Tag: web services

New features from Flickr

Flickr Blog has two good news:

  1. Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is available.  Those of you using Flickr Uploadr to send pictures to you Flickr photo stream might want  to upgrade.  The new version offers a bunch of handy functionality, such as tagging, naming, and describing photos, as well as reordering.  These are much faster to do on your computer than over the network, so it should speed up your processing quite a bit.
  2. Statistics for Pro accounts.  If you have a Pro account, you can enable statistics and enjoy some graphs.  It takes about 24 hours for the stats to appear once you enable them, so be a little patient.  Finally, you’ll know  how people are finding your pictures, where from they are coming, and what are looking at the most.

Web-based personal finance managers

Over the last few years I’ve made several attempts at improving my personal finance management. With the exception of the last six month, I never tracked my spendings for more than a month or so. Two main reasons for that were:

  1. I never was on a financial edge for more than a month or so.
  2. I don’t enjoy accounting all that much and I never had a tool that made it anymore pleasurable.

Each of my finance tracking periods has been guided by a different tool. I tried a few approaches from plain text and spreadsheet files, through custom written scripts, to widely used applications. None of those worked for me, except for the last one I tried – GnuCash.

I use GnuCash for about six month now. It’s a really nice application, which implemented a few ideas right. But for me two things made it – documentation (especially 3 pages of Accounting 101 shipped with the software) and the wizard which asked a few simple questions and created some accounts for me to use. I started with the simple things, and somehow they worked. Then I tried a few more advanced ones (multi-currency, transaction splits, etc), and I still loved it.

I still love GnuCash. But I am starting to feel the need for a web-based tool. As good as GnuCash is, it has a number of pitfalls for me:

  • All data is on a single computer. I need to back it up myself. I can’t access it if my laptop is not with me.
  • My mostly used tool is Firefox browser, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t use it for my accounting too.
  • Web-based services can offer additional goodies such as SMS/IM integration, email reminders, social aspects, and so on.

So, today I started looking for a replacement. My quest began at the LifeHacker post titled “Is Mint Realy For Your Money?” The article reviewed Mint.com service, while comments suggested a few alternative solutions.

Here are the services that I tried. Note – I haven’t spent much time with any one of them. Mostly those were brief sessions of register – create an account – create a few transactions – check the settings – logout.

Yodlee MoneyCenter – looks like something feature complete, but the interfaces are overly complicated and there is a certain degree of paranoia with logging in and out. While it looked like Yodlee was doing everything I needed all at once, the complexity of the interfaces and the general speed of the site made me go away without spending much time there.

Wesabe – got me impressed. Twice. Just a few minutes after I registered, I got an email from one of the co-founders – Marc Hedlund, welcoming me to the community. Marc caught my twit, followed to this blog, read a few recent entries (especially those about privacy concerns and Firefox extensions). His welcoming message provided a few extra pointers in the areas that I appeared to be interested in. Wow! I’ve seen a lot of services with personalized, fast responding support teams, but Wesabe guys (there is a blog and forum too) are a couple of levels above anything that I can remember.

The second impression on me was by Wesabe’s tagging system. Again, being a web addict I’ve seen plenty of sites and applications that use tagging. Wesabe did something really cool – they kept the simplicity of the concept while greatly extending the functionality. You can do anything with tags there. It’s very similar to the way Flickr uses tags for some internal stuff, but here tags are given to the user.

Regarding the functionality, Wesabe takes a more social approach to finance tracking and accounting. Most of the boring stuff is simplified and automated. Things which are used most often are implemented in the very straightforward way. And there is just enough of functionality to make it useful without cluttering the service interfaces and users minds.

There are a couple of limitations that prevent me from using this service right now though. None of the Cyprus banks support a straightforward export of data in any format that can be used to input accounts into Wesabe. So, I’m left with only cash-type accounts. And currently those cash-type accounts in Wesabe cannot track the account balance (no opening balance, reconciliation, etc). Marc mentioned that account balances will be added to cash accounts shortly, since many people requested them. Once this done, I’ll jump back to Wesabe with my bank statements. Really, really neat service.

ClearCheckBook.com – looked like I can work only with one currency at a time. That’s not acceptable. I use three at the moment – CYP, USD, and EUR. CYP with gradually disappear over the next few month, but I’m stuck with USD and EUR for some time to come.

Then I finally got to the service which started my quest today – Mint.com . Unfortunately, I wasn’t at all able to try it out, because it supports only United States banks and financial institutions. There was no way for me to avoid account import from one of those places where I don’t have an account.

So, as you can see from the above paragraphs, Wesabe is the one closest to my needs.  And compared to the other ones it is so much nicer that I’d rather wait for those features that I need rather than settle for something that I don’t enjoy half as much.

What other services are there?  Did I miss anything?

Looking for a king of TODO list managers

Recently I did another round of TODO applications testing.  There are plenty around, but none of them seemed to fit into my work flow.  I wanted something online, but something fast.  I wanted something simple, but with enough features to integrate with the rest of my toolbox.  This, that, and a bit more, and preferably free.

Just to give you an idea where I was before the TODO list manager – I was using Google Calendar with tasks written down as all day long events, which I was constantly moving forward, spreading them across the upcoming week.  Needless to say this was somewhat time consuming and boring, with a few low priority tasks falling off the list every now and then.

My  quest for TODO list manager started with Hiveminder.  This is a really nice web application, which is easy to use. It implements some really neat ideas, like doing a brain dump first and then reviewing and reorganizing tasks later. It also integrates nicely with the outside world.  There is a way to link it with Google Calendar, as well as follow things via RSS feeds.  There is some integration with email.  And, also, there is a very nice system in place for sharing tasks with other people.  Plus, Hiveminder is the baby of the same parents who gave us RT request tracker.

As I said, Hiveminder is a really nice application.  But it didn’t fit into my work flow somehow.  And I was a little bit turned off by the interfaces. Needs a bit more polish  I guess.

Then I tried … well, I don’t really remember now all the applications that I tried.  What I remember is that there are plenty of good ones.  Each does something differently, focusing on different areas of TODO list management.

… then I settled on Ta-da List from 37 Signals – people, who really know how to web applications.  I loved Ta-da List the moment I saw it.  After all those features and ideas that I saw everywhere, it captured me with it’s simplicity.  There is practically no functionality.  Just create lists, add and remove items, and subscribe to the RSS feed. That’s pretty much it.  That’s what I was looking for.  In case I wanted something extra – plenty of functionality is available through commercial upgrades.  But, at that time, I didn’t want any extra functionality.  I’ve seen so  much of it everywhere that I wanted to get away from it for some time.  And it worked.  For some time.

Finally, I arrived to my current choice of TODO list managers – Toodledo.  A few of my friends were trying it out independently of each other, and all seemed to have only positive feedback about the service.  When I tried it – I understood why.

Toodledo is a very feature rich service. It has lists, goals, contexts, priorities, notes, due dates, and a tonne of other features.  Somehow they are organized so that they always nearby, but without jumping into the face.  The interface feels like it had a lot of thought put into it.  But the best of all – the connectivity of the service with the rest of my tools.  RSS feeds are there.  Google Calendar is there (and it’s done better than that of HiveMinder).  There is Firefox extension with sidebar and toolbar buttons.  And there is even Twitter integration.  What more can I ask for?  (Provided that I don’t use iPhone, for which they also have an integration).  In this place and time, Toodledo is just perfect for me.  If you are in search for a good TODO list manager, I strongly recommend that you give it a try.

Twitter limits outgoing SMS to 250 per week

I just noticed that there is now a limit of outgoing SMS messages from Twitter to your mobile phone.  Current number is 250 per week.  Apparently, this was introduced some time ago (a couple of weeks?), but only noticed it now.  There is no mention of it in Twitter Blog.

Twitter is not currently running any ads or membership services, so it’s hard to see how they can pay for all those outgoing SMS, except via a few investments that they got.  So, this limitation was somewhat expected.  It’s still sad to see it come, even though it’s high enough for most people not to hit it at all.

I think that Twitter will (or at least should) introduce some commercial packages with some extra features and several options for SMS limitations.  250/week for a free account sounds like a reasonable amount.

Google Sites – another tool to wait for

Some time ago Google acquired JotSpot – a wiki-like web service. There weren’t much news about it since then though. It was obvious that JotSpot will join Google’s office applications in one form or another. But details and time lines weren’t clear. Slashdot runs a follow-up post, saying that JotSpot will replace Google Pages tool. It will be called Google Sites. Here is a relevant quote:

Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

Obviously, this is something to wait for. There is a demand for a tool like this among small companies, and existing solutions could use a little competitive push.

Update: More details about Google Apps plans for 2008 at this Techcrunch post.