If you are like me, you come across dozens, if not hundreds of new websites a year, each offering some new tool or web 2.0 service that is sure to revolutionize the way your surf the web or do your work. Most are just neat little gimmicks or don’t fit into your workflow. However, there are some I’ve run across this year that I found to be quite useful either for personal or professional use. And without further ado, I give you the 12 Web Tools of Christmas.
1) dropsend.com — Do ever need to email a large file like a high-resolution photo or video clip? Don’t want your email to hang-up for 30 minutes, only to reject the file and force you to start all over? With DropSend, you can send files up to 1 GB with ease. A free account also gives you 250MB of online storage.
2) buzzword.com — Buzzword is hands down the best online word processor I’ve ever used. The interface is clean and elegant. Adding images and tables is easy, its collaborative tools are very slick, and it handles pagination and typography better than Google Docs and Zoho. Adobe recently acquired the company that developed Buzzword, so look for them to put their muscle into Buzzword’s future development. (I like Buzzword so much, I even used it to create the first draft of this blog post.)
3) editgrid.com — What buzzword is for word processing, EditGrid is for spreadsheets. It’s the most “Excel-like” of the available online spreadsheets and if you are a power Excel user, then EditGrid is the only web app that could possibly meet your needs. Many Excel features, including sorting, charts, auto-fill, cell border, number formatting, cell formatting, import, export, freeze pane, text overflow, auto-fit row/column size, word warp, and cell comments, all work the same in EditGrid as they do in Excel with the exact same keyboard shortcuts. And since EditGrid is a web app, it’s easy to setup cells that retrieve data directly from the Internet. Also promising is EditGrid’s integration with the iPhone.
4) splashup.com — Splashup is the closest thing to a web-based version of Photoshop—at least until Abobe releases the real thing. This little tool covers about 20% of the real Photoshop’s features, but they happen to be the ones I use 80% of the time. It connects directly to flickr and picasa for easy access to your images stored online. I just wished it saved working files as .psd instead of in its own proprietary .fxo format.
5) scribd.com — I hate websites that contain links to .pdfs and Word .docs. It’s annoying to have to download the file and open it another application in order to get one or two pieces of information. The more I have to repeat this process the more annoyed I get and the more likely I am to abandon the site and go on to something else. Scrbid prevents you from annoying me and other users like me. It allows you to upload your .pdfs and .docs and then provides you a flash document reader that you can embed in your webpage. Think of it as youtube for documents.
6) vectormagic.stanford.edu — This is THE TOOL if you need to convert bitmap images into vector formats. It actually works better than Adobe’s LiveTrace feature that is included in Illustrator. This little utility has allowed me to scale up logos for HD Video with a minimum of fuss.
7) zamzar.com — Zamzar is another utility that has proven to be a real lifesaver. If you ever find yourself out of the office and away from your $1000 encoding software, zamzar will be your best friend. Zamzar is a Swiss-army knife of file conversion. It can convert from formats like DOC to PDF, PNG to JPG, and OGG to MP3. Name almost any two file types and Zamzar can convert one into the other. The quality of video file conversion is not the greatest, but when you are in a pinch, it’s good enough.
8) getmiro.com — I love iTunes. It’s great. It’s the primary way I listen to music and find and download podcasts. However, iTunes was initially designed as an audio player and video has just come along for the ride. Imagine an iTunes that was designed from the ground up with video in mind. What would it include? Well, it would play multiple file types including MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, and Flash Video. It would handle HD files with ease and efficiency. It would support and download bit-torrent files. It would connect to any publisher with a video RSS feed. Take all this, add in social-site integration with Digg and del.icio.us, and you have Miro.
9) box.net — Box.net provides simple and easy to use online file storage and sharing, but’s that not all. You also get password protection for all shared files and integration with web apps like Zoho, and Twitter. Plus, box.net provides one-click posting to WordPress and LiveJournal with more apps and services being added all the time The first GB of storage is free with a wide range of pricing plans for additional storage and bandwidth. A box account is a real asset when you are on the road without a laptop of your own.
10) tokbox.com — TokBox is an online video chat client that you can embed in any webpage or blog. This has exciting educational potential, since a TokBox video chat session could theoretically be conducted from within a course in Blackboard.
11) wufoo.com — Wufoo let’s you quickly build pretty web forms and surveys and then embed them into your personal webpage. The data analysis tools look nice too. The free account gives you 3 forms with up to 100 entries a month.
12) flock.com — Flock is the web browser for users devoted to their social networks. If I were a big Facebook user, Flock would be the only browser I would use. Flock’s ability to keep track of your contacts, online accounts, social bookmarks, and stored media and keep them all in easy reach is the best thing to happen to web surfing since tabbed browsing.
And here’s one more tool for a Happy New Year…
twine.com — What is twine? I have no idea. Apparently it is social bookmarking meets wikis meets YouTube with a layer of artificial intelligence keeping everything just a search tag away. It’s the first true semantic web application! (Whatever that really means.) I recommend you apply for a beta invitation because everyone will be blogging about it next year and you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. It’s 2008, the year of Web 3.0.