scumble on 13/11/2006 at 14:36

---

I may just have been slow, but I've been quite impressed with the things coming out of google labs recently. In fact, while trying out Firefox 2.0's extended feed subscription utility, I realised one could try out (http://www.google.com/reader) Google Reader. I think it's the most useful feed reader I've used so far, mainly because the clean layout is so good. I've tried feed readers before, but not really got on with them for one reason or another.

It's possible that I find the google implementation more useful because I can put it on the personalised home page, so I'm guaranteed to see it when I start up the browser. These days I'm so scatter-brained that I will constantly fail to look at things that interest me without some sort of prompt.

Incidentally, when it comes to remembering things, the (http://www.google.com/notebook/) Notebook is also rather handy, particularly as the firefox extension allows you to highlight any section of a page and add it to your notes, together with a link reference for the origin of the note.

Aside from these quite simple applications, I think what interests me the most is how easy it's getting to throw functions from different sites together. Well, there's a lot of bumpf about regarding Web 2.0, Web 3.0, mashups and "Composite Applications" going around, but the concept seems to be working quite well at the basic web user level, where we approach the stage where anyone can whip up a kind of web application to do something fairly specific (mainly a customised view of information at the moment).

The question is, how complex might it get? Additionally, might it be a bad idea to use too many online services that retain a lot of personal information? Is there a bit of a risk in having someone else store information that is valuable to you?

None of this is "new" of course, so I post mainly because I've just become aware of a few things and desire discussion, which is why people post on forums, obviously...