2009: Products I Can't Live Without

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2009: Products I Can't Live Without by Michael Arrington on January 4, 2009 127 Comments

At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this - previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies - this list is all mine.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.

As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

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Company: Jingle Networks Website: free411.com Launch Date: June 16, 2007

1-800-FREE411 was created to provide callers with a free alternative to the skyrocketing rates being charged by phone companies for directory assistance (411).

The service is made possible by thousands of national and local businesses who sponsor… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Animoto

Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.

Website: animoto.com Location: New York, New York, United States Founded: August, 2006

Animoto generates custom, professional-looking slideshows from user-uploaded music and photos. Their “patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design” drives the web app. They say the Cinematic A.I. analyzes… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.

Website: delicious.com Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States Founded: November 1, 2003 Acquired: December 1, 2005 by Yahoo!

Delicious is a social bookmarking website – the primary use of Delicious is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On Delicious, you can use tags to… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Digg

Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Website: digg.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: October 11, 2004 Funding: $40M

Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Facebook

I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.

Website: facebook.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Founded: February 1, 2004 Funding: $516M

On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the student body… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Friendfeed

Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.

Website: friendfeed.com Location: Mountain View, California, United States Funding: $5M

FriendFeed aims to be a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The four founders were all team members at Google and helped to launch such products as Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Gmail

I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.

Company: Google Website: gmail.com Launch Date: April 1, 2004

Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free email service with innovative features like “conversation view” email threads, search-oriented interface and plenty of free storage (almost 7GB). Gmail opened in… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Google Reader

Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.

Company: Google Website: google.com/reader

Google Reader is an online RSS feed reader. Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Hulu

Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.

Website: hulu.com Location: Los Angeles, California, United States Founded: March 1, 2007 Funding: $100M

Hulu is NBC Universal and News Corporation’s online video joint venture. The site focuses exclusively on professional content and does not take on YouTube directly as a viral video destination. The site… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

iPhone 3G

The first gadget I’ve included over the years - the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.

Company: Apple Website: apple.com/iphone Launch Date: July 11, 2008

Announced at the 2008 World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone 3G is the successor to… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

MySpace Music

MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.

Website: music.myspace.com Founded: September 25, 2008

MySpace Music is a joint music venture, with equity stakes from major labels, that allows users to stream music on demand, create playlists, and add widget music players to their profiles. The streaming will be advertising supported - at first via… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Pandora

Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.

Website: Pandora.com Location: Oakland, California, United States Founded: January 1, 2000 Funding: $21.3M

Born out of a love for music with 99% of its employees at one time or another working as musicians, Pandora is truly a company wholly dedicated to music. With a database of more than 600 thousand songs, each digitally annotated with musical… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Scribd & Docstoc

We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.

Website: docstoc.com Location: Santa Monica , California, United States Founded: August 1, 2007 Funding: $4M

Docstoc is the premier online community to find and share professional documents. Docstoc provides the platform for users and businesses to upload and share their documents with all the world, and serves as a vast repository of documents in variety… Learn More

Scribd

Website: scribd.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: September, 2006 Funding: $12.8M

Scribd is a social document sharing site that borrowed a lot of the basic design principles from YouTube. Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have - I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.

Website: skype.com Location: London, United Kingdom Founded: August 1, 2003 Acquired: September 12, 2005 by eBay for $2.6B in Cash

Skype is a peer-to-peer Internet telephony service that is free for Skype-to-Skype calls. The service also allows Skype users to call mobiles and landlines, and vice-versa. Skype has special charge plans for non-Skype-to-Skype calls. Skype is… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

TechMeme

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.

Website: techmeme.com Location: Menlo Park, California, United States Founded: October 16, 2004

Launched in 2005 as Tech.Memeorandum.com, the site that is considered by many as the blogosphere’s daily tech newspaper was later renamed Techmeme (pronounced “tech-meam”). Stories often hit Techmeme days before the New York Times and other… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Website: tripit.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: October 1, 2006 Funding: $6.1M

TripIt is an intelligent travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans so that their trips go more smoothly. Travelers simply forward their purchase confirmation emails to TripIt and TripIt automatically creates… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Twitter

Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.

Website: twitter.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: March 1, 2006 Funding: $20M

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July 2006, is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Wordpress

We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend - without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Company: Automattic Website: wordpress.org

WordPress.org is the community site for the WordPress blogging platform. This is the place to go for bloggers who need help or resources for their WordPress blog.

On March 29, 2008, Automattic launched WordPress 2.5, a major upgrade to their… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Yammer

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

Website: yammer.com Location: West Hollywood, California, United States Founded: 2008 Funding: $50k

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”

As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

YouTube

YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Website: youtube.com Location: San Bruno, California, United States Founded: September 11, 2005 Acquired: October 9, 2006 by Google for $1.65B in Stock

YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. YouTube is the leader in online video, sharing original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

Website: zoho.com Location: chennai, India Founded: September 15, 2005

Zoho offers Office Suite, which includes Writer, Projects, Sheet, CRM, Show, Creator, Wiki, Planner, Suite, Notebook, Chat, Meeting and Mail. All products are offered through dynamic webpages that allow for rich online applications.

Zoho’s parent… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger), Ghost Hack Beauty, Mario Bruggemann

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