December 2007

Manage your finances in a social network? Are you kidding me!?!

OK, when I read this Lifehacker article on Wesabe, I couldn’t imagine how they could make social networking mesh with managing your finances. And I’m not entirely certain they have but the heart of their idea is pretty good, especially if they can do the things with privacy that they say they do (see their Security & Privacy page.

What is it, you ask? THey give you an interface to enter purchases from the web and your mobile browser. They also give you a tool to extract data from your bank and credit card sites and upload it. Your purchase history is compared against others (don’t know how they choose the demographic yet) and you’re shown tips for managing your purchases by category (tag). I’m not convinced but I’ve signed up for an account anyway.

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Pipes: Combining “things” to create an RSS feed

Chad put up this really interesting article about Yahoo! Pipes. So, here’s the deal with pipes, away from all the hype and buzzwords. If you’ve got something (a web page, a spreadsheet, Flickr photos, OPML, …) that can be accessed from the Internet-at-large, you can use Pipes to fetch it, manipulate it (i.e. filter items, recode items, etc.) and put it into an RSS feed that you can then retrieve with your RSS reader. That’s what they mean by “aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web”. It’s not difficult to do if you have ANY programming experience at all — it’s a visual, drag-n-drop environment with a lot of help.

Give it a try and if you can’t think of something you can use it for … well, you’re not trying hard enough 🙂

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