-Gmail email accounts, I still use OSX’s Mail.app to manage my email. This is fine however, as most email services I use offer IMAP, so they’re able to sync across multiple computers without problems.

The other main problem with going completely web-based is that I don’t have offline access to my calendar, docs and RSS within Google. For this reason, it obviously won’t suit everybody. But for my uses, this isn’t really an issue as I work online almost all the time.

In summary, I’ve been able to ditch several desktop apps in favour of using my web browser for everything. Not only this, but I’m able to access multiple web services at once using socialthing! and iGoogle, which save me from opening a dozen browser tabs at a time. I’m enjoying the increased organisation, less clutter in my workspace, and the noticeable improvement in computer performance with less desktop apps to run. There are now only two desktop apps that I use for web-based service; Mail.app for email, and Adium for instant messaging across multiple services (currently MSN and Google Talk).

Using the Desktop for Web Apps

The alternative to doing everything web-based is to use an application such as Fluid (for OSX Leopard only) or Mozilla’s Prism (multiplatform, in development). These pieces of software allow web-based apps such as the above mentioned Facebook, Google Calendar, Twitter, etc to be run on the desktop. They run in their own windows and have their own icons, just like any desktop application.

There are definitely benefits to running web apps this way. You won’t lose anything when your browser crashes. You can access the apps using alt-tab or command-tab or Exposé like other desktop apps. You can keep the apps open without interfering with your web surfing and having multiple browser windows or tabs open. You still minimise your use of multiple desktop apps because technically you’re only running the one app, be it Fluid or Prism, just with multiple windows for multiple web services.

I haven’t had any experience with Prism so I can’t really say much about it, but I do know that Fluid brings quite a lot to the table. See this screencast of Muxtape with CoverFlow using Fluid for example. Despite my preference with doing everything web-based, I would still use something like this for its simple convenience.

Web Apps and the Future

Web apps definitely aren’t going anywhere. With the increasing number of web startups that are happening, and the growing popularity of social networking, music and video streaming, and other related web services, we’re only going to see many, many more of them. Some of them will just be mixups of what we’ve seen before, but every now and then a real gem appears that many of us will feel the need to use, or at least try for a time.

What does this mean? Probably a few headaches for the average internet user, and a few more for the web geek. There comes a point when you can be doing too much online, and find yourself spending far more time than you originally intended just checking your RSS feeds and replying to your friends’ messages over multiple services. That’s why organising your online life is just as important as organising your offline life (that’s IRL for us geeks). These web services shouldn’t dominate our online lives, but compliment them and add a level of interaction to them that isn’t otherwise possible.