Cool Tools
Automatically feed a site’s content to Twitter and Facebook
Updating multiple social media accounts can be time-consuming. One way to cut down on time spent managing social media presences it to automatically post content from another website.
TwitterFeed is a free service that allows you to send headlines from a website or blog directly to Twitter or Facebook using the site’s RSS feed (if you’re [...]
See what users are searching for on Google
Determining the public’s interest in a subject has become increasingly easy in the Internet era. One of the tools that facilitates these measurements is Google Insights. The site allows you to input terms and receive of a graph of “search volume” on any given topic over a period of time. It mashes the results up [...]
Get traffic statistics for someone else’s website
Want to know how many people are visiting your favorite website? That’s pretty simple, using some free online tools. Access such statistics at Compete.com or Alexa.com. Their data is gathered using a panel of a couple million Internet users. You can also check out Quantcast.com, which gives you traffic statistics but also estimates gender, age, [...]
Launch your own social network
So after all this talk about social networks, what if you’re interested in starting your own? Ning is the place to go. There are already more than 1.5 million social networks on the site on a wide variety of topics.
The site can be useful for both internal and external collaboration. People have launched social networks [...]
Share files and collaborate online with a group
Need to share big files, conference-call, chat or carry out any other form of online collaboration? Drop.io might be the answer. Drop.io is a free online service that gives you space in “the cloud” to collaborate in a private, virtual environment.
To use the service, simply visit the website, enter a name for your “drop” [...]
Capture a screenshot of a website
Need to make a screen capture of a website? That’s much simpler to do when the site neatly fits the size of your monitor, but most don’t. To avoid having to piece together a series of screenshots to capture a single webpage, use Aviary’s screen capture tool. Try Talon, an online tool from Aviary.
Talon allows [...]
Let users suggest, then vote among questions or ideas
Google Moderator lets you create polls where users can decide between competing questions, suggestions or ideas.
Except it’s different than a traditional poll in that you, the creator, don’t have to provide the ideas for users to choose among. Instead, the tool harnesses the power of the crowd to create the ideas and to moderate the [...]
Create an online game or puzzle
So you want to create your own game? Try a free online service such as Sharendipity.
It’s one of several online services out there that will let you create games from scratch or allow you to customize an existing template. A great deal of the services out there offer templates and games that can’t be customized [...]
See Twitter trends in your area
One of Twitter’s most useful features, even to casual users, is that it allows one to look in on conversations going on all over the world. The downside to that is that the hundreds of thousands of conversations out there must be filtered to make meaning out of them.
One tool that may help is Trendsmap, [...]
Host live chats or live-blog an event
Here’s a tool that’s starting to pop up all over the place lately. CoveritLive is a sort of hybrid between a chat room and a blog. It’s often being called live-blogging.
CoveritLive (and similar services) is often used for sporting events or for fluid breaking news situations. The free service allows you to place a box [...]
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