Account Overload

    Which one to choose? With the plethora of available services on the net it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide which ones you want to use. Site X has these features, site Y some overlapping ones and site Z some of both X & Y but not all. Yes, you can do your research and find reviews and comments and comparisons and then you find your Wednesday night is gone.

     Then there is account management. Site X has openID where you can use your email or Facebook account to log in. Site Y will let you use site X's account but you dont have a real account, it's accessed through your email or Facebook and site Y doesn't allow you to to use those. Then there's mobile devices. The mobile apps don't always allow you to use an openID making it difficult to log onto site X, you need to have a "real" account/username and password.

    OPenID is a great thing but as far as I know, it only works when you set up new accounts. There is no way to go to some of your existing accounts and change your login to an openID. OpenID has this feature on a wish list of future improvements.

    The connectivity and interaction between services and devices is getting better but it still amounts to a lot of account overload. I enjoy researching and investigating new computer technology. I think I would like a job as a personal computer advisor, letting people know what the best options are for their needs. I guess that is what this course and program are preparing me to do.

    So, I've got some new accounts. While doing my initial playing around with my new Android phone a couple of months ago, trying to fill it up with as much stuff as I could I ran across Springpad, a notetaking scrapbook type application like Evernote, accessed through a browser or a mobile app. Apparently it does things a bit differently than Evernote in that it will search through your notes, bookmarks and web clips and give further recommendations based on what it finds. Here is a good review. I'll have to start using it more to see what it can do for me both personally and professionally.

   For online storage, I think I found a service that I'll be investigating a bit more and may purchase premium services or hardware from them. It's called Tonido. Instead of uploading and saving everything to a third party service, you use your own computer as a file server as long as it is connected to the Internet. You choose which folders/files to share, either publicly or with a guest login. You can access your entire computer remotely from any connected computer or smartphone. With premium services or hardware, you can mount your remote computer as a local drive and directly edit and work on files rather than downloading - editing - then syncing. The service has many more features which you should check out. There are some interesting educational uses for using Tonido, read here.