Reviews

Damnit. I've been working on a great review of GrandCentral's online service for several (ok several, several) months and we keep finding a reason to postpone it. First, there was the buyout by Google and as usually happens, no one cared about the service, they just cared about the price. Then there was the fact that they closed the Beta and the only thing anyone cared about was, "Where can I get a Grand Central invitation?"

Timebridge has released a web-based, public scheduling manager into beta that may cut down on the amount of "back and forth" it takes to schedule a meeting through Outlook. If you have ever scheduled a meeting through Outlook, you know that it may take several emails and cancellations to get a time that works for all attending parties. With Timbridge, you are allowed to pick up to 5 possible meeting times that attendees can pick from. And you're not restricted to Outlook, as Timebridge also interfaces with Google calendars.

Online desktops have the potential to change the way we use computers as much as or more than any other technology that has recently emerged. What, you've never used one? I'm not surprised. The basic idea behind them is very sound, but so far their real world implementations haven't been. Online desktops provide internet-based services that allow you to do all the things you could do while you are at home sitting in front of your desktop, from any computer connected the the 'net. Specifics vary from product to product, but generally there's some sort of online storage, a few applications, and an interface that emulates an operating system. Sounds like a great idea, but

Editors note: It's not all sunflowers and "Kumbaya" at Texxors.com. Last week Tara wrote an article on the Pandora internet music service that some of our other editors disagreed with. In the interest of equal time, here are their thoughts on why Pandora rocks.

If Texxors.com seems schizophrenic at times, it's because we've got several different author's writing for the site. As you might expect, these authors don't always agree on the best products or approaches. You saw this a little bit in Jeff and Liz's different takes on how to stay virus free online and you're going to see it again in this response to Tara's recent article on Pandora.com. In the interest of presenting multiple opinions and giving our readers as much information as possible, these are the reasons I and a few others affiliated with the site think that Pandora rocks.

In a recent post in the forums reader olhaok mentioned the Ning social networking site. My first thought was, "That thing's still around?" When I first came across Ning several months ago it was very rough around the edges. The concept was interesting but the implementation was very poor. I expected it would soon get lost in the flood of new social networking sites that were emerging at the time. The idea behind the service was good enough: to offer a full-featured, free, online content management system and social networking service (think Wordpress meets MySpace or MyBlogLog), but it just didn't seem like it could recover from some serious design flaws.