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Getting Hip(er) to Web 2.0

I admit it — I’m a very Web 1.0 participant on the intertubes. I spent most of my time on web sites like Yahoo Mail, New York Times, and the like. I read digg and am an avid Facebook user, but I’ve avoided some of the “cooler” and more interesting Web 2.0 companies.

Thus, I decided last week to get hip(er) with the times and plunge in to the world of last.fm and del.icio.us. Recently I’ve become a fairly exclusive Mac user (one MacBook, one MacBook Pro with VMware, and a Windows Server 2k3) and a Firefox user (never use Safari, and I don’t use IE in Windows any more). The plugs in for del.icio.us in to Firefox and last.fm in to iTunes are awesome. They make the cloud experience seamless with my desktop experience.

A while back I switched from Meebo to Pidgin (and now Adium) since the web experience wasn’t yet as good as the desktop, and I think that’s a kernel of why I like these two Web 2.0 apps a lot: I can use the apps I know and like (Firefox & iTunes) but they add value in to the equation by leveraging social effect and the ability to roam information between computers. The latter is really important to me since I use one machine for work and another at home, I have the same bookmarks between them and my music is scrobbled on both systems. For the bookmarks case, I used to use FolderShare but the Mac client for it is unusable. I still do use FolderShare, but only in my VMware Windows XP machine and my server.