Turntable.fm and Blip.fm are both social music web apps. They allow you to listen to music online, and turn that listening into a social experience. They have some notable differences, though. Which is right for you? This comparison might help you to decide.

Functionality Overview

If you’re new to both sites, here’s a quick run-down.

Turntable Functionality

Turntable.fm: The coveted DJ spot is "Now Open"!

Turntable is set up like a virtual concert venue. Your profile is represented by an avatar who is either in the audience or is one of the DJs playing music. The rules about who gets to DJ and when vary from one virtual venue to the next. There are at most five DJs on stage at a time and they take turns choosing songs. There is a meter at the bottom of the screen. Anyone in the room can hit the “awesome” button to give the DJ a point. Or the a listener can hit the “lame” button to express disdain. If the lames outnumber the awesomes, the song gets skipped. Points can be used to get more impressive avatars.

Blip.fm Functionality

Many people find DJs from the user recommendations after a song play

Blip is often described as “Twitter plus music.” I don’t like this description because it appeals to neither Twitter fans nor Twitter adversaries, but it is accurate. If Facebook and Twitter are a lifestream of consecutive status updates, than Blip is a music stream of consecutive song updates. Your station consists of your songs and your followers’ songs, although you can create a customized station using their Tag Tuner or add songs to your playlist. You can also play just songs you’ve blipped. Instead of points, Blip offers props and badges. Unlike Turntable, users have to earn points in order to give them away.

In Favor of Turntable:

Cute Avatars Give Real-Time Feedback

Turntable looks like Second Life with its little avatars, though at this time you have little control over their actions. When someone likes a song, his or her avatar’s head starts bopping. Not only is this adorable, it gives the DJ real-time feedback on whether or not people are enjoying the music.

On Blip, people give “props” when they like a song. These are collected on your props page, and you don’t see them unless you go there. The instant feedback on Turntable tells you several things: if listeners “like” a song right away, it is probably already a song they know and love. You can watch as several people hit the awesome bar around a particularly lovely climactic section. It also tells you which songs have played well in that room. If someone got a lot of avatar head-bopping to some underground hip-hop in the indie rock room, you can probably pull off that Aesop Rock mashup you were considering.

Users have profiles

In keeping with the tradition of Twitter, Blip only allows you a link and a few sentences to describe the music you play. On Turntable you have a full profile that can be viewed by clicking on the avatar. Why is this important? Because when you’re trying to decide whether or not to follow a DJ, it’s useful to know if the 80s B-side set was an anomoly or if the DJ plays that music all the time. On Blip, you can view a DJ’s entire playing history, but most people won’t take the time to dig. With a profile the DJ can state clearly what he or she primarily plays. This gives each DJ more freedom to play outside the DJ’s genre without fear of scaring away listeners.

Music is divided by genre

Blip is a free for all. Anyone you follow will show up, along with your own songs, in your radio stream. You can listen strictly to your own songs in chronological order on your profile page, but most of the time you’ll want to be on your main page so you can discover new music. If you’re the type who listens to only one genre, this won’t be a problem. But in this increasingly diverse global age, most of us are interested in more variety. So if one of your DJs is in the mood to play a retrospective of sixties folk and concurrently another DJ you follow is playing hot new dance tracks, your playlist will go up and down from Joni Mitchell to Booty Shakin’ Beats remix back down to another girl with an acoustic guitar.

On Turntable this jarring experience is avoided by having different rooms, which are usually distinguished by genre. DJs take turns playing for the entire room, and the pressure is on each DJ to play a song that transitions well from the one before it. If someone plays a song that doesn’t fit the theme of the room, the moderator can give that person the boot or annoyed listeners can lame the track so it gets skipped.

No YouTube

Personally, I like that Blip.fm plays YouTube videos because it has allowed me to catch up on all the videos I missed since MTV went in the toilet. But enough people don’t like the YouTube songs that Blip created an option to remove them from your search results and skip them on your station. The sound quality of most YouTube videos will be adequate for the majority of work-day listeners but the discerning listener with a fancy stereo may notice a difference.

The real problem with YouTube videos isn’t the difference in sound quality of the home-grown and official music videos. The problem is slogging through crappy bootleg concert footage and teenagers doing living room covers in the hopes of landing their big break. On Turntable, all their tracks are clean so your only risk of getting a dud is if you upload it yourself.

Use the music you have on your computer

Recent changes to the Blip.fm song database have sent many of its biggest fans away. Previously, on Blip you could play any song as long as there was an mp3 link out there. This has led some people to upload songs strictly for use while they are DJing, which was a lot of work just to share new tunes with your pals. However, Blip’s recent deal with the labels has removed this functionality. Thus all of the old links to mp3s in the archives are broken. The tradeoff is a million clean mp3s with label support. You can also play YouTube videos on your station, which fills in many of the gaps on unreleased or extremely new tracks.

Turntable has a database, and you can upload any song that you have on your own computer. This is hands down the best advantage of the site. While a large database is good, it’s no competition for an unlimited database. So long as you can find it and download it, you can play it on Turntable. Keep in mind that music sites tend to get more restrictive as they age because they get threatened with lawsuits by the record labels. Turntable is in Beta while Blip has been around for a few years so it is possible that once Turntable explodes in popularity it will change its policy too.

The arrangement that Blip has with the record labels is supposedly similar to the one at Grooveshark, so if you have an account with them and are satisfied with their selection than the selection at Blip most likely won’t be a problem for you.

No Ads

Blip.fm has banner ads and occasionally roll-over pop-up ads. Some of them are pretty damned annoying. However, Turntable is a new site so there’s no guarantee it will stay ad-free for long.

This leads me to a final and more subtle advantage of Turntable…

Turntable is a New Site

New sites have a number of less obvious advantages. While Blip is still a small team, the Blip developers have been in the works on a new site for the past year. Thus supporting Blip is not their primary concern. The Turntable developers, on the other hand, will send an avatar to your room immediately if you contact their customer service. Because the site is new, you may still have a chance to influence the developers about new feature decisions.

It also affects the atmosphere. When a site is brand new, most people don’t have a ton of friends there already. This means they are open to chatting with strangers and there’s a general buzz about sharing tips on how best to take advantage of what Turntable offers. Most Turntable users are still actively looking for DJs to follow. I would be so bold as to say that Blip.fm is possibly the least-cliqueish site I’ve ever encountered (more on this later), but the sense that it is no longer the coders’ top priority has lessened morale.

In favor of Blip:

Actual photos

People lie, but at least each photo is unique. On Turntable it is common to see someone on the site who is identical to you in appearance because of the limited number of avatars. This will change as they get more avatars, but it still makes it harder to recognize your friends or even to know at a glance which profile is your own.

Less intrusive bugs

Both sites have bugs. However, the kind of bugs that Blip has usually involve the columns not sizing properly, or banner ads popping up in the wrong places. The bugs on Turntable involve the music stopping abruptly or getting accidentally booted from a room. In other words, the bugs on Turntable get in the way of you actually listening to music and are therefore much more annoying. On the other hand, Turntable is still in beta so hopefully they will get these kinks worked out soon.

All your friends are in the same place: your stream

At Turntable, rooms are divided by genre. Thus if you want to find your friends, you have to go to the room where they are. When you scroll through the rooms, it shows you an avatar if someone you follow is within. You also get an email every time someone you follow goes into a room, which will become annoying once you are following more than a handful of people. The emails can be turned off, but then you have no way of knowing when your friends go online. On Blip, on the other hand, everyone is playing to your stream (exactly like Twitter if Twitter played music) so you will always know with a cursory glance who is playing music.

Messages over chat

Part of what makes Turntable addictive is that every room is also a chat room. The problem is that it means the community actively discourages you from using the site as background. I can listen to Blip all day long, only going to the site to occasionally reblip a song or play something new. If I play two songs an hour and finding each takes a minute, I can get eight hours of music for only twenty minutes of effort.

This may come down to personal preference. If the time you spend playing music is spent only playing music, you may prefer the immediacy of a chat box. But if you are a hopeless multi-tasker like me, a music site that demands all your attention is too much of a distraction from the To Do list.

Communication is achieved on Blip by selecting songs

Because Turntable has DJs choosing songs right after each other, it would seem that DJs are more conscious about selecting for their audience. I am definitely more likely to hit the “awesome” bar if the song is more than good, but also a well-thought out follow-up.  On the other hand, because each message on Blip comes with a song, DJs often choose a song that fits their reply. For example, if someone compliments my stream, I may say thank you with Cut Copy’s “Feel the Love.”
The nice thing about this is that it cuts out a lot of the negativity and bickering. Again, this may come down to personal preference, but if I don’t like a song I may say so in chat room but would be a lot less likely to do so if I have to choose a song to reply with. This is related to the next point…

Supportive atmosphere

It is hard to describe how the set-up of a website can contribute to its atmosphere, but it makes a considerable difference. First of all, when chat comes on the scene, you truly get to know people…and that’s not always a good thing. Strangers who share a love of music feel a great kinship on Blip, but at the end of the day they are only acquaintances. You can conceptualize this as the difference between how people use Twitter and how they use Facebook. Because of Twitter’s limitations, like Blip, it is less personal. There are plenty of people who are “great friends” on Twitter that would rather not be Facebook friends.

But there is a more important aspect that shapes the atmospheric differences between Blip and Turntable. Blip allows “props” but there is no way to express dislike for a song. While there have been times I wished there was an easy way I could press a button expressing contempt for the music someone has cluttered my stream with, not having that ability keeps things friendly. If I really hate a song and feel so strongly about it that I need to let the world know, I can respond with a song and a message expressing myself. However, it is rare that it comes to that. You get props so you know a song went over well. Songs that don’t get props could have been hated, or maybe no one was listening, or maybe they liked it but not well enough to give it the click. Or maybe they are out of props! The point is, you don’t know, so you don’t stress it.

Compare this to a situation I had at Turntable.fm the other day. I was in room where 90 percent of the songs DJs chose were getting skipped because so many people had hit the “lame” button. Only one or two tracks got enough positive feedback to push the meter into the green “awesome” zone. I had recently installed a Chrome add-on that has little pop-ups telling you who lamed or awesomed a song. So I know that there were three people in the room that were hitting the lame button within the first ten seconds of most songs playing. Perhaps they knew and hated those artists, but I get the feeling that at least one of them was lame-ing every song so it would be more likely to be skipped, and thus get back to his or her DJ turn sooner. I actually saw one DJ mark a song as lame before it even started playing and then change his vote to awesome once the song got a chance to get going. Now maybe these people are just very harsh critics and they were being true to their feelings. However, I have a solid reputation as an online DJ, and the brutality of that room managed to shake my confidence. Average Avatar who just wants to share a few songs from bands he adores is likely to walk away from such a room very unhappy.

The flip-side of this was in a room I visited later that evening. The room had a non-genre theme, so the song choices were all over the place. The chat was very positive and they were sharing non-music links as well. People said “hello” and “good-bye” as avatars moved in and out of the room. Most heads were bopping for all my song selections, and despite the vast diversity of genres, most songs had the Awesome-O-Meter firmly in the green. Perfect, right? Alas, no. One kind fellow pointed out that I’d yet to give points to any of his songs. There was a woman who kept asking if she should skip her own songs because no one had given her any points. Look, just because I don’t want to give someone props for playing the same classic rock I’ve heard 70,000 times on the radio doesn’t mean I want to have a dialog explaining that. But because props cost nothing to earn, there becomes some peer pressure to claim you love songs that really you only “like.”

Blip is also a music journal

Even though both sites are designed to be used as radio, Blip has an advantage in archiving every song you play. This means that if I go back to Christmas 2009, there is a record of the night my dad introduced me to King Crimson. It means that if I want to do a “Best songs of 2010″ list, I can comb through all the songs I played over the last year to see what I might have forgotten.

This used to be a major advantage of Blip, but as of September 2011 those old mp3 links are no longer playable. Your journal still exists, but the links will all be broken (unless they were YouTube videos). This is due to the new label agreement that Blip has made. It’s a big loss for those who liked to comb the archives, but Turntable has no archives at all to compare this with.

You can DJ whenever you want

To me this is far and away the biggest advantage of Blip over Turntable. I find that often when I am paying more attention to Turntable than I would like (e.g. when I am failing to multi-task effectively) it is because I am checking the chat to see if a DJ slot has opened up. This is not fun. In popular rooms, it can take about four hours to get a chance to DJ, which is a longer commitment than I want to make. To combat this, some rooms are a free-for-all. Take Indie OneNDone: there DJs are only allowed to play one song, then whoever has the fastest fingers can jump into the DJ spot. This is even worse for productivity because one will never get a chance to DJ unless she is giving her total attention to Turntable, and then it is only for one song.

The other option is to start your own room. If you have three friends rounded up and you don’t care about attracting the herd, this can be a fun alternative to other chat sites. But you can’t DJ on your own because, to appease the music labels, single DJs only hear 20 second clips. Otherwise, you have to go spam other rooms to recruit DJs. This is discouraged within the Turntable subculture, but I don’t see any way around it as the site is currently designed: either I have to go find people to DJ with or I am alone in a room listening to 20 second clips. No fun! I have created a room and managed to get a small crowd, but when the room clears out after I go to sleep, it effectively ceases to exist. In my experience, a room with 7 avatars isn’t superior to one with 100, but I end up in the crowded rooms because even in the small rooms the DJ slots are always completely full anyhow. On Blip you can listen to any DJ at any time, or play any song at any time.

Comparing Blip and Turntable: in conclusion

Both of these are fantastic sites for discovering new music, so which is better will ultimately come down to what kind of user you are. I highly recommend them both over better-known sites like Last.fm and Pandora.

If you loathe multi-tasking and primarily want to share music for a short time when you are done with your work, Turntable may be the best site for you. If you want to play extremely rare tracks or if you’re a proud sound quality snob that would never enjoy a track playing on YouTube, by all means Turntable is your choice.

A quick note on extremely rare tracks. By rare, I don’t mean recent indie bands or illegal bootleg mashups or popular DJ’s remixes that don’t have their own albums. That stuff can mostly be found on YouTube. By rare tracks, I mean B-sides from indie bands that were barely popular ten years ago or ragtime blues from the late twenties or remixes by DJs unknown outside of your region. Underplayed music is my specialty and I can usually find whatever I need with Blip’s YouTube functionality.

If you are more interested in playing music than listening to music, and you don’t mind YouTube videos, Blip.fm is still the better choice. Conversely, if you want to use the site as background while you get on with your day, I still recommend Blip.

Have you tried both sites? What do you think?

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Today, 40Tech is pleased to present a guest post by Karma.

You suave and debonaire 40Tech readers likely know all about microblogging. If you like the ease of sharing things through Facebook and Twitter but wish you could post longer entries with more formatting, Tumblr or Posterous might be what you need. Alternatively, if you want to start a blog but have been overwhelmed by WordPress, Movable Type, or Blogger – Tumblr and Posterous are a dream come true. Posting to both sites allows all the standard features of a blog post: you can toggle between rich text and HTML, customize your theme, split your entries into multiple pages and alter the formatting. However, these sites are taking the lead over traditional blogging platforms because it is much easier to get up and running. They also have some features that leave those other blogging sites in the dust.

What They Have Common

The first and most important thing Posterous and Tumblr share is this: it is ridiculously easy to start a new blog. All you have to do is click on a button, give it a name and you are ready to dive in. You don’t even have to commit to a name because you can easily change both the name and url of your site at any time. This has affected the culture of Tumblr because there are so many one-off sites. For example, when Arcade Fire won a grammy, someone started a tumblog called Who is Arcade Fire, which posted examples of angry fans complaining about this band they’d never heard of. This sort of site that is incredibly timely and focused on something very specific is common on Tumblr. If you’ve ever had a crazy idea for a site but thought it would be too much work to set up a whole new blog, you may want to use Tumblr for it. Such are the things book deals are made of

If using your own custom domain is a sticking point, don’t worry as both sites support it. You can also have custom pages, other than your blog (e.g. Links, About, etc.). Perhaps you are concerned about making sure content plays nice with your smart phone. Posterous has a nice clean interface on my Android; Tumblr’s is damn sexy – though Tumblr’s currently has a bug that will only let you post to your main blog. If your phone isn’t fancy but does have email, you can use Posterous to post by email (more on that later).

With either site it is dead simple to take a picture with your phone and have it up on your site in no time, and both sites allow you to post content at a later date. This is a great way to keep content fresh and not overwhelm your readers. For example, on my hyperlocal site, I have a “hooptie of the month” picture. I actually posted all of the pictures at one time, but they only show up on the dates I’ve scheduled—shh! Don’t tell! This encourages Tumblr to have shorter posts: why post all ten hoopties from the car show, when I can get twelve posts out of it?

The advantage with Posterous is that they actually support formatting the date in a multitude of ways, so you could type 12/22/12 or Dec. 22 2012 and it will figure out what you mean. Tumblr has only one format and they don’t tell you what it is, so I’m often left scratching my head trying to figure out how they want it typed. However I think Tumblr wins because they have a queuing option. Just click “Add to my queue” and it will wait to post that item for a few hours. You may customize the queue so that queued posts go up at a certain time, or you may rearrange the order they will post.

Finally, if you want to have a group site or accept submissions from the masses, both sites will make the process easy for you and your users. In the next section, we will get into the gritty on where each of these sites truly shines.

In Favor of Posterous

Post by Email

The beaming pride of Posterous is the ability to send an email to a secret address that will automatically post to your blog. We’re not just talking about text here. Attached photos will show up as a slide show and attached music will display in a music player. Add tags by putting them in double parenthesis in the Subject box. All you need is a link to a YouTube video to get it to display the embedded player. Pretty much anything you can post, you can post by email.

Uploads Aplenty

Tumblr only allows one song to be uploaded every day. This doesn’t include songs embedded through other sites or links to songs posted on your own server, just what they hold onto for you. Also remember that you could post ten songs and queue them to post at different times in the week. But if you’re determined to post five songs every day, this could be a factor. In Posterous, you may upload 100 MB, regardless of what the content is. At that size, you’re more likely to be limited by your email provider (though you can still post via the web).

Import Your Existing Blog

If you already have an existing blog that you’d be switching from, this could be the deal-breaker on Tumblr. It’s easy to switch to Posterous because you can use their import feature to bring in all the posts you wrote on some other site, whether that site be Ning, Tumblr, TypePad, WordPress, ActiveRain, TwitPic, Blogger, or Movable Type.

Private Blogs

While you can set certain posts to be private, only in Posterous can you make the whole blog private. You could start a blog for your family reunion, for example, that only members of your family can see. Tumblr is very much about their community, so it is understandable that their site is not designed for this functionality.

Autopost

Autopost is the feature that has me devoted to Posterous. Ever known someone that somehow manages to post all their content everywhere? Ever wish you could post once and have everything go to all your sites? Sure, there are other sites that will automatically send your blog to Facebook and Twitter. But with Posterous, you can set it to automatically send the pictures in your blog Picasa and Flickr. That concert footage you just blogged will automatically post to your YouTube account. Most importantly, you can autopost to your own domain. And you can do this all by sending one email.

Recently I noticed that the pictures and music I autoposted weren’t displaying with the pretty formatting I mentioned above—no nifty music player or picture gallery, just a long string of pics and an icon that says “click to listen on Posterous.” The issue was only on sites where I autoposted; it showed up on Posterous fine. I could understand if they did this deliberately, to drive traffic back to Posterous blogs.  I emailed them to ask if this was a permanent change or if it was a bug and they wrote back, “Thanks for the report, we’ve been responding to changes in the autopost destination’s API, and are working hard to maintain/restore the functionality you’re used to.” This is critical, as it would be unacceptable to have my main blog look like a duplicate site that redirects to a Posterous blog! Hopefully they will have this resolved soon. In the meantime, Autopost is still a terrific feature that will increase your productivity if you use a lot of sites. Isn’t Posterous  swell? But Tumblr has a few tricks up their sleeve too. In the next section, we’ll dive into those.

In Favor of Tumblr

More Themes

Posterous only offers a few themes to dress up your website. The ones they have are shiny and flawless, but for sheer quantity they can’t compete. If you like to change your design every few months, Tumblr has 869 to choose from, If you are one of those people that abandoned Myspace for Facebook for design reasons, Tumblr will have you writing love notes in no time. The themes are gorgeous and, unlike Facebook, pictures and video display full size, just like they should. Posterous also displays content full-sized, but it is the next feature that makes Tumblr themes even finer to look at.

Interesting Page Layout

On Posterous, like other sites, a post is just a post. On Tumblr your post will fall into a particular category: audio, video, chat, quote, text or link. Each of these will display differently on your page, creating a more diverse layout. Creating a “Chat” post will display text in different colors for each speaker while “Quote” will make the text extra large with giant quotes around it. This creates some limitations, as it would be pretty difficult to post a video clip in a Chat post, but most of these can easily be gotten around. Ironically, most of these fancy trappings will be lost on the people who come to your site within Tumblr, as they only see your posts via they’re stream. Still, it’s a nice touch for those landing from Google.

Mass Post Editor

Say you have a blog about concerts you’ve been to and it only just now occurred to you that all of these posts should be tagged “music.” No problem, you can use the Tumblr mass editor to tag multiple blogs at the same time. Since the editor shows thumbnails, it’s also a good way to see several months’ content at a glance.

“There’s An App For That”

Because Tumblr is so popular, there are a ton of third party apps, widgets and customizations. There’s one that will play all the music on your page. There’s one to record and share voice notes. There’s one that lets you add speech bubbles and quotes to your photos. There’s one to post animated gifs from your iPhone directly to Tumblr. There’s one to turn your tumblogs into a printed magazine. There’s one turn your posts into an Advent calendar. There’s even one to browse Tumblr as a video game, though for the life of me I can’t figure out how it works (which is probably for the best!).

RSS Import

Using this feature, Tumblr can automatically post any photos that show up on Flickr onto your tumblog. It can import your other blog posts as links or links with a short preview. You can import multiple feeds, which would theoretically allow you to post all kinds of stuff without even logging into Tumblr regularly. Essentially, it is like the opposite of Posterous’ Autopost: one exports your content to other sites, while Tumblr’s feature is about automatically bringing content from elsewhere into your blog.

Saved Searches

In Posterous it is possible to search the content on their community but in Tumblr you can save those searches. For example, I have a saved search for “San Francisco” that I use to find content for my local blog. This is great because it gets you out in the virtual community, rather than reading and reposting from the same blogs over and over.

Devoted Community

Speaking of community, Tumblr’s is addictive. Tumblr is growing at an explosive rate and it’s getting a reputation with all the right people. While even the dusty hat shop in Nowheresville has a Facebook page, you can count on your favorite magazines and blogs to proudly display their Tumblr badge. This, more than anything else, is what Tumblr offers: a place to share your stuff with a community that just can’t get enough of Tumblr—and if you’re on Tumblr, that means you.

Even layout is community focused. Posterous conveniently emails your subscriptions, where they can be ignored as just another list-serve. Tumblr treats your subscriptions more like a social network by putting your followers’ posts on your homepage. Because of this it is very hard not to peek at what is posted there before going on to post your own content. For every post I write, I tend to “reblog” five or ten of someone else’s, because whenever I login there are ten posts staring back at me, batting their eyelashes, begging to be read.

Part of this is just sheer numbers: Posterous may be the 474^th most popular website in the world, but Tumblr is kicking them in the tush at number 48. But it’s something more than numbers too: Tumblr is that rare commodity in that, unlike social networks, its users are eager to break away from the circle of blogs they know. When you are too tired to write a blog post and just want to look at funny comics/political infographics/gifs of cute kittens, Tumblr will be there for you.

But I hear you saying, “Kittens! Bah! I only care to post my own content!” First: your loss, as link sharing will get people coming to your site. Second: if what you want is to get strangers to read your finely crafted prose, Tumblr may be just the magic you need. I only post every other week, but in the year I’ve been using both sites, 88 people have begun following my tumblogs. When I’m actively posting, I get one or two new followers every week. From Posterous? Six. Ever. All together. Their SEO is strong, but the odds of Posterous users discovering your content within the site is not. It’s as simple as this: if you post quality content on Tumblr, you will get new followers.

The Big Picture

In the end, Tumblr and Posterous aren’t that similar after all. Tumblr’s audience slants younger and hipper and the single-item format encourages posts that are short and snappy. Thus, if you want to write about trendy new bands, share photos, comics or graphs, Tumblr is the best choice. If you want to be a part of a blogging community, definitely go with Tumblr. It’s flashier with more fun tricks, thus it’s a good pick if you’re the type to own a Helvetica t-shirt and a first generation anything.

Posterous is focused more on functionality, so it will probably appeal more to practical folks who see their blogging software as a tool to be used and nothing more—and in that respect, it excels. If you want to post long multimedia entries or if you have an established audience that isn’t trying to gather new eyeballs, I’d recommend Posterous. Or, you could be like me: Post all your original content to Posterous and have it autopost to Tumblr. This way you can have the best of both worlds.

Which is your favourite?

Karma is a blogger from Oakland who blogs about many things, and loves music like. Seriously. Loves it. You can find her as a top 10 DJ on Blip.FM, or on Future is Fiction, one of her many blogs.

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Every once in a while, we get the opportunity to offer you guys something for free. We don’t always do it, mind you — we get a lot of solicitations, and only care to post about the products we think will be most useful to you. Well, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a representative of Digital Innovations. They make products for cleaning LCD screens, repairing discs, that sort of thing. I’ve seen their products before, or others like them, but honestly never considered buying them. I tend to roll on the cheap, as you know, and didn’t want to spend money on things that I wasn’t sure would even work.

The email came at a good time, though. I happened to be in the middle of transferring my CD and movie collection to digital, and there were a few discs that I couldn’t even put into my machine without the read-difficulty locking everything up. So when he offered to send me a few of their products to test in return for a fair review, and maybe a giveaway for our readers, I said “Sure. But you realize I’m in Canada, right?” A few weeks of shipping and customs errors later, the box arrived.

Here’s what I found:

When I opened up the box, I was surprised to see that I had been sent $97 worth of product (see the shipping receipt below the list). I received:

• 5oz ScreenDr – LCD Cleaner
• SkipDr for DVDs & CDs – Disc repair kit
• SkipDr for Blu-ray – Disc repair kit
• CleanDr Lens Cleaner for DVD & CD
• CleanDr Lens Cleaner for Blu-ray

Note: CleanDr has been re-branded to ScreenDr.

The Screen Cleaner

I was really only expecting the SkipDr, but was pretty stoked about the LCD/Plasma screen cleaner. I live in the often-rainy Pacific Northwest and own two dogs. No matter how well I dry them, they still manage to shake and spray mud all over my bloody LCD TV. Between that and my half-pint, me and my wife would get tired of cleaning it and things would sometimes build up to the point of needing to be scratched off. If you have kids and dogs, you can probably relate.

So I tried the ScreenDr — which now comes in a larger, 9oz bottle for HDTV — and was pleasantly surprised with how easy it and the microfiber cloth that it comes with cut the grime away. I have no idea what the solution is comprised of — the bottle says fancy things like “deionized water and proprietary polymers” — but just a little bit of it cleaned the dickens out of my TV screen, with nary a streak to be seen. That was one item down with a good experience to report — except for the bottle splitting a bit along one of the seams and causing a leak that needed to be taped shut, that is.

BEFORE

AFTER

Disc Cleaning & Repair Kits

The next item I tried was the SkipDr for DVDs & CDs. I tested it on two things: my CD of The Best of Sting and The Police — which was scratched all to hell and consistently tried to kill my computer and various CD players on track 13 (cue eerie music here) — and a home movie DVD of my mother’s that always played like it was in the shadows and under water. I followed the instructions, and, after about a minute of grinding noise while the disc was in the little machine, and another minute of buffing with the little microfiber cloth that comes with it, I found myself listening to “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” while watching a DVD that was as clear as an old home movie can get. I’ve tried several other discs since, and as long as there was no serious damage that reached the data layer, I continually had great results. Another “as advertised” experience.

Note: Be sure to follow the instructions and spray the disc before using the repair machine. If the disc isn’t wet, it could be damaged.

Things to Watch For

I didn’t have a need to test the lens cleaners or Blu-ray version of the SpinDr, but the fact that there were two machines got me wondering. I popped onto the Digital Innovations website and did a bit of poking around, only to find that there were SkipDr machines for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii, as well. Each had it’s own particular branding and its own particular price (though they generally cost the same). There were even different models and brand names within the set, some older, some current. This seemed a bit suspect to me. I’m in marketing and I get the concept of brand differentiation and hitting specific target markets for maximum impact, but a disc is a disc right? How much difference could there possibly be?

I emailed the rep and asked him point-blank. His reply was straightforward: CDs and DVDs are CDs and DVDs. Blu-rays are a bit different, as the data is much closer to the surface and the disc itself is much harder and thinner. This means that they need a machine that has a different abrasive and uses a different amount of pressure than the CD/DVD version to be effective. When it comes to all of the other variations though, that’s just marketing. A Blu-ray SkipDr will have exactly the same effect as the one branded for PS3. Xbox and Wii versions? They’re no different than a DVD. So the bottom line here is, if you ever do decide to buy these products, buy the one that suits your disc and happens to be the cheapest or currently on sale.

One other point in regard to things to watch for: if you aren’t doing like me and going all digital, and you plan to keep your discs over the long term, take care of them. While you can repair the same disc multiple times, the Flexiwheel grinding band only has so many uses (approximately 25 according to the site). If you keep having to repair your discs, you will also have to keep buying replacement kits — which cost $9 a pop.

Would I Buy It Now?

Overall, I would have to say, yes, I would purchase these products if I had need for them — unless I could find something similar at a better price that worked just as well, of course. I haven’t had the opportunity to test anything else, so I can’t say what those alternatives would be. The Digital Innovations products definitely performed well, though — and I have absolutely no problem giving them away to you for free.

So, On to the Free Stuff Already!

Be the first to contact us (you can comment, email, tweet, or Facebook) about why you want, need, or could use any of these products, and Digital Innovations will send you the exact same $97 package they sent me. The only catch is you have to live in the continental US or Canada — shipping would be a nightmare, otherwise. Please make sure you provide a valid email address for contacting you, as we will need to forward that to Digital Innovations so they can chat with you about your shipping details. Do not give us your shipping details, please!

Want the free stuff? Have at it! And leave us comments about any experience you might have with these products already, too.

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Reading about how our readers approach their tech/workflow combinations has been both enlightening and a pleasure. You guys are smart — and we appreciate you taking the time to articulate your personal systems with us. Nina Kefer has already shown us two GTD setups in applications she has experimented with. Her Beauty and Brains: Getting Things Done™ In Style series has put an emphasis on mobility (from the iPhone), a beautiful user interface, and above all, functionality. She wraps up her series today with her own take on and review of GTD in Springpad (Bobby put together a slightly different approach here), and a final conclusion as to which GTD setup ultimately works the best for her – and might for you, too.

Beauty and Brains: Getting Things Done™ In Style, Part 3 – GTD in Springpad

In my previous articles (GTD With Awesome Note & Evernote, GTD With 2Do & Toodledo) I looked at different combinations of front and back ends to Get Things Done. However, if you’re after the seamless sync that only native apps can deliver you may want to consider Springpad. Like Evernote, with which it is often compared, it is basically a virtual filing cabinet, but its dedicated task management features give it an edge over Evernote, whose tick boxes and tags can be used for task management, but which needs a dedicated front end like Awesome Note or Egretlist to schedule them and set alerts on your phone. Springpad seemed to offer everything that I missed in Evernote – scheduled tasks and events, sorting by due date, reminders, sync with Gmail and Facebook contacts and with Google calendar – and the recent Evernote update, which emphasised social networking at the (temporary) expense of advanced features like saved searches, had widened this gap further, so I decided to give Springpad a go.

Springpad allows you to create as many notebooks as you need and drag them into whatever order you want, both on the web and on the iPhone. You can customise the background as well as the colour of the notebooks, although the choice for the latter is limited to a combination of twelve colours and textures. For my GTD setup I created nine folders:

• Inbox
• @Computer
• @Contact
• @Errands
• @Home
• @Waiting
• Projects
• Someday
• Reference

Since the notebooks are quite big for the small iPhone screen and it isn’t possible to move or delete the Friends Stuff folder which occupies a prime location in the top left corner I had considered creating a Next Action notebook and making tags for the contexts, but then I would have had to open the notebook each time to check how many tasks are waiting in each context. Moreover, tags appear last in the list of options for filtering the “Stuff” in your notebooks and aren’t sorted alphabetically but by popularity, i.e. the tags you use most often appear at the top and the ones you use least are at the bottom. Using tags for contexts would have therefore involved a lot of scrolling and looking around and I prefer to have as straight forward a setup as possible. Fortunately, though, I’m able to view all my nine folders without scrolling, which wasn’t possible with Awesome Note or 2Do. Springpad also has categories, which should be the closest equivalent to contexts, but it is not possible to filter by category and categories are only displayed within tasks. To my mind, having to open every task to check its context in order to be able to complete as many tasks within that context as I have time and energy slightly defeats the object.

Within each notebook you can add a multitude of items: a note, a task, an event, a contact, a check list, a packing list, a shopping list, an alarm, a bookmark, a business, a restaurant, a wine, a product, a book, a movie, a TV show, a music album, a recipe or you can look something up on the internet. You can attach pictures and other files to notes, share tasks via email, Twitter or Facebook or make them public on the web. The iPhone app even includes a voice recorder and barcode scanner. However, it is not possible to share notebooks with selected people or teams without making them public – which means sharing them with the world.

On the web, a task can be scheduled, given a category or tag, have an alarm set and have a note, link, photo or other file attached. For special emphasis it can also be flagged. On the iPhone, a task can be scheduled, flagged, given a tag or category and have a note, photo or audio file attached. Tasks can then be moved freely from folder to folder as you work through them and sorted by due date, date added, category and name, both on the web and on the phone, and filtered by tag, alarm or flag. However, there are no recurring tasks and no plans to implement them. If a task is recurring you have to create it as an event, but this is only possible on the web, not on the phone. Also, Springpad doesn’t support projects or subtasks, so the closest equivalent is to create a checklist. While this is a more functional solution than the Awesome Note method of listing the subtasks in the body of the task/note, only the parent task can be scheduled, so you still have to create separate to-dos for each subtask as you work through your projects.

You can create contacts in Springpad, either from scratch or from existing contacts in Gmail or Facebook, but unfortunately it isn’t possible to link them to a task or event — to remind yourself to ring someone, or book a hotel, for example . It also doesn’t seem to be possible to add hotels or restaurants from Gmail contacts. They can only be created from scratch or by using the “Look it up” function, and for this to work you first have to tell Springpad which city to search for in “Add Nearby”, otherwise it will return US results or no results at all. Searches for wines, books, movies, albums or other product info are equally temperamental. For example, I used the barcode scanner of the iPhone app to scan UK versions of American films and while it recognised the DVDs and correctly displayed the price in pound sterling, it only searched US retailers and often came back with no results. By comparison, Red Laser found dozens of UK retailers, sorted by cheapest price.

Reminders are a bit tricky too. For example, if you want to add a reminder to a task you must do this before selecting a due date, otherwise the only choice you will be given is to set a reminder one or more days prior to the due date. The only available types of reminders are email or, for US residents, SMS. The iPhone app doesn’t offer local alarms, which means that you cannot disable data roaming if you want to receive reminders while travelling abroad. As a frequent traveller, I often depend on this app because internet access may be unreliable or not available at all, so I incur roaming charges for receiving reminders and depending on the country and phone plan this can be very expensive. It also means that reminders don’t work if the phone is in airplane mode. Finally, there is no icon badge to indicate overdue tasks; you have to open the notebooks within the app and tap on Alerts to see if any tasks are overdue or check your inbox for reminder emails.

The feature I was most excited about was the sync with Google calendar because mine syncs with the iPhone calendar, so I was looking forward to a fully integrated task and event management solution. Unfortunately, the way this is implemented in Springpad is not very practical. Springpad doesn’t actually sync with your existing Google calendar. It creates a new separate calendar, which is perfectly fine if you don’t want your tasks – which appear in Google calendar as all day events – to clutter up your regular event calendar. However, tasks can’t actually be synced to this calendar, only events can, and since these events appear on the Springpad calendar they don’t sync with my iPhone calendar because it syncs with my regular calendar, i.e. the one that is connected to my Gmail.

The only workaround appears to be to copy events manually from the Springpad calendar into my regular calendar, so I might as well create them there to begin with. I can add tasks that have due dates to my regular calendar via the iCal feed but, as with events, this is only possible on the web and these tasks then aren’t visible in the iPhone calendar either. Since there is no calendar view within Springpad, not being able to sync with the iPhone calendar means that here is no offline calendar view for your tasks. I understand that Google doesn’t allow sync with Google tasks, but other task managers are able to sync both events and tasks to Google calendar via the iPhone calendar, so it should be possible to implement a more satisfying solution.

At first glance, Springpad seems to offer everything that I am missing in Evernote – scheduled tasks and events, sorting by due date, reminders, sync with Gmail and Facebook contacts and with Google calendar – but upon closer inspection it doesn’t deliver, yet. It is brimming with possibilities and perhaps one day it will become the one-stop solution for task-and-everything-else management I dream about. However, currently there are too many shortcomings to make it a viable option for anything but casual use and its US focus severely limits its usefulness for international customers. Until these issues are addressed, it will remain just another virtual filing cabinet for me.

Conclusion: The Best GTD Apps for Me Are Below

So which of the other systems did I choose? I found Awesome Note to be the most intuitive and straight forward of all the apps I tried; it literally felt like shuffling magic paper from multi coloured folder to multi coloured folder. However, while I continue to rely on Evernote for filing away reference material, I discovered that for GTD I prefer a framework that is specifically targeted at task management, such as Toodledo. In combination with 2Do, I have yet to come across a task or project that I’m unable to process down to the necessary detail. Will I stick with it? Who knows. If Awesome Note found a way to use Evernote’s tags and sync with Google calendar, and Evernote brought back saved searches and list view, I may well be tempted back.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• GTD With 2Do and Toodledo [Reader Workflow]
• GTD in Springpad
• Opera Mini for iPhone: First Impressions
• Awesome App Updates: Flipboard, Zite, PressReader (iOS)
• My Daughter Ate My Stylus — So I Learned How to Make a New (and Even Better) One

If you’ve ever thought that you had the perfect idea for an app, but just didn’t have the time, the means, or the skills to build and launch your gift to the mobile world (and your wallet), well guess what: there’s an app for that. Now before you begin mentally slaying me for my use of Apple’s now cliche slogan, read on — I’m actually not joking. The app is called FundedApps, and its entire purpose is for you to send in your idea so that they can make it happen for you. If they like your idea, you get £250 upfront, plus 25% of the net profit that the app makes.

So what’s the catch?

On the whole, after reading through the Legal section on FundedApps’ website, the operation appears to be legitimate, and not just a way to scam you out of your brainchild. There are protection clauses for them, of course, but also many for you that sing to the tune of confidentiality, data protection, and the ability for you to still use the idea if they reject it. Once they take on your idea, they become the owners of it, but all you have to do is just hang around and wait for your quarterly cheque.

So far so good, right? Still waiting for the catch? Don’t worry, that’s up next.

The catch is actually related to rejection. FundedApps reserves the right to reject your idea based on their own determination, and that of their investment committee, of marketability. If the idea doesn’t cut it, they reject it, and appear to be contractually bound not to steal the idea and make millions off of your baby without you (those terms are not specific, though — see section 7 of the FundedApps Legal page — so I would love it if people with lawyer-eyes could have a read through and report back). However, the only way to submit your idea in the first place, is to send it in via their free iPhone app. This is where they get you: each submission you make via the iPhone app costs you £1.19.

Paying that little amount may not seem like a big deal to you, especially if you consider it is the only investment you have to make, and your cut of the profits could make you a millionaire, but bear in mind two things: more ideas will be rejected than accepted, and there are no original ideas under the sun — which is to say that, if you’ve thought of it, then so have a few thousand other people. Not to mention the fact that, with the thousands of apps already on the app store(s) it is possible that your idea already exists, in some form.

I don’t say all of this to bash FundedApps — on the contrary, I think their idea is brilliant, and I wish I’d thought of it. The thing is, they are likely to make money hand over fist, even without their cut of the profits brought in by the multitude of apps they do to create. It could very well be that a submission to FundedApps is the best investment you ever make. I do advise that you read their legal page carefully, however, and have it and any related documents looked over by a lawyer. I also advise that, before you start spending your £1.19 on a wing and a prayer, you do your research first — especially if you have a lot of ideas. £1.19 may not be much, but as any avid iTunes user or slot-machine gambler can tell you, it adds up quickly.

Here’s the FundedApps process, as stated in their FAQ:

• • You download our App
  • Using our App, write down your idea and submit it to us for a cost of £1.19
  • We reveiew your idea
  • If we think it is a good idea we invest our money and make the App
  • You receive a payment of £250
  • We use a bit more of our money to launch the App
  • You receive 25% of the Apps’ net revenue
  • We continue to manage the App and make it even better

So what are your thoughts on FundedApps? Planning to give them a try?

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

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If you’re an aspiring children’s author, a teacher, or just looking for something fun to do with a kid in your life, Storyjumper is something you’ll want to take a look at. I came across the web app randomly and was amazed by how easy it was to jump in and start creating. In fact, me and my two year old made a book just tonight — and she wrote it.

We didn’t even have to log in to get started — you don’t need an account unless you want to save your work. All we did was go to the Storyjumper website, click create and chose to “Build a book from scratch.” You don’t have to create one from scratch, however. If you are looking for some truly easy fun and a little inspiration, you can choose one of the templates which get the story started for you – and include a Treasure Map Builder, Trucks and Rescue, Magic and Myth, a Krazee Calendar and more. You can even grab a book that someone else has completed and allowed others to modify, then create your own version from that work.

Once in the editor, it was a matter of a few clicks in the sidebar to get our story started. The sidebar was broken down into four expanding menus that were easy to navigate and uncluttered:

Props - Characters, items and other useful things to set in your scene.

Scenes - Fun and creative backgrounds to your pages.

Photos - Don’t like the stock art? Want your own characters and backgrounds? Upload them here.

Text - Choices for the written portions of your book.

There were stock items in each menu, but a click on the “more ____” button brought up even more choices that, once clicked, lived in the sidebar as well.

My daughter told the story and we found scenes and creatures that suited her safari tale. A bit of clicking and dragging was all that was needed to move elements around, resize them, and make other quick adjustments. We ended up with 14 pages, a book cover, and a dedication to her Mommy. It’s saved in my account and shared with the world (you can choose to post your work publicly, share it with specific people, or just keep it private). You can view our story here, if you like – the reading application is pretty slick too. :D

If we want to, we can now print off a paper copy of the book, continue to share it digitally, or can buy a hardcover version for 25 bucks. Not a bad thing, when you weigh in the fact that the creator is completely free! It looks like other people can buy the book as well, when it is offered up publicly, but there is no readily available mention of compensation to the author regarding if or when that occurs. Authors do retain copyright on all of their original works, however, which includes your own images and your own words. By using the service, you are granting Storyjumper license to reproduce and sell the work.

Storyjumper is an awesome way to encourage reading and imagination. Your kid can learn the creative process as young as a toddler, and have fun doing it — and that is no small thing! There is even a classroom edition to help teachers integrate the entire system into their curriculum. I highly recommend you go and check Storyjumper out, or recommend it to someone who has a kid in their life.

What are your thoughts on Storyjumper? If you’ve created any stories, share them in the comments!

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I admit it: I'm a productivity junkie. I am ever on the search for that elusive application that brings me just one step closer to organizational nirvana. Currently, I'm loving Producteev — but you're never to tied down too look… right? As debatable as that may be to some, when a business acquaintance introduced me to Glasscubes, I was wowed enough to dig in and give it a try. Glasscubes is pretty, smart and extremely well rounded! If you are looking for a really slick and functional service that allows you to collaborate on documents, share files,  manage tasks, projects, and calendars — and even use as a CRM and teleconferencing tool — then you'll want to check out Glasscubes.

What's Good/How it Compares

So you might be thinking that you know a dozen or so services that promise the same as what was mentioned above, but Glasscubes probably does it just a little bit better, and might do just a little bit more. It's pretty much a one-stop-shop, offering a range of features that are usually spread out over two or three applications.

It's not just the offerings that set Glasscubes apart, however, it is the incredible amount of work that has gone into designing the user interface and integrated functionality of the program. Glasscubes' designers have done a great job of remembering that the people who will be using their SaaS (software as a service) are, well… people. Whether you are a high-powered CEO of a multi-national company, a small to medium business (SMB) owner, or a lowly struggling freelancer like myself, you will find Glasscubes extraordinarily well laid out and easy to use. This all goes a long way to lowering the inherent stresses of project (and customer) management.

Standout Features

Glasscubes offers enough functionality that to list it all here would likely require you to seek the quiet shelter of mind-numbed sleep — so I won't do that to you. Instead here's a shortlist of some standout features that might make Glasscubes a great choice for you:

• Multiple workspaces that can be configured with as much or as little of Glasscube's functionality as you need — everything from just a chat area to a full blown management and collaboration space.
• All you could ask of a task and project management functionality, including a dashboard view, progress bars, time tracking, add comments and attachments, discussion boards (with polls!), a calendar that syncs with outside services, internal announcements, whiteboard feature, RSS activity feeds, permissions layers for nearly everything, and more and more and more…
• In-app document previewing and collaborative editing via a complete integration of the Zoho office suite.
• Intelligent search that makes it very easy to find what you need — even if its inside a document.
• Configure your Glasscubes account for document and task/project management, or as just a CRM — or unlock it all.
• The mobile version is device agnostic — which is to say that Glasscubes will work on pretty much anything. Even an iPad or iPhone. No flash here, folks. The mobile version is currently in beta, but the full site is accessible as well (just a bit heavy).
• A social aspect to user profiles (add bios and social networks).
• Brand Glasscubes as your own company in everything but the free version.
• Built in Teleconferencing that works Skype out (web conferencing is in the pipe).
• An easy to use and very functional Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). Great for people like me who want to hide whimpering in a corner when presented with most CRMs.
• A very flexible sales team that is willing to work on pricing outside of the packaging — even for us lowly freelancers, who often get the short end of the stick here…

What's Integrated and What's Coming

Lots of great integrations are planned for the future of Glasscubes, but the team is very particular about where they take their service, as they have a very happy client list and, understandably, don't wish to jeopardize it.

Currently Glasscubes is integrated with the Zoho office suite (as mentioned) and syncs (by click) with Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook. Google Docs integration is coming soon, as are Google Contacts; they are also in talks with some third party providers of mind mapping software. Sadly, there are no plans for Evernote integration — though I did try to sell them on it! Don't worry, though. They have a strong built in notes system.

There are several updates in the Glasscubes pipeline that aim to increase the overall functionality. For example, they are planning to add Dropbox-style features to their Folders (a mapped drive for Glasscubes on your computer), add reporting and email integration (should be live now) to the CRM, quick ways to add tasks, and an API for third party developers to adopt their technology into more new and wonderful integrations.

What's Not to Like?

Glasscubes could still take another step toward the modern bent of companies by integrating more into current popular workflow tools, such as integrating instant messaging and some social tools that we already use, and email-to-task functionality. Real time docs editing and other real time features may also be a benefit, though that sort of thing is often overrated and could potentially ruin the user-friendliness of the service. 

I have read some reviews that complain that it is not "corporate looking" enough — but that's a selling feature in my books. This is enterprise level technology that is focused on the small to medium enterprise — and the look, feel and pricing reflect it. Did I not mention the pricing yet? Check it out below in US dollars. You can also view it in Pounds and Euros.

Conclusions

Because it is so configurable, without being overwhelming, and constantly improving, Glasscubes is definitely worth a look by anyone who needs any or all of the offered services. I might wish for a more robust free plan (with something like Producteev's unlimited workspaces) for personal use, but Glasscubes is meant for business and is marketed accordingly. And I'm cheap. 

Glasscubes is available inEnglish, German and Polish, with French, Spanish, Russian, and Czech coming in the near future.

Check out Glasscubes here. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• Producteev 2 Stands Task Management On Its Ear With A Fast, Easy, Cross-Platform Solution
• GTD Not Working for You? Try Action Method Online
• Toodledo Gets an Official Makeover
• Producteev Adds Google Tasks Sync, Outlook Plugin, with Native Mac, Windows, Android Apps On the Way
• GTD With 2Do and Toodledo [Reader Workflow]

A few weeks back we announced a writers’ contest. The folks at GTDagenda, a Getting Things Done app, offered us two free-for-life premium subscriptions to their task (and life) management service ($69.95/year value, each), and we decided to give one of those subscriptions away to the winning writer of an impartial review of the app. The winner of this phase of the contest is Josh, for his exuberant and well rounded take on GTDagenda as a service (congrats Josh!). Check out his review — and how you can win the second part of the giveaway — below!

Josh’s Take

Wow, talk about full featured! GTDagenda.com sets a new bar for the million and one getting things done apps and sites based on David Allen’s system.

I will admit right from the start that the site can be a bit overwhelming. There are goals, projects, tasks, checklists, contexts and more — plus the ability to prioritize and slice and dice in a couple of different ways. Let’s just say there is a learning curve.

Once you sit back and look at how it all fits together, though, the picture becomes less cloudy and you see the genius of the design. Your goals remain at the top of each page, to keep you focused on the overall picture, and each tab walks down from there. So with your goals in mind, you can easily start a project and define the tasks that make up that project.

Typical of most GTD apps, there are priorities and contexts that you can define for each project and task. There are a number of fields to complete when creating an item, which may turn some people off, but once the item is created the data is used in some powerful ways to analyze what you have to do.

My favorite feature, that nearly every other GTD offering is lacking, is GTDagenda’s use of a calendar view. In the top right of each page is the calendar, with due dates in bold. When you click on a date it brings up your agenda for the day with the ability to edit any entries and even add new ones (including memos and meetings). I can’t tell you how nice it is for me to be able to quickly figure out, on a Sunday night, exactly what my Monday will look like. In other task and project management apps, I have often found myself wondering if this next item really a Next (Monday morning), or a Soon (maybe Monday afternoon or even Tuesday). In GTDagenda, I simply set the date for when it really needs to be done, and pull up the calendar. For those who prefer the looser categorizations they are still there, but GTDAgenda offers flexibility to those of us who need just a little more direction and specificity.

The final tab in the app is for Checklists. The checklists are a great way to record those steps that you do on a regular to semi-regular basis. For instance, in projects I have to complete on a quarterly basis, I have checklists because it is nearly impossible to remember all of the steps when I haven’t thought about it for 3 months. Previously I’ve kept some checklists in Word, some in Excel, and some in Evernote…it was a mess. Now they are all in one place, and right there with my daily agenda. Falling just short of perfect though, the checklists seem to be kind of an afterthought here. It would be nice if I could assign due dates, contexts, priorities etc., to them and move them into projects or tasks as they become due; but it is a huge step forward just to have everything in one place. By the way, if you don’t use checklists, read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande — you will wonder how you ever lived without them.

GTDagenda is filled with intuitive features, like auto-populating the date on an item when you are looking at a specific day in the calendar view, shortcuts along the right side of the screen for your calendar (as mentioned previously), as well as for projects and contexts. You can also email tasks directly into the Inbox, which is extremely handy. Overall I’d rate GTDagenda as a 7 out of 10. If it had an iPhone app (as opposed to just a mobile site and an Android app) it would probably jump up to an 8. If it had a better integration with Evernote I’d have to give it another point, but right now it’s a strong 7 for me.

This is is of course just scratching the surface of GTDagenda, with so many features you’ll have to give it a try and see if it’s right for you. Once you do please let us know what you think in the comments!

 

Win Your Own Free-For-Life Premium Subscription to GTDagenda!

Did Josh get you interested in GTDagenda? If so, do one of the following and the Premium subscription of GTDagenda is yours. Free. For life. That’s $69.95 per year. In 80 years, that’s $5596.00.

Not a bad bit of savings, really.

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*** UPDATE: As mentioned in the comments below, the winner of the second portion of this contest is Scot Newbury! Congrats to both Scot and Josh on your wins — Dan from GTDagenda should be in contact with you soon. *** 

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• Get a Lifetime Subscription to GTDagenda for Free – and Become a Writer Too?
• Getting Things Done (GTD) in Evernote with Only One Notebook
• GTD, Producteev, Evernote — Bridged!
• Five Ways to Increase Your Productivity Using Text Expansion Software
• GTD With 2Do and Toodledo [Reader Workflow]

If you are a dedicated Windows Live Messenger user and own an iPhone, you may want to take a gander at the official, recently released (and free) iPhone app for the longstanding IM service. The new Live Messenger app is fairly slick and easy to navigate, has push notifications, displays updates from many of the services you can integrate with in your Windows Live account — including Facebook — and handles the job of basic messaging very well. That said, there are a few obvious gaps and design flaws that have made the experience a bit frustrating for some.

Live Messenger for iPhone Features

• Chat with Windows Live and Yahoo! Messenger contacts
• Push notifications
• See what your friends are sharing and update your status on multiple Social Network accounts including Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and a slew of others
• Take photos or upload photos from your iPhone to share on your Windows Live account (add captions, yadda yadda)
• View and interact with your Windows Live connections and your own profile (including viewing profiles, chat, call and email)
• Lots of smiley emoticons for the lovers of smiley emoticons
• Access your hotmail account and send messages right from the app

Where It Lacks

• You can’t add or remove your social networks from within the app
• Push notifications have been reported to be spotty at best
• The app seems to have a problem refreshing the status of your online friends
• No group chats
• No iOS4 multitasking support at this time (and at least a two second wait for the app to load)
• UI issues that make it difficult to find settings — like where to log out, for example
• No way to reorder your contacts based on status, groups, hiding offline, or any other way that seems readily apparent
• Can’t block or delete contacts
• The email functionality appears to be just an embedded browser viewing Hotmail’s mobile version

How to View Profiles, Change Online Status and Sign Out of Windows Live Messenger for iPhone

In case you are one of the many having trouble with this, you can find your profile link, change your picture and online status by touching your profile picture (this is how you interact with your contacts’ menu options as well). To sign out of Windows Live Messenger for iPhone, go to your online status menu and you will find a “Sign out from here” button below Appear Offline.

As mentioned above, if you are a major Windows Live Messenger or even just Windows Live user, the new offering from Microsoft is a great start, and it ought to give you most of what you need on the go. It will likely improve in a hurry, too, considering Microsoft’s current push to take over the net. However, if you are an IM power user, you may wish to stick with another free service, like eBuddy, or Nimbuzz, which also allow for multiple instant message and some social network chat accounts.

What do you think of the new Windows Live Messenger for iPhone? Let us know in the comments!

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• Awesome App Updates: Flipboard, Zite, PressReader (iOS)
• My Daughter Ate My Stylus — So I Learned How to Make a New (and Even Better) One
• There’s An App for That – Get Charged Money When You Miss a Workout [iOS]
• Three Low-Cost, DIY Ways to Use Your Smartphone While Wearing Gloves
• Funny Stuff That Siri Says – the Website

Some have you may have noticed our minor obsession with productivity applications here at 40Tech — particularly with task management apps. In the past, we have written on GTD in Evernote, Action Method Online, reQall, Dial2Do, ToodleDo vs Remember the Milk, and more. We also briefly made mention of Producteev, then a promising but still incomplete service focused on cross-platform task management and communication. Now Producteev is back and swinging out hard with Producteev 2, promising one of the best personal and business task management apps to hit the web. Producteev's goal is to enable you to work with their task management system without requiring you to make major adjustments to your current workflow. Producteev 2 is powerful,highly flexible, and free for individuals.

"Producteev’s solution connects email and tasks with a broad range of popular communication tools and seamlessly brings them into a user’s work environment, without requiring them to change their work preferences."

Cross-Platform

Producteev has put together a really slick and easy to use web application — but you don't actually have to log into it at all, if you don't want to. You can fully interact with Producteev using only your preferred communication tools, including email, Gtalk, Yahoo and Windows Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Twitter, with more services planned and on community request. Producteev uses Facebook connect as well, which allows for extremely simple sign in (for you and people you want to invite in) and they are planning more robust Facebook integration in the future. By "interact fully" I mean that you can add tasks (including full email messages, deadlines, labels, and workspace tags), receive tasks, and receive and act on notifications from any of the services mentioned above that you choose to connect to your workspaces.

Workspaces and Task Sorting

You can set up multiple workspaces in Producteev, with variable settings for each one. Essentially, you can have multiple task management ecosystems set up for projects, businesses, personal use, groups, or whatever combination thereof that you choose, with each one having its own specific communications and notification settings, labels, teams, filters, etc. You can work with all workspaces separately or as one (using the Overview tab), easily maintaining your entire life's tasks, as well as viewing them through their specific microverse for a more granular look at what you need to do. For an even more specific view of your tasks, you can sort them by Manager/Owner, Deadline, Label, Last Changed, Assigned To, Team Member, and more. There is also a calendar view for timelining that will sync fully with your Google Calendar. Once tasks are in a workspace, they aren't by any means stuck there. If you need to transfer a task (or multiple tasks) from one workspace to another, you can do so easily by accessing the Bulk Actions menu that appears when you select a task's checkbox, or by clicking on the workspace area within the task itself. Drag and drop functionality is being looked at as a future update.

Task-Specific Features

Each task can be set up for public or private visibility, easily assigned to someone else, have multiple labels attached, deadlines and reminders set up and changed, and keeps a running and dated list of actions and changes on the task. You can also send tasks directly to Google Calendar as well as add notes directly to the task, complete with any attachment. I have tried attachments of various sizes (one was 17MB) and file types and haven't had a problem yet.

GTD Methodology

The entire system of Producteev 2 has a strong basis in Getting Things Done methodology and should be very easy to adapt to your GTD workflow. Tasks sent from anywhere and anyone are automatically added to your Recipient Inbox in close to real time, and you can then set the task up for action (or set it up right when you send it to Producteev using hash tags) by adding deadlines, appropriate workspaces, and labels/tags. You can also take advantage of Producteev's Star and Smart Filter technology, as well as the learning algorithm of the Producteev Hot! list to help you maintain a grip on your most important tasks.

Gmail and iGoogle Integration

Producteev 2 has a gadget that plugs directly into your iGoogle and Gmail account for a quick and easy visual management of your tasks right from the popular start page or email platform. You can work with Producteev via any email system, but the gadget provides a nice top-down overview right from Gmail. For general email use, you can forward emails to Producteev yourself, in their entirety or with edited notes, turning them into tasks that will remind you of their existence at the time you set (and clearing the clutter from your email inbox); and you can even set up filters in Gmail (or any email client with filtering capability) to have emails with certain flags automatically sent to Producteev as a task.

Browser Integration

As a part of its mission to provide you with the ability to add and manage tasks from wherever you are working, Producteev 2 is including extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox. No direct word on integration for Internet Explorer, but, if there is a strong call for it, either Producteev or someone else will likely make it happen. As an interesting side-note, however, the folks at Producteev have done the unprecedented and have created Producteev 2 to work very well with Internet Explorer — in fact, they are even working on *gasp* IE6 compatibility!! For that alone, I salute them.

Social Gaming in Producteev Academy

An interesting feature in the new version of Producteev is their social gaming functionality through Producteev Academy. Now, some might say that gaming is the exact opposite of productivity, but the Academy provides an interesting approach that is meant to challenge team members to out-do each other in their use of Producteev, ultimately increasing their productivity as they race to get things done. This badge-focused "game" also has the convenient side-benefit of providing team managers with data on productivity. If anyone finds the concept of social gaming toward productivity just too alien, not to worry – Producteev Academy can be simply turned off.

The Producteev 2 iPhone App

Producteev 2 has launched with a new (and astronomically better) free iPhone application. The UI is much improved over the previous version and gives you access to most features of the web app. The new iPhone app also adds the wonders of Offline Sync and Push Notifications to make your life and task management easier while on the go. I've been playing with the pre-release version, and have found it easy to use, understand and navigate; though I would say it may be a good idea for the Producteev team to add the ability to create a task immediately, as opposed to the current workspace selection screen. Anything that can be done to speed up task entry will only improve the iPhone app's usefulness. Down the line, it would be great to see the adoption of voice entry for tasks (a la reQall), as well as integration with other services. In my tests, I have had a bit of trouble with a delay in syncing, but that could have more to do with the fact that I am using a beta app than anything else. I have not yet spoken to Producteev's support on the matter, so don't take it to heart.

Coming Soon

In the immediate future (meaning this month), Producteev will be releasing a desktop version for Mac OS. The desktop app will also have Offline Sync, and will have access to all of the features of the web app. A Windows version may be available in July, but there is no Linux version planned. For mobile: Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile 7 versions are in the works for possible release this summer as well. All future desktop and mobile versions of Producteev will come at the convenient price of Free. Other integrations, such as plugins for email clients, sales tools, and various web-based productivity services are planned for the near future. Producteev will also be releasing an API for pretty much everything, which is great news for third party integrations into even more services (such as Evernote…). When asked about Evernote integration, the CEO of Producteev, Ilan Abehassera, said that it is a distinct possibility. As with any new feature, though, it will depend on user interest. The more people shout for it on the Producteev support forums, the more likely and the more quickly it will happen.

Pricing

Pricing for Producteev is based on both features and workspaces. Users can have as many workspaces as they like, both free and otherwise, and can even mix and match pricing packages as the workspace needs require. Producteev has designed their packages based on the needs of individuals and businesses, providing individuals with a Free account that is limited by only allowing three users to participate in the workspace, as well as having no smart filters, no reporting, no support outside of the forums, and only eight file attachments. For businesses (or people who need a bit more) there are the Premium, Bronze, Silver and Gold packages respectively. Premium workspaces are $9/month each and allow four users, two filters, reporting, 15 file attachments, and email support. The rest of the packages bring an increase in users, filters and files at $29/month each, $54/month each, and finally, the Gold workspaces are $84/month each, and provide for up to 40 users, five filters, reports, 1000 files, and phone support. I imagine they could be talked into custom packages for any business that needed more than that.

As the pricing is set monthly, workspaces can be up or downgraded as needs require, and once again, you can have as many workspaces, mixed and matched, as you need, including multiple free workspaces.

Producteev 2 In Action (10min Screencast by CEO)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Conclusions

Producteev 2 has taken the original version and reworked it practically from the ground up. They have focused on ease of use, adding and managing tasks without major learning curves or disruptions to your current workflow (by integrating with things you use every day like email, IM, mobile), and otherwise attempting to bridge the gaps left by other task management services. Producteev has an ambitious and robust development plan and schedule and offers a decent amount of service for free, with a trial business version also available. There are definitely a couple of bugs in this release, as it is just coming out of beta, but at the core, Producteev 2 works very well and is definitely worth a try – with all of the newness and awesome packed into the service, I can’t see why you wouldn’t want to!

Let us know what you think of Producteev 2 in the comments!

UPDATE: Producteev has simplified their pricing. See below. 

All plans now come with unlimited tasks, labels, SSL protection, attach files to tasks, free apps (iPhone, Gmail gadget), notifications via IM and email, Google Calendar sync, and Producteev Academy. 

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• Producteev Adds Google Tasks Sync, Outlook Plugin, with Native Mac, Windows, Android Apps On the Way
• Producteev Wants To Be Your Virtual Assistant
• Glasscubes: A One-Stop Shop For Your Productivity, Collaboration, and CRM Needs
• GTD Not Working for You? Try Action Method Online
• Producteev Gets a Massive Upgrade: Android App, Windows Desktop App, and an All Around Makeover