Five free Web apps we can't live without

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.

A pop-up on the Bloglines beta start page. (Click for larger view.)

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.

One database collects all Computerworld product reviews published this year. You can see the live interactive database below. Sort by any of the available columns by clicking on the column header (clicking the same header toggles between ascending and descending sort). Click on the search box, and you'll see options to search by product name as well as headline and date.

2007 Computerworld product reviews

Web apps we can't live without:
The A-list Ta-da list PBwiki Google Docs		Bloglines v3 beta Zoho Creator		Honorable mention Basecamp Google Calendar Carbonite