How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that’s what we’re trying to do these days – but all these new applications and services don’t have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember.
Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you’ll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.
Some of Our Favorites
AideRSS plus Snacker
RSS news ticker Snackr was an app that people either loved or hated when we first wrote about it here. The attractive Adobe AIR interface is now even more compelling now that you can sync it with your Google Reader account (as of last week). One of the best uses we’ve found for this ever-flowing stream of news though has been to fill it up with “best of” feeds from AideRSS. AideRSS is an app we’ve written about over and over again here because it’s just so darned useful and cool.
Put the two together though and you’ve got a stream of just the breakout hits from high traffic feeds. We enjoy and recommend reading the top stories on topics like the semantic web, mobile and recommendation technology through Snackr – but we’re sure you can build your own easily.
Ma.gnolia (or Del.icio.us) plus Feed.Informer
You can do a whole lot of different things with social bookmarking tools like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us, probably including some things most readers here aren’t familiar with. One of our favorite things though is to pick a particular tag from your account and run the RSS feed from that tag through a handy little service called Feed.informer.
You can display any amount of the feed on a web page with just a few lines of embed code, including the “notes” field for your tag as editorial or summary information. The result is a little news section for your website, powered by your social bookmarking tool. It’s a great way to continue sharing found items online that don’t warrant an entire blog post.
FriendFeed and MuxTape plus FluidApp
We wrote here earlier this year about a fabulous mashup of mixtape service Muxtape and single-app browser creation tool for Mac called FluidApp, but it’s also really useful to combine FriendFeed and Fluid.
Most of the other standalone FriendFeed apps are hard to use (excluding the wonderful mobile app FFtoGo) but putting your friends’ feeds and conversation in a standalone browser makes it easy to follow along without losing the FF tab in your browser. FriendFeed’s auto-updating keeps the dedicated browser up to date and the FF favicon looks great in your dock.
Single app browsers fall into the “seems stupid until you try it” category, but put the right app in there and you’ll enjoy it.
Windows users can check out Bubbles, a service that was reviewed and discussed recently at Download Squad.
Facebook plus Dapper
The RSS extraction tool Dapper is really powerful, once you figure out how and why to use it. Here’s a 4 minute screencast we recorded about how to use Dapper but the sky’s the limit with what you can do with this free tool.
One of the things we’ve done with it lately is scrape birthday notifications out of Facebook. Not everyone logs into Facebook everyday, but people tend to put their real birthdays into their profiles there. It’s really nice to get those birthday notifications by RSS in another setting that you spend time in more regularly. Step by step instructions for doing so are available here.
Friends of RWW
We asked around and got some input from friends about what apps they like to use together. The responses ranged from combinations aimed to increase productivity to making the most of music listening. Here are some of our favorites.
Local Portland tech blogger Rick Turoczy says he likes to use Twitter search (formerly Summize), combined with Yahoo! Pipes and RSS to SMS service Pingie. We’re not sure what he does with those apps together, but the magic results in his getting a lot of industry news before mainstream media outlets do.
MicroISV consultant Bob Walsh makes the most of his fleeting thoughts by sending voice recordings through Jott over to “memory extender” EverNote and “thence to various programs on my Mac.” That’s the kind of thing many of us have probably envisioned doing, we’re glad it’s working for Bob.
Susan Kirkpatrick (no relation) is a prolific multi-media blogger. How does she do it? [I] “send a blog post with a picture attachment via email to Utterz; it posts to Flickr, WordPress, Pownce and Twitter.” We haven’t used it a lot ourselves, but Utterz is pretty impressive and we here rumors that there is even more sophisticated developments being worked on behind the scenes there, too.
Virginie De Bel Air says she likes Last.fm + SonicLiving, a service that tracks your favorites on iTunes, Last.fm or Pandora and notifies you when those bands are coming to perform in your area. Utilitarian and rock and roll! We hadn’t seen SonicLiving before.
Security and IT exec Greg Hughes likes to let his hair down and shout Shazam! sometimes. Specifically, Hughes says he finds himself using the Shazam music identification app to identify a song he hears and then Pandora to discover more that’s related. All on the iPhone, too.
What About You?
What are your favorite apps to use together? There are so many new apps that launch everyday, we can’t imagine the infinite permutations that users could come up with. Putting together multiple apps usually implies though that you’re fairly comfortable with one or both of them, that they are equipped to live as something other than a walled garden and that each has stood enough of a test for users to believe they are stable enough to smoosh together.
Productivity? Fun? A combination of both, perhaps? We’d love to know what your favorite apps are to run together.
Photo: “Web 2.0 Crawl Yahoo Brickhouse: Nate Westheimer of BricaBox, Dave McClure, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme” by Brian Solis. Just imagine how great it would be if these app guys worked together!
