Our recent internet lives have been inundated with social this, and social that. We all have a LinkedIn, Facebook, mySpace (or whatever) account to keep in touch with our buddies, our colleagues and our family. Given the abundance of these services that we are part of, here are some suggestions for apps (or integration) that would make Maemo even better.


Blogging Client:
It would be nice to have a robust, blogging client so that you can blog without going to the webpage of your blogging service to do so. Off the bat, I would say that Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Twitter, and Tumblr should be supported. You can sync up your x-recent posts, you can create new ones, edit old ones, and so on. I tried using WordPress on the browser that is supplied with ITOS2007, and I was having issues. A blogging client would side-step these issues and provides greater functionality.

Social Network Client:
Facebook has made a special interface for the iPhone, and MySpace is a downloadable application on the Sidekick/Hiptop. It seems like a great idea to create a Social Network Client that supports the top 5-10 networking sites and allows you to at least do some rudimentary stuff like accept/reject connection requests, see who recently joined (example: new classmates or colleagues in LinkedIn), check your email, change your status, browse through your friends list, send messages, and so on.


Podcast Client:
The RSS reader (with the exception of aforementioned improvements) does a good job for text and image based RSS feeds. It would be nice if a podcast/vidcast client were available for the ITOS2008 platform. You could subscribe to your favorite podcasts, choose which ones to download, and have seamless integration with the media player for the playback of those podcasts. I know that canola offers this kind of functionality, but it would be nice to have the functionality of a podcast client as a separate app. I don’t use my tablet as a media center, and therefore don’t want to fire-up my media center app when I want to browse or listen to a podcast.

Flickr/Picassa Manager:
Many people store their images online these days, either as a backup, a way to share with friends, or a way to easily post them on their blogs and websites. It would be a great if a Flickr (and/or Picassa) manager type application were available for this platform. You could browse through your photos, add or change tags, create and add to collections, and have the ability to upload from your device. I know that the neither the N810 nor the N800 have great cameras, but with Bluetooth you can always transfer images taken from phones or cameras that have built-in Bluetooth or SD slots.

YouTube Manager:
In similar fashion to the Flickr Manager, the YouTube Manager would allow you to browse and play through videos that you have marked as your favorite, it would allow you to change your account preferences and information, search for videos (like the iPhone YouTube client) and finally allow you to upload videos to YouTube (taken with a phone or other device, or videos available in your SD card)

Bookmark Manager:
The built-in bookmark manager is OK, I generally don’t get thrilled about things such as bookmarks, however there would be a nice killer feature that this app can have: Integration with del.icio.us (and/or other bookmark repository sites such as Yahoo and Google). You can save new bookmarks locally to your tablet; you can save them on the network on your preferred service(s); and you can access bookmarks already saved on those services without needing to fire-up the browser and navigate to those sites!