Some new feature goodies

Lots of nice improvements have been made recently in web-related software and services that I regularly use. Here is a list of the ones I can think of that are worth mentioning:

• coComment: This service just keeps getting better. Now it allows me to track conversations via webpages or comments on individual postings. Cool! Even better is the fact that I can be notified when someone has commented on a webpage or posting or comment by seeing the coComment icon in my webbrowser change color. When there has been some activity on something that I have tracked in coComment, the blue coComment icon in my web browser’s status bar adds a red-bordered envelope. Another cool feature is that if I navigate to a webpage that anyone else is tracking via coComment, the coComment icon turns orange to let me know that others are discussing it. All in all, very nice!

• Meebo: I have been using Meebo for a little over a month now and have found it to work quite well for the IM accounts I use, including Google Talk, AOL, and Yahoo! Messenger. A few days ago they really hit the ball out of the ballpark, in my opinion, when they announced a new service called Meebome. Basically this allows me to embed a live chat service in any webpage I want. I quickly put one here in my blog and I might add it to a few other places. With this service in place, I can be logged into Meebo and automatically see if/when someone visits FML! Noone has initiated a chat with me yet but it is really interesting to see in real time the number of people who visit the site.

• Bloglines: Like coComment, this service, too, just keeps improving. The latest improvement allows users to use the letter ‘o’ to open up the original blog post when viewing it in Bloglines. The lack of this feature (which has been present in Google Reader from day one) has been the only major gripe I’ve had with the service ’til now.

• Google Maps: I have always liked this service and again, it just keeps getting better! The latest improvements include the ability for me to use the service from my cell phone. Very, very nice. I’ve tried it out and it works very well. The only problem is that as one would expect, it takes up a lot of bytes and I will have to watch this carefully because of service limitations in terms of the size of data transfers with my cell phone service. Another improvement in the service is that I can now store favorite locations.

• Comcast Digital Voice: This VOIP service from our cable TV and Internet provider is something we’ve thought about in the past but didn’t try because we didn’t think we needed a dedicated home telephone. We thought we could just rely on our cell phone service instead. After trying this for a few weeks, though, we concluded that it would be good to have a regular telephone service. We chose Comcast Digital Voice because it seemed to meet our needs quite well and we get a discount because we are already have other Comcast services. We’ve only had it in place for a few days but it seems to work great!

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