List of online social tools I use

A client asked me the other day what social networking services do I use. I rattled off some of the usual suspects, including this site here.

I was surprised that later there were many more that I kept thinking of. So I decided to make a list. This is just my list, and certainly isn’t a comprehensive list of all the social media tools and services available. I know lots of people who use far more than I do, but most people use far less. Where do you fit in on that scale?

1. My website/blog right here, where you are now. This is the central tool of my online social toolbox. Perhaps it is my online social toolbox.
2. LinkedIn In my opinion, an essential way to keep in touch with people in a professional capacity. Do it.
3. Twitter This has fast become the most frequently used tool at my disposal. Real-Time blogging. Valuable in many ways – chat, track news and topics of interest, make online notes of things to look at later, link to interesting sites and more!
4. TweetDeck Since it started integrating my use of Twitter across my PC and iPhone (not to mention FaceBook) it has become a valuable social tool to me in its own right.
5. FaceBook For me personally, a time-sink (more on my use of it below). For many others, indispensable.
6. Delicious Live bookmarking. Sounds boring, but actually very useful indeed.
7. Technorati Tracks blogs – a good source for hot topics and interesting conversations (incidentally, I need to claim this blog: ayncsk9rdv ).
8. YouTube I use this a lot, but I don’t really use it much at all (confused? See below).
9. Friendfeed Just started using this, and the jury is still out. Sure looks fascinating, but will it be useful? (Update 26-08-09: Friendfeed has been aquired by Facebook; I personally won’t be using Friendfeed in the future.)
10. Bloglines Currently, my RSS Reader of choice, but I am constantly looking for something better.
11. iGoogle I am using this a great deal with my work at the moment. Useful for collating various online sources of information (I use it when talking to clients to be able to easily find information quickly)
12. Google Talk Currently my IM client of choice. It works well, but I wish it did video.
13. Skype Skype is becoming a ubiquitous communications tool, not just voice. Cheap, useful, works well – love it.
14. Gmail (including Google Chat) It is better than just email – the search rocks and the IM client is good too (it has video!). Can’t wait for Google Wave though…
15. Google Apps Lots of hype around this product. I’m not sure it will be a Microsoft Office killer, but it is having solid uptake. I think this revolves around the fact that Google are not pitching it directly against MS Office, instead promoting the ease of online, real-time collaboration.

Some I use a lot more than others, but this doesn’t mean they are less important. For instance, if you discount my viewing the funny stuff and interesting tutorials on YouTube, I actually use (i.e. contribute to and interact with) YouTube very little. However I do regularly link to video’s I think are interesting, so I do direct some eyeballs that way.

I personally get little value from FaceBook, other than seeing up-to-date photo’s of my loved ones, so I try to avoid it. If they switched to flickr I’d be there in a heartbeat! Come to think of it, I should get that ball rolling myself. However, despite my ambivalence towards FaceBook I still update there reasonable regularly. This is an interesting example of convergence – TweetDeck gives me the ability to post my tweets as FaceBook updates. Therefore I do update my FaceBook page reasonably often simply because it is so easy for me to do so through TweetDeck.

Interestingly, one third of what is on the list above are Google products. Without actually writing this list, I wouldn’t have guessed that. I feel surprised, yet I also feel I shouldn’t be.

A few other services worth mentioning that perhaps don’t quite fit into the list above:

1. Wikipedia I use this heaps – from reading up on things of personal interest to checking what certain acronyms I use everyday actually mean!
2. eBay I don’t use this personally, but my good wife does, along with millions of others.
3. GoToMeeting I have only used this recently, in a fairly limited capacity, but from what I’ve seen it works very well. Remote conferences, meetings and demonstrations work well with this.
4. Google Maps I LOVE Google Maps. especially on my iPhone.

Not every service is for everyone – some things are quite specialised or detailed in what they will do for you. But there is a plethora of tools out there to use. The big question is: Is this tool/service really just going to waste my time, or will it give me a measurable benefit that outweighs the cost? (note that cost is not only money, but time also)

So what do you use? What does your list look like?  And what cool tool do you love that I should know about?

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