I hate it when I have to log in to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn to check on the status of those sites. By the end of it and including email, I might have 8-10 tabs open–on a slow day. Logging into all of these sites is time-consuming and takes an application all its own.
Yonoo is a tool that’s available that can help you consolidate your social media into one browser-based view. Set up was easy. You can establish a free account and then you select the social media that you want to include in your Yoono view. As you select each site, a window opens where you log in to the social media site and that’s it.
You have to install the Yoono plug-in for your Firefox or Chrome browser. I use Safari, FireFox and Chrome constantly so I loaded the plug-in for Firefox and Chrome. There’s also a client version that you can download but lately I’ve been using browser-based applications more and more.
Once you have the plug-in installed and the social media hooked into it, Yoono runs as a sidebar that you can easily minimize as needed. I’ve only just started playing with it but my initial opinion is that this is a pretty handy application. Price: FREE-99.
The next browser-based application that I think is a must-have is HootSuite. HootSuite is a great way to update your social media in one consolidated application. If you have multiple Twitter accounts or blogs or even LinkedIn, you can submit updates using HootSuite There are many cool functions that HootSuite has but one of that I like best is the ability to schedule the posting of my Tweets. I can work on my Tweets for tomorrow right now and I can line up however many tweets I want so I can dominate a Tweet Stream. I always Tweet and retweet through HootSuite. I tweet excerpts from each of my blog posts and sometime retweet others’ tweets. Price: FREE-99.
If you’re a Mac user and even if you’re not, you might want to look into Microsoft’s browser based versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel. These are stripped down versions of the client apps but they work pretty well, they’re browser based so you don’t have to bastardize your Mac with Windows software, and it’s FREE-99–always the best price. You have to have a Live.com account. I’ve written on this before. You can check it out by clicking here. Price: FREE-99
Another really cool app that I use all of the time is iCyte. ICyte lets you capture webpages and save, categorize and reference whenever you want. This has been great for me because I still like to keep lots of tabs open so that I don’t loose a page that I’m interested in. Now, I can just save the page to iCyte and come back to it whenever I want. What’s key is that it saves the page as it was when you saved it so if the site owner takes the page down, you can still get back to it. ICyte also has a feature where you can go to the live version of the page. Price: FREE-99.
