Web Apps Galore

It seems nowadays, there is a web application for everything. In a few short years, we’ve seen explosive growth in a movement called Web 2.0. This has resulted in a shift towards spending more and more time in our browsers, and less time in standard desktop applications. With so many new web applications popping up left and right, you will invariably see clones and companies trying to best each other. It can definitely be overwhelming trying to keep track of them all. The following are the web apps that make the cut for me. Those who know me well, know that I am extremely particular about the technology I use so I hope you will find these sites as useful as I have.

I’ll start off with a name everyone recognizes. Google. Aside from Google search, Google provides a number of staggering number of services ranging from Picasa and YouTube, to Google Docs, and Grand Central. However, Google’s shining star (aside from their search of course) is Gmail. In the free webmail arena, Gmail is the clear cut winner, scoring major points for innovative features and UI and also keeping everything free (you have to pay Yahoo for anything “advanced”). Another strength of Gmail is that you can port it for use on your own domain name. Anyone who’s used the webmail interface provided by their web host can appreciate Google Apps. I’m assuming most people have already experienced for themselves the power of Gmail; and since I have enough to say about Gmail to merit its own post, those who are unfamiliar can read up about Gmail at Lifehacker.

Right in line with the usefulness of Google’s apps, lies a website known as Mint. Mint is a financial tool that allows you to consolidate all your financial information presents it in an easy to understand format. It lists all your transactions across all your credit and debit cards and generates graphs of your spending trends (so you can see your financial mistakes in pie chart form ). Also, Mint keeps track of your interest rates on your credit cards, and bank accounts and suggests offers from other banks to help you save. There are also notifications (via email or SMS) that you can setup for your accounts (ex. have Mint txt you about a low account balance). Mint also recently added a feature for tracking investment portfolios, student loans and mortgages. Naturally, having all this sensitive information in one place is a reason to be wary. However, Mint does not store your personal data and uses bank-grade encryption. If you’re still skeptical, Mint has been featured in the likes of The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Time, BusinessWeek, CNN Money, The NY Times…the list goes on and on (read: Mint is pretty legit). In the future, Mint plans add feature such as bill pay making it an even more powerful tool. Like every good web app, they have demo video which you should definitely check out.

The next app, Dropbox (still in private beta but I have a few invitations available…) is one of those tools that you’ll wonder how you lived without. In my quest for a free iDisk alternative, I found this nifty app that seems to be much better implemented than services such as Box.net and free unlike SugarSync. Another plus is that the developers seem extremely in tune with the user community, in terms of addressing concerns, feature requests and being active on the Dropbox forum. It’s sort of hard to explain exactly how Dropbox operates, so I’ll just let you watch yet another screencast (I promise it’s worth it).

While those are the web apps I use on a daily basis, there are still many helpful apps out there I haven’t mentioned:

• http://epassportphoto.com/ – Essentially free and instant passport photos
• Pandora – Must have if you like music (who doesn’t?)
• Hulu – Free, fast and legal web TV.

As you can tell, I basically live on the internet; computers do everything for me. But hey, what’s wrong with that? I hope you find these web apps useful, or if you know of any better ones I’d love to hear suggestions. Do you have any favorites I missed?