Officially Lucky

I saw Michael Arrington post his list over on TechCrunch and since I have always been a proponent of using online tools over desktop applications to get things done. In the past year though, it has become even easier to make that transition. Whereas I swore off desktop mail clients years ago and went 100% Gmail, I just recently made the jump from NetNewsWire to Google Reader (mostly for the cool sharing support and persistence everywhere, including the fancy mobile interface for my iPod touch and Blackberry).

So here’s a list of all the online tools I use on a daily, or at least weekly basis:

• Gmail — For all my mail accounts. The Stone Ward Interactive department I work for based in Chicago also has our own Google Hosted mail for our stoneward.com accounts. It’s pretty awesome and works well in MailPlane
• Google Reader — I have been the biggest fan of NetNewsWire since I came to the Mac platform, but the always available Google Reader has finally drawn me in. Google Reader reccomends me new feeds based on my reading history, offers fun and interesting statistics on what I’m reading and sharing, allows me to share interesting items to my Google Talk friends (and publish them as an RSS feed), and bookmark (star) items I want to come back to later. All online, and all of those features available on any device that can browse the web, including my Blackberry Pearl and iPod Touch.
• Pandora Radio — I just got into this recently as well. It’s been around forever, but now I use with with Fluid. Pandora, in case you were unaware, lets you build custom radio stations around a single or multiple artists, and you are then played an endless stream of music that is similar to your starting parameters.
• Google Notebook — I’ve been using Google Notebook more often now that I am again using Firefox as my main browser. It lets me amass lists of links into differente “notebooks.” From there I can simply go back to them when I need them, post them as their own static webpage along with my comments, or I can import them into Google Docs.
• Facebook — Facebook has become the central authority on my social circle. I maintain a lot of relationships there, and Facebook aggregates a number of details about my life and is second only to this blog when it comes to my online activities. I love the feed of updates about what all my friends are doing and I usually check in about once a day when I can.
• Last.FM — When I’m not listening to music through Pandora (noted above), my iTunes is continuously broadcasting information about my listening habits to Last.FM. If you’ve ever seen the items in my TumbleLog in the middle column of my blog with tiny speakers next to them, those are the tracks I’m listening to, when I’m listening to them.
• Flickr — Jacqui and I are officially Flickr fans for life. We’ve been uploading nearly all our photos to this site for years now and I personally don’t know how we’d survive without it. We currently pay $25 per year for a pro account, but we would easily pay three times that amount. We’ve uploaded nearly 8,000 images and had 280k views of those photos!
• Twitter — What more can I say about twitter? I use it everywhere; my phone, my iPod, my desktop. It’s ubiquitous and has become indispensable for tapping into a huge hive mind of really smart people.
• Google Docs — We use this a lot at Stone Ward Interactive for collaborating on proposals and other documents. Jacqui and I also use it a lot when we need to show each other things like financial budgets, make lists of things we need to buy for Christmas, moving checklists, and other lists we both need access to.
• Google Analytics — The world of website analytics prior to Google entering the arena was a dark and scary place. GA has changed everything and I use it extensively on all my projects and Stone Ward uses GA to track, measure, and optimize our projects for clients as well. The reporting and depth of statistical knowledge you can gain in such a short period of time is astounding. It has definitely made me look much smarter than I actually am on several occasions ;)
• Yelp — Yelp is a site where you can read reviews of almost anything. The most popular things on Yelp are restaurants, clubs, diners, bars, hair dressers, retail shops, boutiques, et cetera. You can rate and review those things, as well as read the reviews of thousands of other people. Yelp is a must-use site when visiting a new city or even when you’re looking for something new in your own city. We use it all the time.