Category: flickr

How many online services did you sign up for, use once or twice, and then never return again?

In my case, that would be lots of ’em. Some of them are really popular services like Digg or Mister Wong, where I just haven’t found a personal use case, or I’ve got a substitute or workaround. While some of them have disappeared, like leze.de or gada.be.

Here’s an idea for a blog post which I’ll update as I go along and find more unused websites in the backwaters of my Internet history.

Sites I tried, but which I don’t use anymore:

• Digg
• Mister Wong (I keep forgetting the url and typing mrwong.de)
• MyBlogLog (I wanted to un-subscribe, but I didn’t see the corresponding info, and now I’m too lazy and too busy. I don’t like the automatic delurking. Sometimes I want to lurk around for a while to get an opinion on the site…).
• Stumbleupon (I tried this once or twice, got really frustrated by the navigation and the tool bar, and couldn’t find a way to un-subscribe and leave).
• Web.de (changed the policy for their free email service to make it unusable, a clear goodbye from my side.)
• Blog-city.com (the hosted blog service I first tried out when I started blogging in 2003, at the time it had long and frustrating upgrade cycles, the reason that I moved to my own installation of WordPress)
• Blogger (I read some Blogger sites… but I hate it if I need to sign in into Blogger to leave a comment, I’ve got about 2 Blogger logins floating around and I just find it cumbersome).
• Bloglines

Sites or services that I visit regularly:

• Flickr
• del.icio.us
• Gmail, Gtalk…
• Wikipedia
• Technorati and blogsearch.google.com (mainly due to lack of alternatives, I think there’s lots of room for improvement in both)
• Slug.ch and blogug.ch (for the Swiss perspective)
• Youtube, Revver
• Skype (I recently signed up for SkypeOut and used it to call Malawi, very good sound quality, comparable or lower pricing compared to telecom carriers)

On the content side of things, I read:

• Scoble
• Dooce (you’ve got to have at least one mummy blogger in your Webtwodotoh portfolio)
• Metablog.ch (although recently this blog has slowed down a bit… I guess, Matthias has a lot of other duties)
• Climb to the Stars
• Gapingvoid (all time favorite)
• Google News, and I’ve set up Google Alerts for a couple of keywords.
• WordPress and WordPress.com (WordPress goodness hosted for you)
• Lorelle on WordPress

My favorite RSS feed by far:

• Dilbert

New explorations:

• Twitter
• Stickis
• Vox.com (they offer a smooth integration into external sites like Flickr. Pretty cool!)
• Jumpcut (downside: another Yahoo! company…)
• Afrigator (Blog aggregator for African sites, I like their crocodile icon!)