Online Media Cultist

Not so long ago in relative terms people who owned things such as car phones and fax machines were likely fodder for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Today, it’s easier than ever to reach people and to be reached.

Nowadays we have e-mail, which is still one of the best and most amazing things you can do online. But how people are e-mailing each other is getting more interesting, refined, and in some cases more confusing!

For example, a post about e-mail by Fred of A VC reminds me that for some, social networking websites like MySpace are used as primary e-mailing platforms. It’s always a bit of a surprise to me when a friend of mine e-mails me through my (seldom used) MySpace profile, particularly when I know they have my primary e-mail address (dumpsterbust@gmail.com). But for these and many others, social networking has become so part and parcel to their online experience that it simply makes all the sense in the world to e-mail via MySpace or Facebook, etc.

Instant messaging has also become an indispensable communications tool of the online world. As e-mailing is an art form distinct from other forms of communication (to emoticon or not to emoticon, that is the question ) instant messaging requires a different form of etiquette and set of rules. While you can set up status alerts (Busy, At Work, etc.) it’s often difficult to tell when it’s a good time to essentially bug someone or not. Drawing that line for yourself and for others can be a challenge in a global world where the workday never ends.

GTalk, the instant messaging tool within GMail, forms a slightly hybrid category all its own. I’ve noticed that people feel more comfortable using GTalk for quick questions/interruptions than other forms of communication, such as AIM. Perhaps this is because communication in this case is between two people who already know each others GMail address, and therefore feel a little more familiar than in an AIM environment.

There are more variations on this theme (some people I know prefer to e-mail via Twitter!) but I think you get the idea.

Back to GMail for just a second: Tony Hung would like to see column sorting added, and it’s hard to disagree. Personally, I’d love to be able to add widgets to my GMail page as it’s something of a personal communications hub for my online life. For example, a Google calendar overlay that can be minimized or maximized (in the same way as GTalk windows) would greatly help me keep organized.

Gmail is an e-lifeline for me. It’s typically the first thing I open up when I go online, and it serves as the main channel in which I not only communicate with the world, but it’s also the place where I store an enormous amount of information and organize my online life.

One of my ongoing challenges is to stay organized on the multiple fronts that make up a modern online media cultist’s life. I’ve experimented with a bunch of calendar applications, but still haven’t found anything that has worked for me. Partly out of desperation, I’m giving Google Calendar one last go. I’m hoping that its e-mail alerts will give me help me to have some hope of keeping up with things (remembering people’s birthdays: the bane of my existence!).

I’d really love to see an embeddable widget within Gmail that would let me scroll through events in my calendar. I kind of envision the interface to work something like meevee’s television widget, allowing you to scroll up and down through upcoming events. If we wanted to get fancy about it, it would be really cool to have a widget with different tabs that could be related to channels or tags. So I could set it up that I could have a “birthdays” tab on the calendar widget that let me scroll through only birthdays that I had entered, or “deadlines” or “essential TV shows” (Sopranos! The Shield! Lost!) and so on.

By the way, one application that has been a really pleasant surprise in how much it’s helped me keep tracked and organized is Joe’s Goals, which is a simple, easy, and kind of fun way to track progress and goals day-to-day. Thanks to the great Lifehacker for the tip on that.

Influential tech blogger Michael Arrington announced the “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” for 2007 today. The list of 15 web services – including Digg, Flickr, Gmail, Skype, Techmeme, Wordpress, and YouTube – is interesting as a collection in several ways.

My first thought is that while most of these services didn’t exist two or three years ago, they really are indispensable to the daily life of many web users as 2007 dawns. And that’s striking because it shows you what a flattening force technology (and “web 2.0″ as its modern Internet equivalent) really is. I can look at the list and know that I use many of the same information-gathering and communications tools as “influential tech blogger Michael Arrington,” for instance.

If e-mail was one of the Internet’s earliest (and some might still argue only) “killer apps,” I agree with Mr. Arrington that Gmail is just about its perfect web-based incarnation. The ability to tag messages (you can put label a message however you like and have it saved to multiple folders), instant refreshing (messages pop up without you having to do anything), and threaded messaging make it an essential everyday tool.

Two of the selections – Amie Street and Pandora – are music related. I’ve intrigued by a service called eTunes of late, which has kind of an “early beta” look to it but is a really easy way to gather music online and then stream it at will.

While I think that Digg is probably the best current incarnation of the new breed of “social news” sites (though I think the future lies with hybrid models spearheaded by the Netscape, a meshing of an editor- and user-controlled experience), I’m partial to Reddit because of its simplicity and the mere fact that it casts its net to a range of stories that I happen to find interesting. Reddit’s innovation to allow users to vote stories “down” may actually be its worst feature as it encourages active news submitters to vote stories down. However, voting comments down, which Reddit employed before Digg added the feature, is great. Nothing’s more satisfying then clicking a down arrow on someone you disagree with!

While Mr. Arrington uses NetNewsGator and NetVibes to read and organize RSS feeds, I’m partial to a combination of Bloglines and RSSFwd. NetVibes, part of the new breed of “web 2.0 start pages,” is a great product but the prospect of staring at a bunch of boxes crammed with news headlines doesn’t quite work for me in general. That said, I’m nearly awed by what a super-cool product yourminis is.

The other things that I use everyday include Basecamp, project management software put out by the 37 Signals folk, and AIM for instant messaging.

What’s finally intriguing is that there is not one social networking product on Tech Crunch’s (or my!) list. I wouldn’t be surprised if this will change in the next year or two, as companies fall all over themselves developing more sophisticated social networks that cater to an older/more mature demographic and an ever wider array of specific interests and lifestyles.