Other practical Web 2.0 applications

So, thinking about how Digg isn't particularly of any practical use to the typical SMB got me thinking about other popular Web 2.0 sites and how I think they can be of practical use. With a little creativity, there are a lot of free tools that can be adapted to business use. They aren't necessarily replacements for critical line of business applications, but handy tools which may be cheaper and better for some tasks than custom development or traditional off the shelf software. Off the top of my head, here are a few examples with some generalized application:

Google Home Page
Who needs an expensive corporate intranet with a trendy dashboard when you can whip together your own custom Google page with hundreds of free and useful information gathering widgets? Calendars, searches, webcams, customizable news and finance aggregators, to-do lists, translators, they're all available. Give everyone in the company access to the same homepage and use the Sticky Note widget as a communication board. Many of the modules available, in fact, allow the use of tools mentioned below, making this a sort of meta-tool.

del.icio.us
del.icio.us is billed as a social bookmarking site; it's somewhat like Digg, only more individually and small-group oriented, and without voting (which isn't really very useful for individuals or small groups anyway). Essentially it's an easy way to keep your bookmarks, just as you would in a web browser, only they are accessible from anywhere, available to anyone to see, and categorized by something called "tagging." Traditional bookmarking relies on a hierarchy--you might have a folder called "News" for example, in which you would then put another folder called "International," in which you might put a link to CNN's website. But CNN also has national news--do you add another bookmark in your "National" folder under "News?" Tags allow you to mark the item with as many labels as make sense and save it once, but show it under any of them. This is particularly handy when you're sharing information with other people, who might tend to categorize it differently. If each of you tag it appropriately, however, it becomes more accurate and more easily located for others in your department or company.

Yahoo Groups
Or go old-school; Yahoo Groups has been around for years, and provides a surprisingly powerful set of collaboration features for free--e-mail list management, chat, file storage, photo album, elementary database, shared calendar, and more, all in an easily shared or secured environment. Very easy to set up and use, perfect for small companies, departments, or ad hoc working groups.

Writely
Now owned by Google, this free on-line word processor is a simple but functional replacement for Word or WordPerfect. Free, easily shared, more than powerful enough for most people. Google is also coming out with online accessible spreadsheets--basically the entire office suite, available anywhere you are at on any computer you can get web access with.

Mologogo
Have a small delivery company? Want to track your couriers like big trucking companies do? Buy them GPS enabled cell-phones and use this service to view their location on top of street or satellite maps for nothing.

Picture Cloud
Or maybe you sell stuff--physical stuff. Think it would look snazzier in 3-D, or just from more than a single angle, but the services and software to build pictures that way is too expensive? Try Picture Cloud--the poor man's simulated 3-D viewing experience. Take pictures from angles around your item and submit them, and Picture Cloud will automatically turn them into a pretty good simulation of a live-motion panning camera view of the object.

Basecamp
Powerful project management software, entirely web-based, out-sourced, and easily shared with internal and external project participants alike. It's not free, but it's scalable, and all data can be exported from it for backup or if you decide to move on to something else in the future.

Stikipad
A hosted, online Wiki, one of several. You've probably heard of Wikipedia--it's a Wiki used as an online encyclopedia, but the technology can be used for almost any sort of cataloging or documentation--the power of it is that it's online, so instantly accessible from anywhere with a web connection, and user-editable, so it can be easily kept updated without overloading any one person.

SproutIt
I just came across this one--it's not free, but it's interesting and I have at least one current client I'm going to recommend it to. It's an online automated e-mail management system, using basic artificial intelligence to receive and sort mail coming in to common addresses (like "sales" or "support") and automatically produce recommended replies, reducing the time to manage each individual piece of mail. This has long been a function available in helpdesk software, but that's either very expensive or very complicated to implement--this is entirely web-based, easy to get started with, easy to quit if it doesn't work well.

There are more industry-specific sites, also--RENotebook for real-estate investment management, Schoopy for educators and classroom management, Lulu for on-demand publishing. Everyone has an itch to scratch--now, they are sharing the scratcher after they've built it.

And if you don't find any of those useful, or if the functions seem good but the specific sites do not, check out this categorized list of sites--some free, some fee-based, but all along the general lines of those listed above. If del.icio.us sounded cool, but didn't quite do it for you, check out the other sites in the bookmarking section--there are a dozen variations on the theme, each with a specific riff. New services and software are being created every day along these lines. Somewhere, something will jump out at you--or you can call us with your itches, and we can help you find the perfect scratcher... faster and cheaper than traditional development methods could ever deliver it to you.