mixwit.com is awesome. start mixin yo!

This weeks' latest craze. Friendfeed > Twitter > Quotably > Tweetburner

In case you haven't tried any of these sites out, I'd highly recommend you take a look. This is for anyone who is relatively new to social media, microblogging, and socnets (social networks) in general and hasn't yet heard about twitter and the amazing things you can do/learn from the twitterverse.

1. Twitter - the center of the interwebs. http://twitter.com

2. Friendfeed - the latest uber-socnet aggregator. http://friendfeed.com 

3. Quotably - new site that allows you to better track twitter conversations. http://quotably.com

4. Tweetburner - nifty new URL shortener, but geared for Twitter. Similar to TinyURL. http://tweetburner.com 

That's all for now.

PS - I so want to get this new gadget to compliment my Verizon EVDO USB modem. 

Dusting off teh cobwebs. hello world. again.

It's been almost a year since I've written anything on this blog. With all of the change that's happened in my life this past year and the somewhat chaotic roller coaster of a ride I've been on, it's been difficult for me to muster up the time and energy to contribute on a regular basis.

This post is a new attempt to change that trend and start contributing quality content back to the interwebs. I'm gonna keep my posts short and sweet, but I hope that this is the start of what will become a more consistent and interesting forum that allows me to post more than 140 characters per post (no offense twitter)

So long web2.0. Nice to know you.

After a long 72hr marathon down at the Moscone Center at the web2.0 expo, I've come to the conclusion that its time for me say goodbye to web2.0. It's been fun kids, but I've got more important projects to work on.

Tags: web 2.0 expo, web2.0, moscone center, hype, people, internet, lifecast, lifecasting, justin.tv

Lifecasting mashup with Justin.TV > Chris Pirillo > Robert Scoble > Jeremiah Owyang

OK. this is a long post. I wrote the first rough draft on the airplane this morning after being up till 3 am, sleeping till 4:30am and then catching a 6am flight down to SFO. Now I'm about to finish it here at the web2expo @ Moscone west (level 2).

Here's the background - I started checking out justin.tv after seeing some early coverage of his project on the usual techno-geek blogs. The whole idea and concept behind what he is trying to do fascinated me and while I have not been watching from the begingging, I have been watching quite intently over the past week or so. Quite an interesting little science project they have going. Clearly capturing a certain buzz and the media seems to be in a frenzy. What the media has no clue about is what I want to focus on in this post.

So as I started watching justin.tv, about a week ago, I began to notice a very strange phenomena taking place in the chat rooms. During pauses, technical glitches, or times when Justin just wasn't all that interesting, the action in the chat rooms picked up considerably. As I started to poke around, I realized that ad-hoc communities and new relationships were forming right in front of my eyeballs were being forged directly in the chat rooms.

For example, Lobby 1 on justin.tv is quite active and there seems to be an entire group of folks who are now "regulars" - myself included - at least since this week (lol). I started to make connections (via IM, txt, twitter, blogs, myspace, etc etc) with several really interesting people in the chat rooms -- which is really what piqued my interest and led me to want to participate more and more, especially during the times when the live feed went down or the feed was just plain boring.

It became clear to me that the chat rooms are where the real action takes place and that's where I found myself being drawn in the most. Being able to chat with people from around the world in real time while also watching the live feed from justin.tv results in some pretty interesting discussions. Sure there's your fair share of immature, inappropriate, and sometimes just downright nasty chatter in the rooms, but the rawness and uncensored nature of both justin's live feed and the raw nature of the chat is what makes it so addictive.

The more I watched, the more I realized that the entire concept of lifecasting is poised to become the next social networking medium. forget myspace, blogs, and the like, a new generation of social networking is upon us - sites like twitter, jaiku, and justin.tv represent the dawn of a new era - the next generation of the web - what some call the semantic web - and others call web3.0. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the term "web3.0", as the whole versioning thing is pretty silly. Let's get web2.0 out of beta and into production before we really start to build the web3.0 platform.

I think what we are seeing happen before our eyes is watching people like you and me take back the internet from the establishment. We saw this on Saturday when Robert Scoble began his very own lifecast of his car trip to Merced. Robert, with the help and "sponsorship" from UStream, setup his Sony Vaio laptop with a Verizon EVDO USB modem, connected to a pretty standard webcam, and hit the road with his family.

Robert started broadcasting and I immediately hopped over to his live stream. Then the craziness ensued. I started chating with Robert while he was driving in his car and talking with his family. Through the IRC chat, Robert began answering questions and interacting with the 20-50 or so folks who were in his chat room and watching his lifecast.

At this point, I realized that the whole game was changing right there in front of my eyes. Then I did something else. I posted a WTF on Technorati and a story on Digg (minimal action on both posts - I don't often post to Digg or Technorati, although I monitor them quite frequently on my orginial signal feed), so I'm not in with the front page posting crowd. I'm a mere mortal. Anyway, that's not the real point here.

Now here's where things go a little Twilight Zone.

Next, I pasted the link to Robert's live feed in the Lobby 1 chat room on Justin.tv.

Then in Robert's chat there is talk about getting Justin in Robert's chat / video stream - which I thought was going to go down at the web2expo and not on a Saturday morning.

Well, we didn't get Justin in Scoble's chat (he was busy with trapeze lessons), but we got some of his crew. Emmett from Justin.tv was in Robert's chat room for a bit and was actually watching Robert lifecast and participating in Robert's chat.

Then things get even weirder. Robert is taking phone calls and somehow word gets out to Chris Pirillo that Robert is broadcasting live from his car. Sure enough a couple minutes later Pirillo shows up in Robert's chat and they start talking.

Then Robert's connection goes down. As a backup, Chris gets Robert on his mobile, turns up the volume of his own live feed, and voila, there you have it - the first human to human lifecasting mashup. Then it got even crazier when Jeremiah Owwang (who is also broadcasting live?) joins both Robert and Chris's live feed. So all of a sudden we have a 3 way live and real time lifecast enviornment with at least 4 lifecasters talking to each other using at least 6 different mediums - chat, IM, IRC, cell phone, video lifecast feed, skype.

By now, things are just getting nutty and I'm muting one feed, listening to another, chatting in yet another - at one point, I had no idea which feed the audio was coming from, which video to watch, and my head was spinning --but the amazing thing is that no matter how the connections were made -- Robert, Chris, Jeremiah, and the folks in the chat rooms were able to seamlessly (well almost) communicate for the entire exchange. At one point I was relaying messages from Chris (speaking verbally in his feed) to Robert (asking robert to call Chris at home).

After at least an hour of this insanity, I had to call it quits. My head was literally spinning and at that point in time, I realized that today the game has changed.

I think the fact that this whole thing is about people and not technology is different. We are on the verge of another wave I think. This wave is where people take back the internet from the establishment. The standards, technologies, and techniques to facilitate human to human interaction in real time on the internet are all in place. The hardware is still evolving, but its clear that sites like Justin.tv and the concept of lifecasting, along with the "wisdom of crowds" concept are fueling this fire.

The dynamics in the Justin.tv chat are fascinating. I would love to see a sociologist or psychologist analyse the logs. There is an entire micro-community of relationships being made right under the justin.tv phenom. Robert just proved that it is possible for others to do similar things. I don't think Robert was trying to show Justin up, as Justin and his team has a very impressive custom hardware solution for his live broadcast.

I think this is one of the more interesting events I've seen take place online in a long long time, which is why I am currently sitting on a plane with literally 2 hours of sleep headed down to san francisco to see how things go down at the web2expo event and also at tonight's Ignite which we should hopefully see Justin attend and speak. I've sent out some feelers to see if I can present at Ignite and tell this story to more people and get their feedback. I will be fickr-twitter-bloggign the entire experience using my Verizon EVDO phone. Here are the relevant URLs:

Follow me [bdeseattle] at the web2expo here:

• http://twitter.com/bdeseattle [rapid fire twittering - high level of activity]
• http://flickr.com/photos/bdeseattle [rapid fire camphone2flickr posting - high level of activity]
• http://bdeseattle.blogspot.com [less frequent - will try to post daily wrap ups to my blog but the real action will be on flickr and twitter]

Technorati Tags: lifecast, web2.0 expo, san francisco, twitter, flickr, mashup, robert scoble, justin.tv, Chris Pirillo, jeremiah owyang, mashup, web2.0, web3.0, bdeseattle

scoble.tv

Justin.tv gets one upped by Scoble. The entire game will change now.

Tags: camera, justin.tv, live, robert scoble, scobleizer, selfcast, twitter, video, web3.0

twitter v. jaiku - a good old fashioned technorati smackdown

OK - Jaiku seems to be poised to explode and I thought I'd whip up a quick and dirty comparison using Technorati graphs. Here we go. Ready, set, go. Let's get it on!

Posts that contain Jaiku per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Posts that contain Twitter per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Technorati Tags: twitter, jaiku, technorati, comparison, statistics

3 topics of discussion on web3.0 & the semantic web.

I just finished listening to an excellent interview with Nova Spivak, the CEO of Radar Networks, and I must say that I'm very impressed with his visionary thinking and current thoughts on the state of web3.0 and semantic web technology.

Clearly we are at a crossroads and I agree that 2007 could be the year that we go into production with web2.0 and begin to really build out a production quality web3.0 platform and start to roll it out to the masses. Enough with the betas already. [Mini-rant- Let's engineer quality code first and release it later instead of the current trend in web2.0-beta-land.]

I thought I'd post some of my recent thoughts, questions, and insights on the semantic web and web3.0, as I think the interweb is about to get turned upside down and start folding in on itself, like a protein molecule in a much larger & increasingly complex strand of DNA.

Topic 1: We have the standards, do we have the tools to build semantic web apps on the web3.0 platform?

I think the tools are still a bit immature, lacking, and hard to use, but they are evolving. While I have not used this tool yet, I've heard that the the TopBraid Composer 2.0 is perhaps the best commercially available tool on the market right now and there are others coming, but the development projects I'm seeing are still very AJAXY in nature and aren't necessarily focusing on cleaning up the metadata and adding semantic web features and capabilities [yet].

The #1 issue right now seems to be answering the question: How do you build a massively scalable storage and query engine that can scale to support growth in the hundreds of billions of RDF triples range and the high volume of r/w queries to interact with them? Maybe we need to start looking at complex biological, geospatial, and astronomical systems that can approach the same orders of scale and magnitude to draw upon how they function and exist. I don't know. Totally speculating here. I'm currently liking the discussion on 3d visualization for semantic web triples.

Topic 2: Can we build interfaces that my mom and grandmother can use, while collecting enough metadata to feed the semantic web machine? What about privacy concerns?

What if I don't want your app to capture every single click I take through it? Or maybe I do? I don't know. What's the right level of user interaction that should warrant the implicit (or explicit) use and collection of RDF triples?

How can we make our apps brain dead simple enough so that end users can even comprehend the benefits that this next gen of apps will bring? I have a hard enough time explaining this stuff to my geek friends, let alone my mother. Can we really build interfaces that are seamless and hide the underlying complexities of the semantic web engine from the average joe? I'm not sure that we can.

How can we encourage users to participate in the read/write web3.0 database and actively contribute semantically rich content? Can we really bring this technology down to a common level so that all users -- on a global scale -- can benefit, while actively contributing to the growth of the semantic web database?

I realize that there are more questions than answers in this blurb, but I am really struggling with this topic and am not convinced that we can build a web3.0 platform that can be adopted by the masses on GLOBAL scale [yet].

For example, it frustrates the hell out of me that when I do a technorati search for "web3.0" the majority of results that come back are in other languages that I don't understand. If I'm to understand the power of the semantic web and web3.0 platform, then I would expect this query to return results that I can read and understand.

I don't want to have to go to google translate, copy and paste the url, and get some less than perfect translation that currently only allows me to translate to/from one language at a time. Will semantic web and web3.0 really solve this problem? I really hope so, but I think we are a LONG LONG way from achieving this goal.

Topic #3 - What can we leverage / bring over from the web2.0 platform?

LOTS!!!!! I think the most important aspects of web2.0 that will fuel the web3.0 fire include: mashups, public apis, web sites as web services, social networking techniques, tagging systems & folksonomies, socially-driven software, leveraging the wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, the collective intelligence, and the good 'ole "unintended consequences" or use of web2.0 features in new or unconventional ways.

Ouch. Now my head hurts.

I'll leave this post with a link to my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with web3.0.

Tags: web3.0, semantic web, future, web 3.0

[TEST POST] this post has an embedded hcard microformat (incomplete) for bdeseattle - used for active r&d.

bdeseattle

Interweb

bdeseattle

Seattle,WA
, 98102 USA

AIM

This hCard created with the hCard creator.

Technorati Tags hcard, microformats, sample, bdeseattle

addicted to twitter?

OK - so I've spent the last couple hours geeking out on twitter. I'm fascinated by its rapid growth and am interested in understanding how the social aspects of its features are being used. I am a twitter noob, but I've found a couple of useful posts, and more importantly found some "web2.0" friendly peeps to follow on twitter. This will be my rapid ramp up program. I just figured out how to post to twitter from my mobile via txt, I also have an IM account that I can post to using meebo.com, I also added a Post to Twitter link to my Firefox search bar, and I'm starting to understand their apis and syntax for posting to the site. I'm curious to see how this site will grow and evolve over time. Happy twittering all.

Technorati Tags: im, sms, socialsoftware, twitter, twittervision, web2.0

just say no to aprilFools2.0

Ok. The april fools stuff online is getting a bit out of control. and now it's spreading like wildfire across the blogosphere and interwebs. From techcrunch, to gmail, technorati, and even scriptingnews and yahoo. Great work all. Here's my collection of spoofed sites. Enjoy all.

Tags: april fools day, aprilfools, gmail, humor, scripting news, spoofs, techcrunch, technorati, web2.0

10 things that currently frustrate me.

OK - I've been thinking about this for a bit and thought I'd toss it out there for the blogosphere to digest.

1. Not being able to capture thoughts, todo items, and having an effective way to manage them. jott is my latest attempt to bring order to the chaos that is my brain.

2. Getting 1x EVDO signal on Verizon's 3G network in my home, while I get 5 bar EDGE/GPRS from Cingular.

3. My cable internet, voip, and hd cable provider. Service is quickly going down hill and getting less and less reliable. Also can't stand the increasing cost after 6 month promotion expires.

4. Not being able to control my HD DVR from my phone. I've heard that Tivo has a solution for this. DirectTV here I come??? If what they say is true, I look forward to the days of having complete control over my DVR and a hundreds of HD channels to choose from.

5. Staring at my terabyte Yellow Machine storage device sitting next to my crappy Motorola HD DVR that only has a 250GB drive. Not being able to archive my HD content in an easy and efficient manner sucks or being able to expand the storage capacity of said DVR.

6. Being able to capture an hour of video on my phone, but only being able to send 15 sec clips over MMS / email from my LG VX9900.

7. Being locked into 2 year contract with my Verizon EVDO PCMCIA card that I hardly ever use.

8. The state of my NCAA brackets.

9. Not having the bandwidth to attend some of the interesting web2.0++ events going on right now.

10. Not having the time to get my blog off of Blogger and onto a home-hosted Ubuntu / Wordpress soln.

Let the Madness Begin

Today and tomorrow are my favorite days of the year in sports. The NCAA tournament is such fun to watch and I've got several brackets in play. Here are my picks:

Technorati Tags: ncaa, march madness, 2007, college basketball, bracket, cbs, yahoo, pickspal, espn

Syracuse got screwed - 2007 NCAA March Madness - web2.0 Style!

Thanks to Mike Arrington for the scoop on this cool new bracket mgr / social networking / ncaa march madness site - http://hoops.pickspal.com/

Here's my widget with a direct link to my filled in bracket.

I've also got brackets filled in for Yahoo Sports, ESPN, and CBS Sportsline

Link to my comment on Mike's post on Techcrunch

Technorati Tags: ncaa, bracket, 2007, basketball, pool, web2.0, techcrunch, widget

cool network speed test with visualization

Check out my results of a ping from Seattle to DC using my Comcast broadband connection over wireless 802.11g from my Dell D620 laptop.

Tags: speed, test, network, bandwidth, visualization, ping

Epic day on the backside @ Steven's Pass, WA

So after dialing in all the weather data, avalanche report, current traffic, and planned avalanche control work, we decided to head up to Stevens Pass instead of Alpental. And while I heard Alpental went off, I think Stevens got more snow. I was easily knee to waist deep pretty much all day long. I only snapped one pic from my new LG ENV phone (more on that in another post), and I still need to post it. Needless to say the skiing was epic and I'm really starting to get comfortable with my new boards. They frikin slice and dice the deep stuff and really let you commit yourself to the fall line. I went steep and deep and pointed em straight down the hill and OMFG, pure bliss. Makes the daily grind worth it.

There are more storms a brewing with more snow in the Mountains. I will be heading up to the mtns at least one day this weekend. Woot!!!

PacNW mtns rip!!!

word.

Technorati Tags: skiing, stevenspass, 02202007, powder, deep

new storm promises a deep powder day

So, I'm usually pretty good at heeding the warnings put out by the NWAC, but this one takes the cake. Crazy changing conditions in the northwest snopack. Am heading up to Alpental tomorrow morning for some freshies. Will be skiing with 2 others and returning in the late afternoon - definitely plan to be back before 5pm pacific. Will have full compliment of gear including tranceivers, shovel, probe, first aid, and provisions for a night or two.

Source: http://www.nwac.us/products/SABSEA

============
BACKCOUNTRY AVALANCHE FORECAST FOR THE OLYMPICS WASHINGTON
CASCADES AND MT HOOD AREA
NORTHWEST WEATHER AND AVALANCHE CENTER SEATTLE WASHINGTON
900 AM PST MON FEB 19 2007

NWAC Program administered by:
USDA-Forest Service
with cooperative funding and support from:
Washington State Department of Transportation
National Weather Service
National Park Service
Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission
Pacific Northwest Ski Area Association
Friends of the Avalanche Center
and other private organizations.

This forecast applies to back country avalanche terrain below
7000 feet and does not apply to highways or operating ski
areas.

WAZ513-518-519-019-042-501-502-ORZ011-201700-

&&

ZONE AVALANCHE FORECASTS

* OLYMPICS- WASHINGTON CASCADES NEAR AND WEST OF THE
CREST-

...AVALANCHE WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 4 PM PST MONDAY
UNTIL 4 PM PST TUESDAY...

Considerable avalanche danger above 4000 feet and
moderate below early Monday, gradually increasing
through Monday afternoon.  Significantly increasing
danger Monday afternoon through early Tuesday becoming
high above 4000 feet and considerable below. Gradually
decreasing danger Tuesday afternoon and night becoming
high above 5000 feet and considerable below.

* EAST SLOPES WASHINGTON CASCADES-
Considerable avalanche danger above 6000 feet and
moderate below early Monday. Gradually increasing
danger Monday afternoon becoming considerable above
5000 feet and moderate below. Further increasing danger
Monday night and early Tuesday becoming high above 5000
feet and considerable below. Gradually decreasing
danger Tuesday afternoon and night becoming high above
6000 feet and considerable below.

* MT HOOD AREA-

...AVALANCHE WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 4 PM PST MONDAY
UNTIL 4 PM PST TUESDAY...

Considerable avalanche danger above 4000 feet and
moderate below early Monday, gradually increasing
through Monday afternoon.  Significantly increasing
danger Monday afternoon through early Tuesday becoming
high above 4000 feet and considerable below. Gradually
decreasing danger Tuesday afternoon and night becoming
high above 5000 feet and considerable below.

SNOWPACK ANALYSIS
Very warm and sunny conditions Saturday helped to melt
and weaken surface snow on most open slopes. Cooling
Saturday night and light to moderate precipitation
deposited some 3 to 6 inches of new snow along most west
slope areas with up to 12 inches in the Mt Baker area.
This initial snow formed a relatively good bond to the
underlying wet and refreezing snow. Some reluctantly and
isolated ski triggered soft slabs were noted Sunday in
the shallow amounts of new snow from ski area
professionals. Also, very strong ridgetop winds scoured
much of the new snow on exposed slopes, exposing the hard
underlying crust. Continued light to moderate snow
showers Sunday morning through Monday morning have
deposited an additional 4 to 8 inches of new snow along
the west slope areas, Olympics and Mt Hood area.
Continued moderate to strong winds have likely built more
significant wind slab layers on many steep lee slopes,
mainly northeast through southeast facing slopes at
higher elevations where greater wind transport has
occurred. Snow pits early Monday morning at Snoqualmie
Pass noted a weak layer of grauple snow about 4 inches
below the surface at 3000 feet, likely deposited during
showers overnight. This or other near surface weak layers
have likely formed in the recent snow during fluctuations
of wind and snowfall intensity. Any triggered slides are
expected to release on these buried weak layers but may
fail or step down to the underlying crust where a weaker
bond exists, mainly above 5 to 6000 feet where
precipitation initiated as snow Saturday night.

Also, the strong winds and recent snowfall have built
extensive cornices along ridges and backcountry travelers
should be extra cautious near ridges.

Along the east slopes, significantly less new snow is
maintaining a lower danger, with shallow new snow
deposits over a very firm crust or breakable crust in
shaded areas.
 

DETAILED FORECASTS


MONDAY, MONDAY NIGHT
Light rain or snow Monday morning, gradually increasing
with moderate ridgetop winds. This should slowly increase
the danger as wind slab deposits increase over steep open
lee slopes. Further increasing rain or snow Monday
afternoon with strong winds. This should further increase
the danger early afternoon. Further increasing rain and
snow becoming heavy to very heavy Monday night with very
strong crest level winds. This should cause mostly
unstable snow to develop above about 4000 feet near or
west of the Cascade crest, Olympics, and Mt Hood area
where natural or triggered slides should become
increasingly likely late Monday. The greatest danger
increase should be on steep lee slopes near ridges,
mainly northeast to southeast facing. Travel in avalanche
terrain is not recommended by late Monday.

TUESDAY, TUESDAY NIGHT
Heavy snow early Tuesday at cooling temperatures and with
very strong winds should maintain or increase the danger.
Unstable slabs are likely on a variety of slopes,
especially northeast through southeast facing slopes near
or west of the Cascade crest, Olympics and Mt Hood area
where backcountry travel is not recommended. Slightly
less wind at lower elevations and less new snow fall
along the east slopes should limit the avalanche danger
increase, however unstable slabs are also likely on steep
open slopes at higher terrain. Decreasing snow showers
and further cooling with decreasing winds late Tuesday
and Tuesday night should allow for a slow decrease in
danger.

&&

Backcountry travelers should be aware that elevation and
geographic distinctions are approximate and that a transition
zone between dangers exists.  Remember there are avalanche
safe areas in the mountains during all levels of avalanche
danger.  Contact local authorities in your area of interest
for further information.

NWAC weather data and forecasts are also available by calling
206-526-6677 for Washington, 503-808-2400 for the Mt Hood
area, or by visiting our Web site at www.nwac.us. Also note
that field snowpack information is often available on the FOAC
website at www.avalanchenw.org, and weather and avalanche
glossaries for commonly used terms in the forecasts can be
found on the NWAC education page.

Kramer/Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center

$$

Tags: alpental, skiing, backcountry, avalanche, snow, conditions, weather

lights out @ flickr? apparent cache crash

flickr down for massage. going on several hrs now. that's not like yhoo. maybe the flickr team is still reading that lovely memo that Mike posted over at techcrunch.
Technorati Tags: flickr, beta, site, problem

del.icio.us team rolls out sweet new keyword feature for quick launch from browser bar.

As I reported in my last post, I noticed a new feature on del.icio.us today. I think they just rolled it out. The strange thing is that I don't recall updating my del.icio.us bookmarks plugin anytime recently. what's that update process del.icio.us devs?

So here's how it works - there's a new keyword field that is available as an option when you ctrl+d or click tag / use what ever save to del.icio.us method you use. I will say that this technique does require the del.icio.us bookmark extension.Above example: I want to be able to type tc into my browser url bar and go to www.techcrunch.com. All I need to do is enter tc into the keyword field and click save. that's it. I just added keywords for all my favorite sites - flickr, del.icio.us, gmail, owa (outlook web access), digg swarm, orginalsignal, myblog, etc etc etc.

this is kind of like having a launchy-style cmd-driven interface for your favorite bookmarks. I think its pretty slick.

Update: Just posted on TC forum to see if others have noticed this feature.

Technorati Tags: del.ico.us, keyword, shortcut, hack, lifehack, productivity, firefox

an important milestone

Where to begin. It's been a heck of a week for me with several projects at work reaching critical mass. Under immense pressure to build no fewer than three custom solutions with buggy software nonetheless. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about something much more important.

Today I reached a new plateau in my quest to move from the desktop to the browser. Allow me explain - our company just rolled out Exchange 2003 and the associated Outlook Web Access (OWA) client - you know the browser-based version of the Outlook client (which I deplore, hate, and have wanted to ditch for many years). I've been looking to move to a 100% browser based email client for Exchange for some time and while OWA tends to be an IE-centric interface, I've got a quick and dirty solution that allows me to open OWA in a Firefox tab. Here's what you need to do:

1. Install the IE Tab firefox add-on
   
2. Restart FF and fire up a new tab in Firefox.
   
3. Use the IE tab context switch (click the FF icon in the browser status bar - bottom of browser).
4. Enter URL to OWA webmail client.
   
5. Tag it with the brand spankin new del.icio.us keyword feature "owa" and now any time you type owa into your browser url bar, OWA will open. (you'll need the full blown Firefox del.icio.us extension to do this step). [SEE UPDATE BELOW]
   
6. You're done. That's it. No more need for outlook application.

Here's what mine looks like:
Do you realize what this means for me? I've finally rid myself of my dependence on Microsoft Office as a desktop platform for personal productivity. Here's my list of Office replacements (all of which are tagged in my del.icio.us bookmarks with "start" tag - I use this to rapid fire open all in new tabs for super productivity when I need to start my day.

MSWord > Google Docs
Excel > Google Sheets
PPT > Thumbstacks
Outlook > OWA

Other MS Replacements that are part of my arsenal of tools:

Outlook Express News Reader > Google Reader
MSN / Windows Messenger > Meebo
Windows Search > Google Desktop
MS Paint > Irfanview
Windows start menu > Launchy

---

DEL.ICIO.US KEYWORD FEATURE UPDATE: this feature has magically disappeared. I snapped a screenshot of it. I wonder if the del.icio.us guys are rolling out a new feature? For some strange reason, I don't see this new keywords field anymore. But I do have proof that it was there at one point. See:

Technorati tags: microsoft office, replacement, firefox, IE tab, browser, outlook, outlook web access, owa, hack, tips, howto