Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

I had a good conversation with someone about loyalty to websites a few days ago and was thinking about this some more this morning. Looking at my everyday online tools, for some of them I'm actively looking for alternatives at the moment, while I'm too lazy to change others, and some of them seem untouchable.

RSS Aggregator - There's a whole bunch of them out there, but I still stick with Bloglines. It's simple and works well on desktop and phone. I came very close to exploring alternatives a few weeks ago when some feeds weren't getting updated, but things got better before I got a chance to look at other options.

Email - I didn't think I'd ever switch from using my own mail server, but the draw of gmail's spam-filtering and archiving was too much. I'm not looking to change at the moment, but the transition to gmail was much simpler than I would have expected, so changing to something else might not be too painful.

Blog Search - I started out with Feedster, then switched to Technorati, then a combination of Technorati and PubSub, and now I've switched back to Feedster. Search engines always seem easy to transition because I don't have a lot of ties to them, but it's amazing what little things affected my recent decision to go from Technorati back to Feedster.

Technorati's new UI brought some changes that just wore me down and drove me away. The first is I like having the cursor in the search textbox during the onLoad event. It saves me from having to click in there every time. Such a small thing, but doing it multiple times a day gets old.

The second thing is I tend to use medium-sized browser windows, and with feedster's search results I get 7 results displayed before I need to scroll down. With Technorati, I only get 3 results and they're the tagged results, not the normal results. I'm not finding enough posts that use tags enough that would warrant this priority in search results. And the tagged results often seem to be the from same people that are very tag-happy, and from some who appear to be abusing the system. To me, it comes across as 3 paid advertiser search results, followed by the real results I'm looking for, which is reason enough to take my searches elsewhere.

Finally, the slowness of Technorati was the last straw, so I'm back to Feedster, and anxiously awaiting Google to unveil something or some unknown player to step up.

Stocks, News, Sports, TV - It's shocking how long I've been using my.yahoo.com. My account there is using an email address from a startup I worked for from '95-'96. Still happy and not looking for alternatives.

Social Bookmarks - This is something where I've yet to find a nice home. I've moved on from del.icio.us and Spurl. I'm currently using Furl and StumbleUpon, but could jump at a moment's notice. Outfoxed actually looks pretty interesting, but I haven't gotten around to checking it out yet. I'm not even bothering with My Web 2.0 since none of my friends will join. This space really needs a leader to emerge. Until then, I'll keep looking.