Yesterday I got an invite for a service called Freebase. Here’s what they are about (from their FAQ):
Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at www.metaweb.com.
I signed up for their waiting list after reading a rather enthusiastic review at TechCrunch. Here’s also a review by Tim O’Reilly.
After some time playing with it, I’m quite impressed. While the service is mainly geared toward developers, it’s actually quite fun spending some time tweaking entries and adding new ones. They are still invite only, and some entries reflect that (many entries still rely solely on the content added by their crawler from sites licensed under the Creative Commons license), but I do have a feeling they could find a pretty dedicated community once they open up.
Well, since everyone and their Grandma are pushing towards content on mobile phones, it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise that LibraryThing, everybody’s favourite online library and cataloguing service, can now be accessed via mobile phone too.
From their blog entry:
The idea is simple—you get the most important features of LibraryThing through your cell phone’s “internet” feature. So you can check whether you have something—by title, author, tag or ISBN—when you’re in the bookshop, browse your catalog, and read your reviews. You can even accesss your “Pssst!” recommendations. But I don’t know anything about cellphone security, so you can’t add items, and you can’t look at private libraries—even your own.
This is great news really. It’s not that I love working with screens as tiny as my mobile’s, but I was wishing for something like that a while ago while standing in a bookstore, and undecided whether my girlfriend actually had a certain book. Well, now it’s as easy as whipping out my mobile and punching in http://librarything.com/m/.
LT founder Tim Spalding even set up a test page, so you don’t have to get out your mobile to see what all the fuss is about:
Great stuff!
Well, just when I got used to the idea of using 30boxes, and exactly on the same day the people from webcalendar service Kiko shoot me an email that they’ve totally redone their service, Google’s long awaited Calendar is launched.
Now, I haven’t used Google’s calendar in depth yet, but frankly, it’s not a whole lot different from what Kiko and 30Boxes offer.
30Boxes is really extremely easy to use, it’s got a nice AJAX interface and the input is as intuitive as it can get. It doesn’t have any jazzy display options, but hey, it’s all about 30 boxes, so a day view really would break the whole thing.
I checked out Kiko as well, and it’s quite feature packed. It’s got a whole lot more options than 30Boxes, but it can be a whole lot more confusing as well. It does have a really nice AJAX interface, but their input is a bit more strict than the 30Boxes one.
Finally, new player Google Calendar really doesn’t overwhelm. It uses interface and AJAX features most GMail users have come to love, but strangely enough, there’s no GMail integration? What gives? I do think though they’ll add that soon.
All of these calendars offer sharing and collaboration features, as well as iCal and RSS functionality.
I guess I’ll just stick with 30Boxes for now though.
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