How to use the new web

The web is a new place. With all sorts of new services and ideas popping up all over the place, it’s no longer just a question of wandering through a few sites or links, and searching Yahoo! for the answer to a question.

Instead, the internet is growing into its own platform. More and more, there are things to do online, instead of simply existing as a database.

The question becomes: how do you use the internet? There’s so much cool new stuff that it’s hard to keep track of how it becomes the one complete, usable, cool time-wasting time-saving place we call the “web.” Here’s how I use it.

The Browser

For a long time, there wasn’t really a question. If you browsed the internet, you used Internet Explorer, and if you had a mac, you used Safari. That was it. Now, however, there are a number of good (and mostly) free browsers available to choose from that sport different nifty features.

I’m including the browser here because I think it changes the way you surf. I switched from IE to Firefox about a year ago, and It’s made a huge difference in how I use the web. The biggest and most obvious difference is tabbed browsing, which if you’re using any of a million other browsers, isn’t much of a change.

Firefox is my favorite because of its extensions. I actually made a list of the extensions I use a while back. I need to update the list since I’ve added many cool new ones since, but it’s still a good starting point for someone who’s just installed Firefox. There’s another BIG list of extensions here, but aside from being the “50 best,” they don’t come with much recommendation. It’s almost better just to browse Mozilla Update.

This array of very ingenuitive input makes Firefox a better choice for me than options like Netscape (still around!), Opera (not actually free!), and Maxthon (which is also very cool).

The Start Page

For me, the start page is the fundamental crux of the web experience. It’s there every time I start my browser, and I keep the most important links and content readily available on it.

One of the coolest new aspects of the internet is the way most content has become syndicated. Put most simply, this means that instead of going to the content, it now comes to you. On my browser’s home page, I have modules for my three favorite blogs, certain tags I like to follow on del.icio.us, and several different news feeds from magazines and newspapers like Wired and the New York Times.

Several places offer customizeable start pages, and creating a nice-looking, organized home for the content you look to most often on the internet can be really cool.

Of the options I know about, I would recommend using one of three services: My Yahoo!, Customized Google, and Start.com. Other places such as AOL and MSN offer customizeable start pages, but I’ve found them to be a little too corporate and a little inflexible.

My Yahoo! suffers from some of those defects as well. Of the three, it is my least favorite, and I’ve included it here mostly because so many people use and enjoy it that there must be some value to it that I haven’t recognized. Alone of the three, it hovers an ad banner at the top of the page, and the design is much less flexible than I want from my start page. The big advantage to my Yahoo! is that it’s easy to integrate with Yahoo! mail (if you use it).

In contrast, Google’s customizeable pallete is just that: a pallete on which you can add content. It allows you to freely and easily move content modules around the screen by click-and-dragging them to various columns. It comes with the smallest selection of “recommended content” for you to choose from (news feeds, quotes, word of the day), but allows you to “create” a content module from any RSS or ATOM feed you choose.

Microsoft’s side-project Start.com, which I already wrote about here, is similarly designed. You can drag modules around the screen, and it uses some fancy-schmancy web coding to do a cool “pin” function with searches you do, and pages you open. Start.com also displays images within modules (say, the Calvin and Hobbes daily comic feed) unlike Google, which simply lists a link to the cartoon. Between Start.com and Google, I’d say it’s mostly a matter of taste.

del.icio.us and digg

With the advent of blogging and searching and organizing things in general, its occurred to some very smart people that “tagging” was worth resurrecting. It’s my understanding that tags were discarded as categorization material early on, but someone recently decided to try it anyway, and it worked perfectly.

In any case, the two very cool things that have showed up on the web because of this are del.icio.us and Digg. They’re a little bit different in their implementation and interface, but fundamentally they both collect cool links. I use del.icio.us more because I’m used to it and its what I ran into first.

To be fair, it took me almost three months to really understand how del.icio.us works and it what ways it can be useful to me. I’ve come a long way from the first time I had it explained to me, so a lot of things make sense and seem obvious to me now, but I still remember being utterly confused by it at first. I’m still amazed that there are people with enough of a conceptual grasp on the web and where it’s going to actually create services like this.

One of the cool things about del.icio.us is the ease with which things can be tagged and syndicated. I’ve started considering certain tags within del.icio.us as channels, in the same way that a TV channel is a large collection of content presented within a certain genre. Another cool thing about del.icio.us that differentiates it from digg (for me) is the way bookmarks are kept with your accounts — it gives more freedom to keep a list of links for yourself.

I’m constantly coming across things that I’d like to keep track of. Cool sites with cool flash games, news, commentary, or just images. I can tag them for myself or I can tag them (using the “for:” tag) for other people who have del.icio.us accounts, but either way it shows up in my (searchable) list.

For me, and this is not the way you have to do it, I usually find cool things on digg (which is centered largely around submitting cool articles and having people “digg” them until they hit the homepage) and then tagging them on del.icio.us so that I can keep track of them.

Either way, these two services will form the core of a very unique community function on the web. Fred Wilson (who I think invested in del.icio.us) often mentions how he considers posting to del.icio.us essentially the same as blogging. I disagree because I think you need to have more input than you get the chance to write when posting there, but that’s just my opinion. Cool things are happening and will continue to happen with these sites.

FlickR

FlickR, not to be confused with the gaming e-zine Flicker, is a Yahoo! bought service for storing and sharing photos online. If you don’t believe the hundreds of reviews about how it’s the best option out there, I’ll tell you a few reasons to think about how it’s changed the way we use the web.

(As a side note, I think services like YouTube are going to quickly follow in FlickR’s footsteps, and as cheap bandwidth options continue to increase, video sharing will become more common and more cool).

Because basic FlickR accounts are free, starting an account and uploading photos is incredibly easy. There are desktop tools to streamline the process even more, and as time goes on the process of uploading pictures will get easier and easier. FlickR is also fairly flexible. It offers paid accounts with unlimited uploading bandwidth, and allows all users to adjust the size and image rights to their albums.

I could go on about the features, but that’s not the point of this post. What does FlickR do that changes the way we use the internet? It shares. What del.icio.us is to static internet pages, FlickR is to images. When you upload an image, what you’re really doing is posting it. You have an account with a photostream (rss feed) and people can browse through your work. People can leave comments and rank photos. It’s a community that integrates really well with the rest of the internet, especially blogs.

The bottom line is, even if you have no interest in photography, this is something to keep an eye on. Very cool things will come out of it.

iTunes

I know what you’re thinking: iTunes isn’t particularly connected to the internet. Sure, it has a music store where you download music, but fundamentally it’s for playing music on your computer.

Yes and no. I honestly wouldn’t be very surprised (or particularly upset) if Apple imbedded Safari into iTunes at some point in the future. Then you could make iTunes your RSS reader as well, which makes enough sense just because its where you get to arrange your podcast and vidcast feeds anyway.

But beyond that, iTunes is already far more integrated with my web experience than it appears. On the most basic level, it fetches CD information from the ‘net every time I stick a cd in the drive. On a much more complex level, it manages what I increasingly want to call my internet channels.

Using the same trick as I do for my start page (which I learned for Fred Wilson, the incredibly busy yet incredibly net-savvy VC), I can use del.icio.us to feed video files directly into iTunes as a “podcast.” This way, as people tag funny and interesting videos online, I get a steady stream (or channel) of content directly in my iTunes.

If you want to try it out, the “funny video feed” can be put into iTunes easily. Under the advanced menu, click “subscribe to podcast,” and type in: “http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/funny+system:filetype:mov”

I’m not sure what’s next, but rest assured that iTunes (starting with 4.9) is extremely well integrated with the internet, and I can only see it getting better. Apple just needs to stay smart enough to keep the distance between DRM-ing the content they sell and DRM-screwing up the program people use to run it. If iTunes tried to lock down the videos and music that I get through freelance feeds, I’d switch programs immediately.

Widgets

I’m relatively new to this idea. I heard about widgets months ago, but I only downloaded the Yahoo! widget engine last week. To be entirely honest, widgets don’t seem to do much that’s particularly new or that couldn’t be done other ways.

What they do do, and do well, is convenience. There are hundreds of thousands of widgets available for download from the Yahoo! database, and I’m sure a good portion of them are actually useful. As it is, the only two I ended up keeping on my desktop were the Clock that came with the engine (I do need an easier to spot clock on my desktop), and a little widget that gives me a dialy dose of Calvin and Hobbes.

Widgets are in this post because I think they have a lot of potential, and if we give them time some very useful applications will emerge. I think the best comparison would be that these widgets are like the modules on your start page, except that they populate your desktop. If you like the idea of making your desktop your web-top, go for it.

Blogging

I feel obligated to tack this on at the end, even though it’s like saying you need a Turkey for thanksgiving dinner. Chances are, if you’re reading this post, you understand how blogs have changed the internet. Most importantly, they make everything a discussion.

If you don’t read blogs, you might want to consider it. They’re the flagship of internet interactivity that everyone’s been babbling about recently.