Comments on: Why people really love their web apps

by: Miles Galliford

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:27:46 +0000

I thought that this list of applications would be useful. These are the web apps we have used to build our company from 2 to 10 people over the last couple of years. They have helped keep our start up costs down and contributed a lot towards the company’s success.

Below is a summary of the most important apps. Full list here.

Communications

Skype (www.skype.com) - chat amongst employees, with suppliers and for customer support

Gmail - (www.gmail.com) - most convenient webmail because it links into so many other free Google apps

Pidgin - (www.pidgin.com) - aggreagte messaging clients

Jajah - (www.jajah.com) - cheap landline calls

Images and Image Editing

SnagIt - (www.snagit.com) - Great software solution for grabbing screen shots

FotoFlexer (www.fotoflexer.com) - My preferred service for online editing

iStockPhoto (www.istockphoto.com) - cheap stock images

Flickr (www.flickr.com) - image backup and sharing

Multimedia

Camstudio (www.camstudio.com) free screencast video editing solution. Adequate.

Camtasia - (www.camtasiastudio.com) - fully featured (but reasonably expensive) screencast software, but worth the money if you are ceating a lot of tutorials.

Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) - open source audio editing software. Not as good as Garage Band, but does a good job

Networking

Facebook - (www.facebook.com) The business favorite

LinkedIn - (www.linkedin.com) Excellent for reaching potential partners, clients and employees

Plaxo - (www.plaxo.com) the best solution for keeping contact details up to date

Back Up

Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) - I always pay for back up because it is so important for a business. Carbonite is simple and cheap

SyncBackSE - (www.2brightsparks.com/SyncBackSE) - god solution for local back up

Company Organisation

Google Sites (www.google.com/sites) - exciting new service from Google that enables you to store and share documents. Like having a company intranet

Google Calendar (www.google.com/calendar) - all our team have use

Google Calendar so its easy to find people and coordinate diaries

Google Docs (www.google.com/docs) Not the best office applications, but it is integrated into the other Google services so we tolerate its shortcomings

OpenOffice - (www.openoffice.org) All our team now use OpenOffice. It is now a genuine free substitute for Microsoft Office

FreshBooks (www.freshbooks.com) an online invoice tracking solution.

Web Stats

Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) - the best analytics solution out there

Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) - We use alerts to monitor what people are saying about us and our competitors

Customer Relationship Management

SugarCRM (www.sugarcrm.com) the open source version is a bit clunky, but once setup works well

Kayako - (www.kayako.com) a very good help desk management tool which tracks support tickets. Invaluable!

GoToMeeting - (www.gotomeeting.com) we do all our demos and training online via GoToMeeting.

So that’s my opening salvo!

If you have other tools that are free or cheap that you regularly use, please share them. I will ceate a master list and post it on the forum.

by: Top 10 web applications - success of UGC « jca’s Com blog-notes

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:59:11 +0000

[…] mars 16, 2008 · ClassÃ© sous Com · Tagged top 10, UGC, user generated content, web application ranking Through a poll launched on the web by a small British company (carsonified), 3000 web users voted for their preferred web application. Results were released in March 2008 and they are quite interesting in a perspective of user generated content (see previous post about it or another one in French) : […]

by: Kei

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:32:31 +0000

Just curious, how were the surveys distributed? Through your website? I’m curious to know about demographics of the survey pool. Like Tamlyn and Warren, Ravelry.com - a hot knitting community? :0 still speechless

by: Douglas Neiner

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:23:08 +0000

I find it interesting that Basecamp and Mint (haveamint.com) are in the 10 ten, yet they are pay services (Basecamp has a free option as well as their pay plans). The free services overwhelm the list, but these two apps are SO good, that the paying community has voted them into the top 10. I think that speaks volumes to the people behind these two companies.

This poll was awesome and very interesting to look at! Thank you Carsonified!

by: Ellen

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:25:51 +0000

Ravelry’s awesome! And it’s a huge community since it was opened less than a year ago (and is still in beta with 90,000+ users)…

by: Warren

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:00:34 +0000

And what about Ravelry.com?

Something tells me the poll has been a little bit hijacked.

Always a danger in any poll online now, because genuinely its unexpected but can you categorically say its wrong?

Is their a possible indicator that could be used to ‘even’ things up a bit

Like take the number of votes and multiply it by number of users or somthing / or devide by alexa score (needs a bit of thought)

I think its interesting but ultimately i just wonder about its accuracy.

Any change of releasing the next 20-30 results? ( i think they would be far far more interesting)

by: Tamlyn

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:23:12 +0000

Ravelry? “A knit and crochet community”? I’ve heard that knitting’s enjoying a comeback but, I mean, in the top 10?!