Features
Top 30 online tools
20070713 [Computer Shopper]
Top 30 online tools 6 - 10
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1 Wesabe Details: www.wesabe.com Type: Money management Wesabe is a site where you can view all your online bank statements at a glance. Why would you want to do this online when you have Quicken or Microsoft Money to do the same thing on your desktop? It's all about community interaction. While many financial websites, such as fool.co.uk, offer some form of user contribution, Wesabe takes it further. To use the system, you download bank and transaction data from the online banks where you hold an account. Current balances appear in the main window, and you can drill down into individual statements. Wesabe's community feel is exemplified by the way you can clean up incoming statements. You can edit a transaction name on your statement, which is especially handy if a transaction has a lengthy name. Wesabe automatically applies this to future statements as you import them. If other members have already edited the same transaction name in their statements, Wesabe will suggest this edited name to you and other members. You can also apply ratings to merchants, which are aggregated with the opinions of other users. You organise your finances by tagging individual transactions with labels such as 'groceries' or 'going out'. You can add multiple tags (or labels) to a transaction and split a transaction between them by specifying the amount to apply to each tag. For example, if you withdrew £100 from a cashpoint machine and spent £80 of this on groceries and £20 on a lottery ticket, you would add tags in the form of 'groceries:80 lottery:20'. Then, when you searched for your spending on groceries, the £80 would show up, and when you view lottery tags the £20 would appear. You can also use the spending summary to illustrate graphically where your money is going. The biggest advantage of tags is that Wesabe matches money-saving tips - supplied by other members - according to your tags. There's an obvious transatlantic feel to Wesabe, but don't let that put you off. It supports UK banks, and you can change the default currency to sterling from a drop-down menu. The site doesn't link directly to your online bank accounts, so you have to download data manually from your online bank or use a separate desktop application. But Wesabe is smart enough to ignore transactions you've already uploaded. This manual approach has a distinct privacy advantage. Because the only personal data the site captures about you is your sign-up email address, there's no glaring risk of an identity thief emptying your accounts. |
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2 Meebo.com Details: wwwl.meebo.com Type: Instant messaaging The ability to communicate wherever you are seems to be not so much a bonus as a requirement these days. For those whose chosen medium is instant messaging, meebo is a one-stop web application that makes it easy to keep up with many different instant messaging programs at once. With meebo you can connect simultaneously to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber messaging accounts, all through a single web page. Simply enter your screen name and password for each of the chat systems to which you want to connect, and meebo logs you on to each at the click of a single button. It then takes you to a new page that shows you which services you're connected to, grouping all your contacts in a single buddy list. Meebo is a fine example of how feature-rich web applications can be. When you receive messages, they arrive in their own pop-up windows (if you have disabled pop-ups, they appear instead as draggable windows inside the browser page). Using meebo is also a sneaky way of getting round office restrictions on messaging or fussy corporate firewalls. As long as you can connect to the meebo website, you can use instant messaging, even if the standard firewall ports used by instant messaging applications are blocked. It is possible to log into multiple accounts without registration, but you have to enter your login name and address for each service individually. This is a good option if you just want a quick text chat with a friend or to check who is online. You can even be invisible, so you can see your contacts but they can't see that you're online. If you register with meebo, though, you need only enter a single meebo name to open all your chosen accounts automatically. You also get the ability to store chat logs. |
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3 Netvibes Details: www.netvibes.com Type: Web portal Netvibes is a customisable web portal that enables you to collate information from different sources on a single page, which you can then set as your browser's home page. Both Google and Yahoo! have similar offerings, but Netvibes does it better. A typical Netvibes page is divided into tabs, each of which contains modules that hold a particular type of information. Netvibes has built-in modules for news headlines, weather information, blogs, email accounts and Flickr photos that you can configure. A great timesaver is the web search module, which searches multiple search engines and displays the results in a tiny window. If you can't find the module you want, you can build your own and even share it with others in the Netvibes ecosystem library (http://eco.netvibes.com). You add modules to your page by dragging them from Netvibes' sidebar, and arrange them by dragging them into position. You can tailor your page further in the Netvibes' Settings menu by choosing from a clutch of themes that alter the appearance and colour of your home page. Netvibes even lets you upload your own images to use as the background. |
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4 Google Mail Details: http://mail.google.com Type: Webmail When Google Mail launched its free webmail service - to huge media interest - there was some concern about privacy. Google scans email messages in order to target recipients with tailored advertisements. However, on the plus side you get 2.8GB of storage, and it allows attachments of up to 20MB. Finding messages is easy with Google's built-in search engine. We've used Google Mail for two years and found that downtime is extremely rare. Its spam filtering is quite effective, and its organisational tools are flexible. Unlike Outlook, Google Mail doesn't organise email into folders. Instead you tag mail with labels. This takes a little getting used to if you're unfamiliar with tags, as email isn't automatically moved out of the inbox. However, you can set up filters to tag mail as it arrives. |
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5 Dabbledb Details: http://dabbledb.com Type: Database application Dabbledb is an online database application that lets you cut and paste data from databases and Excel spreadsheets to a web page and restructure it completely. You can use Dabbledb to filter data and add relations between fields. It can even grab data from websites at regular intervals. The application can filter and sort both numerical and text data and display it visually, for example in a calendar or a graph. You can save these views and go back to them later. Most cleverly of all, Dabbledb interprets data, recognising dates in a spreadsheet, for example, and showing them in a calendar view. The downside to the free version of Dabbledb is that it doesn't have any password protection, which means your database remains open to public view. But provided you don't want to use it for any particularly sensitive information, it is a powerful and easily accessible tool. |
