Ans' Weblog

There are so many webservices out there.  In this blog, Ans shares his experiences and helps you to make a good choice for yourself. 

For more then two years now, he was a member of the Yahoo 360° community.  When he started, he had no experiences whatsoever in blogging and sharing his life with the outside world.  He learned a lot at 360° and is very grateful.  360° was also a platform where he met great new friends. 

But recenlty he decided to leave 360° for the simple reason that 360° is not offering a sufficent service anylonger. The blog is slow, pictures are not updating, profile pics not working, messages send late, … On top of this the communication about the problems and the future of 360° is very limited. In this post they announce that 360° will transition into a new profile thingie. Mash is one of the possibilities. Ans chooses not to transition to mash, cause it is still to messy.

Time to look for alternatives for some services he used at Yahoo.  The services are: webmail, blogtool, social networking, photo sharing.

He keeps his Yahoo account because their webmail is one of the best. Especially the integrated messenger, the RSS feeds, the unlimited storage space, the integration in the Yahoo messenger and the overall experience is just great.

Here at wordpress.com he found a neat bloggingtool.  He likes wordpress a lot.  The energy behind the community feels great.  This is also the reason why he chose facebook for social networking. The overall feeling is for him the most important reason to choose a webservice.  The only minus here at WordPress is the disabled feature of embedding flash because of security reasons.  Although adding music, video’s and slideshows to a blog is possible it would be nice if embedding flash was allowed (for example for greetingcards, and other stuff).  At the other hand, he loves the simple style.  Flash at times, make a page to chaotic.
He prefers facebook above other webservices as Hi5! and myspace because it is just great.  The site is highly adjustable, they have good privacy policy, and people tend to be real.  Flickr is still very nice for sharing pictures. It is simply the best. Easy to upload, organise, share and archive your pictures. 

These three services are well integrated into each other by means of widgets and applications.  The openess towards other platforms and integration is another advantage WordPress, facebook and Flickr share. 

Ans would appreciate it if you share which services you prefer and why.