9 Internet Things I Love
I woke up with no topic for today’s post. I went searching for ideas, and two jumped out at me – My love affair with … and My five favorite websites.
So, here are 9 Internet services that I absolutely love.
Dropbox
Dropbox is drop dead simple. It just works. I’ve paid for Apple’s .Mac/MobileMe/whatever for a long time. I always wanted to love the iDisk part of it, but I couldn’t – because it didn’t work. Dropbox works exactly as advertised, and you can share it with your non-technical friends and they get it.
I have the free storage and that’s enough for me. I don’t keep everything in it. I use it as my storage for many iOS apps that require syncing, and I keep a support folder there so most of what I am working on right now lives there. I jump between many computers and mobile devices and I always have the files I need.
Evernote
Though I do have several different notebooks for writing ideas (lot of good that did me today, right?), I use Evernote pretty much as it’s advertised – it’s my external brain. Anything that I know I want to keep that doesn’t have a “right place” goes in Evernote. I’ve paid for the premium service for years. It’s well worth the price.
If this, then that
I recently discovered ifttt.com, and I love it. With it, I can have certain events on some webservices I use trigger actions on others. For example, every time I like a video on Vimeo, it is posted to Tumblr. They’ve added a couple features over the last week that I am really excited about. I plan to write more about those soon.
Kickstarter
Another recent discovery, Kickstarter has changed my life. I kid you not! It’s crowdsourcing for creative projects, and it’s an idea that had to happen eventually. Very, very well done!
IMDb
I’m a big fan of movies, and I love being able to cure that “hey, where do I know that guy from?” with IMDb. The iPad app probably gets more use than any other app on my iPad.
turntable
I love this website so much that I’ve restricted use to only Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I check in to hair metal Fridays every week and we rock out together. It’s fun to spin the tunes, listen to the music, and chat a bit about music, family, and work.
flickchart
I haven’t used this as much lately, but I had to mention it since it is one of my favorite finds over the last few years. I’ve written about this one before.
HBOGO
If it were not for this service, I would have ditched HBO long ago. Using this service, HBO subscribers can view any episode of any HBO original show, any movie showing that month on HBO, as well as a large collection of other movies. A subscription is certainly more expensive than a streaming only plan with Netflix, but given that HBO has some of the best original TV programming available today, this service makes it very much worth it. If you watch TV in batches like I do, you could cancel and resubscribe occasionally and save money that way.
When I discovered Twitter in 2006, I thought it would certainly change the world. It didn’t evolve quite the way I had imagined, but there is no doubt it has had a tremendous impact on the web and modern culture. My enthusiasm started to wane as the service became more popular, but I had to include it here, because I still get a tremendous amount of value out of it.