Virtual Assistants: The New Must-Have in 2008?

I know that there have been many days when I wish I was a Hollywood celebrity just so I could have my own personal assistant to run all my errands, keep track of my appointments, and fetch me coffees. When I spotted three different services and apps designed to do at least a bit of that work for me, I rejoiced, hoping that a trend is in the air this year that will bring me the ideal artificial assistant.

The first two are a plug-in and an online app, respectively, and while neither one may appeal to the masses, for a writer, there's immense promise there. Zotero is a Firefox plug-in that promises to help collect, manage, and cite sources. Geared toward research papers, it's essentially a bookmarking tool with additional features. Not only does it integrate with Microsoft Word and Open Office as well as WordPress (with future support promised for other blogging platforms), but also features note-taking capabilities (with-autosave), automatic citation capture from web pages, storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and entire web pages, and formatted citation export. Zotero is a free, open source application produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

(Zotero in action)

The second entrant in the personal research assistant space is Lumifi, an online app that has a similar purpose. Lumifi features a search feature to help you start out your research, as well as tools to analyze content, manage your data, and share information. Lumifi requires that you create an account on their site, and while it helps with cross-referencing and providing a single point of data retrieval no matter where you are, it lacks the seamless integration that Zotero provides. It's much easier to save files and citations within the browser whenever you happen upon them than do it all from within Lumifi. Since a good deal of the time I'm not actively researching a particular topic, but instead, stumble across something of interest, I see myself using Zotero far more than Lumifi, which seems geared solely toward more intensive research projects like papers and books.

The real prize in the bunch, however, may be PageOnce, which just netted $1.5 million in funding. Still in private beta, what I've seen so far indicates it's going to be exactly what I'm looking for in a virtual assistant, providing an online secretary that tells me where I need to be and what I need to be doing. They are currently taking applications for their private beta, but of the three, this is the one I'm looking forward to a full launch of the most. I need someone to get me organized, and even if the PageOnce launch will be the end of this particular trend, I'm still climbing aboard.

Additional source: Mashable