New online stuff that I don't understand yet

THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2009 AT 4:00PM

There are a couple "new" techie applications out there. Maybe not new as in cutting edge technology, but more like new to me.  I consider myself one of the late early-adopters, which means I'm not the first to latch on to new technology but am not far behind the pioneers of the tech world.

There are three newish applications I've bene using which I'm still in the process of understanding.  Here they are, listed in my order of comprehension - Bing, FriendFeed and Wolfram alpha.

So Bing, pretty straightforward - Bing Is Not Google :-) I guess that says it all.  Bing is Microsoft's attempt at ratcheting up the competition with Google.  It's a search engine that has some pretty nifty features compared to google.  Of course as a die-hard google fan it'll take more than some fancy colors and over-mouse-hovering-graphics to get me to change, but I'll definitely be keeping my eye on Bing over the next few months. If for nothing else then the fact that saying Bing brings back fond memories of that long-gone TV show.

Next on the list of new online toys to play with is FriendFeed.  I've go to say, not real sure how to use this one yet.  It seems very useful, often mistakenly compared with Twitter, FF is more of a online feeds congregate-or.  One place to go where you can see most of the information you're interested in reading, but more importantly - one place where all your friends can go to see what you are saying on the web.  It takes feeds from most of the popular social news / blogging sites like facebook, twitter, digg, etc.  I guess my problem with friendfeed is that it just reminds me of how un-geeky my friends are.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life - I don't have enough geeky friends that are interested in the same soul-uplifting, heart-warming, techie stuff that I am.  If I did then FriendFeed would be the place I'd tell them all to go.

And lastly, but least understood by me, is Wolframalpha.  The bottom line is that as Leo Laporte said on one of his recent podcasts, I'm just not smart enough to use wolframalpha.  I can tell you what it's not, it's not a google, its no bing and it cant be called a search engine.  Rather than searching for pre-answered questions on the internet Wolfram alpha computes answers to questions based on data it has within its databases.  Like fine wine, WA is an acquired taste.  I've been forcing myself to try and use it at least once a day to understand what all the hype is about.

So there you have it folks, techy stuff out there that I don't understand yet :-)  While I'm still trying to figure this out I hear Google Wave is in the works. Am not even going to go there!