Some great Web 2.0 tools

The Fall is a great time to refresh your website and meet the growing demands of your audience by providing value through unique and original interactive tools. Here's a quick run-down of what lies beyond YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the like.

DYI Mash-up/Widgets - This is the holy grail of Web 2.0 applications. For those of your with kids its the equivilent of "stone soup" for the internet - taking open source applications, adding in a bit of this and a bit of that and creating a new beast altogether. Some of these (like FeedFlash) do one thing well, others (like Pageflakes) extend things a bit more.

• Pageflakes


• Wigipedia.com
• Openkapow
• Click2Map™
• FeedFlash widget,
• mockatoo.com
• Snipperoo
• Spinlets

Surveys - There's no better way to drive a bit of stickiness to your site than through interaction. Interactive surveys have been on the web for a while. Old stalwarts like Zoomerang are slowly falling by the wayside as these dynamic new apps will attest.

• FormSpring
• QuestionForm

Email/Communications - As Patrick attests, this is and might always be the "killer app". The professionals use mostly Lyris as their software platform but the big and clunky interface may soon fall victim to one of these upstarts. Personally, I've started to use iContact and I find it effective, inexpensive and easy to use.

• Letterpop
• Feelbreeze - email campaigns
• Geesee - Free chat
• Kontactr
• iContact.com
  

Multimedia - Whether you need a quick graphic fix or an interactive video embed for your site, these new upstarts offer some interesting apps. My favorite is Bubble Guru.

• Empressr
• favicon.ico Generator
• EasyCropper
• Fresh Badge Generator
• Bubble Guru

Blog marketing - Eyes are everything to a blog. Here's a unique start-up aiming to help the lowly blog out.

• Blogsticker

Content/Data - While widgets are the "in" thing right now... the next big thing IMHO are content and data services that can help you gather and present content in a unique way. Here are some initial approached to this issue.

• SNiPiTRON
• MyownDB
  
• Dabble DB
• Texty
• Listphile

Interactive tools - Whether you need a google map or a PDF conversion tool... here's a host of interesting sites that can help.

• Demofuse.com
• WriteMaps
• Web2PDF Online Widget


• Bravenet

Social networking - So you got the facebook group, your on MySpace and your YouTube is grooving. How what? Well how about managing all your profiles in one place. Here's an original idea for social networking.

• profileomat.com

Presentations - Everybody uses PowerPoint these days... How about putting those online. No problem.

• Preezo
• PreZentit
• WebSlide