Drowning in Web 2.0

There are 2 main factors related to Web 2.0 which are making it a success, but to be honest to some extent I feel they are complicating digital life again!
The two factors are:

• Speed
• Cross-border (private, business) Integration

Don’t you love the fact that new solutions are coming out at an incredible pace and with an impressive quality? Or the fact that your life does not need to have such a strong wall between private and business? I personally love it.

Now the part I am having problems with now is coordinating or integrating the information or services I manage with the solutions. When do I use which tool and how do I coordinate the people I which to work or communicate with agree to my choices?

Here is a list of some of the tools I have been using so far for different areas of life:

• Communication Tools

• • E-Mail

    In the company Outlook is our standard tool.
    In my private life I have managed to gather a bunch of e-mail providers. The main ones being Yahoo, Hotmail now called Windows Live and Google Mail. Google has turned nowadays into my main e-mail portal due to the easy integration of all other accounts. The only integration missing is between company and private e-mails which appears to have a good reason.

• • Instant Messaging

    All providers listed above have their own instant messaging platform. However the only one I have managed to use constantly has been Messenger.
    I guess I would need to add skype to the list as well. But I’ll stick to the instant messaging functionality.

    So far it had been pretty easy to manage the contacts I could chat with on the respective platform. However new platforms like facebook, have brought this services to a next level. Now the main question is, how can we best manage all of these accounts?

    Some solutions have come out which help you a lot but not fully. One of these is meebo which has a very nice solution to join different instant messaging accounts into one platform. But for me it still misses the integration of facebook and skype. Another tool I have started to use is ebuddy which combines all the ones I got frommeebo plus facebook, but as you guessed or know, they left out skype!

    So as a result I can’t seem to find another option than to continue hopping from tool to tool to be able to communicate with my different contacts.

• Collaboration Tools

  Now the other area I want to address in this blog is the collaboration area. I know a lot of people have their own definition of what collaboration means, so I’ll be talking about tools which allow you to combine features like document sharing, task management, discussions, etc..

  There are several tools on the market. The ones I have been busy with include Google Wave, zoho and Microsoft Sharepoint and recently 12Sprints. All of them have their own strengths and weaknesses, which I will address in upcoming blogs. The biggest issue is, similar to the problem addressed when describing the communication tools, when to use which one? How to combine them all? So far the best way to combine them has been through the use of e-mail alerts which let you know where to go to. But to be honest is this the solution to the problem?

  And this is why the factors I mentioned at the beginning, speed and cross-border integration, are in some way bringing a new layer of chaos. Maybe we should call it Chaos 2.0. The tool which manages to come up with the best solution to integrate this kind of platforms will certainly move all the way to the front. At least until the next layer of chaos comes.