Egoslut's Ego

WEB TOOLS

Finally, this section is a general mish mash of great items to help you use the web differently, better or just see some stuff you might not normally find. All of these things I use daily and make my web usage way better.

1. TwitterFox

   So, if you are like me and Twitter is one of the most common things you use on the web, PLUS you use Firefox, you cannot go without using this plugin. Twitterfox adds a small icon to the bottom right-hand corner to you browser that allows you to get updates in real time, post tweets to your feed including highlighting direct messages and @ messages and give easy link access to everything everyone puts up without going to the Twitter website. Add, to that multiple account support and you have the best Twitter app on the market.

2. Digg

   Digg is the social news website I mentioned in the Diggnation piece. The idea behind Digg is that no one news source can have all of the info. So, why not have one place where the Internet community as a whole can put links to things it thinks are important. Then add a voting structure, called Digging, on it that allows people to quickly say whether or not this is important to them. Combined you can see how web trends are created, grow and die a firey death, sometimes within a matter of minutes. It’s broken down into a great selection of topics and media types. As well as one of the strongest communities on the web.

3. TwitterFon

   I recently got an iPhone which is an incredible web tool, but one of the things that it really addicted to Twitter. Now, I have had my Twitter account for about a year but it wasn’t really used much until Twitter released it’s Facebook app which allowed me to push my Twitter updates right to my Facebook status message. Then I found Twitterfon. First of all, it’s free and it does all the things that the top pay iPhone apps do (with the exception of multiple accounts). What this means is that on my iPhone I can, add a tweet, in that i can easily add a link, add a pic, retweet, send @ or DMs easily, add a GPS reference to my location, search # webtrends, see who’s Twittering near you and generally post my Twitter awesomeness all through a 3g network. If you have an iPhone and you use Twitter. This is a must.

4. Miro

   One of the downsides to my awesome new iPhone is the fact that I had to go back to iTunes as my primary podcast subscription tool. I HATE iTUNES! If there was ever one piece of crap product that Apple built, it’s iTunes. Especially for podcasts, a format they virtually created. Why do I have to delete a reference to a video from the list instead of just the video itself. What if I want to find it and download it again? Apple?… anyone?… Bueller? Enter Miro. It’s built on the VLC player which means if there is a video format or codec out there, it plays it. Also, it’s subscription method for podcasts is fantastic and easy to manage. plus it’s a full bittorrent client. It’s store isn’t quite as robust as the iTunes store but it’s getting there. However, I still can’t sync my iPhone with it. Version 2.0 was just released and I haven’t downloaded it yet though, cross your fingers.

5. TVersity
   

   
   

   The last one here was a little bit of a struggle to come up with, then it dawned on me. Which web tool do I probably use the most? TVersity. Now this isn’t specifically a web tool, though it has parts that are web specific, but it is one of the best pieces of free software there are on the web. Here was my problem. I hated my cable company so I didn’t pay them. They hated me for not paying them so they cut off my cable. I still wanted to watch TV. Luckily, I could download any TV show I wanted online. The only problem was I had to burn them to a DVD to watch on my TV. Then I found TVersity. Using a networked item connected to the TV, in this case my Xbox 360, this program creates media server on your computer and allows you to stream all your video, music and pictures to that device. It’s not copying them to the console. It’s streaming them. Incredibly fast and completely reliable. It works with any networked gaming console including, PS3, Wii, PSP, iPhones… anything. Plus it allows you to access Youtube through it, subscribe to podcasts and watch a variety of online sources.

So that’s my Internet. Man, that ended up being way longer than I thought it would. Check out some of the links there I’m sure you will find something in there somewhere you like. Also, post into to the comments some of your links. I love checking out what other people surf. There is also a poll up now where you can vote for your favourite social networking solution. I would love to know what people are using.

I’ll talk to you guys later.

e.