3 Awesome Sites That I Use Everyday (besides the obvious)

Thought I would take time to share three websites that I use on a daily basis.  I intend to make a case why you should too.

The first one I have spoken of before:

I mentioned this in a previous post, but I want to mention it again.  This site lets you update an endless array of social media sites at once.  People have told me before they think it is neat that my myspace and facebook statuses match my twitter tweets.  That’s all thanks to ping.fm.  With google talk integration and mobile capability, I love to ping all the time.  

 

 

Mahalo is one of those great sites that you could be on for hours.  It bills itself as human powered search, and I guess I see that.  But the beauty of mahalo is that it is a great site to keep up with current events.  You know how you will be walking past a TV and you will hear someone say something like “And that’s the latest on the Obama water bed scandal”… and you think to yourself.. “What??!?”

Well mahalo surely has a page devoted to the obama water bed scandal, explaining it with basic facts and relevent links.

In addition to that, they also have a daily show (called mahalo daily) that is a fun watch.  

 

Lastly, my current favorite is a site that we at Slamwire/Pupilcity have partnered with:  

Tokbox has completely revolutionalized the way we communicate at AJU and at Pupilcity.  It is a super simple, free website that allows you to chat, video mail, and conference… all using webcams.  

Webcams are one of those things that have been around forever, and you have always thought, “this is going to be the future of the web.”  But only until recently have high speed internet connections become common enough to support wide spread, practical use.  They have been around a little while, but they seem to really be gaining steam.  If you have a webcam, visit www.tokbox.com/jarrod5 to call me and see how awesome this site is.  You don’t even have to sign up to call.  Just visit my page and hit the call button.  Seriously, I don’t want to AIM, googletalk, or anything else again.  Tokbox blows them all away.

 

Ok, so, Ping.fm is what I have been waiting for someone to create

So I recently noticed a button on all mashable posts that said “ping”. Thinking this was a new fangled way to facilitate a trackback, I clicked it. It brought me to a site called ping.fm. Intrigued, I began to look into it and I realized it was what I have been saying I want for months now: a site that allows you to update your facebook status, myspace status, and twitter, all at once. I am sure that myspace only recently opening of their network is the reason no one has done this before. That being said, I absolutely love this service.

Beforehand, I had setup twitter to update my facebook status, which worked ok, but not as widely and I wanted it to. Ping.fm even has a google gadget and a AIM and Google talk plug in, so I can update right from there. Since I have a blackberry with google talk installed on it, I can update my statuses, wherever I may be. Is that geeky? Yes. Do I care? Nope. It’s too cool to not do.

I have always said that the technology that truly revolutionizes our life is the one that blurs the line between offline and online living. I have sat in my favorite watering holes and twittered what awesome new craft beer I was having. I have updated my facebook status as I went sightseeing around Hollywood, intentionally making my fiance jealous (she was at work, I was supposed to be at a business meeting… see me rubbing it in here, here, and here.). The point being, technology helped augment something in my offline life. Those are the type of things that take us to the next level. I feel like ping.fm fits that description.

FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO SIGN UP:

go to ping.fm and signup using “landofping” as the code to get in the beta…