The Guardian has listed its predictions for the 100 top sites for the year ahead: . There are some sites that are new to me in there (such as loopt & walkit [hope they start to expand to other cities]) – however, I’m surprised at how few Google based tools are in there (e.g. Bloglines rather than Google reader) – though I’m pleased to see Zoho rather than Google Docs in there.
100 top sites for the year ahead
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I was looking at the list too – how on Earth do they compile it? I use google shared services because that’s where I started (in fact with Writely) … so why do you favour zoho? Is it for functional/technical reasons? Or for usability, or social/political reasons? I do use bloglines rather than google reader, but again that is mainly a consequence of being an early adopter. The ‘100 top sites’ inspires me to look at some new stuff (the data visualisation stuff is interesting), but not to change from sites I already use and feel happy to continue using.
No idea how they compile it!
I also started with Writely, & then moved to Google Docs. I started investigating Zoho (& a few others as well), just to compare functionality. At the time, Zoho was better specced & also worked with Google gears before Google docs did. It wasn’t really for social reasons, as fewer people that I knew used it (though we did use it for the assessment project that I worked on with Mike McCabe & co.
I used to use Bloglines, but when I discovered iGoogle, I’ve not found as good a plugin for it as the one for Google reader. In many ways, Bloglines has better functionality – and it’s possible to have a direct link to its OPML file, so I was able to create a widget with Grazr for the blog – which was always synchronised. Grazr slowed the blog down, so I removed it. So, bloglines lost out mostly because I had to go to the Bloglines page -rather than seeing it in iGoogle (or, on the tablet – in Vista’s sidebar)
I’d agree that it’s not always worth the effort changing sites if there’s something that does what you want well … but it’s knowing when it’s being done better! (E.g. when people moved from Alta Vista to Google)