I tend to think a lot about how far technology and the Internet has come. I know I’ve written about some of it here. One of the biggest surprises to me has been how much better web-based services and software have become. Don’t forget, even a popular powerhouse like YouTube was launched initially in 2005. It’s so easy to upload video online these days and share with your friends. It really wasn’t that long ago that such a task would’ve been difficult or impossible. When you add in the fact that mobile computing has completely blown up in terms of processing power and data throughput, it’s enough to make one’s head spin.
So for this Kibbles and Bytes article, I wanted to talk about a few of my favorite internet-based services and software.
- Vimeo – YouTube’s smaller, less popular brother? Maybe, but I really like Vimeo. They were always geared more towards higher production quality videos and I love that it’s more about the video itself than the social aspect (as on YouTube). I actually pay for a pro account because I tend to shoot a lot of video and the pro account allows for more upload bandwidth and faster video processing times. Possibly trivial, but I’ve always loved the styling of Vimeo’s site. It’s cute, fun, colorful and simple. It makes using the site a pleasure and helps compliment the great videos and films people post there.
- GitHub – Yes, this is an obligatory nerd choice. GitHub has exploded as the destination for developers to post their code, collaborate with others, download and distribute open source software, manage projects and more. It’s what we use here in the Small Dog IT department for all our software development and distribution. What you may not know is that GitHub doesn’t have to just be for software. Almost anything that you want to collaborate on with others can be set up on GitHub. A few years ago, I experimented with using it as a versioned repository for a story I was writing. It actually worked really well. The versioning works best for flat text files, but technically it can be used for anything.
- Gravatar – Gravatar is a really cool service that allows you to manage all of your online avatars in a single place. Each avatar can be linked to an email address. If you sign up on a 3rd party website with that email address, and the site implements Gravatar’s API (which the vast majority do these days), it’ll automatically pull in your avatar. Want to change your avatar on all the sites you use? Just log into Gravatar and change it! I love this service because it helps keep my online presence consistent and if I feel like changing the image, it’s super easy. It also keeps a library of previous avatars so if you want to go back to a previous avatar, you can do so easily.