Favourite things, part 2
11/11/2008
What was the best site/app you came across in 2008?
Media & PR expert
Tim Gibbon
Elemental Communications
With the intensified explosion of the number of social media driven
marketing technologies, networks and widgets leading interest in the digital space this year, there are far too many apps to choose from.
With so much going on, it’s just one reason why we created the Social Media Portal (http://www.socialmediaportal.com) to connect with others in this space that are also creating interesting apps and technology. After discussing web apps with .net earlier in the year Trillian, Netvibes, Skype, Snipr and Time and Date are still daily tools that life would be more difficult without when connected to the internet as much as I am.
However, researching Wiki software and the need to create an internal training area for a forthcoming Elemental site, clients and partners,
Google Sites caught my eye again because it may suit some of the requirements we need. As much as I enjoy software like Confluence, other options are more financially attractive. Now seeing Google Docs implemented into environments that are similar to what we maybe exploring and the recent launch of Chrome has made me lean toward Google Inc. in general as my favourite app/s this year, just because of the sheer number of useful technologies from them that I have become accustomed to, and dare I say dependent upon to a degree.
The icing on the cake for me is Google’s Open Social due to Elemental’s interest in this area as I discuss above. Our desire to create apps of our own means that these lovely pieces to the jigsaw along with other contributors, whether they are well known technology brands or individuals, will certainly be influential in the way for us to collaborate and communicate in the future. I can’t wait to get stuck into them properly.
Tim is director of Elemental Communications
Social media and comms expert
Rachel Hawkes
Elemental Communications
Gosh, it’s so hard to choose just one favourite!
There’s Gmail, which groups my email conversations together and provides a pretty neat filing system in the way of adding labels (and since they added the coloured labels, I love this feature even more).
Then there’s the obvious choice in Facebook, which has helped me find so many old friends from school and keep up to date with friends and family back in Australia - loving Facebook for that.
As a ‘closet knitter’ I’ve taken quite the shine with Ravelry.com, which lets me swap patterns and hints and map projects. The user interface is a bit clunky, but it has some good features and really has thought carefully about the knitting community.
Justgiving - particularly Justgiving’s fundraiser widgets - is right up high on my list. As a trustee of a charity, during the recent Adidas 5k women’s challenge I was able to add all of our charity’s fundraiser widgets to a dedicated page on our website. This helped our members and visitors keep up to date with how we were doing with individual targets and helped drive donations. We raised over £2,000 through Justgiving and it took care of all the Gift Aid paperwork on our behalf, which is brilliant.
My overall favourite, judging by the amount I use it and the usefulness it has in my day to day work, is Netvibes. I love it. It’s the first site I open in the morning and the last site I close at the end of the day - it’s constantly open in my Firefox tabs, and helps me keep up to date with sites (both personal and work related) I monitor on a daily basis. It’s hard to imagine being online without it now!
Rachel Hawkes is an account director at Elemental
Content specialist
Stuart Dean
Cognifide
There are so many great applications being launched, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all. The consistent favourites through 2008 for me have been Confluence, Jira, Last.fm, Netvibes and Google Docs.
As Cognifide is a pan-European company with offices in the UK and Poland, tools like Confluence and Jira are invaluable in connecting client, development teams and other stakeholders on a per-project basis. Confluence is a really simple to use yet dynamic wiki software that enables us to collaborate and share knowledge internally easily and effectively.
Jira is an ‘issue tracking tool’ from Atlassin - the same company behind Confluence. Jira is a flexible application to work with, and allows us to schedule bugfixes, testing, enhancements and overall project management. Both Confluence and Jira play an important role in my day to day working life, and are my favourite apps for that reason.
When I’m out of work-mode, Last.fm is definitely a favourite application for music and still one of my old time favourites. Then there’s Netvibes, which I like even more since they upgraded to Netvibes Ginger as I can now save individual feed items as well as share easily with colleagues and peers.
Stuart Dean is the chief executive at Cognifide
Content specialist
Siim Vips
Modera
It’s certainly been the year for web applications, more than I have seen developed and marketed harder during my time in the software industry. Social media has been one influential catalyst in this heightened activity with brands embracing apps and widgets; sometimes without clearly understanding the technologies and implications.
Further to a review of our favourites web apps this year by .net, Google is still very high on my list. The apps that continue to be most useful include Gmail and Google Maps for personal and business tools. These are simple to use and intuitive for a range of users, developed with maximum optimisation and performance in mind. True to form from the Google camp, there are many APIs to explore, making the apps even more appealing to individuals and businesses, which present additional alternatives to a wider range of users. It’s the same philosophy that Modera applies when developing our web apps and products, although we bring more visual elements to the formula.
However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the web application of the year for me because of what it delivers to the industry. Developers and businesses owners can now use economies of scale whether small, medium and large enterprises. They can strive to be more cost-effective, saving large sums with their bandwidth and the other support that the solid service and products offers. So impressed with that AWS has to offer, Modera has embedded the option of using AWS as standard across our products and services (http://www.modera.com/products and http://www.modera.com/solutions).
Siim Vips is founder and CEO of Modera
Project manager
Ané-Mari Peter
on-IDLE
It’s impossible to ignore the raft of iPhone apps that have sprung up with the new iPhone 2.0 software release, of which my favourite is the application that lets you control your computer’s WinAmp through your iPhone (or iPod Touch).
For web development Github the ‘social network’ code repository for programmers has the on-IDLE studio buzzing. It’s a new-ish hosted Git repository service where version control is decentralised by giving each developer a local copy of the development history and then changes are copied from repository to repository. It is simple to fork and merge code making the system an ideal tool in our collaborative development environment. It is well-designed, elegant and a real on- and offline tool for open source projects.
Ané-Mari is the co-founder of on-IDLE
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Comments
Tom Freeman / 13/11/2008 / 10:59 / http://www.pricewatch.org.uk
The most useful thing online for me this year has been using Google documents. After accidentally removing Office from my PC, I was left with little option to but give online documents a try, and I was very impressed. The ability to share documents simply by entering someones email address also makes collaborating on projects really quick and easy.
