Author: David Thuis

The Internet has changed so much over the last few years.  There are now so many applications to help you do what you need to do without ever downloading a single piece of software to your computer.  I recently did a search for the Top applications available, and I found very few lists, so I decided to put together a list of a few of my favorites.  If your favorite is not listed please feel free to list it in the comments.

Personal Information Management

Email:

If you are like me you have more than one e-mail account.  When you are away from your computer, or you need more than what you cell phone can offer, you can browse to Gmail, Yahoo Mail,  Windows Live Mail, or many of the other webmail services; but that takes a lot of time and effort.  Threadsy is the answer.  This little web application allows you to check all your e-mail accounts in one screen.  When you add your Twitter and Facebook streams, and a nice little chat box courtesy of Meebo, this website is a one stop shop for your communications needs.

Calendars:
I primarily use Google Calendar for my personal calendar, but I needed something that could aggregate my entire families schedules into one nice little package.  That’s where Cozi comes in.  Cozi allows me to import my families School Calendars, my personal calendars, and more.  This site is so beefy I’ve only touched the surface of what it can do.

Tasks:
As my wife would say, I don’t make enough lists remind of all the tasks I need to do.  When I do I’ve used Google Calendar, Outlook and other services to try and remind myself of all the little things I need to do.  But then everything is spread out on multiple platforms, and unless I check each one I am likely to forget what was required of me.  Remember The Milk is quickly becoming the answer.  Web-based task lists that I can access from everywhere, and it will even SMS or e-mail me reminders when I need them. 

Notes:
Just like tasks, I don’t take as many notes as I should.  When I have to put together a publication for work or Scouts that involves researching the web or collecting photos, I tend to create folders and save bookmarks all over my computers, which makes quite a mess. Evernote solves this by allowing my to type a text note, clip a web page, snap a photo and much more and placing it into a format that is easy to work with.

Real-Time

Feed readers:

I know RSS feeds are rumored to soon go the way of the floppy disk, but in the meantime I still subscribe to a lot of them.  I used to read them in my browser or in my e-mail clients, but they didn’t sync up the way I needed and I had to constantly delete “unread” items that I had already read.  Google Reader reader is my answer to that problem.  One place to check all my feeds, and once I read them they are “read”.

Links:

There are a lot of sites like Delicious that allow you to share your favorite bookmarks/links, but I don’t really want to use them.  I just needed some place that I could store my Firefox, Chrome, and IE bookmarks without my having to manually export and import them to and from multiple computer systems.  Google Bookmarks and Yahoo Bookmarks is the solution.  They are very similar, so check both out and make a decision which may be right for you.

Documents

Create/edit:

This is my favorite part of the “new” web.  You no longer need to purchase expensive word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation software to get your work done, it’s all available FREE online.  Google Docs has been around forever and used to be my favorite, but since Microsoft Office Live introduced on-line scaled down versions of their MS Office line, I find myself using that more and more.  Really a dead tie here on which I like better.  I now use Google Docs primarily for “work” related items and Microsoft Office Live for personal items.  Both allow you to create, share and collaborate all kinds of documents.  Try them both and pick a favorite.