Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Tops

It's probable that even the most seasoned blog reader is not attached to lists the way I am. Here it really helps clarify what services provided by websites are considered the most valuable, helpful or enjoyable. For whatever reason, these are the sites that drag people back.

I was aware the whole time that one site's placing wasn't a sure indicator of the popularity of the product they provided. Perhaps they exercise a monopoly of some kind. I'd say at a rough estimate, popularity is crowded for some products and services and dominated by a few players with others. So it depends.

Instant messaging is popular in the app. That makes sense. There isn't as much need to have an instantaneous medium where one is restricted to websites; why not email?

Bottoms

When it comes to the worst, a search under Internet products and services is endless complaints about Internet service providers. I think I even saw Choice's name pop up.
As for products, here's a fun site that looks at the worst products sold on the Internet. Or at least they're for sale; too crap and people won't buy. I wouldn't swear by that though.

As for Internet products, you could do worse (well no you couldn't, that's the point) than Motherboard article "Some of the Worst Internet of Things Products You Could Buy This Christmas" [I love the hyperlink title too]

Given that we're likely to only deal with the big ones, its my brand of curiosity to look at worst video sharing sites. Was Video Sift in 2008 knocked out of the competition by that review?

With social networking it's going to be the sites that are most popular that are also lambasted. It's all one giant argument. I can recall campaigns against dangerous or destructive influences when I was a kid and they continue to this day when looking at social media.
You can go and search for your own worst search engines.

The reason I say that is because my furtive attempts at finding out which search engines failed in their task threw up the names of ones we've canvassed or they swiped from each other. I guess all the Internet can be said to have this tendency; the wider the message is disseminated, the more likely it will be copied or co-opted.
Would it be right to highlight Blekko when it is only fifth worst on someone's list (below Ask Jeeves cum Ask.com)?

I had no part in choosing the worst encyclopedia 

Port-a-loo portals

You can do a bit of online shopping, you can sell online or you can even go online to bag out online shopping websites.  I can quite imagine eCommerce is a fertile ground for shysters to ply their trade. Not to mention novices who make the experience painful.

Photo sharing is variable in picture quality.

It's scary to even look at bad Internet security and my search for bad entertainment sites wasn't very entertaining.
Image result for bad portal


Saturday, November 25, 2017

Security detail

Top Internet Security Suites

  1. Bitdefender
  2. Norton Security
  3. Kaspersky Labs
  4. Trend Micro
  5. BullGuard
  6. Avast
  7. Panda
  8. G Data
  9. ESET
  10. F-Secure
 [source: Top Ten Reviews

Friday, November 24, 2017

Instant mess age

Instant Message services available online

as opposed to on App

[source: Lifewire]

The first thing I wanted to note is the volatility of the instant messenger mart. I use an app. And there's the elephant in the room: Facebook Messenger

AOL's messenger service - it may not look like it but that's the first one listed - is an ominous declaration 

Heads Up!

AOL Instant Messenger will be discontinued on December 15, 2017.

while eBuddy has given up

A step towards the future: eBuddy Chat is no longer available

Recognizing the decline of the instant messaging networks that eBuddy Chat supports and the rise of smartphone messaging, we have decided to solely focus on making XMS the best smartphone communications tool in the market.
We would like to thank you for being part of the eBuddy Chat journey and welcome you to continue your messaging journey with us on XMS.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Say 'cheese', such ease

Yes, it's still helpful to know what the most popular software is now.

Photo sharing takes place on Facebook and via email but the site we most think of is Instagram which has been taken over by fb, I take it, so it's a bit of a blur.

  1. Instagram
  2. Facebook
  3. Flickr
  4. Imgur
  5. PhotoBucket
  6. Picasa
  7. Twitpic
  8. Pinterest
  9. Photoshop
  10. Imageshack
I found hyperlinking all of these that there is so much cross pollination taking place (or did we discover that a few posts back but in a slightly different context?) The images are used in other forums: on blogs and social media, as well as the photo sharing websites themselves. Formal credit is given as that was the place it was first posted or the title of the image.

I think there's room to mention another four since Facebook and Flickr have been extensively covered already, PhotoBucket appears to be in limbo or something's going down and Photoshop was mentioned last time. So let's add OneDrive by some company called Microsoft, followed by tinypic, Shutterfly and Snapfish

Wednesday, November 08, 2017

Software you live

It was Windows Live popping up in most visited websites that brought us to ponder type 'software and services'

Best software

  1. Napster
  2. HyperCard
  3. MS Paint
  4. Netscape Navigator
  5. Firefox
  6. Photoshop
  7. WordPerfect 5.1
  8. Lotus 1-2-3
  9. Scrivener
  10. Solitaire
[TechRadar 'The Ten Most Loved Programs Ever']

I have retained this title but there is an itch to add 'for it's time'

Although software, even for those who don't work in an office, has become almost a symbol of change and rapid obsolescence. TechRadar have looked at the impact and significance rather than how each compares with something developed recently.  

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

Providers

The most popular Internet service providers are difficult to discern since population size plays a part; we may have our peccadilloes when browsing the Net but everyone needs an ISP to get started. It was on this basis I decided not to call on Verizon but link to Canstar Blue's rating of broadband services - they're Australian, they're 2017:

 We have room for a tenth but who should it be? With the impending National Broadband Network, we have not only NBN.co but someone called Mate. For all I know MyRepublic and nextalk might be ADSL2. We've got Foxtel (feeding funds to the ideological foe) but haven't made the connection to foxtel broadband

Monday, November 06, 2017

Internet service

We can't move over to less popular sites featuring photo-sharing or document sharing, or make a passing nod to the websites that have vanished, until we have sorted out what this Internet services and products means. The Storage News thinks it means Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which is closer than those sites who think from the search terms used that we're looking for the most popular products and services being offered on the Internet.

Gmail proved to be a good service and has stayed. An overview of Internet services from Spring semester, 1996 reveals the following:
A lot can change in twenty years, especially in cyberspace. My searches for Archie and Veronica, Gopher, Usenet and Telnet suggest these are foundling services that have since been supplanted. Back then they said WWW was another part of the Internet, not synonymous with it, but I think it has very much taken the lead.
You can see at the ten year mark how changes in technology affect pattern of useage. Most of the hurrahs are reserved for improvement in speed.

Again it is hard to get a measure of the popularity or importance of Internet products when too often this is read to mean 'products sold on the Internet'. It took me a bit of digging before I could find a site that would tell me what was truly meant by an Internet product.
Image result for types of internet product

Saturday, November 04, 2017

Head in the clouds, head on the cloud

In addition to its nebulous eCommerce, Amazon is a site for cloud computing. According to The Windows Club back in 2014 these were the top cloud computing services

  1. Microsoft Cloud Services
  2. IBM Cloud
  3. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
  4. Citrix Cloud Platform*
  5. Joyent Cloud
  6. BlueLock Cloud Services
  7. Verizon Cloud
  8. SalesForce Cloud - Ruby Platform as a service
  9. RackSpace Cloud
  10. Google Cloud Platform
 Image result for microsoft cloud services
     
*or for a more serious explanation of Citrix

     
     
    Image result for ibm cloud