Keystone’s Favorite Web Tools:

Netvibes – Part RSS reader, part start page, Netvibes gathers the feeds of all your favorite websites together in one place so you can instantly see new reading material without clicking through bookmarked sites. Netvibes also acts as a home page that you can customize to show only what you want to see. You can add a weather widget, your Twitter feed, a Facebook feed, email widget, etc. It provides one-stop-shopping for your Internet news needs.

WuFoo – This form builder is not a free service but takes the hassle out of online forms. They offer all kinds of tools around a basic form building outline. Wufoo can even provide payment integration into your form.

TweetDeck – One of my personal favorites, TweetDeck is a Twitter management tool that allows you to update your Twitter and spread that update across Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleBuzz, Foursquare and more. This is a great tool for any business trying to break into social media marketing. It puts all of your social media on one platform.

Flickr – Flickr is a free photo hosting service to store your photos and edit them with Picnik online. Flickr also allows for photo sharing and it’s all free.

FileZilla – Free FTP program to transfer files from one computer to another through the Internet. Easy and free, this FTP program is perfect for a quick file transfer.

Support Details – SupportDetails is a very helpful service that instantly tells you the specs about your computer that your tech will need to know. For example, it will tell you what your operating system is, DNS stuff, etc. Not free, but awesome. It provides information on domain names and domain records as well.

PopScreen - This video bookmarking service lets you sign up and drag the PopScreen icon to the top of your browser… Then, whenever you see a video you like that you want to watch again later, just click that browser button and it’s added to your bookmark list. Outstanding.

Tumblr - Blogging boiled down to its simplest form. Also, the Tumblr community allows users to “reblog” any Tumblr post they like and it will appear on their own blog. Then you can view most “Tumbled” blog posts of the day or week, etc. Also, with tons of smartphone apps, your tumblelog can be updated very easily from your phone.

Google products – Google products include mostly free products and services that are as good or better than competitors that cost money. Analytics for site stats. Checkout for online payments that has special . Calendar (with sharing). Gmail (kicks all other free email’s butts). And gTalk for inter-office text, voice, or video chatting.

AdBlock Plus – AdBlock Plus is a Firefox extension that detects and then blocks ads on web pages.

Pandora – It is just fantastic. Lets you listen to the music that you really want to hear by creating personalized radio stations. Not only is Pandora free, it also suggests other music you might not have heard before.

Hulu – Hulu may not be the best for your workday, but we couldn’t forget it in our favorite online tools. Hulu gives access to online TV show streaming and some videos for free.

YouTube - YouTube might be more of a distraction for some of your fellow co-workers, but we think it deserves “best online tool” status. Not only does YouTube have tons of entertaining, random vidoes, but it also has tutorials and informative videos on almost any topic. Try your favorite video in XL.

WordPress – WordPress is free blogging software that is robust, always improving, and feature-rich. Plus it’s very easy to figure out.

Keystone’s Least Favorite Web Tools:

StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon is a Firefox extension that shows you random web pages based on the category of pages you choose. You can vote each page up or down and eventually, you’re on there so often that it begins to know what kinds of random sites you like to look at. We think this tool is entertaining if you like looking at random pages of the Internet, but it’s mostly just a time-waster.

Foursquare - What’s the point of “checking in” at different locations? So people know where you are every second of the day? We think Foursquare and any other mobile “check-in” service is a little too stalker enabling for our business.

LinkedIn - Even though most of us have one, LinkedIn has provided very little results for us. Twitter and Facebook are starting to provide more business connections than the “professional network” that is LinkedIn.

Delicious - This bookmark manager is good for scoping out the hottest websites right now, but not one we’re going to sign up for. It may be good for organizing bookmarks if you can’t organize your own bookmarks, but we don’t like the idea of other people looking through our bookmarks.

Yammer – Yammer is just like Twitter, a micro-blogging social network, except just within your company. This might sound like a great, innovative idea to some people, but we think Yammer is just unnecessary. Why would you update your Yammer when you could just send a gTalk to someone across the office in real time? For Yammer to be successful, all your co-workers must be logged in on all workdays, and that is just unrealistic.

Facebook - Now, we don’t all agree that Facebook is a “Least Favorite” (uhum, I do not agree that it is a “Least Favorite”) but I’ve been out-voted. Facebook has turned into more hassle than it’s worth. All the security setting, ads, and constant updating make Facebook not worth the work to some businesses.

We hope you will try out some of our favorites, especially if you’ve never experienced them before. If you have any suggestions or objections, you can email your comments here.

If you’re on Twitter you know that you have to limit everything to 140 characters. Those 140 characters can be pretty difficult to achieve if you want to include a link to the funny article your Tweeting about. So Twitter supported a safe service to shorten URLs for its Tweeters, Bit.ly. Now Google, YouTube, and Facebook are jumping on the bandwagon and have all come out with their own URL shortening services.

Google just announced their new URL shortener on December 15^th. The service, found at Goo.gl, is only available for Google products, like Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Google’s newly acquired YouTube.com is also creating its own URL shortening site for YouTube videos. With the beginning YouTu.be, these URLs are used only for YouTube videos and nothing else. Facebook is the most recent to join in on the URL shortening fun with Fb.me. This URL shortener is used mainly for pictures and commercial pages on Facebook.

Each of these sites is being very smart by not allowing their services to be used for anything outside their sites. TinyURL was the first big hit Website for shortening URLs but soon was banned by many Websites for distributing spyware. By creating their own URL shortening services, Google, YouTube and Facebook are avoiding that risk altogether. These shorter URLs also don’t disguise the URL, so you know when a URL is going to take you to a YouTube video or a Google Toolbar or a Facebook picture.

In 2006, five years after its launch, Internet Explorer 6 came in 8^th in PC World’s Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. Now, the same browser is known for its terrible susceptibility to hackers and viruses that has become evident over the past nine years.

Even though IE7 and IE8 have both been launched, IE6 still has a pretty large following. A well known site that uncovers interesting stories on the internet, called Digg, claims that about 10% of traffic to their site is from Internet Explorer 6. That is a remarkable percentage when considering that Digg had over 38 million visitors to their site in June alone. Even though Digg reports so much traffic from IE6, they also report that only 1% of comments are left by IE6 users. Therefore Digg is considering removing some of their key features for IE6 users, like commenting and digging.

Digg isn’t the only site considering to move away from the parasite if IE6. YouTube is now taking steps to decrease visitors from IE6. If you currently have IE6 as your browser and you visit the YouTube site, you will see a blue bar at the top of the home page saying that you should upgrade to a newer browser. It also informs you that YouTube will be phasing out their support of your browser soon so you need to download Google Chrome, IE8, or Firefox 3.5. Google is using this “phasing out” announcement to really promote Google Chrome. On every page you visit on the YouTube site (almost every page) there is a link to download Google Chrome in some advertisement.

With the latest data from StatCounter, Internet Explorer lost 11.4% of the market share to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari since March. If Microsoft had a face, it would be starting to sweat in this heat.

Also, the sky is blue, LeBron James is talented, and men like sports.

But beyond the stating of the obvious, those two articles linked to above have some staggering statistics.  Even if you already knew Twitter and YouTube were huge, you probably still didn’t realize exactly how huge.

YouTube users are now uploading more than 24 hours of video every single minute.  That means that in the time it took you to read this far through my article, another day’s worth of video has been posted.  Holy cow.  No wonder Google is losing over a million dollars a day on YouTube.

Twitter, on the other hand, may be breaking popularity records before our very eyes.  In February, they had 9 million unique visitors.  In March, it jumped to 19 million.  Well, the April numbers are in, and Twitter has surged to 32 million unique visitors per month.  That’s way more than an upward trend.  Twitter has more visitors monthly now than the New York Times, Digg.com, or the popular business networking site LinkedIn (Twitter actually doubles LinkedIn’s 16 million monthly visitors).

Want to really have your mind blown?  Consider this:  Twitter’s numbers above don’t even factor people who use the service via their mobile device.  And the convenience of “tweeting” from your phone is part of the site’s popularity.  Who knows what their true popularity is when you factor that in… but I’d wager it’s a lot higher than you or I thought it was yesterday.

Newsflash:  some schoolchildren cheat on their tests.

I know, I know… we thought we’d beaten cheating by banning cell phones during class, right?  Well, just because you take the tech away during the test doesn’t mean they aren’t using tech to help beat that exam.

Apparently it’s quite the craze for teens to share cheating techniques through YouTube videos.  See this example… or this one.

Both of those examples look like more effort than simply studying, but what do I know?

There are countless others on the video-sharing site.  While it may be tempting to panic and decry the decay of civilization over the fact that “Youtube is helping children cheat,” think about it this way:  teachers now have a handy database of video demonstrations on all the latest cheating methods they should watch out for.  If I’m a middle school or high school teacher… this news is the best thing I’ve heard in years.  I now have an insider’s perspective.

It’s just another example of these rapidly-emerging technologies impacting our day-to-day lives in unexpected ways.  Students have been crafting clever ways to cheat for hundreds of years, and they will be doing so for another hundred.  Thanks to the open and neutral nature of the web, though, this new wrinkle means teachers are learning right along with prospective cheaters.

Google, the current king of the Internet and all-around innovator, has announced a new technology called Audio Indexing–actually it’s called GAudi, which sounds more like a car than a web service.

Either way, it’s one of the slickest things I’ve heard of in months.

GAudi will catalog every word uttered in a YouTube video and add it to a searchable archive.  Translation:  you will soon be able to search videos by keywords used within the video.

For now, the product is still in Beta (limited testing mode), and will only be indexing YouTube videos related to the current political races.  So you can search for a soundbite you read about in a news article–maybe something Obama or McCain said–and then use GAudi to search for video of the speech on YouTube.

That’s pretty mind-blowing to me.  Sure, there have been speech-transcription services for years that allow you to dictate text to your computer… but they are far from perfect, and had never been applied to video like this.  As video’s importance on the web increases, technology like GAudi makes finding the right video a heck of a lot easier–and if you’ve ever tried to search for a particular video on YouTube without knowing its title… you know how frustratingly hard it can be.

Imagine a future where your company creates and uploads videos to YouTube–maybe instructional, maybe humorous, maybe just advertisements–and you’ve used some good keyword selection in writing the spoken script for that video.  People who just surf around YouTube for videos related to their favorite topic will then have a much easier time finding your content than they currently do.

So now everyone in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry will be adding video content writing to their roster of services, as companies begin to learn how the spoken audio of their movies can help them reach new customers.

Very exciting stuff.  Stay tuned for more developments.  And you can check out GAudi and search for things the candidates have said here.