Twitter - I check my Twitter account 3-4 times a day. Why is this a go-to tool? Twitter is a fantastic social media platform. The simplicity of the allowed 140 character posts makes reviewing updates quick and easy. I have the opportunity to follow people that I admire, aspire to be like, make me laugh, or deliver relevant newsworthy updates. There’s always something interesting out there to read on Twitter. If you don’t have an account – you should jump on the tweet wagon.  If you’re a twitter newbie, check out Twitter and Your Website for some great tips!

iPhone – If you’ve read any of my other posts you already know I use my iPhone like it’s going out of style. There is literally an app out there for everything. It makes me more productive, more connected, and it keeps me occupied during any free time I might have. I even have a page in my blog dedicated to reviewing an iPhone app each week.

Mashable.com – Mashable is a social media and technology news guide. The information I find from this website is always new, fresh, and accurate. I find myself checking the front page hot topics several times per day (aside from reading @mashable tweets).

Google Wave – I use Wave on a daily basis. More and more of my contacts are getting access to Wave and it’s now much easier to send them a wave instead of an email. Conversations are much easier to follow; documents, images, etc. are much easier to keep track of; and collaboration is more productive and effective. If you’re not sure what Google Wave is, you can learn more or you can watch the “brief” demo from the creators of Wave.

Snagit – If you’ve ever had to grab screenshots of a website it can be such a pain to hit ctrl+Prnt Scrn on your keyboard, paste it into Paint, edit out the things you don’t want to share with the world, save, and send out. Being a website designer and website manager, I discovered Snagit early on and believe me – it has certainly paid for itself.

What makes Snagit so great? For one thing – I can set it to snag a region of a page (that I specify), a particular window, a scrolling webpage, etc. There are so many options. After a screen has been captured, I can edit it right inside the Snagit Editor. No need to save it and edit it elsewhere. I can add other images, point out parts of the capture, and I can even create things from scratch using the the editor.

You can download a 30 day trial or purchase the software for $49.95 (definitely worth it).

These are just a few go-to technology things that I use and love. What’s in your technology toolkit? Send us a comment.

When I hear a particular company is developing an app, I’m interested to learn more. As an avid iPhone user, it’s feels like a Christmas present every time I download a new one. (Of course the “present” is even better when it’s an app that I like.) Today I learned about a company that is developing an “iPhone-esque” web application that will have the same look and feel of a native iPhone app, but will only be accessible via the phone’s browser. (The thought being that multiple types of mobile phones will be able to access the app.)

Here are the thoughts that ran through my head:

A.) Why would you spend ‘x’ amount of dollars on development, resources, etc. to create a web application that looks like an iPhone app and behaves like an iPhone app, but ISN’T an iPhone app? (How does the saying go, “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck” – or maybe it should be.)

B.) If the web app doesn’t do anything different than the company’s website, what is the incentive for me (the iPhone user) to access it when I can just as easily (and probably just as quickly) use the Safari browser and go to the main website?

C.) Am I the only person who thinks this is a waste of time, money, and valuable business resources?

I later found out that several of the decision makers for this particular brain child don’t even have iPhones, nor do they know much about them. So this faux-iPhone app will be created and will be unsuccessful because the project isn’t being thought through.

If your company is creating, beginning to create, or potentially will create an iPhone application—for all things sacred PUT SOMEONE ON THE PROJECT WHO KNOWS A THING OR TWO ABOUT iPHONES. Approach the project from the iPhone user’s point of view. Create something engaging that either a.) does something different, or b.) presents the information differently than your company website. Otherwise, you’ll be spending money to develop something that the user can certainly live without, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do.