Cool Tools
Find new Tweeps to follow
Twitter — just like most social networks — becomes more useful as you connect with more users. But finding those users can be tough for a newbie. Other social networks have created tools that automatically generate lists of users to connect with based on a user’s habits, but Twitter has yet to generate a similar [...]
See how a story evolved on Twitter
Twitter has a built-in search function, which performs well at finding Twitter posts in real time. But to dig into Twitter’s archive to see how a story or event evolved over time on the service, the built-in search feature sometimes falls short. Google now has a tool that allows you to search Twitter and visualize [...]
Online Photoshop alternative
Photoshop has become the industry standard for image editing. But for those without access to the desktop version who need to carry out basic image-editing tasks, Adobe has a free online alternative. Just point your browser to Photoshop.com, where you can upload images to edit and then save them to your desktop computer. The functionality isn’t [...]
Create simple polls
Polls can be an easy way to create some simple user interaction, but there are many providers out there for the simple polls you see on many websites. One of the more prominent services is PollDaddy, a product of WordPress-creator Automattic. PollDaddy has both free and paid accounts. Paid accounts are necessary for anyone who [...]
Measure your site’s Web traffic
Most publishing platforms and web-hosting companies provide some sort of tool to gauge your web traffic. However, most built-in solutions aren’t able to provide the depth that outside, professional web analytics tools can. One of the most commonly used professional tools out there is Google Analytics. Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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” [...]