Floating Sun » ajax

Web based password manager

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:03:32 +0000

Does anyone know of a good web based password manager? I’m inclinced to hack up my own, but I wanted to dig around a little bit first.

Password management has always been an issue with me — there are just way too many passwords to remember, and even though I’m usually lazy and end up using one of 2-3 passwords in most places, I still need to remember login names (why can’t websites explicitly mention that they use email addresses as logins). And sometimes I do create new passwords, which are just impossible to remember.

I’m sure someday we will move away from text based encryption schemes and have some funky audio/visual passwords which won’t require me to remember arbitrary strings of text. But that day is not today, and so I need some solution. Traditionally I’ve been using applications on my desktop to keep track of my passwords (my own Starfish, Revelation etc) and that has scaled nicely so far.

But now its getting out of hand. With all the Web2 hype, new and interesting startups come up on a daily basis. All of them need your email address and password. I have more than 5 GMail accounts. Several bugzilla accounts. Credit cards. Insurance companies. Banks. Airlines. Portals. Passwords, passwords and more passwords. Thanks to spam, now you need some kind of authentication mechanism to get to anything useful on the web. So my list of usernames and passwords is becoming unmanageably long.

Starfish and Revelation were fine, but I would have to sync my password files across systems. But when I was travelling without my laptop, I’d be stuck — so I do need a web front end. Besides, this seems to me the kind of web-app almost everyone needs. So how come I haven’t seen a cool AJAX-ified web based password management tool yet?

Any takers?

The Next Bubble

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 02:00:23 +0000

This whole Web2 thing seems to be headed to be the next big bubble. I suspect it //will// burst at some point, but its too early to speculate why or how or when — for that matter, it might never actually burst, or it might just be subsumed by a greater, bigger, deeper Web3.0 thats still mostly in people’s heads.

Anyhow, what //does// bother me that is how quickly people are catching onto the Web2 bandwagon. While this is good, it is useful only if each new entry adds some innovation and value to the whole. However, right now it doesn’t look like that. Many people are coming up with the same ideas, at about the same time and with about the same functionality. Let me give a few examples:

* Calendars: [[http://planzo.com/|planzo]], [[http://kiko.com]]
* Events: [[http://upcoming.org/|Upcoming]], [[http://eventful.com/|Eventful]]
* Web based email (redux): [[http://zimbra.com/|Zimbra]], [[http://roundcube.net|RoundCube]]
* Groupware (redux): [[http://joyent.com|Joyent]], [[http://renkoo.com|Renkoo]]
* Social bookmarks: [[http://furl.net|Furl]], [[http://del.icio.us]], [[http://del.irio.us]]
* Democratized News: [[http://digg.com|Digg]], [[http://reddit.com|Reddit]], [[http://shoutwire.com|Shoutwire]]

And there are many such more (feed readers, todo list managers etc)

Now it would be foolish for me to claim that having choices is bad (infact, quite a few people would abuse me for the rest of my life if I said something like that, because I often use that argument in favor of Linux). It might just be the case that since all this is so new, people are just getting started with the same kinds of things — extensions of applications we already use and love (email, bookmarks, calendars). But somehow I get the feel that while we’re all really excited about the technology, very few people really have a good idea of what its capable of and what kind of **new** and **innovative** applications can come out of it.

Nonetheless, exciting times! Every other day I think about leaving all this and starting my own :-)

Funky

Diwaker Gupta — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 22:20:30 +0000

Check out [[http://www.ning.com/|Ning]]. They have made the next step in bringing web based apps to the user — by letting anyone create any app. Its pretty neat. You can create your own craigs list, or match.com or hot-or-not or any of the [[http://appideas.ning.com/|tons of ideas]] that Ning gives you. Or, just go and build something new.

I think its pretty cool. Exciting times.

Writeboard

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 00:27:07 +0000

Though I’m not quite impressed with writeboard. Its just //ok//. I think [[http://jotlive.com|Jotlive]] is way more cooler — it seems you can actually see different people editing different portions of the document in **real time**. Now //that//, is neat.

What is Web 2.0?

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 06:11:30 +0000

If all the buzzwords and acronyms (Web 2, AJAX, RSS, XHTML, XSLT, tags, blogging, podcasting) are hurting your head, no fear — none other than Tim O’Reilly himself has written a nice essay titled “[[http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228|What is Web 2.0?]].

While not the most comprehensive and the most insightful piece, it is nonetheless a very good overview. If it seems too long, just go through the 8 bullets down at the bottom for the meat of the matter.

Web based office

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:46:53 +0000

A sort of survey by ZDNet on Web2.0 [[http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/index.php?p=20|office applications]]. I had mentioned most of these applications in an [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/09/15/189/|earlier post]].

I want to write about so many more things but this week is just crazy. Hopefully I’ll have some more time over the weekend to actually write something thats not just a link :)

Finally, a real web IM

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 05:23:27 +0000

Check out [[http://meebo.com/|meebo]] — no really, I mean it. Do it — you’ll be surprised.

I was shocked at how well it works. Almost as good as gaim, kopete or trillian. I could log in instantly, it showed me my offline messages, I could chat with one accounts signed into meebo and the other one on my desktop. It was freaky. Damn cool stuff!

The [[http://blog.meebo.com/?page_id=2|team]] looks interesting — young, vibrant and mostly female :-) (no, I’m not trying to be sexist). Do check out the [[http://blog.meebo.com/|meeblog]] and the [[http://forum.meebo.com/|forums]].

Wow.

Towards an online desktop

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 05:17:59 +0000

Lets see what do we have so far:

Now all we need is a good replacement for photoshop, powerpoint and excel and integrate them all together into a single portal (Yahoo? Google? M$? other takers?) and there you have — your online desktop!

Of course, easier said than done. But things are moving fast. Very fast.

Ajax galore!

Diwaker Gupta — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:40:43 +0000

Check out [[http://www.protopage.com/|Protopage]] — you’ll be blown away.

Just as desktops are becoming more usable and more good looking, Ajax is coming up in a big way posing a major threat to “traditional” desktop software.

Some more Ajax stuff:
* [[http://ajaxmatters.com|Ajax Matters]]
* [[http://hinchcliffe.org/archive/2005/08/18/1675.aspx|State of Ajax]] (via /.)
* [[http://script.aculo.us/|script.aculo.us]]