From a business networking perspective my top site is LinkedIn with Business Warriors coming in a close second. Both get to the heart of what business networking is to me: connecting with business contacts and learning more about them either for an ongoing project or a possible future collaboration. MyGenius is a little too much functionality without the meaningful interactions in my personal experience. I am sure there are lots of people who do a brisk trade through MyGenius so I am not going to malign the service. It just does not work for me.
When it comes to working online, Basecamp is the king of online collaboration spaces. I use Google Docs quite a bit at iCommons but Adobe’s online word processing app, Buzzword, is pretty darn cool!
When it comes to the social stuff I am a big fan of Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed (really growing on me) and Jaiku. Pulse is pretty close to what Facebook used to be in terms of what it offers as a social networking site. It is also my preferred contacts service because I can point people to a single address for my public contact information and lifestream. I use Facebook but not as my core networking tool. If you don’t go for the gazillion inane apps on Facebook it tends to be a little thin. FriendFeed is my next best lifestreaming service and social interaction site. It does a fantastic job aggregating my content and facilitating really great interaction (even if very few people seems to be using it in my circle of contacts). Finally Jaiku is a fantastic aggregator and a very social place. If it weren’t for the fact that the majority of my contacts use Twitter I’d still be a religious Jaiku user. I hope Jyri and his team come up with a stunner service soon because Jaiku is a service that deserves a lot more attention.
On the short message/status side the only real option at the moment is Twitter and that is mainly because everyone seems to be there, not because it is a particularly stable service. That is its appeal. The absence of threaded comments makes it a bit of a hit and miss affair although apps like Twhirl do address that issue (thank goodness). There is a lot of talk about FriedFeed taking Twitter’s place but I don’t see that happening in a hurry. Even if FriendFeed had a better mobile presence (Jaiku is still tops there) I still see people sticking with Twitter because of its simplicity and because it has all the users. In terms of functionality I prefer Pownce and I am really starting to like Seesmic as a video conversation tool. The problem with Pownce is that it just doesn’t have the traffic Twitter has and it will not succeed the way it can because of that. You have to look at where the community is or all you have a nice looking app.
When it comes to where I put my content, I use Vimeo for personal videos and will use Viddler for my work related stuff if and when I put stuff up there. I use Flickr for my photos and have a Pro account there for a couple years. Nothing else really compares given my needs. My presentations go to Slideshare (works ok enough).
I bookmark stuff on del.icio.us primarily and also use Digg. Occasionally I’ll use Muti but I tend to go back to Digg.
As for the rest of the stuff I use, I am a big fan of the OmniGroup and use a couple of their apps for my day to day productivity work; NetNewsWire because of its integration with Newsgator (although I want to have the option of downloading images automatically); Adobe Acrobat Pro (expensive but what a wonderful app for me to have as a lawyer); Firefox 3 (Safari is good, but my preference at the moment is Firefox) and Mac goodness generally.
Otherwise if you want to see what else I have signed up for or am using, you can always check out my ClaimID page.
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basecamp, friendfeed, netnewswire, plaxo, productivity, pulse, seesmic, twhirl, twitter, vimeo, viddler, preferred services
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What do you think?