Google's spreadsheet definitely isn't powerful enough for some of my projects. (A personal task analyzing local pedestrian accidents had too much data, for example.) However, it's fine for moderate strength tracking needs and superior when I want multiple users adding fairly simple data to a sheet. It's baffling that Microsoft hasn't jumped into the business of offering a Web platform for easily sharing Excel documents, although others such as eXpresso are trying to get into that business.
Meanwhile, I'm finding Google Docs a nice backup and version-control server for important and useful but not terribly private or sensitive documents.
Bloglines v3 beta
There are loads of RSS readers out there, including worthy entries like NewsGator and Google Reader, as well as some with Web 2.0 interfaces on steroids, such as Pageflakes.
But over the years, I kept returning to Bloglines, despite its aging Web 1.0 interface, because it did what I wanted done with a minimum of fuss. Finally, though, the new Bloglines v3 beta offers an updated UI with a start page and some drag-and-drop ordering that brings the RSS service into the modern era.
My goal in reading RSS feeds isn't to recreate a full, rich-media Web experience. If I wanted that, I'd be surfing directly to source sites. Instead, I want to scan headlines and summaries. I don't want to play around with a lot of buttons, links and options; I'm looking for information.
I want simple ways to subscribe to feeds and see what's new, with some basic feed organization tools. I want to be able to import and export OPML (a way to save a collection of feed subscriptions). And being able to "clip" and save individual stories is nice.
The beta was pretty limited when I started testing, without even a way to mark posts as still unread (that's since been addressed with a "pin" function). I'm still awaiting the "clippings" (keep and save some items) and "publish" (mark items to put in a new RSS feed you can make public) options, but the Bloglines beta help pages assure such functions are on the way.
The start page shows you summaries of headlines when you hover over the item, an AJAX standard that's just coming to Bloglines, and lets you easily add, delete and rearrange components.
The only major annoyance so far is that when I click on links from my start page, I just get a Bloglines summary pop-up instead of going to the source site; for that, I've got to move my mouse over to the pop-up window and click a second time. I'd prefer a summary when hovering but a link when I click.
Overall, though, it's looking like the Bloglines update will refresh but not mess with the basic functionalities that have won the service a place near the top of my browser bookmarks.
Zoho Creator
Unlike word processors or wikis, I haven't seen a flood of free Web sites for building database-driven applications. The few other database entries I'd tried were generally either limited, expensive or cumbersome. But not Zoho Creator.
Zoho Creator sports a surprisingly easy interface for creating your own apps -- even those that include some table joins (that is, looking up information in one table for use in another, which helps put the "relational" in relational databases). With a few drag-and-drops, I quickly created data entry forms with text fields, drop-down lists, text boxes and so on.
My test applications ranged from simple (tracking charitable contributions) to complex (story tracking by writer, editor and status), and all ended up doing pretty much what I wanted.
There's a drag-and-drop option for adding a "lookup" field that pulls selections from another table. It's likewise fairly easy to set up different views of your data, and user-by-user access to each view and form. Creator also offers drag-and-drop scripting, allowing such things as setting defaults or variables based on certain conditions, sending out autogenerated e-mails when a field is changed in a specific way, or validating user input.
For more sophisticated scripting, it's easy to click back and forth between drag-and-drop scripting and the actual code. And I quickly downloaded data from Zoho Creator onto my own system for backup in varying formats, such as comma-separated or XLS spreadsheet format (although, alas, not in SQL) -- a must for any Web-based application where I'm storing important data.