The Perfect 10: Hosted Web Apps
Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge kick of another shot in the popular Perfect 10 series, this time exploring the perfect 10 hosted web applications.
Of course, we are the start of the conversation, but what do you think? What are your favorite hosted web apps? Do you agree with the ones we picked? Which apps should we have picked in our list? share your thoughts in the shot comments below…
26 Comments to “The Perfect 10: Hosted Web Apps”
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1) iGoogle – the dashboard for my online life
2) GMail – the best email experience around and unrivalled spam filtering
3) Rememberthemilk – Helps me “get things done”
4) Twitter – Because it’s addictive and because OStatus hasn’t taken over yet
5) Facebook – Because I can keep up to date with/stalk everyone I’ve ever known
6) Last.fm – Similar artists radio is awesome and the dance/ambient stations help me work
7) Pivotal Tracker – The most awesome agile project management tool, ever
9) Google Reader – The keyboard shortcuts make news & blog reading fast
9.5) Google Calendar – let’s sneak that one in there
10) iPlayer – because I always miss Dr Who/Top Gear/Lost/Hussle/Spooks etc.
Also Angora for online collaboration (http://angora.rabbitsoft.com) …because I designed it
Besides Twitter, I don’t use any.
You’ve covered most of the ones I use day to day, but a very cool thing I came across recently is http://scraperwiki.com/ – it basically allows you to write a web scraper in 20 – 40 lines of python and then you can download the data or access the data through a web api. You can edit the python in the website, with syntax highlighting, and it uses source control behind the scenes.
With the web api you can then use the Yahoo YQL to do queries on it, as detailed in http://www.techbelly.com/2010/04/12/yql-and-scraperwiki-sitting-in-a-tree/
It was started by some of the people from mysociety.org who have set up various scrapers to add to democracy, including writetothem.com to write to your elected representatives and theyworkforyou.com to find out what they do. So now they can crowdsource scrapers for future projects – I believe planning applications is one they’d like to sort out.
Not for everyone of course, but very cool if you do want something like this.
1) Facebook 2) Twitter 3) Gmail 4) Songbird 5) Google reader 6) YouTube 7) Listal
I thought songbird was a desktop application (built on XULRunner)? Is there now a hosted web service which it connects to?
Maybe he means Screemer search or one of the many addons
Nothing interesting here… just GMail, Google Notes for random stuff I want to remember and Youtube. I also have some photos on flickr but not that many and I use maps quite a bit (google or otherwise).
Wikipedia, well that’s where the internet starts
I personally like new and original music so I am constantly trolling through SoundClick.com where I can make ,arrange,and host my own web based radiocast. Most music is very cheap if not free for download.Check out the BlackFlagRebellion@SoundClick.com
I also like Rock.com for my mail service
Sorry Bad Me. Should be Google BlackFlagRebellion/SoundClick.com
Apart from GMail, all of the hosted apps I use are hosted on my own server.
My current favourites are Ampache, Webmin, tt-rss, MythWeb, EyeOS, Tonido, DWWW, TorrentFlux, and phpMyAdmin.
I prefer to self-host because there are no ads and I’m in control.
Fair play to you. There’s no need to use hosted apps if you’re in control of all your own data and you’re prepared to be your own sysadmin!
I like hosting my own web apps and controlling my own data, but it takes some serious dedication to admin your own server. I think it’s an interesting topic (http://tola.me.uk/blog/2009/03/05/cloud_computing)
I find web apps are particularly difficult to maintain because apt-get upgrade is rarely enough. For some reason web app packages are usually very out of date in distributions and web apps use their own individual upgrade mechanisms instead.
There are also cases where I’d disagree with “There’s no need to use hosted apps if you’re in control of all your own data” because the nature of the cloud brings its own benefits.
Wisdom of crowds is one example – spam filtering is much easier for a cloud service like GMail than it is for me running my own mail server because they have a huge volume of email and people clicking “spam” to help improve their filtering. Similarly Last.fm wouldn’t really work if I ran it myself.
Another problem is critical mass – there are distributed social networking alternatives to Facebook/Twitter emerging (http://tola.me.uk/blog/2010/06/09/ostatus), but currently Facebook and Twitter are where the actual people are and social networking isn’t much without people!
Even if distributed social networking emerges, I think there will be issues with bandwidth costs for people who want to run their own server, especially if they or something they post suddenly becomes very popular. We may not be able to escape the cloud entirely.
Having said all that I think there’s definitely a need for a home server distribution which makes running your own server easy, and I mean a personal home server for social media, not a business server. Perhaps an Ubuntu Home Server Remix could be the solution! This is what motivated me to start Webian (http://webian.org) – sorry, I’m getting into a bad habit of shameless plugs on here.
I am not a fan of social networking and actively reject all attempts at making me your friend on the various networks I subscribe to. The only exception to that rule is Pidgin as it would be silly to have no contacts there.
The small number of people who do (or at least might) use any of the services that I host are limited to family and a few friends. Mostly the services are there for my own benefit for those odd times I am away and really want to listen to my music collection or fetch some file etc.
Also I like to tinker so if I am given a choice between a hosted service or hosting an equivalent service myself, I will always at least try the latter.
I purpose built my home PC to virtualise XP (for work) and to me the PC is just a collection of services with internet access to a select few of them. My ‘personal computer’ would be more accurately described as an interpersonal computer.
Managing servers is not actually THAT difficult, I just set it up and leave it as is unless one of the applications running has a major security update. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
All the web applications I’m using are manually installed, the Distro packages would not actually work as my Apache configuration is so heavily modified.
The server is mainly used for web development and has one user, me. Its a virtual hosting server with a difference, each of the web roots are managed with an independent Subversion repository, meaning that if something breaks, getting it working again just requires checking out an older, working version of the specific web root.
Tonido looks very cool btw and very similar to what I’m trying to do with Webian, thanks for the pointer.
http://www.tonido.com – Run your own Personal Cloud
You forgot one: Feedly!
It’s Google Reader with a thick layer of excellent. Relies on a browser extension to work, but at this point it supports Firefox, Safari and Chromium, with mobile platforms coming.
I totally agree with Stuart about Gmail. It’s amazing how far native apps are behind their web-based counterparts, in terms of user experience. I guess the web platform is just that awesome! (At least from the presentation front).
I would love to see the web platform just replace all the crazy layers of convoluted APIs developers use for native apps today.
Of course, there’s the big scary difference that html+css doesn’t afford as much consistency. (Except the stuff that happens for free, within the browser). So, someone needs to answer the question once and for all: is that consistency thing we’ve been chasing for decades really that important?
@sil Do you really like the Remember the Milk web interface? I find it cumbersome. I use Hiveminder for my task-list (http://hiveminder.com).
My favorite is probably Media Convert
Obviously Hulu doesn’t charge for the episodes it provides, but do the downloads count against your quota? Or are there also deals with particular ISPs to make that data free?
In Australia a number of ISPs provide Australian Broadcasting Corporation (national broadcaster) content free.
What was the wiki for TV programmes Aq mentioned?
that would be tvtropes.com
much obliged
or tvtropes.org to regular humans
One of the things I don’t like about Last.fm and the like is that they are built around the idea that you like a particular kind of music and always want to listen to that kind of music. But I sometimes like to listen to different kinds of music. Sometimes I am in the mood for 80s rock, sometimes in the mood for Latin salsa, sometimes for Celtic fiddles, sometimes classical guitar. I can usually get results that match my mood from Last.fm by seeding it with a band or tag, but functions like “My Recommendations” don’t work when you listen to multiple genres.
I don’t suppose there is a way around this except by creating some kind of multiple-personality concept, which is probably a step too far. But surely other people out there listen to multiple genres of music? You don’t all listen to the same thing all the time?
FailedTheTuringTest you can try BlueBeat.com. They allow you to pick all your own songs, but they play them in random order.
I’m not one who is in love with web apps, generally speaking. I’m one of those, how did Aq put it, “gun toting iconoclast nutters who keeps his data locally” or something like that? I knew you meant it in the nicest possible way, my friend.
In any case, I ran across a web app, which also has an Android and iP0wn3d app. It’s called Midomi at http://www.midomi.com, and it is effectively a google for audio.
I had a song, a piece of jazz (which makes it somewhat niche) that I recorded in college almost 30 years ago. I only had about half of the song because the tape ran out. I tried over the years to find the name of this song.
Last summer, I was talking to a coworker with an iP0wn3d about this song, and told me about the midomi app/web site. He recorded a piece of the song (about 20 or 30 seconds), and fired it off through the app. It came back in seconds, identifying the artist, the song title and the album…Narada Michael Walton’s The Dance of Life, if you are interested. I would have never found this, unless I found an expert, because Narada Michael Walton is the percussionist in the band, which is mainly guitar. But I digress.
In any case, this is a really cool web app.