Quantum Forest

I some times visit Techcrunch, a site that profiles new web 2.0 companies. Most of them share the use of tags (some ridiculous name for the good old keywords), allow sharing content with other users and will go bankrupt. I may try some of them but most of the time they have no incidence at all in my workflow and just forget about them.

Google mail has changed my workflow, at least for personal email. No more folders, just keywords and archiving. Some people may have privacy concerns but, hey, do you encrypt your email? I didn’t think so, so stop complaining because anybody can read it. I would love to encrypt mine, but none of my correspondents actually uses encryption, so it is an uphill battle.

All the other Google services (Froggle, Maps, Chat, RSS syndication, news)? Have not made a dent on my workflow, so from a practical point of view, they are pretty useless to me. One exception in the horizon is Google Calendar (CL2). The fact that it is an internet calendar is not surprising or innovative at all (they are dime a dozen at the moment), but integration with my Google mail (which I find really nice) it is.

There are services from which it is very easy to move away; for example, web search. I may be used to Google, but if there is a new service which provides more relevant results, I will start using it without hesitation. That is what I did when moving from Altavista to Google in 1998. Yahoo is now looking more relevant to many searches I am doing, so I may switch to them.

Apart from that, what would I like to have?

• My desktop everywhere, like YouOS (a java script based web operating system) but that actually works for me. Having a crummy editor and spreadsheet does not qualify as useful, because I often use the more obscure features of software. However, the idea of runnning a desktop that I can easily access from anywhere is compelling.
• A well integrated wiki+blog. I use PmWiki and Textpattern, but I would rather prefer to use a single system with complete linking across themes and posts. Infogami looks like going in the right direction, but still needs a fair amount of work. If it is a hosted solution I want to have a escape route, so I can save my data externally in a meaningful format.
• A remote disk to keep my things synchronised across computers, something that I can mount from my PC, Mac or whatever I am using at the moment. It needs to have a decent amount space and no, 1GB is not enough (think of pictures, please)!