Social Plate: Best Free Online Services: Symbaloo

Greetings,

The way we use internet in present time’s context is a result of a incessant evolution of technology. Internet user today has become more selective, more demanding & more techno-savvy. We as the present age net-surfers won’t believe in any-goddamn-promising-offer or service; we need to have a handful reasons behind everything that goes into that particular service. A poll result stated that around 52% of all the internet users in the top developing countries do not own a personal computer or a laptop, they use internet cafe.

Thus the internet using platforms of all these 52% users is a public-workplace which meansthe surfing environment is ever-changing. Thus arises the need to give mobility to all the frequently used services/stuff. This is to be done by storing the data online so that even if the environment changes you have like your passwords, bookmarks, web notes, startup pages, and all such stuff along with you. That’s why ‘keeping online’ is important.

So I would like to lay down some such ‘online’ services which I have tested and am’ convinced with their reasons as to why you should use them. As I said, you won’t take my word outright…yes, you need not!; but I urge you with utmost honesty to give a try to these services, they are a ‘must-have online services’ in today’s times.

This is a post-series which will be highlighting a handful of fabulous online services; and the first post of this series is about one such service called ‘symbaloo’. Symbaloo is a personalstart page, an online bookmarks base, your personal desktop for the internet. By clicking on a block you surf easily to your favorite websites. Note that this is way different from your regular bookmarks. As Symbaloo is intended for those bookmarks which you happen to visit most frequently. Here I am not going to tell you how to use symbaloo instead I will establish the reason(s) on why to use it. If you wish to know how to use it, then you should visitShankrila . Also have a look at this clip to know more.
So it’s a startup page…thinking of Netvibes? yes that falls in the same category but I find it cliche…consider some points highlighting the cons of netvibes

As the ‘widgets’ are a preview of the site itself, the loading time is more.
Links on your dashboard can expire without your knowledge.
RSS feeds aren’t quite as pretty as Pageflakes; pages can be text overload.
Occasional broken/unresponsive feeds.
Although there is a room for customization…we don’t get visual satisfaction. (remember the text chaos!)

As a personal startup page or home page there are a lot of sites with varied sets of facilities…you can read about what all sites provide this homepage service in my next post. For now I will drive you to the point. Allow me to point you to a service which is on the same line. If you happen to be a fox-surfer (Firefox user) then do you remember or know one add-on called‘Fast Dial’ if no then check out Fast Dial. Here are some screenshots of fast dial.

But ‘fast dial’ fails at the point when it comes to placing all your frequent visiting bookmarks online. So if your Firefox crashes, or if you happen to use internet from a public PC then you wont have fast dial at your fingers. That is no mobility!

The conclusion is ‘symbaloo is the right place where you can have a startpage which is not place-sensitive. The looks are stunning, it also gives you the option to place a pre-defined modules in the center of the page which can be tweets box, your Gmail quick-view box, a notepad or a weather display module and many such stuff. What more! you can share a complete ‘webmix’ with others. Here is a webmix created by me which showcases all blogging related tiles.