I love online tools; anything that allows me to save data in a single place with internet-driven universal accessibility is great. But there is a difference between web applications I install on my server and tools I use compliments of the generosity of others. Specifically, what about privacy, and what about data availability?

Take Google as an example. Google has become nearly synonymous with searching the Web, and the people behind it have steadily expanded their offerings with email, collaborative documents, and customizable maps. Google is huge, and the world would share a collective gasp were the Google domain to suddenly go dark. So, email, documents, and other data housed in the massive Googleweb are safe in terms of long term storage and continuous availability. But privacy? Well, Google’s Privacy Policy specifically allows the use of personal information to display targeted advertising. This is no secret, and they go the extra step of providing a human readable Privacy Policy Highlights page for all of us who do not speak the legal dialect of the English language (though the full length Privacy Policy is also fairly readable). And really, who cares if, when reading an email about your nephew’s diapers, Google accompanies it with an advertisement for Fuzzi Bunz somewhere on the screen?

But say you and some friends are working on the next big thing, the website that will turn Web 2.0 into a brief footnote in Web history? You collaborate online, using the tools that fit your project’s needs. The various companies hosting your data are not necessarily your competitors today, but with a press release and an acquisition, suddenly Yahoo also has a mega-tool for photo sharing. And corporate espionage is not just something you read about in the news.

Or say your deadline is fast approaching, and the specifications you need to finish your project are hosted at an ever-useful online website. You go to log in to that familiar web page, only to find that it is not there. Remember the Milk seems like a solid little app, but I have never heard of Emily Boyd or Omar Kilani. Their mini-bios make them sound legit, and the endorsement of both PC World and Popular Science help cement their credibility, but what of the numerous other web tools out there? If a server suffers a sudden meltdown, and the dutiful developer decides to walk away, where does that leave you and your project? Or when an interface upgrade to a web application in perpetual beta cancels your planned 72 hour coding bonanza, will you still make your deadline?

When I discovered SlimTimer, I finally found the perfect tool to track my small handful of personal projects. Has it ever let me down? No. But a spreadsheet saved on my hard drive provides a more solid guarantee that my time accounting will be there when I need it — as only I can accidentally delete it. Of course, in the process I loose the universal accessibility that drew me to SlimTimer in the first place.

With the convenience and accesibility brought by the last few years of AJAX-iliciousness, the vultures have started to gather around the weakest of desktop software applications. We are a society perpetually on the go, using three of four or possibly more different computers in a given work week, and we want all our data ready to go on any and all of them. But in our embrace of convenience and accessibility, I wonder if we have considered everything that we are trading away.

But here goes.

I want the ability to rearrange the order in which my photos are displayed (or maybe this is in there already, and the clever AJAX-y-ness of it has outwitted me).

I wanted something that was simple and well designed, easy to use, and unobtrusive while in use. I wanted it to track multiple projects and have a built-in stopwatch function. Mostly, I wanted it to just work. Those factors in mind, I recently tried SlimTimer.

SlimTimer is web-based and free. It is intuitively simple and easy to use. It has a stopwatch. It keeps track of projects. It generates reports. It’s light-weight and unobtrusive. And it doesn’t require that I install anything. It keeps track of all my data online, leaving me free to work on different tasks on different computers, all the while compiling my project data in a single place. Most importantly, it just works, and it works exactly how, while using it, I want it to work.

Not too long ago, I upgraded from Thunderbird alpha-something to version 1.0.7. Almost immediately afterwards, I upgraded again to Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2. And then a few days later, I noticed the number of unread messages in my Feeds folder was no longer doubling and quadrupling in ways that convinced me I’d never catch up (there are still 197 unread feeds in my Feeds folder). Seems that the upgrade knocked out my automated catch and retrieve feed system.

Surely I am not the only person who has noticed this and despaired.

Turns out Thunderbird now has a Rss News & Blogs function. I’m not thrilled with how it upsets my carefully constructed method of being constantly behind on blog feeds, but at least I’m back on track, and Thunderbird is hard at work downloading more Feeds than I have time to read. So what if I moved to a new city and state just over a month ago? Who cares about the boxes still piled in various rooms. Unpacking? No, that only means repacking the next time I move. What I needed all along was my blog feeds, providing the perfect excuse for staying up late and not quite getting around to everything else that needs to be done.

But please, can I get an extension update so ForumZilla once again moves incoming blog posts into my Feeds directory? Or more than likely, more tweaking is required by me to get this all working the way it was before.

Oh, but upgrading to Beta 2? Worth it.