Sunday 3 February 2013

Top free web apps to supercharge your online social and Professional Life


LET’S CONNECT

A portal to see all your social network streams and post to them; a search engine for what the web is saying about any topic; the best five tweets of the day delivered straight to your inbox; and a whole new look for your Facebook. 


TWITTER ONLY 
NEWS.ME Once you start following more than a hundred people on Twitter, your feed can get a bit too much to handle. Of course, you are bound to miss a few important tweets in the process. But not if you use News.Me which creates a daily digest of the top five tweets (based on retweets, replies and favourites) from your feed and mails it to you the next morning. Simple and efficient. 
www.news.me 
POSTPOST The people you follow on Twitter share a lot of linked content. PostPost collates all of these and displays them in a single interface. You can use filters for web links, photos and videos, or use the readymade list of suggested topics such as cricket, book, space, etc. And of course, there’s a very handy search bar to find what you want. 
postpost.com 

TRENDSMAP There’s perhaps no better service to figure out what the web is talking about than Trendsmap. Trends are represented on a global map and users can surf the graphical interface to figure out the trending stories on Twitterverse. Besides, you can also use the many filters – region, country, city, topics, etc – to find the hottest buzzwords. You shouldn’t miss this. 
trendsmap.com 
TWIANGULATE Enter the Twitter handles of any three people on Twiangulate, and the service will display common followers and friends, influential tweeters, etc, thus helping you discover new people to follow. The service also analyses a tweeter’s ‘reach’ to show you how influential they are and even creates a Venn diagram showing the overlaps between followers for the three users you have compared. 
twiangulate.com 


STUFF FOR FACEBOOK 
SUNRISE.IM When you wake up in the morning, wouldn’t it be convenient if your inbox had a mail that gave you your day’s schedule, as well as reminded you about meetings, birthdays and more? Meet Sunrise which links your Facebook and Google calendars to give you a daily briefing first thing in the morning. 
www.sunrise.im 
AHERK If you need a kick up your seat to make sure you finish a task, Aherk will let you blackmail yourself into doing it. What does that mean? Well, you need to upload an embarrassing photograph of yourself to Aherk, and list a 
task that you’re trying to complete, along with its deadline. Aherk will ask your Facebook friends if you’ve met the deadline. If yes, that’s great; but if you didn’t, the photo gets uploaded to your Facebook wall. Now if that isn’t reason enough to get off your butt, nothing is. 
aherk.com 
OCTOFEED Don’t like Facebook’s default interface? For a more beautiful, minimalistic design, check out Octofeed. All you have to do is sign in with your Facebook ID and it will fetch your wall and lay it out in a whole new avatar of turquoise, grey and white, with separate tabs for playlists, photos, links and statuses. Even notifications get a makeover that’s unobtrusive and easy on the eye. And yes, it’s a lot better to use on tablets too. 
www.octofeed.com 


ALL-IN-ONES 
KURRENTLY Search engines don’t crawl social networks. This means it’s not possible for you to quickly look through the latest posts on any topic. But hey, who needs Google when you have Kurrently? Type in a keyword and this social engine will show you chronologically-arranged posts across Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can choose the speed at which Kurrently refreshes results (0.5x, 1x, 2x or Pause), as well as filter them by network. If you find any post that you like, you can quickly save it for future reference; however, this needs a Twitter sign-in. So whether you want to monitor your brand’s online presence or simply find out what the general consensus is on any topic, you know where to head. 
www.kurrently.com 
STORIFY This is one of our personal favourites. Storify lets users do something long needed with the amount of social updates we get: Collate them into a meaningful narrative. The first thing to do is to login via Facebook or Twitter, or 
create a new account. You will be taken to a window with two panes. The first is a large blank canvas, ready for you to add a headline, description, posts and links. In the second pane, you can search several social sharing services – Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Instagram, Google (web, news, images), Tumblr, etc – for a keyword, user or image, and just drag-and-drop your results into the canvas. 
    You can also embed direct URLs, add other Storify stories, or annotate your canvas with words of your own. It’s a simple, intuitive interface that takes very little time to understand and start using. Once you have created your ‘story’, hit the ‘Publish’ button and share it on your own networks. Simply fantastic. 
storify.com 
PRISMATIC Your activity on social networks – what you like, what you share, what you comment on, who you follow – is a good indication of your interests. Prismatic takes this data and creates a personalized web page with news that you would be interested in. 
    It’ll also throw up a few suggestions of people, websites or sections to follow, and the 
‘World News’ tab shows the latest happenings across the globe. What’s more, you can also search for your interests to add more channels to your reading list. 
getprismatic.com 
CUE Your social information is scattered across many networks, so looking up a person, an event, a post or a link ends up being a Herculean task if you don’t know where to begin searching. Enter Cue – a single window that helps you find anything from your personal profiles. All you have to do is link it up to all your networks, mails as well as cloud sharing services. 
    Cue is also testing an ‘Events’ service that displays your schedule across different calendars, such as Google and Facebook. A premium account also lets you hook up services such as Basecamp, Evernote, Google Reader, Tumblr, Yammer, Reddit and Pinboard. 
www.cueup.com 
STREAMIFIED This web app lets you view all you networking streams in one place. Users can add their accounts from services such as Twitter, 
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr, Google Reader, Instapaper, Pocket, RSS Feeds, and even blogs. The main window displays constant updates, while all your other accounts are in a sidebar, allowing you to quickly switch to them individually. And yes, you can also post to all your networks in one go. While the design isn’t great and the site is a bit heavy, it still beats all the others in functionality. 
streamified.me 

PIXABLE Photos are shared everywhere: Facebook feeds, Instagram, Twitter, Google Drive, Dropbox. Pixable, however, lets you see all these pictures – uploaded by you or your friends – in one place. It works best for Facebook, with filtering options such as ‘most recent’, ‘top of the day’, ‘new profile pics’, ‘new cover photos’, etc. And it even lets you follow ‘interests’ such as the Presidential Inauguration, Celebs, Funny, etc. Throw in a search bar to quickly look up a friend and you’re set. 
www.pixable.com 
FAVEOUS While browsing through your social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pocket, Tumblr, Youtube, Instapaper, RSS – you come across links and posts that you ‘Like’, ‘Favourite’ or add to your list of must-sees. Faveous brings these favourites under one URL. Create an account (you might have to tweet/post on your Facebook wall to get an invitation) and start adding your services. It’s an extremely convenient solution for looking at your most-liked online items. 
www.faveous.com 
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