Thing 13. Online Productivity Tools

Well, well...I have to admit up front that this it the type of "Thing" I hate...a huge amount of websites, each with its own learning curve, and hard to understand explanatory screens, forcing us to try them out by downloading unknown programs at slow speeds, and worse of all: different pricing for different levels of usage and features...way too hard to have then a comprehensive look at all this in the short time we have to do this assignment, but I will tell you what my initial impression is...and here again my innate contrarian nature is coming out (this seems to happen at different places throughout my blog, so sorry for my lack of cooperation and self-control)...here's my take on this, and I admit only after a somewhat superficial, careless examination of these many widgets and organizers, and such...my unspeakable thought for the day is this...Do You Really, Really Need Any Of This Crappy Stuff To Run Your Life??? Write that over and over again on your cool sticky note program....

Now, by this statement, I mean do you really need to pay for something, that, at best, is a marginal improvement over that which for most of us already comes free with the typical e-mail program you probably have right now...For example: If you have Yahoo Mail...have you seen everything it can do?...did you check out its great calendar features, with the e-mail reminders,and notes that you can add to help you organize things, as well as share with all others through the net if you want. And you can customize the appearance of these programs you already have much more to your liking if you looked into it..and with no charge, and with little hassle or reliability problems....and you already have it, like I said...You might check out the way I did, the MyYahoo page or the iGoogle but for me, I don't like a busy home page even with these customization aspects because I like to keep my home page minimum for fast download time since my home connection is not the greatest. In short, almost all typical information that an average person would need to run their life is already free and available at the big players like Yahoo, MSN, or Google--yes, it is nice to see other competitors out there, but unless you are running a big business or something like that why suffer the hassles....

One more thing as far as most of these widget stuff goes, I see from the comments people made on the 23 Things Blog about their experiences with the "simple" countdown timer listed by the authorities as an example of an easy widget to use...Yes, for me too...I couldn't get it to work properly either...of course the thing was free, but this is what you should expect all too often from these widgets...I should tell you from my own usage, just for your computer safety knowledge, that many of these are spyware traps that do funny things to your computer...I remember a free weather bug item I downloaded once that was so nice to have, except it kept sending secret private information to advertisers so that they could throw some "relevant" ads my way; and man, was it hard to uninstall from my computer when I found out about it! (And remember, you will not have available that computer whiz person from the help desk at home, protecting you from this as you might at work). So here is the dilemma on widgets to remember: money is usually the reason behind most of these programs...money, money, money... but if you want to protect yourself from sneaky tricks, then look to pay for a program since those are usually more on the level in what you will get...sometimes it pays to play...even on the net...unless you live a simple life like me, and realize that all you need is what you already have...check out the big players' freebies first...can a guy named Shocker boy, steer you wrong???