In response to RWW’s post on their top 10 apps, here’s the ones that I used a lot in 2008, and why I thought they were relevant within the tech industry. They are not in any particular order.
Reminds me to pay my credit cards, helps me separate out my business expenses, lets me know where I’m spending my money, and reminds me how much I’ve lost 
Simple, free, and lots of functionality, so much for Money or Quicken.
Posterous is doing for email what Twitter did for SMS. Posterous takes one of the most basic forms of communication (email) and empowers you to be able to post pictures, video, and blog posts to a range of services. I like this aggregation of tools on the publishing side for power users, and I like that the posterous blog itself is insanely easy to use for your non-techy friends.
I’ve only been using Disqus, so I’ll focus on that. What I like, yet again, is the aggregation. It takes my conversatinos from seperate blogs all across the web and puts them in one place. More importantly, its put them in email, so i can respond from my phone. This will get even more interesting as they integrate with facebook connect.
The only “location-based” services that I currently use. GPS enabled mobile apps aren’t far along, and don’t have the critical mass of users. When I travel, family and friends on facebook want to know where I’m going and these two sites make that easy. Tripit takes it a step further by organizing my itinerary for me.
Boxee/Apple TV
I know that AppleTV isn’t a webapp, but these two services combined showed me (or rather helped me prove to my roomates) that cable TV is no longer a requirement. Theres a crticial mass of on demand entertainment via iTunes and Boxee to not need a hundred dollar commitment to the big cable providers.
From the consumers perspective GetSatisfaction aggregates tech support and company contact all into one easy to find location, with one login. As this post shows, I use a lot of webapps, and eventually have questions for the companies. Most have terrible forums that are inactive and require seperate logins, and frequent followups to see if your questions have been answered. Do us a favor, get on GetSatisfaction, we’ll like you more.
I hate evite.com. Anyvite lets me avoid using evite.com, its easy to use, and it looks good. Strike up another good app for ycombinator! Unlike other invite systems, I actually get RSVPs to my events, and people use the comments.
I discoverd and bought more tickets to shows this year through Tourfilter thatn through personal recommendations, last.fm, and ticket master emails combined. Yeah a lot more people are doing it now, but these guys made my life easy, and they got me to buy a lot of tickets, thats a big success for a webapp.
I don’t do graphics work enough to need photoshop on my machine, plus its expensive. There are tons of simple web-based photo editing sites out there, but this is the only one I kept coming back to after I found out about it. Its the only one I needed because it did everything.
Highrise became a big-small contender in the CRM space this year by adding Deal tracking and full data export. Not to mention, no CRM comes close to making it this easy to keep track of your contacts in detail. After falling off the wagon with Salesforce (multiple times), SugarCRM, and PipelineDeals, Highrise is the only one that became critical to my day-to-day activites at work. Though its not quite ready for a full sales team because the lack of personal views on the activity dashboard and in the contacts.
My name is Evan Bartlett, and I'm all about connecting people and finding better ways to do things. Every day life should be approached with the eye of an entreprenuer, so here's where I'll hash out my ideas on the intersection of sales, community, and product!
