I liked Mind42 a lot.  It is very clean and easy to use.  It reminded me a lot of MindMeister.  I like who you can use tab to add new nodes. 

They also get props for the central featuring of collaboration.  Mindmaps are not too useful without others helping to build it out.  I definitely like Mind42.

Mindomo took forever to load.  Once it did, there were lots of buttons and toggles and switches.  I much prefer the clean look of MindMeister and Mind42. 

If you have to have a ton of options and settings, use Mindomo, otherwise, chose a different mind mapper. 

Makes it easy to get feedback from your team on videos.  Easy to comment and highlight certain sections of the video and see different feedback from team members.  

You see on YouTube a lot, how people will write "look at 2:15, so funny."  It is hard to comment on video.  A unique problem with video is that it is linear.  Commenting on a photo is easy, as there is only one thing, but a video is minutes long and constantly changing.  Market7 solves this problem by tying the comments to the time in the video so only the comments relevant to that time show.  

Not incredibly user friendly yet, but powerful.  A must for teams that are scattered geographically and have to deal with videos.

With the popularity of Twitter, there has been lots of link shorteners launching.  I like bit.ly because it includes analytics.  You can see when and how many people clicked on your different links.  A simple service but it does it well.  

Image editing shouldn't have to be a pain.  Skitch makes it easy to snap screenshots and add text, and highlights with it's simple drawing tools.  With drag and drop saving and 1 click uploading, it is easy to send to friends.  

Overall, a well thought out application.

No sign up.  Just start emailing.  Dead simple.  Nice layout.  Handles videos, and photos wonderfully.  Clean look.  Built in analytics. 

This is just a super service that anyone who wants to start a simple blog should use.

One of the best.

I love using TweetDeck. I really started to understand and use Twitter after I downloaded it. The ability to see your direct messages, replies, and custom searches is invaluable to actually use Twitter. You might miss one using Twitter's site, but TweetDeck pulls them out and saves them. The iPhone application works great, uses the same familiar interface. Sometimes it doesn't sync perfectly with the desktop client, but it works well enough. I would recommend that anyone who wants to really use Twitter check out TweetDeck.

Bubbl.us does what it says and is free. A simple mind mapping tool with the ability to save, export, and share. You can create different bubbles and adjust their color and text and easily create children or siblings. You can save your mind-maps by signing up for a free account. While it lacks some of the features other mind mapping sites have, you can't beat the price.

If twitter is the microblogging tool of the masses, identi.ca is the home of the geeks. An open source micro blogging solution identi.ca a little hard to use. Not as slick but more feature rich than twitter, users sign up and then... if your friends are not already on the site, you really have no reason to go to it. Unless you really like IRC chat rooms and updating builds of open source software, i would use twitter in place of identi.ca.

Bits of News seems to be a blog more than a service. The news is outdated and seems sporadic. I don't really understand the premise of bits of news. It seems to want to be a citizen journalism site but it doesn't seem to make that apparent. Nothing on the site is unique and there are a lot of ads. Not really worth using.

I found the site hard to use with little info. I couldn't find anything for places i already knew, much less for places i wasn't familiar with. When i used the search function for a couple cities, it gave me results in New York. Only when i put in a city, state, and sometimes a zip code would it give proper results. But the results were not that good. A couple of "Places to Eat" and "Interesting" consisting of one liners about the place, and a picture. There is no support offered and it doesn't seem to have a vibrant user base. The quality of the site could improve as users submit material, and maybe you will be able to find that "place that's not in the travel guide" as they advertise, but I won't be using This Place I Know, and can probably find the information it should have elsewhere.

I like Yelp. It gives people who had a good or a bad experience a place tell about it. You will usually find those two extremes. I use yelp to check out a restaurant that i have never visited. I also sometimes will just see what's available and highly rated in an area to discover new places. Most of the time, the reviewer either really liked it or they really didn't. But the reviews equal out giving a balance score. Since yelp is still growing there are sometimes only a couple of reviews available for any one establishment. Most are well thought out and written, but you'll get the usual un-intelligent rants sprinkled in as well. The iPhone app is very nice as it can combine the GPS and Maps function making places easy to find and get to. A good thing is that yelp is becoming more and more important to business. Many are starting to monitor the comments and respond. As more and more people review establishments, it will become more and more accurate and useful.

If you want to know the complete and extensive discographies of your favorite artists Discogs can help, but so can Google and Wikipedia. Discogs has an extensive community build database of discographies. If you obscure band is not included you can add it. But the site is very bare bones and has a lot of ads. And i found all the info using Google and Wikipedia. If you are a music addict you could find this site useful, but i don't see a big use for it.

Animoto is beautifully simple. They want to make your photos looks sweet. You upload some images, pick a song or upload your own, and Animoto makes a music video out of it. You might say but i can do this myself on iPhoto or one of the various other programs out there. The answer is yes you can, but if you want something more than fade in fade out and zoom, Animoto rocks. It syncs up the images and music and makes it look awesome. You can make free 30 second videos which can be shared with friends, or you can pay a couple bucks to make vidoes up to 10 minutes which can be downloaded, YouTubed and burned to CD/DVD. Or you can buy a year pass for 30 dollars to make as many videos as your heart desires. It used to be that you just let the Animoto magic do its thing and you couldn't control the output, but the guys have been adding features. You can now control how fast certain images display for and you can add text as well. The iPhone app is way cool. You pick the photos out of your phone library, pick the music, and in a couple minutes the video is on your phone ready to watch. The guys at Animoto are just really sweet as well. I sent a suggestion and i actually got an email back thanking me and explaining some things. So cool. Overall, Animoto is well on its way of ridding the world of bad slideshows, and boring presentations.

I used to use Quicken but it was cumbersome. When i tried Mint the first time i was amazed at how it automatically categorized and sorted all my transactions. You see the different categories and how much you spent in each. Sometimes you have to set rules for how certain transactions are handled. Sometimes if i eat at Food Express it categorized this as Express and puts it into the Clothing category. But a simple rule and Mint will automatically fix this for all past and future transactions. You can set your own categories and Mint is smart enough to suggest categories other users have entered. You can also set budgets and receive emails when you are close to or exceeding your budget. Mint also helps protect against identity fraud by sending you alerts about unusual spending or deposits. The iPhone app is great. It allows you to see your balances and budgets. I would like the ability to edit transaction but the app is meant to be a display only, like an update. Basically i love Mint. It makes it easy to track my money and best of all it doesn't cost any money!

I started using Evernote about 8 months ago. Now i wonder how i lived without it. It is just an amazing app. Online, on your computer, or on your mobile phone, you have your notes, pictures, and voice notes. One of the amazing features is text recognition. Once your note syncs with the Evernote servers, the text is searchable. For example if you have a hand scrawled note about an meeting with "Dave" you can later search for "Dave" and Evernote find your hand written note. Simply amazing and it works very well. I use the iPhone app which is amazing as well. I am constantly taking pictures of posters of events and things that i need to remember. My only complaint is not even Evernotes fault. Sometimes the pictures are blurry so the text recognition doesn't work but this is the iPhone lens fault. Another incredible thing is that Evernote is free. You have a monthly upload limit, but i have never reached my limit. If you go premium, you get more uploads (which means more notes) and extra features such as file synchronization. I would recommend and encourage everyone to use Evernote. There is just to much info out there to keep track of without a good note taking system.

Google Videos plays videos on the internet. That's about it. YouTube came along later and has more of a community feel, but Google Videos does what it does well and is free. If you need a place to host a video Google video will work. You upload your video to the Google servers where it becomes searchable and viewable to everyone. You can rate and share videos. There are no size or length limitations to the videos. There is some confusion between Google Video's and YouTube however as Google owns both Video's and YouTube and if you search for videos on Google, both will come up. One benefit of Google Videos is that it is not blocked as often as YouTube. If your university or company blocks YouTube, Google Videos can host the video instead.

I use facebook. A lot. It is one of the most popular social networking sites for a reason. It allows you to connect with your friends and family and keep up with their lives. If someone takes a picture of your friend and posts it, you can see it. It is enjoyable to find out that an old friend got married or moved. You can always connect to them using the in site email. I was out of the country and out of internet contact for 2 years and when i came back i still could contact all my friends. This alone makes it very useful. There are some down sides. Some privacy advocates think it makes to much information accessible to strangers but privacy settings are available. Technical support is limited. If you don't like something or facebook doesn't like you, you are kind of out of luck. But overall, facebook is an extremely useful and popular site.

I judge associates technical savvy based on if they use Gmail or not. There really is no reason to use anything else. Plenty of space always increasing. POP and IMAP make it easy to work with Gmail from other programs. If you use an online email solution, it should be Gmail.