I’m going to be a little unoriginal and echo Michael Arrington with this post here, where I generate a list of my main web tools for 2009. My list is actually a lot shorter than his—for one, I’m not that “social” and also still seem to be hooked on working through desktop apps on my Mac.

The list:

• Twitter is still hard to define for other people that ask me about it. I don’t use it as a chat-client much, rather I use it as a push-mechanism, that aggregates all links from my blogs and bookmarks, as well as some micro-thoughts.
• FriendFeed is more of a chat-client for me, I like the centralised comment interface, love the rooms, and also use it to feed all content to it. It’s also a big source of news for me, while I read Twitter less and less (except for those people I pulled into FriendFeed, of course).
• Delicious is mainly for bookmarks that I can use through the great Firefox extension, but I also feed the ‘techiteasy’ tag to the @techiteasy channel on twitter for instance. A secondary bookmarking system is Netvibes and FriendFeed likes.
• Netvibes is my rss-reader of choice, because it isn’t linear like Google reader and allows me to get a quick overview of what’s playing in the world. I also use it to read my mails and have twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc. clients embedded in widgets.
• Facebook is my address book for friends, a tool I use to arrange meetings, and to check what’s going on in the lives of people that are close to me. I rarely use apps on it, except for a birthday calendar one.
• Gmail is a reliable mail-client, period, and one I use as a backbone for even my own domain-mail.
• Wordpress is Tech IT Easy. I personally never use its dashboard, preferring to compose posts in Marsedit for the Mac.
• Blogger is all of my other blogs (at the moment 2, previously around 4) and a very reliable service that doesn’t annoy me with script-blocking or similar. Some would call it blogging for kids, of course, but I don’t mind. I see it more as the gmail-version of blogs.
• Picasa is the backbone for publishing pictures on blogger, I don’t really do web-based picture collections anymore, except through Facebook.
• Google.com, I nearly forgot. It is, next to netvibes, the most visited website for me and essentially what connects me to every website out there.
• I’d like to list a list of news sites, unfortunately I feel that rss and Twitter/Friendfeed have commoditised the idea of news sites and severely restricted my loyalty to only a few aggregators and sites, including BBC news, Techmeme (less and less), and Hacker News (more and more).

The following list consists of tools that I use online, but much more infrequently.

• Last.fm and favtape.com for music
• Tinyurl for rickrollling people
• Printwhatyoulike.com for ink-efficient printing
• Google docs, mostly for designing surveys, though the paid version of surveymonkey.com is much better
• Youtube and Google Video, for music-videos mostly
• Translate.google.com, a very handy tool to translate websites and the occasional work-doc.
• Twitterkeys for talking like this: The ♨ of success does not always = ✌, ♥, and ☯
• Search.twitter.com, mostly for finding out who said something about @vincentvw.

What are some of your favourite tools for 2009 and why do you use them?

Vincent

Related posts:

1. What I'd like: a spoiler-and annoyance-free web
2. Meet Friendbook, FaceFeed, or whatever… I can't tell the difference anymore
3. The noise of web 2.0
4. Join me on Blellow!
5. Why people "UnFollow" me on Twitter

No Responses to “Favourite Web Tools to start 2009 with”

1. editorialcampana says:

   January 5, 2009 at 18:05

   Never knew about google translation. Thanks for posting that as a reference!

   Reply
2. Maurelita says:

   January 5, 2009 at 19:04

   Google translation is fun ; works for isolated words but also web pages – as long as you keep in mind it’s just a robot !

   I’d add to my personal favourites Jaiku (still cannot get myself to Twitter) and a brand new discovery Spotify that allows scrobbling to Last FM. Just brilliant but a limited beta (?) for the moment.

   And facebook has surprisingly become my favourite venue of microblogging : I do it in Finnish French and English whereas I only jaiku in Finnish. Focusing my target population…

   Happy New Year with tons of snow in Paris ! =) * * *

   Reply
3. ceciiil says:

   January 6, 2009 at 11:05

   Hey Vince, thanks for that.

   I have been on facebook for about 18 months but I’ve only been using it on a regular basis for the last 3 months since about everybody I know is now facebooked. I guess it’s probably the reason why it turns out to become uncool for A-list bloggers such as HughMcLeod but that’s another issue.

   I like linkedin for professional network, myspace for music networking (though it seems that many myspace bands are now migrating to faceboook – supernormal included).

   I just never get used to twitter or friendfeed, both being too hectic for me.

   Reply
4. Craig Peters says:

   January 6, 2009 at 15:30

   I use Netvibes, but I’ve had a ProtoPage account for a while and tend to use it more: There’s a universal look to the ProtoPage widgets that makes for an easier reading experience, and you can resize the widgets and adjust layouts in a way that you can’t with Netvibes.

   LinkedIn is my social networking site of choice, but it would be a LOT better is Discussions would live up to its promise (more here: http://www.lohad.com/?p=2115)

   PrimoPDF and the FireShot plugin for Firefox are terrific.

   Reply
5. Vincent van Wylick says:

   January 6, 2009 at 15:37

   Yeah, I should’ve mentioned LinkedIN, though I don’t use it as much as I would like.

   Netvibes did introduce some more layout options last month, which seem interesting, though iGoogle’s recently added resize-option is still the king in that as far as I’m concerned. Protopage looks a little geeky for my taste, but if it’s reliable, that’s all that counts.

   Reply