Webliminalblog

Web services with no fee

This started out by looking at what was available at Google labs. That's a place where Google shows off some items it's thinking of rolling out for public use. Today they included Google Compute, Google Viewer, Google Webquotes, Google Glossary, Google Sets, Voice Search, and Keyboard Shortcuts. Some of these have been around since May of 2002. I was looking at Google viewer. It gives a preview of each item in the list of search results. You can scroll through them. It was helpful, but my screen flickered a lot each time a new page was brought into view. I used the search expression Web server applications, since Karen Anewalt and I are starting work on a book on that topic.

The site I spent some time looking at was server.com. It offers a variety of applications at no fee with advertisements or for a monthly leasing fee. The applications include DiscussionApp a threaded message board with integrated mailing list and RSS syndication, ListApp a mailing list manager, DBApp a database application, CalendarApp, and NewsApp a news aggregator. I tried ListApp. It was very easy to set up and modify through a control panel they provide. When a user subscribes or gets email there's an advertisement and a line of text that really annoys me. "Get rid of the ads- lease this WebApp for as little as $5 a month." It's annoying because it's stronger than an advertisement, it tells the others using the service that the provider isn't paying for it. It might also encourage individuals to subscribe. It seems that messages posted to the subscriber list are sent out once per day, at midnight. Still, it's a pretty good service. At the basic level it's free, you concentrate on dealing with what individual users see (third tier), and they maintain the server. Of course that last item is the point of our book. Once the server is set up correctly installing applications like these aren't very difficult.

Posted by ernie at July 1, 2003 07:58 AM