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What’s your favorite online or social "cool tool" & why? What makes one tool stand out over another?
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2 Answers
I like Rockmelt. There are lots of social media and networking integration tools, but none that integrate directly into your browser the way Rockmelt does. Rockmelt is the browser, with the social integration built in. For someone who likes an unobtrusive approach (you can toggle all of the social aspects and it simply becomes a Chrome browser) to social media/networking updates, this works well for me. Sharing across the most common social media and networking sites is a breeze. It also has features like "read later" which I fine helpful since there are things that interest me, but maybe not at the moment, and I really don't want to bookmark them. But what I really like about it is that it utilizes "the cloud" very effectively. So if I switch between my desktop and laptop, all my bookmarks, RSS feeds and status follow me from one device to the other. They have an iPhone version and are working on an Android version (which will make my circle complete!).
What makes one tool stand out over another? I think that's a matter of personal preference. While I may like a tool like Rockmelt, the next person may hate it. I think some common attributes of well-liked tools are the richness of the user experience, performance and stability. And ultimately, it has to provide value to your day-to-day life in the digital age.
I guess my other "favorite" tool is ifttt (www.ifttt.com). Okay, so I guess you really can't have TWO favorites, but I find this one interesting and cool in a strange kind of way. Who would ever think that "workflow processing" would be cool? That is essentially what ifttt is. The names stands for "if this then that". It has two main components - channels and recipes. Channels are things like Facebook, Craigslist, Foursquare, Boxcar, Posterous, Soundcloud, RSS feeds, SMS and about 25 others. Recipes are basically workflows. If something happens on Facebook then do this on SMS. Or if a new post shows up on Posterous do a status update on Facebook. If someone checks in on Foursquare then send me a text message. And so on. There's a whole collection of community-created recipes that you can utilize, or you can build your own.
I'm not sure that I will ever have a whole bunch of recipes, but an example of one that I find useful is that whenever a new startup shows up on @betalist I get an email with the pertinent info. I could obviously go sign up on @betalist, but this way I have one less UID/password to remember!
Time will tell how successful ifttt will be, but for now it's kind of an interesting idea. Workflows... go figure...
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