There are a lot of Web 2.0 folks out there competing for the gold medal in online To do list application. There’s a clear winner. It’s Todoist. Why? For starters—and this is precisely why I realized I had to actually blog about the service as opposed to just use it—rather than just import it into my iGoogle home page, I just made it my home page on all my machines. It’s that useful. The first thing I want to see when I wake up is Todoist.

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I posted my thoughts about user expectations regarding search over on The GUI designer’s coffee break. Here’s what I said:

“It’s interesting to note that several of these expectations stem from searches being based on loaded results from another server and the necessity of typing in a full query before seeing any results. “Live” searches such as the one in Apple spotlight and some being implemented via AJAX on the web change this. Here’s one example. On my blog, I’ve made the argument several times that search engines should also be capable of chatbot behavior. It should engage this behavior when an intelligible phrase would allow it to walk users through to more accurate information. Google’s “Did you mean?” functionality is a good start but lots more could be done with it. Combine that functionality with live search and I think the result would be very powerful.

Powerful is maybe even an understatement. A well-thought out chat/search bot with live results and recommendation capabilities could be insanely great. I’ve learned enough about web services that it may be time I start thinking about building this concept in Flash.

I’m not sure why Ajax developers have become so ecstatic about DHTML development when they still face the problem of IE at Microsoft. Microsoft just has such a terrible reputation for ruining the party. The more complex Ajax apps become the easier it will be for Microsoft to break them. This is why I personally prefer Flash/XML app development. It’s not going to break (at least not due to Microsoft’s efforts).

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Out friends over at Abstract Dynamics have written an interesting article on the phenomena of tagging. For those that don’t know, tagging is a new kind of shared meta-data being used largely alongside blogging. Technorati is a great central repository of this sort of thing, along with del.icio.us. And while Read more…