The Best and Worst of Online Tools

We took an office-wide survey of most useful, and un-useful, Internet tools to provide you, the reader, with a reliable reference list of online tools. These tools are mostly free downloads and are only a click away.

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.