Every day in the PlusNet office somebody will post a “Have you seen this great website?” forum post, a “How cool is this?” message will go around or you’ll see a Twit from a friend claiming that this new site makes the whole Internet as we knew it redundant. I’m sure you’ve been there yourself. Yes, there are a million and one interesting/cool/impressive things floating around on the Internet, but how many of these sites do you personally need?
Do you have particular web-sites and web-tools that are so useful that they have actually become an integral part of your life, or as cool as something may be, is it really just time-wasting flotsam?
Personally, I really couldn’t do without the trusty old HSBC Internet banking website. I know it hasn’t really been upgraded for 6 or 7 years, but who cares? It tells me how much money I have (or otherwise) and I can pay my credit card bill without having to go through the pain of an automated phone system or posting a cheque in the mail.
I find that iGoogle is extremely useful; it aggregates the RSS feeds from all the news sites that I read, and provides me with rudimentary ToDo List functionality and access to all my bookmarks, on whichever of the 3 devices I access the web on.
Apart from that, what else is there that I really need? Yes, Facebook is useful when planning my social life and seeing what my friends are up to, Flickr is useful for sharing my photos with family and friends (and also a useful backup of many years worth of photos), and apart from that, cool does not seem to equal necessary. Twitter, Plaxo and Pownce don’t really do anything for me, do they you?
Google Grand Central may be of use when they open up the service to the UK, but for now I’ll stick with Skype on my laptop and Fring on my phone.
I don’t really watch a lot of TV due to being too busy with other things, so BBC iPlayer isn’t something that I need. I’ll wait for the day when TV stations decide to provide 1 minute summaries of their programming in the style of ZeroPunctuation - much more efficient… 
So, I suppose that all sounds a bit like Mr Grumpy, but if I don’t need something then I’m not going to waste my time on it.
How about you the PlusNet Community Site reader, what web-sites and web-tool do you really rely on as part of your life?
Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet
I’ve just watched the fifth and final episode of what I’ve found to be a remarkable, if somewhat short, series. The biggest challenge faced by the producers of ‘Paradise or Bust’ (BBC2), and one met with varied success, was in getting close enough to the ground level project whilst retaining an understanding of the online aspect; the Tribewanted community who are ultimately responsible for making the whole thing happen. More…
Three months after the Fijian military coup that will, for me at least, forever be associated with a bizarre four day delay for a rugby match, Ben Keene is evidently more confident of the Tribewanted project’s future. Last night’s ‘Paradise or Bust’ (BBC2) showed us the island of Vorovoro at last beginning to see the benefits of investment, as the local villagers improve their lot with fluorescent lighting, TV and DVD entertainment. More…
It’s quite astonishing what had been done in the first two months’ development on the Fijian island of Vorovoro. After his visit, shown at the start of last night’s ‘Paradise or Bust’ (BBC2), co-founder Mark Bowness somewhat lamely leaves to concentrate on ‘other ventures’. Presumably this means his ‘Have You Got The Nerve?‘ idea. More…
In last night’s second episode of BBC 2’s captivating Paradise or Bust, the purse strings on Vorovoro get stretched tighter and tighter in order to keep the project running, whilst online discontent grows; seemingly in direct proportion to project leader Ben Keene’s stress levels. More…
I was reading a stimulating blog by Tomi Ahonen last night about the Sprint Nextel nightmare that is playing out in the telecoms market in the USA.
To cut a long story short Sprint, who are one of the largest telecoms and Internet companies in America, booted around 1,000 customers off the service for calling the customer support centre too often. As a result they have lost hundreds of thousands of customers and are now having to lay off 4,000 staff. Unsurprisingly, they have been vilified in online and offline media. More…
I watched a programme last night on BBC2 called ‘Paradise or Bust‘. This one had passed me by until now, but this is Web 2.0 crowd-sourcing taken to extremes. More…
The telecoms and Internet strategy consultants over at Telco 2.0 have written a very interesting article with their take on the future of broadband. They’re talking about worldwide trends rather than just the UK but there are some intriguing lines of thought.
A few of us from Plusnet ventured up to Leeds last Wednesday evening to attend GeekUp, a gathering of web ‘geeks’ and other technically minded people from the Yorkshire area.
Why would we spend an evening geeking in Leeds? It allows us to find out what people are doing in the industry and to make some noise about the great things we are doing here at PlusNet. More…
So, everyone’s heard of Facebook, MySpace and so on, bringing communities together. But what about a community managing the decisions behind a football team? The buying of players, sacking managers and so on?
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
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