Perhaps I shouldn’t get excited over new web 2.0 services, since as Asheesh points out they’re proprietary and you have no control over them. That said, if you’re using web services like Flickr, it’s good to have accounts on competing services so that if they suddenly turn evil for some reason you can switch to someone else without too much trouble.

In that spirit, I’m trying out this Flickr clone, Zooomr, which is apparently giving out pro accounts to people who blog about it in an attempt to boost their userbase. I guess it worked for me ^_^

One thing that’s cool about Zooomr is that you don’t even need to sign up to get a free account… if you have a Livejournal account or a Google account, you already have a sign-in for Zooomr. I wish more services would use OpenID or something like it (I’m told OpenID has its flaws), it’s fun and easy ^_^

UPDATE (August 17, 2011): Five years later, none of my images on Zooomr are loading, including the one in this post, and the site looks rather ugly and abandoned. The problem with playing with trendy new web 2.0 services is that if they are a fad and you actually rely on them, you may be left out in the cold.

Brian, Karen and I have started a band called Wrong Side of Dawn, and we’re looking for people to play bass and drums. If you know anybody who plays those instruments and lives near Swarthmore, PA or North Brunswick, NJ (where Brian lives), please let us know!

You can listen to our demo tape on the website, which we hope to turn into a professionally recorded album by the end of the summer. Let us know what you think of the demo!

Yesterday I was trying to make it easier for people to subscribe to War News Radio‘s podcast, so I turned on Feedburner’s service which allows people to subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail. Unfortunately, I realized today that Feedburner sends out e-mails daily (with no option to change the frequency of e-mails), and that you can’t control how many posts are sent at a time. We only publish one show every Friday, so there is no need to e-mail people about our last 10 shows every day. This is a really stupid and useless service, and they don’t even have a pro version with more functionality.

So I went looking for competing services, and I found plenty. The problem is that there are too many, and I can’t choose between all of them! Here are a few I am considering:

* FeedBlitz – Everyone agrees that it’s butt ugly and horrible, but for some reason massive numbers of people use it.
* Squeet – Also kind of ugly, and apparently doesn’t let you see the e-mail addresses of your subscribers, which is a win for privacy but a loss for functionality/convenience.
* Yutter – Looks simple and relatively pretty, but their blog seems a bit unprofessional, and they seem like such a small operation that they may very well disappear.
* Zookoda – Apparently very full-featured and customizable, but apparently a pain to set up. Also, I’m not sure whether the people who subscribe using it will show up properly in my Feedburner stats… FeedBlitz and Squeet are FeedBurner partners so they show up fine, and Yutter claims it will be counted in FeedBurner stats… Zoodoka doesn’t say one way or another in their FAQ.

Where the @#$% is a comparison chart when I need one? Comparison charts are really indispensable for making up one’s mind in situations with too many choices.

What should I do, folks? I’m seriously hyperventilating here.

UPDATE: As Asheesh points out, all of the above services are proprietary, and a self-hosted open source solution would be superior. What I really want is a WordPress Email Notification Plugin, but unfortunately the existing one is out of date / abandoned looked out of date/abandoned. There are rumors of an updated version being in development, and I would be willing to donate to such a worthy cause if it is in fact in progress. I’ve e-mailed them, we’ll see if they respond.

UPDATE 2: The people responsible for the plugin wrote back and said:

Nelson,

This is still active and we’ve not had any issues running the latest release on WP 2.0. If you know of any specific issues, please let me know.

Also, yes, donations would be extremely helpful in order to free up our time. (See: http://blog.watershedstudio.com/2006/03/anouncement-wordpress-email-notification-plugin-v30-development/ ) If everyone that used it donated a few dollars we’d be golden, but I believe that we have a grand total of $7 in the v3.0 development jar to date.

If you have any questions feel free to let me know.

Brian

I think I will put a little money in the pot… if this is something you might use, you should too ^_^