Four things that “virtually” everyone needs: netvibes, feedburner, videntity (openID) and digg

[First off- this is shameless promotion of stuff I like- if you're going to complain that I'm basically just advertising at you, go fish]

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while and I might not even finish today, but these are 3 virtual products that I just can’t help but promote to everyone. Now I realise what I’m really promoting is a product which serves the function of one of these, but these are the ones I use, and I have my reasons why I think they’re the best.

Netvibes: the personalised start page

I won’t call it a “home page” although it’s often market as that, since I feel a home page speaks of a website others can reach you on (for me socialurl or videntity will be this, still haven’t decided). Netvibes is, among other things, an RSS aggregator, allowing you to read all your blogs in one place. It also allows you to import all your bookmarks from your browser so you can access them online if you haven’t already ported to del.icio.us. Of course, it lets you import del.icio.us as well in a mini API allowing you to navigate via your tag cloud. Thus it’s a bookmarker/navigator and a feed reader. It also has several other nifty features: a digg API for tracking the latest hot stories there, a flickr feed displaying tag’d pics of your choice, integrated meebo and so on. Since there’s a (semi) active developer community, new APIs are being written all the time which you can embed into your page. Perhaps the most useful API for me is the MySpace one. Now I want them to create one for every social network! But essentially it lets you track the main pic, tagline and comments of any myspace you choose. Oh and your email. Heh. Just go try it!

Feedburner: like giving your RSS feed steroids (in a good way)

Feedburner takes any RSS feed of your choice and not only tracks your stats (admittedly wordpress already did that quite well), it gives you a lovely button showing the number of people who read your feed that day! More importantly, feedburner republishes your feed allowing value add: you can select a variety of buttons to add to your feed, you can pick a nice chicklet to pimp your blog and so on. The reason feedburner is probably the best service I use is it’s so handy, but free. I don’t see why you wouldn’t republish with them. Maybe MySpace is your hell, netvibes a gimmick you don’t need and openID just a hassle, but if you blog, if you have RSS, go right now and burn your feed.

Videntity: OpenID is great in general, here’s a way to get it and the social networking features aren’t that bad, especially so early on

In case you don’t know about OpenID, the idea is to have one login (a url) that you can use all across the web, for everything. It’s safer, faster and is part of the new web3.0 vision. More than the semantic web which is seen as the heart of web3.0, for me openID is what will lead to the next evolution of the web, web4.0, the trusted web. First you have social networks, creating a virtual identity. All your virtual faces lead back to information about you. Then you use OpenID as your universal greeting, a common thread between your profiles. Finally you have a co-ordinated virtual identity that is related to your real-life self. I’m not proposing we just map from life on to the web, I think the joy of the web is in its ability to free us from our lives, to allow us to reform ourselves in our own virtual image. OpenID allows a unification of that virtual image.

Digg: the social news site

What can I say? I don’t read the news, and I’m not really interested in what people have “dugg” up lately. But I think digg nevertheless is increasingly vital to be subscribed to. Why?

1. You can’t digg things if you’re not a member
2. Digg is now so influential that almost everything can be “dugg”.
3. Therefore digg is democratising the web. It allows you to put your support behind any article with the “digg-this” button. You think it’s good? Digg it!

[Meta- ironically I haven't yet worked out how to add digg this buttons to my posts, but you can digg them via my RSS feed on Feedburner or share my blog using "AddThis!" over on the right there. AddThis is gaining traction quite well, maybe I'll edit this post properly later.]

[Meta (v2)- I notice I haven't mentioned del.icio.us and maybe I should have. It's certainly influential, but I just feel it's more nice to have than "why don't you have it?" Perhaps this is true of AddThis also.]