Friday, February 02, 2007

The new internet

I've been exploring the possibilities of the new internet. Yahoo for example has upgraded its email and calendar to look and act more like your own desktop applications, it also has widgets that you can install on your own desktop, it's mainly for PC user's mac-envy, they are cute, but they might slow down your computer I'm told.
Same goes for Google. Google desktop is like one big widget holder. What is more interesting is the google documents and spreadsheets. You can keep documents on a web site and invite people in to collaborate. For example, I will put up a document for song lyrics (soon), I write the first part, and you get to add on to it a second, and someone else a third, an old game that we can play across the globe. Same goes for spreadsheets. I have been using the google spreadsheet to keep track of my diet.
I recently lost about 50 lbs. Now I have to stabilize, so I still have to keep an eye on things. So I decided to test the google spreadsheet by making a calendar (you can find templates on the microsoft web site). Each meal is color coded, green if very good for you, red if it's deep fried pizza and chocolate mousse (more on the diet in future posts). This way I can follow the patterns, you know, every time you have a deep fried pizza (also called panzerotto) you should not have another one for at least a couple of days, and so a red case should be followed by a couple of green ones. If there are e few green days in a row then it means that if I have lasagna one night then it will not be the end of the world. Anyway, to come back to the point, this spreadsheet is online, so I can access it whether I'm at work, at home or on the road.
Another example of the new internet is the thingy I put there on the right. It's a link to an excel template I made to keep track of eating patterns. It's stored on a site called box.net, I can keep 1GB of stuff there for free. They are not the only ones I guess, but it works pretty well so far. So you can just go there and download the template, then upload it into google documents. I could have done it directly on Google documents by sharing or publishing the template on there, but I just wanted to try this other thing.
Finally you can make a personalized google home page where you keep track of all these different things you have set up.
All this raises lots of questions about internet dependency and security, but lunch time is over, more soon.

1 comment:

mctrask said...

I use the google documents site too. You should try out google notebook. It's a fun new tool.