Best Podcast Number 1

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Best Podcast Number 1

Bill Butler: BestStuff Podcast, April 1st, 2006.

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Bill Butler: Welcome to the BestStuff Podcast. I'm Bill Butler.

Tim Moses: And I'm Tim Moses. Each month we'll discuss and recommend some of the best items in today's marketplace.

Bill Butler: This week we'll discuss the best of the new web, also called Web 2.0.

Tim Moses: So sit back and relax for the next half-hour with the BestStuff Podcast.

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Bill Butler: All right, well thank you for joining us. This is our first episode of the BestStuff Podcast, and it's coming to you from BestStuff.com. You can find all sorts of interesting reviews and data on the best products on the web, and this week Tim and I have decided we're going to talk about the best websites out on the internet. Since this is our first podcast, we're still in the process of evaluating different pieces of hardware that we intend will probably be the mainstay of this. But we're constantly looking at new websites and new ways for people to interact or be more productive in their businesses, and we have some good ideas, things we'd like to share with you. So I'm going to start out with Writely. I found out about Writely I guess about three or four months ago. I read a website, a blog basically, called TechCrunch, and it's pretty good about outlining all the new Web 2.0 players, and Writely really, really stands out. I think it stands out because much like email, where it's that indispensable office productivity tool, Writely is a substitute for Microsoft Word. It has a good portion of the functionality of Word without a lot of the bloat that you find in some of that software. You're not installing a program onto your desktop, but instead you're going to a web page, Writely.com, and you simply sign up with an email address and a password and you have access to pretty extensive features which give you..

Tim Moses: Spell-checking would be one of those, so if Bill writes how he speaks, that would be useful.

Bill Butler: Yes. Let's see. The other coolest thing about Writely that I like is that -- and this is a real problem, I think, in larger businesses, and even small companies, but larger businesses to a greater extent -- is when you write something, you try to get other people's feedback on it or input and perform revisions. While Word has red-lining capabilities, you have to go to the time of saving that document, you have to attach it to an email and send it out to a group of people. Writely eliminates a lot of those extra steps and let's you share that document on the website with other people. So if I have a document and Tim is interested, and I'm interested in getting his feedback, I can invite him to that document with his email address, and he can simply make the change he wants to make or even offer suggestions.

Tim Moses: The cool part is that you can both be, or any number of people can work on the same document at the same time. So it's not like in Word where you take it and send it to somebody, wait for them to finish, they send it back. You're waiting for somebody else to have time to work on something and then send it back, in which case it may be small changes and you can spend a lot of time going back and forth. The cool part is two people could be working on it at once. That's what I think.

Bill Butler: Yeah, absolutely. And above and beyond that, it has beautiful security built into it as well. Because if I specifically invite someone, they can actually come to it with a secured user name and password. But I can also publish it publicly. Or I can invite five people to actually view the document but not actually give them permissions to make any changes to that document, to maybe get a general impression but not to allow them to physically make changes, which I may not want to lose control over.

Tim Moses: My big question about Writely is, it's great that you can start from scratch and write something here, but what if you have an existing document? Or what if you need to take it out and send it to somebody who's not on the internet, if there are any people like that anymore? What options do you have there?

Bill Butler: Writely's done a really good job of this. It's not perfect yet, but it's awfully good. And it's better actually -- I've downloaded a lot of programs that claim that they're Microsoft Word substitutes on my Mac, and I've got to say it's probably better than almost any Word emulator out there, except for maybe OpenOffice, which does an awfully good job. So you can take a Word document and you can actually upload it to Writely. It has a very easy interface for doing that, the same way you're used to uploading pictures or anything like that to the web. And once it comes into Writely, it looks like the Writely document, it's actually formatted for the most part like your Word document. By the same token, if you finish a Writely document and you have it complete the way you want it, you can either elect to export that document to your local desktop -- so save it locally, and it'll save it with a .DOC extension or an .RTF if you want rich text, or .PDF even. I think PDFs, if they're not here yet, it might be a pro version. So it's very flexible from that standpoint. You can also print directly from the web page. It has a print button, and it does an excellent job of formatting the text the way you see it on screen as the Word document. The other things I think are extremely cool about it is that it's tag-friendly. For those of you who are not used to the Web 2.0 environment, you know we're all used to thinking in terms of directories or folders, creating a new folder and dropping documents into it. And while that is helpful, the tag mindset is becoming a little more prevalent on the web. The idea is that if I had something that was a proposal for one of my clients, I could tag it as "proposal" and I could tag it with the client's name. And that way if I ever decided to come back and wanted to look at all my proposals, I would just choose the tag "proposal" and I would view all my proposals. And if I wanted to actually view a proposal for that particular client, I would choose "proposal" for that client name and would view just those documents. So instead of having to create hierarchies, the tags sort of on the fly create these hierarchical ways of managing your information.

Tim Moses: Which if you'd try to do that with folders, you'd be making multiple folders, making aliases or shortcuts to your documents to put into multiple places. Tagging seems like such a simple way of handling things, but really the flexibility you get out of it is pretty amazing.

Bill Butler: Yeah. And now you have these things called "tag clouds". If you've seen them before, I didn't get it into recently. It seems like I should have gotten it, but when you see a bunch of tags on a page and some are bigger and some are little, I was thinking that was just for artistic merit, that it was just a way to display those tags. In fact, the larger tags tend to be the most popular tags, so the tags on a tag cloud grow with popularity. So when you go to scan a page that has a bunch of tags on it, BOOM!, there's the biggest tag and that's the most popular one, and the littlest tag is the least popular tag. So it's a really clever way of keeping the social. Web 2.0 is all about the social aspects. It's all about trying to reuse information to the best of your ability. The other obvious things. It tracks revisions automatically, and you can fall back to different revisions. If you have revisions, it's saving constantly, so you can look at revisions 11 seconds ago or three minutes ago or five minutes ago.

Tim Moses: So you're not marking each revision, it's just automatically doing that?

Bill Butler: It is on top of it. It just marks revisions constantly. Every two to five minutes you've got a revision. You can also hit the save button if you want to stamp a revision. But this document -- for instance, Tim and I are working off our show notes in a Writely document, and we could very easily click on revisions and look to see what each of us did over the last 30 minutes preparing for this. We talked about uploading documents, but it can also insert graphics. It's great. If you have a signature you need to insert or if you have a logo you need to insert, that's very easy to do. Multiple browser support. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari -- all the main browsers have great support under it. And by the way, Google just purchased them. That's another great endorsement for this product.

Tim Moses: So they should be around for a little while.

Bill Butler: Right. If it wasn't Google, it would have been Yahoo, because of the way they're fighting over properties and what they want.

Tim Moses: Well, the little bit that I have looked at it, it seems very slick. The nice part about it is that it's fast and responsive, the interface is very fast. I've used some other 2.0 that just feel real sluggish. And I'm not running it on a really speedy machine, but I haven't noticed anything in here that seems slow or painful to use at all. It seems very streamlined, and all the important things are readily available.

Bill Butler: Yeah, it's just the opposite of what you come to look at this present...

Tim Moses: As opposed to using Word.

Bill Butler: Right. Well, using Word, using Excel, using PowerPoint -- any of the applications where you have these egregious licensing deals when you go purchase the software, you have a fairly painstaking installation process. You have more features than probably most people would use. I would say 95% of the people are going to use the very, very basic features when it comes to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and those kinds of applications. So it's kind of refreshing to come to something that's going to have all the features I need and it's not going to have any of that bloat, so I don't have all that confusion in the menus as I'm going to do things. But yeah, we've belabored Writely enough. Do you have any comments on it before we head on to my next one?

Tim Moses: Probably should move on. I could go on for a long time about it. The best thing to do is go out and give it a try.

Bill Butler: It's Writely.com. Tim, do you want to do one of yours?

Tim Moses: Sure, I can put one in here.

Bill Butler: Great.

Tim Moses: The next site for me has come in handy a number of times lately. It might not be something I'd normally use, but it is Meebo.com. It's sole purpose is to let you do instant messaging. If you go to the website, you can log in with your AIM, ICQ, .Mac, Jabber, GoogleTalk, MSN, whatever service you happen to use, or you can log into multiple at a time, and from the website it's your instant messaging client. So your buddy list shows up in a window. Any message that pops up, pops up in a different window. They're all within your web browser. And the feel of it feels just like a desktop application all inside your web browser window. So the great part about this is you can get your instant messaging -- it has all the regular instant messaging features -- but you don't actually have to have any client software to do it. So if you sit down at a friend's machine and you want to get on instant messaging, you don't have to install something to get to what you need, you can just start using it. Just go to the website and it's all there, and it remembers a lot of your settings. What's been especially useful for me recently, if you ever go someplace where there's a public network and they may not have all the proper ports open for doing instant messaging, that can be a problem for a lot of people. Or it could be a problem at work. So if you're at work and they've locked things down so that you can't do instant messaging, this is your way around it. You just go to the website, log in, and it all happens through the main web port, port 80, so anything which supports web stuff, any firewalls that have that open, you can do your instant messaging from many of those services. So it's been pretty slick. It's a nice site.

Bill Butler: I had a hard time understanding why people wanted these services, and you just touched on it right there. I work in a location that's not behind a firewall, and so I can use all my native applications to do everything. I can use iChat for communicating with chat, and I can use Jabber or any of the other clients I want to use. But I think this also is why Gmail has also gotten so popular -- the idea that you can have encrypted, secure email over port 80, anywhere. I'm not sure, but I'm fairly sure that most of the people that use Gmail and have come to rely on it, it's their personal email for their non-work-related things, and they know they can get to it anywhere because it's on port 80.

Tim Moses: Yeah. And I feel like there are a lot more people who have multiple devices. Their work computer, their home computer, their laptop, their phone or whatever else it is. People are used to using more devices and more machines, and rather than trying to keep all of their favorite software up to date on all of those different machines, it's just a whole lot easier to use a website. And these websites are getting to the point where they're really starting to feel like a desktop application. Here you don't have to worry about updating anything. You just sit down at any computer you want to and you've got all your stuff, and it's got your preferences. Like Writely, you've got all your documents in one place. You don't have to worry about sharing those or burning them on a CD to take with you...

Bill Butler: Or coordinating a network drive.

Tim Moses: It's just all of the hassle involved with administrating your own machines is eliminated with this. You just have a web browser, you get to your stuff.

Bill Butler: Cool. Well, I'm going to jump into Basecamp. Basecamp is really cool site. Actually, while I'm talking about it, would you mind looking up the website? Because I don't think it's Basecamp.com, I think it's...

Tim Moses: Cwork? If I remember.

Bill Butler: ...something else like that. Well, there's a couple different URLs for it. You might just want to Google it. But basically, Basecamp is this really cool way to manage projects and to manage tasks in your business. It would probably replace something like Microsoft Project or any one of the myriad of project manager software. It's not like the other Web 2.0 apps. It's got kind of the bare-bones functionality, but once again for 85-95% of the people who are projected-oriented, Basecamp is going to meet your needs for dealing with groups. Did you find that URL?

Tim Moses: Yeah. BasecampHQ.com.

Bill Butler: Oh, I missed the "HQ", that's what it is. BasecampHQ.com. I think, to me the cornerstone feature of Basecamp is this concept of a milestone. Basically what you can do is you can say, "Look, I've got a milestone" -- I think people in the corporate world probably call them deadlines, but a milestone's a much nicer word for it -- "I've got this milestone in two months and it has to be done, and this is the person responsible for doing it." And so beyond that, within that milestone, you can actually go in and assign to-dos that have to be done in order to meet that milestone, and then you can check off the milestone. But as you have more and more milestones, they automatically put themselves on a calendar, because each milestone is associated with a date. One of the really neat things is that you can actually subscribe to that with your iCal, and you can see on your calendar right in front of you, right next to your appointments and meetings, all the milestones that you have set for you and your business. The other thing I really like about Basecamp is that they don't sell it by subscriber or by individual. They sell it to a company and it's for managing X number of projects. So I can buy a one project -- well, the one project is free -- then you can buy, I think, five or 15 project packs. I have the 15 project pack, and it's great because you can have up to 15 projects simultaneously running. Now if you get to 15 and you want to put the 16th, you can retire a project. And so you can continually retire projects, and as long as you don't have more than 15 irons in the fire on projects, it's going to meet your needs beautifully. It's a fairly nominal monthly fee, I think it's $40 or $50 for the 15 project?

Tim Moses: Oh, no. It's $25 a month for the 15, and $50 for the 35.

Bill Butler: Yeah. It also has a great message board area, and this is good when you're working remotely, and also for setting up the project. You don't always use the milestone features. For instance, I did a web project recently where I was coordinating with an external developer, and in the message board area I gave this developer all the information that he might need in terms of usernames, passwords, common information, information from another developer who was going to be providing some input, and we put all this in one area. We even uploaded files and attached those to the specific messages that the developer could use. It streamlined the process so much, because we didn't find ourselves sending emails back and forth, saying, "Could you hand me this? Could you give me this? Oh, I lost this. Could you give me this?" It was all sitting in one common place in Basecamp. I can't say enough good things about it. It's great!

Tim Moses: The experience I've had with it so far. I think the sign of a really well-designed application is that you can get into it and feel that it's very simple, there's not a whole lot you need to look through to start using it. But the more I use it, the more I realize there's a whole lot of complexity behind it, where it's doing a lot of work but you don't even think about it, it keeps you focused on the main stuff that you need. When it comes to project management, that's something -- I've tried a lot of other web-based software and programs for doing it, and most of the programs just seem to get more in the way of doing your projects than they are really helping. Basecamp's been the first thing I've used that really has been useful, it's been easy to use, it hasn't been a pain to keep up with things, and it really is very well-designed, with a straightforward interface.

Bill Butler: Cool. All right, let's move on to the next one. Looks like you have a couple more.

Tim Moses: I do. First of all, I'll just cover something I see is a feature that you'll start seeing all over the place in websites. Surprisingly, it's from Microsoft, and that's surprising in a number of ways because it is a very cool feature, it works in any web browser, and the javascript that makes it work is available under one of the standard licenses used by open source, so they're basically just making this available for anyone to use. The feature is Microsoft's Live Clipboard. What is does is it provides a way to copy and paste information between web pages or between applications in web pages. For instance, you might copy your address information from your address book, and when you're ordering something from a website and you need to enter your shipping information, you can just copy your contact information and paste it in.

Bill Butler: Not line by line, but the whole block.

Tim Moses: The whole [xx], so it takes all the fields, drops them into all the appropriate places. What's more, you can copy things from a web page. So if you go to a web page, you want the contact information off of a site, you do a single copy using your browser's copy functions -- it's not some weird actions or no extensions or plug ins involved -- you use your regular browser copy function, and then skip over to your address book and paste it in. Or do it within a site. So hopefully as more people use this feature, as you manage a site you have copy and paste, which you normally don't see in a website, but here you can copy and paste complex information back and forth all over the place. So it could be a contact. Or it could be an event. Or it could be a photo with a caption and title information and everything else with it. The demonstrations that were used for this that actually work -- I opened up Firefox on a Mac, and it's all there, it works, it's purely web-based to make this stuff happen -- the example they gave was copying at a modified Flickr website, where they copied one photo and then copied an entire album, then pasted in to something else, and it all came across with all the necessary information. Anyway, it just worked very well and it was very slick. It's one of the big pieces that you need for making a web application feel like a desktop application, and it's actually working right now and works in just about any browser. And it came from Microsoft and it's freely available. Very, very cool. So hopefully we'll start seeing that on a lot of websites here in the near future.

Bill Butler: Yeah, and just to clarify. I know Tim did make it fairly clear, but this is not just a website you go to, but this is actually technology that will be, hopefully, incorporated into websites to make it easier for information to be transferred to and from.

Tim Moses: So there's not really a website to send you to to go start using this feature all over the place. It's just something that hopefully you'll start seeing in a lot of places.

Bill Butler: But if you want to learn more about it, just go to Google and type "Microsoft Live Clipboard", and you'll be able to see video presentations and some actual demos you can try out. Probably the TechCrunch Microsoft Live Clipboard is the best link.

Tim Moses: Well, my next one is amazing for a number of reasons, and it's pretty complex so I'm going to try to explain this and have it make sense. I saw a demo of DabbleDB, and I believe the website for it is DabbleDB.com. Right now, I just think you can sign up for future information. If you Google for it, you can find a Quicktime presentation of it. It's an amazing website that lets you import a database or create a database right from the site, and it has all the features that you'd need in a basic database application, you can do relational data. But the amazing part about it is that the interface is so slick. It feels just like a desktop application. It has a lot of the elements that you just really wouldn't find other than in a nicely-developed desktop application. The demo will step you through copying. You're just selecting a bunch of data out of Excel, copy it, paste it into the first step of DabbleDB. It looks at it, figures out a bunch of stuff automatically, and let's you change field names if you need to, but right off the bat you suddenly have your database, one table of information is right there in DabbleDB. You can sort, filter on it, you can choose what columns to display, you can change the types of columns -- all the kinds of stuff that you're used to having in a spreadsheet or a database -- and then you can very easily choose some data to separate out into another table. So if you have a list of customers, and the customers may have multiple addresses, you can separate that out into another table without much work. So without much effort, you quickly go from building a database online from a simple table into something much more complex and much more useful, with all sorts of great features.

Bill Butler: Yeah, they really trumped, I think -- I mean, Google Base has a whole different purpose -- but they really trumped what you can do with an online database. I think they took it so far beyond just the basic data capture that Google's currently doing. The immediate thought I had was, think about all these -- I'm on several boards and a lot of times you have to manage member lists, and usually one person is stuck with managing those member lists and managing every aspect of them, because no one has the knowledge or expertise to deal with the database, and it's never in a nice format. Not everyone has FileMaker on their machines is, I guess, what I'm trying to say. FileMaker is such a nice, easy thing to use. But this brings this really easy user interface to people who -- I could really see if we were going after, let's say we were grooming new members for an organization I was in and we had 25 prospects who came to the November 15th meeting -- being able to assign someone to go through and call each of those prospects and check them off, to say, "I called them, " so that all the statuses could be updated in an easy way. No longer are you relegated to chopping out pieces of Excel spreadsheets and emailing those individuals, you can actually let them interact directly with the database. And that's kind of where I see the long-term.

Tim Moses: It's got similar benefits to using Writely or something like that. It's on the web, it's available to all the people who need to be able to get to it. And they have some cool ways of tying in to the database, like it produces an RSS feed so you can subscribe to see what changes take place in the database. Or export it to a PDF for printing. Or a comma-delimited text file so you could import it back into Excel or something else. So you have great ways of getting data into it, great ways of getting data back out of it. And it can even do some more sophisticated things, like time, if you have any time fields...

Bill Butler: I was going to mention that.

Tim Moses: ...there's a calendar view. You can export it as an iCal calendar to import into iCal or Outlook. It really has some amazing features to it. It is not out yet, though, it's not released, but I believe they're getting pretty close, and it really is amazing. And as Bill had mentioned before, I really see it as more of a competitor to desktop applications like FileMaker Pro or Microsoft Access than I see it so much as Google Base or competing with one of the online things. It really is a slick website.

Bill Butler: I agree. All right. Well, we've reviewed about five products or websites that we felt were the best in their class, and we hope you enjoyed it. In the future, we will be reviewing, most likely, more hardware-based products, but if a great piece of software comes along we will definitely bring it to the mix as well.

Tim Moses: And as our point is this week, software doesn't necessarily mean something to install on your machine anymore, it could be a website.

Bill Butler: That's exactly. So thanks for tuning in to this month's edition of the BestStuff Podcast.

Tim Moses: Be sure to visit BestStuff.com today. If you'd like to contact us with story ideas or general questions, please email Tim or Bill AT BestStuff.com. That's not one email address, that's two different ones. Bill or Tim AT BestStuff.com.

Bill Butler: For BestStuff, we are Bill Butler and Tim Moses. Thanks for listening.

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