The Berkies: My 10 Impactful Technologies in 2008 – Technology That Changed My Life

I started to come up with a list of some of the most meaningful technologies for me in 2008. The one thing that they have in common is that they all changed the way I do something. Amazon is starting to change the way I shop and read. Hulu is changing how I watch TV. Zemanta is changing how I blog. It's not usually a complete revolutionary overhaul; I read the same amount with the Kindle, for instance, but what and how I read, and the way I purchase books, is shifting.

I&39;m curious to hear how technology has changed your life in the comments.

The Ten Technologies That Changed My Life in 2008Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Amazon&39;s iPhone app: I&39;m not yet taking full advantage of it, but I love what Amazon&39;s doing in the mobile space. Take a picture of a product and it will try to find the link to it on Amazon, where you may be able to buy it at a better price. This uses the manual lookup via Mechanical Turk, which could wind up being an incredibly valuable &39;secret&39; weapon. Meanwhile, while this app hasn&39;t totally changed things for me yet, Amazon&39;s WAP site is also incredibly useful. I was in Best Buy recently and saw a great deal on a Canon camera for about $150, and I&39;ve needed a new point and shoot. I checked Amazon and it sold for about $105. Plus, Amazon had 375 customer reviews, which meant a lot more to me than the opinion of the generally non-existent sales clerks at Best Buy. I went home and ordered the camera from Amazon right away (I&39;d have done it from my mobile device but needed to dig up a gift certificate code to apply).

Facebook Connect: I love how easily I can now interact with various sites thanks to Connect functionality. We&39;re just starting to see what we can do with it.

FriendFeed: The best thing I do with FriendFeed is scan it before any campaign planning, or when I want to know more about a topic in how it&39;s represented across the web. Its public timeline is probably one of the most underused tools – search for what any FriendFeed user is posting across dozens of services online. It doesn&39;t replace other tools like Twitter Search, but it does make it much easier to get a rich view into online activities.

GPS: I know, this is broad. I&39;m referring specifically to the $10/month VZ Navigator app I used on my summer road trip. Yet it could have been any other service. It makes one of my favorite activities, travel, so much better and freer, and I&39;m already starting to enjoy some of the more mundane or entertaining options through iPhone apps and the like.Image via CrunchBase

Hulu: Because of Hulu, I now watch 30 Rock religiously on TV, and I didn&39;t have to watch the full episodes of Saturday Night Live since the election clips made it online after (I always forgot when those Thursday specials were on anyway).

iPod Touch: I&39;ve become so much more disappointed with my Samsung i760 since I got this. I&39;m still not ready to leave Verizon and use the iPhone as a phone, but I love the apps for both utility and gaming. Image via CrunchBase

Kindle: It hasn&39;t yet changed how I read. But it might, and it&39;s already starting. I don&39;t lug as many books around when I travel. I&39;ll buy some books on the Kindle when I think the odds are pretty good I&39;ll just read them once.

Twitterfox: This firefox plugin is what I use most often to write and read tweets. Yet it hasn&39;t been showing me all the replies lately, so I may find alternatives for 2009. Runner up for Twitter: Twitturly, which makes it so easy for anyone, whether or not you use Twitter, to see the most popular links being tweeted. It&39;s how I found this amazing fan trailer for a Thundercats live action movie, for instance.
Image via Wikipedia
Wii Fit: Especially now that it&39;s cold in New York, I&39;m so happy to have this as a way to push myself to work out. And the passive-aggressive tone it takes gets the guilt flowing every time.

Zemanta: The best thing about Zemanta is the easy embedding of images, which makes for a richer blogging experience both for writing, and, I hope, reading. Its feature set keeps getting better; I&39;m sure embedding video is coming. Great work to the team here.