Why Lots of Hard Drive Space is Obsolete

About two years ago, Bill Gates published a "Sea Change" memo. He does this to refocus Microsoft on a particular priority. With one of these memos in 1995, he focused the company on the importance of leveraging the Internet in its software. In 2002, he published another memo to focus the company on software security.

I remember when this memo came out. I was working at Ensynch (a Microsoft partner) and this memo sparked a lot of excitement in the Microsoft community. It's funny how long it can take for something like this to be adopted in the general population.

It's now 2007 -- two years after this memo was released. I realized today that I no longer use any local programs on my computer. To clarify, a local program is a piece of software that you install on your computer -- you can access it usually on- or offline and the information is stored on your hard drive. Internet access is so ubiquitous now that everything I do now is accomplished online:

• Write documents
• Manage my finances
• Play games
• Network with friends

The term that's been coined for this shift in how I use software is called "Software as a Service" or SaaS. I didn't realize how useful this model of online software is until my imminent departure from DelCor. In my last job, I had to make sure I deleted a lot of personal files so that my information remained secure. When I leave DelCor tomorrow, I won't have to do this because all the personal stuff that I did while in my office resides online.

This way of using software also proves beneficial in extending the lifespan of my PC. I no longer have to worry about system requirements, hard drive space, etc with my relatively older machine. As long as I can still use Firefox on the computer, I can accomplish all my tasks through the Web.

Five Sites to Get you Started with SaaS:

• Google Docs: Think of this as a free version of Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Everything I could do on a local program (except the most advanced Word features), I can do through this.
• Gmail: There is really no reason that you should be using any other email program. Threaded email, archiving instead of deletion, and search instead of sort. Everything's stored online.
• Mint: Think of this as an online Quicken. Aggregates all your financial data (kind of scary...) into one site for you.
• Picnik/Flickr: Edit your photos online with Picnik and then upload, tag, and share them on Flickr.

SaaS is without a doubt, the future of software -- expect to be charged for the use of some programs in the future as well.

Do you have any other favorite SaaS sites? Share them in the comments.

The Fresh Marketer Lifestream

I have a Lifestream.

What's that? Well, it's an RSS feed of basically everything I write or look at online. I've combined my blog's feed with my Google Shared feed and my Twitter feed. I'll also add in my Flickr feed once I finally get around to uploading my pictures into Flickr (Facebook photo albums are way too closed off from the rest of the Internet for me to use).

So if you're already subscribed to my RSS feed, you'll start getting posts that won't be written by me. These are from my Google Shared site. You can also monitor the posts I think you'll find interesting by looking at the "What I'm Reading" widget. For those of you who haven't subscribed to my feed yet, take a second and click the "Subscribe to my Lifestream" link or add the following address to your favorite RSS reader:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheFreshMarketerLifestream

Also, if you have any problems subscribing, post a comment or send me an email and I'll help you get it setup.

P.S. If you want any individual feed, here are the addresses:

Google Shared:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/09913530811447969166/state/com.google/broadcast

Blog:
http://freshmarketer.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/1219701.rss

Welcome Back

Okay, as I'm sure you can see, I've switched back to Blogger. As much as I've tried to fight it, Blogger is just hands down the best free blog software out there right now. WordPress was good in a lot of ways, but I missed a lot of the features I had on Blogger. Here's how the two services stacked up against each other:

How Blogger is Better than WordPress:

• Ability to add in any HTML, Java, etc code in your post or on a sidebar. WordPress seriously restricted this in the free version.
  
• A lot of already-created widgets that are easy to add to the page. WordPress gave you only a handful of widgets -- none of which were very useful.
• Better RSS integration. As you'll see below, I've changed a lot about my RSS feed and I don't want visitors getting confused about which feed to subscribe to. On Blogger (with Feedburner), I can make all of my feed links direct to the same address.

How WordPress is Better than Blogger:

• I have going to Blogger blogs. Perhaps it's because anyone can create one and it seems that I question a blog's authority as soon as I see it's on Blogger. The irony of this statement is not lost on me.
• More attractive templates. Even if these templates are much more limiting than Blogger's.
• Integrated blog stats -- accessible directly from the dashboard. But it doesn't tell you network locations like Google Analytics does, which is the most important thing I look at.

So there we go. I've switched back to Blogger now. I'll probably stick with Blogger until I bite the bullet and purchase a Typepad subscription. That just seems to be the all-around best option if you're going to pay for a subscription.