WordPress 3.0 brings a sleek and sexy menu management feature along with a host of other features from convenience fixes to major additions.

If you’re an O3 client, you may notice an upgrade flag in your WordPress Dashboard. Don’t worry, we’ll get around to upgrading everyone with due time. We’ll likely wait for the first minor release (3.01) before upgrading across the board.

All new O3 clients will begin to take advantage of WordPress 3.0 immediately! Any questions or concerns, by all means, contact us!

But, there is a rather new topic as to what happens to your electronic identity once you pass on? Blogs, email accounts, facebook, myspace, and twitter accounts… where do they go? Better yet, if some super advanced species happens upon an Earth in ruins, will we be forever immortalized in some hard drive sectors somewhere? This would be the equivalent of archaeologists uncovering old Egyptian scripts and learning about their ancient culture. The one thing that I know I would not want representative of our times is if this advanced being opens up a MySpace profile and immediately has to look for the pause button to stop the bleeding from the ears known as Nickelback… But I digress.

Several popular online services have protocols in place that protect the deceased. For example, GMail will allow access to the next-of-kin upon the submission of a death certificate and other means of proof of identity. More here.

Facebook has a bit of a different procedure in that they will not delete a deceased person’s account, but they will memorialize that person’s profile (use this form to issue a request). They remove status updates but allow wall posts from friends only.

MySpace will not allow the next of kin to edit or delete, but they will remove a deceased person’s profile upon an email request to accountcare@support.myspace.com. I wonder what would happen if I sent an email requesting that the soon-to-be-deceased MySpace be removed?

So that’s that. If it’s your desire to have your online identity taken down upon your death, be sure to leave a note with all the passwords in a safe place. Better yet, leave your next-of-kin’s email address as your alternate so they may be able to use the forgotten password forms to access your account. But, please please please, take down those Nickelback autoplay widgets… really, it’s an embarrassment to society and I’d hate for an alien to uncover your profile first…

Crate & Barrel, besides being one of my favorite stores, has a new shopping cart system that is quite good. In fact, it’s probably one of the best shopping cart systems I’ve seen on the Internet. After looking at product listings and hitting the “Add to Cart” button, which is AJAX’ed, a little frame of sorts pops up on the bottom of your screen giving you a visualization of what’s in your shopping cart. This is the first time I’ve actually seen a visualization like this and the closest we’ve come to actually replicating the physical shopping experience.

Click to enlarge

So living life in the cloud has it’s drawbacks. But so far, it’s been better than having Outlook crash on me 10 times a day.

Now, with the advent of a more robust technological core, the Internet has become more organized and more useful. Web Applications are a big part of making sense of the mess. Chances are, you use a Web Application as a part of your daily life. In the trials and tribulations of an Internet-based small business owner, I use several of them and can’t really imagine how I got along without them. Here are my top 10 favorite Web Applications.

#10 MobileMe

10 years ago, Apple was dead. The company couldn’t find a way to to chip away at Microsoft’s domination of the PC market share. Once every blue moon, a game changer enters the equation and completely changes the way people behave. Enter: the iPod. The iPod, in it’s clunky, first generation form was a sight to behold and your local Best Buy couldn’t keep them on the shelves. From there, Apple kept creating the next must-have device that had every young person scrambling to put together the $5.50/hour they made to purchase the next “big thing” from Apple.

Aside from the iPod, my first forray into the world of Apple came vis-a-vis the iPhone 3G. I was late to jump on the bandwagon, but I say that now typing on my new 24″ iMac. I’ve been converted.

One of the not-so-visible things that Apple offers is MobileMe. MobileMe is the everyday person’s Microsoft Exchange. With MobileMe, you can keep all of your important information synced across various mediums. I purchased the $99/year MobileMe when I bought my iPhone and it was a great way to keep my desktop PC, my laptop, and my iPhone synced with all of my calendar and contact data. I easily added my iMac to that loop. Not only does MobileMe sync contacts and calendars, it also syncs photos, bookmarks, and files as well. For $99/year, it’s a must-have.

www.me.com

#9 Wikipedia

Aside from the occasional content vandalism, Wikipedia is a surprisingly accurate compilation of knowledge. Wikipedia is, in fact, found to be as accurate or more accurate than other online encyclopedias such as Britannica and Encarta. These studies, however, drew hostile reaction from Britannica who questioned the survey’s validity. Want to know more about these studies? Google “wikipedia accuracy” and guess who’s at the top? You guessed it, a Wikipedia entry on Wikipeida’s accuracy. I actually find this kind of funny.

If Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica are the large ships of their industry, Wikipedia is the dingy. Large ships can’t correct course very quickly and takes a lot of time to steer in another direction. Wikipedia can turn on a dime. The knowledge base is updated much quicker than other online encyclopedias due to Wikipedia’s policy of user authoring. For current events, Wikipedia is the first to know.

A famous vandalism incident occurred at the behest of Stephen Colbert, who urged his audience to create their own reality (wikiality). He insisted that the population of elephants had tripled in the last 6-months (while text on the side of the screen captioned: it hasn’t). Lo and behold, entries on elephants were changed to reflect the new reality. Stephen Colbert triumphantly announced that elephants were no longer endangered.

Aside from hoaxes, Wikipedia still serves as point whenever I’m looking up information of fact online.

www.wikipedia.org

#8 WordPress

What would I do without WordPress? I guess we could ask what an author would do without a pen, a politician without tax money, or Alex Rodriquez without sterroids. I’d be in a heap of trouble.

WordPress has transformed the way we do business at O3 Strategies. Starting as a blogging platform, WordPress and it’s massive developer base evolved the platform into an everyday content management system. We provide a WordPress installation with nearly every client we come across. It empowers our clients to take control of their own Internet presence. No longer do they have to send an e-mail or make a telephone call to update their site. They can do it all in an easy way that has been unmatched by its pricey competitors. Best part? It’s free. WordPress will make citizen journalists of us all.

WordPress is also a developer’s dream. Well built and easily extendable, WordPress makes it possible to do almost anything regarding Internet copy.

www.wordpress.com

#7 eBay

First man on the scene and the Goliath in its industry, eBay came and crashed the Internet party in September of 1995 known first as AuctionWeb. eBay has been helping grandma sell an attic full of junk and has provided an avenue for others to make mini fortunes. If you’re looking for a discontinued DVD, a mountain bike, a car, or even a house, eBay probably has it.

www.ebay.com

#6 Mint

Mint has made Microsoft Money obsolete. With a slick, very Web 2.0 interface, Mint provides money management tools with a surprisingly low learning curve. And it does it with pizazz to boot.

Simply enter your online banking account credentials, a vehicle loan credentials, or even your mortgage credentials and Mint gets to work downloading all of your transactions, sorting them, categorizing them and giving you great little views to see what kind of junk you’re spending your money on. Kind of a rude awakening.

Mint also tracks your stocks and other investments and gives you histories and ROIs all on the fly, updated that day. If you’re up to trusting an application with literally all of your money account credentials, Mint will certainly surprise you with its functionality.

www.mint.com

#5 YouTube

Being first with a service is often a recipe for big bucks. That’s certainly what Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim found out when Google gobbled up the video sharing service for $1.65b in 2005. Even with the enormous stature and incredible thinkers of Google, the company found out that Google Video wouldn’t hold a match to the ever popular YouTube.

YouTube has given a creative outlet for many who probably wished they didn’t have that outlet such as the Leave Britney Alone video featuring a rather disturbed young man (?) wondering why Britney is being given a hard time. Others like the Obama Girls got their 15 minutes of quick fame. One of my personal, all-time favorites features a little rabid Wolfpack fan, Locke, who can’t bear to hear that the Wolfpack lost the 2006 ACC Championship at the hands of their hated rival. Shown below.

[youtube width="300" height="243"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pGusFXhWyY[/youtube]

www.youtube.com

#4 Facebook

What would I do with all of my spare time if it weren’t for Facebook? One of the rare cases of being late to the scene but quickly catching up and slaying the beast (mySpace), Facebook has become an ever popular medium to live your life online. CEO Mark Zuckerberg crafted Facebook while sitting in his college dorm room. His first version was a network for Harvard students. It quickly turned to Ivy League students and to all colleges. Remaining as a mostly collegiate application for the first few years of its life, Zuckerberg turned on the faucets and released it to the public at-large in September of 2006. Facebook now has over 200 million active users obliterating its closest rivals. I have an account. You have an account. My parents even have accounts.

I was in college in 2004 when Facbeook hit the scene. Everyone had an account and the first version was rather primitive. The infamous Wall was just a text box and anyone could write or delete anything in it. My how that’s changed.

What makes me mad about Facebook is that the application, in its early form, wasn’t rocket science. I could’ve done it. If only I hadn’t been out chasing the ladies instead. Then I wouldn’t be writing this post and you wouldn’t be reading it. So I guess all of our lives are better for it, right?

Facebook has yet to turn a profit even though the service is perhaps the only other entity that compiles a more complete advertising profile on an individual than Google. Facebook has yet to figure it out, but I’m sure that’s going to change soon. Which leads us to number 3…

www.facebook.com

#3 Google

Coming in at number 3 is Google. Some may question why Google is ranked so low on the countdown. You’ll see later.

Not much for an explanation of Google as everyone knows who they are and what they do. I had written about some newcomers to the scene just last month and concluded that Google has nothing to worry about in the short or long term. Perhaps the forever term.

Google has done an amazing job of first building a fantastic search engine and then compiling search habits on its users to create an advertising profile on each one of its users. It has easily been able to monetize the search industry and is now a multi-billion dollar company. The best part about Google is that they are certainly not resting on their laurels. It seems everyday Google pumps out another fantastic service for the masses, all of them either cheap or free. I guess free is a loose term given that you are giving them mounds of data worth more than gold with every new search.

www.google.com

#2 Online Banking

I hate checks. I hate writing them. I hate standing in line at the grocery store while someone writes one. Everything about them I hate with the lone exception of getting them. Nothing’s better than that.

But what is close is online banking who has largely slayed the check beast. For this article, I am using online banking as a generic term for any company offering your financial profile online. Without these precious little gems, I would be wasting time (and paper) writing those stupid checks instead of clicking around and paying everyone who demands money from me. It has drastically simplified my life and with electronic records on everything, I don’t even keep a check register anymore.

Think of all the baby birds we’ve saved. But not the dodo bird. If only people had online banking in the 1600s.

#1 GMail

No Google didn’t get #1 but one of its products did. The only reason GMail takes the reign over Google is because it has literally sorted my own personal mess into a nice neat pile as opposed to Google which is more concerned with sorting out the world’s mess. And I don’t care about the world. I’m worried about me.

Like you, I still have my Hotmail account laying around. I don’t check it. It’s there only because Hotmail still has me in the system from 1996. GMail is the smartest e-mail application to date, bar none. No more keeping folders. No more losing track of e-mails in the black hole of everyday communication. Applying what Google does best to its e-mail platform, GMail offers a search capability that makes Outlook want to crash (again). And with the introduction of Google Apps, now anyone can craft their own e-mail address and let Google handle the rest. In fact, O3′s e-mail is based on the GMail platform. It’s reliable, it’s searchable, it’s free, it’s everything e-mail should be. And more.

www.gmail.com

And that’s a wrap

These are the Top 10 Web Apps that I can’t live without. If you don’t mind giving up some personal information, the Internet can make life a little more fun and a little more productive.

Wolfram Alpha was launched this past Friday to huge pomp and circumstance, and like Bill Gates’ release of Windows 98, the application failed almost immediately. Nonetheless, Wolfram Alpha was back up by the weekend and rebranded as a test release. This isn’t completely uncommon nor does it affect my first impression of it… yet. So let’s get to work.

What can you ask a computer? Anything I guess. As many of my close friends know, I’m quite privy in the kitchen and one thing I’m always doing with a laptop in the kitchen is conversions. So I asked Wolfram Alpha the following question: “How many ounces are in 14 gallons?” This probably isn’t a question I would ever ask it, but why not.

Wolfram Alpha first interpreted my input with some pretty advanced regular expressions I’m guessing.

Convert 14 gallons to fluid ounces

So far so good. It has correctly determined what I’m looking for.

1792 fluid ounces

There we have it. It correctly did the conversion for me. Here’s where I got really impressed. Not only did it give me what I’m looking for, it also gave me some other important ancillary information.

56 quarts

112 pints

224 cups

53 liters

0.053 cubic meters

52,996 cubic centimeters

Very nice. The first 3 or 4 could be applicable before delving into information that may be useful to scientists or researches, certainly not to the amateur chef. It quickly devolves from usable everyday information into more scientific babble as it presents comparisons as volume.

(6 x 10^-4 to 0.0014) x forty-foot equivalent unit (2TEU)

(0.001 to 0.002) x twenty-foot equivalent unit (680 to 1520ft³)

(0.0024 = 1/423) x standard volume (1000 mol molar volume constants)

Wolfram Alpha gives a few more tables of information that I’m not going to share because I didn’t understand what the last one meant and I imagine it gets deeper from there. Overall, I would say that Wolfram Alpha did its job and presented my question with more than appropriate answers.

Now let’s have some fun with Wolfram Alpha. I asked it a question without a clear answer because of bias. A computer is supposed to be unbiased, right? Go.

What is the best college in North Carolina?

This review hangs on the answer to this question. If it answers North Carolina State University, I’ll be happy. Any other, I’ll claim it to be junk. What did Wolfram Alpha say?

Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.

Fair enough. It gave me some suggestions on “good input” and provided links to things I may have meant, one of which is “college in North Carolina.” That term was a link, so I clicked it. The result? Wolfram still couldn’t understand what to do with my new input that it provided. I don’t see a real problem with this since the question wasn’t a great one to begin with.

I tested a few more searches with Wolfram and found that it is actually really well done when asking questions of fact. Who was the 17th President of the United States. Andrew Johnson came up and gave me some good information on Johnson, including biographical information, his successors and predecessors, even his Vice President (which was blank because he didn’t have one). Wolfram Alpha handles this type of question extraordinarily well.

As a first impression, I don’t see Wolfram Alpha as being much of a competitor to Google. Google doesn’t try to answer questions as much as it gives you a place to go to find the information you are looking for. Wolfram isn’t going to tell you where to get the best pizza in town or deliver a blog about the best colleges in the area. Google will. If Wolfram Alpha is a competitor to anyone, it would be Wikipedia but it would need several more evolutions from here to rise to that.