Yackpack does a really poor job of communicating what it is to the user. There is no “about Yackpack” page, only an “about us” which details who the brains behind Yackpack are.

From what I can gather, Yackpack is about threaded audio conversations. You leave an audio message for people within your specified social network and they can reply in kind. Somewhere on the site the term “time-shifted conversations” appears and it sheds a little more light as to what Yackpack hopes to achieve, though I must admit I’m still a little vague about it all.

My own personal opinion is that in order for audio conversations on the web to succeed (referring to web apps like Odeo and Yackpack here) a new means of interfacing with the web needs to exist. Sitting in front of your beautiful 30” Apple Cinema display and high speed broadband, any user would be expecting high quality video, rather than watching a squigy bar move while we prick our ears to listen to audio. Something in between an iPod and a notebook, possibly something like one of those digital voice recorders permanently hooked on the internet via Wifi or GPRS would do the trick. You speak into your little device and it auto-uploads to your Yackpack or Odeo account, which in turn updates your blog with the latest soundbite, which in turn pumps the soundbite down to your RSS subscribers who get an auto-update on their own little voice recorder device, from which they can listen to the new snippet you put up.

How’s that for a long sentence.

Meebo satisfies a more immediate need for me. Meebo is a multi-IM client, enabling you to log into your MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ, AIM and GTalk accounts without having to download and install software like Trillian (for PC) or Adium (for Mac OSX).

The most intriguing web app was definitely Zimbra. Zimbra is a web-based mail interface, complete with calendaring functions. It utilises Ajax extensively and includes certain small functionalities even desktop apps ought to emulate.

For example, if your friend emailed you saying “let’s meet tomorrow”. Mousing over the word tomorrow in the Zimbra interface would pop up a small window beside your cursor with a list of appointments you have scheduled tomorrow. You can then create a new appointment right there in your mail interface. Properly formatted addresses within emails pop up a small Yahoo Maps graphical representation of where the place is upon mouse-over. Contact information within emails can be saved directly into your contact list. Oh, and did I mention you can drag and drop emails into folders?

Very Web 2.0, whatever Web 2.0 really means.

The downtime of so much Ajax is the long initial loading time, but that’s only at the beginning. After that things are pretty smooth.

If there’re any other cool web apps you’ve seen and tried out, drop us a comment, or email us if you’ve an extensive review you’d like put up here.