The future is now. Sometimes, we don’t look outside our little angle of it, and that means we miss some possibilities. Other times, we realize something’s out there and we have part of the puzzle, but we’ll catch a different view that gives us even more. I’ve compiled a list of 100 possibilities and things happening out there on the Internet that might be of interest to you. You may have even more to add. Please do.
57 Internet Possibilities to Investigate
Streams of Information
- Think about FriendFeed as your own personal newsroom or communications center.
- Revisit Reddit as a news source, and also as a roll-your-own tool for information clustering.
- Use Alltop as an idea-starter, or as competitive analysis of content spaces.
- Cook up six powerful searches on Twitter Search and add those RSS outputs to your feed reader.
- Visit Slideshare weekly and search for new presentations to learn from.
- Use YouTube as a source for lectures and learning. Use Magnify as a curation tool.
- Rediscover what’s interesting in Delicious/Popular. Go back and find tags that matter more to you.
- Reconsider your current blog reading list. Do some quick math. If it is more than 60% related to your industry, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Find the outliers.
- Pick at least one news source from outside your country to monitor information from a different perspective. One of my sources is The Guardian.
- Subscribe to at least one blog with a strong opposing view. Learn from it. Learn where your position is different. Learn how they say what they say successfully. Discover what has impact and what doesn’t.
Web-Based Work
Quickly, what I mean by this is that you might consider looking for web-based equivalents to most of your applications, or web-desktop hybrids. Here’s a list of applications for your consideration, and how they might fit into your work flow. In almost all cases, the apps mentioned work well on both Mac and PC.
- Notes and Storage – Evernote
- Project Management – Pelotonics or BaseCamp, maybe Staction. (Any others you recommend?)
- Sales CRM – Pipeline Deals (evaluating it now). Contact management – Batchblue.
- Invoicing – Freshbooks
- Scheduling – Google Calendar
- Brief Communications – Tweetdeck for Twitter. If you haven’t tried it, do it. (Requires Adobe Air.)
- Online documents, spreadsheets, etc – Zoho or Google Docs.
- Online presentation management – SlideRocket (or if that scares you, Zoho Show).
- Info storage (wiki) – PBWiki.
- Instant messaging – Skype (video, chat, audio), Trillian for PC, or Adium for Mac.
The Video Thing
- Hulu is good. So is Fancast. The new stuff on Fancast is cool. The OLD stuff is amazing. (**Update: Embeds are there. D’oh!)
- If you’re making and uploading videos and not using TubeMogul, why not?
- Most responsive to their community – Blip.tv.
- If you’re not rocking the Flip MinoHD to make portable video easy, why not?
- Devices like Panasonic’s new line of Viera TVs (not out yet) and the Samsung LN52A650 are not just TVs. They do Internet stuff, and Panasonic’s will offer direct Video On Demand service to Amazon Video.
- If you’re looking for Netflix instead, check out the Roku box, or check out Boxee.
- Video as marketing tool is hot again. Check out PermissionTV, for example. Look past the entertainment angle a moment. See?
- Video meets mobile phone? News says Sling has a SlingPlayer Mobile expansion coming for other networks shortly.
- I believe (prediction alert) that the 2009 US switch to all digital signals will also shepherd in a huge side-effect shift of high speed Internet adoption. Some of this will be for video.
- Need to prove something about all this to the boss? Your research paper.
Small and Local
- Think about EveryBlock. Is there a model there for you? Should you consider your local web presence?
- Have you looked at Google results lately, if you ask about a location? There’s room for reviews and other information. There are easy tools to submit more search results. What does that mean to you?
- On a different tack, Google can’t own local, because it doesn’t scale well. What can you do in helping local information and resources flourish? Is there business in that for you?
- Is your organization growing too large? Have you considered the pirate ship strategy?
- Have you thought about small communications? What about tools like SocialCast?
- What does location mean on platforms like Facebook? It serves local ads well. What else?
- Have you built a small, powerful network for your needs?
- Have you built a group around your interests like the So Cal Action Sports Network did?
- What could Flickr be doing for you? Is there value in coming up with projects that draw attention to your efforts?
- Are you adding your local events to Upcoming and Eventful?
Mobile Applications
- Explore iPhone apps, even if you don’t have an iPhone. There are ideas there.
- Keep your eye on BrightKite. It’s a key to the annotated world.
- Mobile audio is a useful communications tool. Have you tried Utterli? (disclosure: I’m an advisor.)
- Microcontent is really here. Seen Jesus and Vishnu on Christmas Eve? (YouTube video. Might be offensive on religious grounds.) That’s microcontent. Verizon’s V-Cast is the old thinking, but not far off.
- If you’re not thinking about games, do. See things like Gameloft and think about the value of the mobile casual games market.
- Have you seen and thought about Modu? It’s hot. The concept is hot. Can you leapfrog anything with that concept?
- You think computer viruses are nasty? What about phone viruses?
- If snaptell doesn’t blow your mind, why not?
- There is more than beer money to be had in developing applications for mobile devices these days. And there is more exposure to be had with that market.
- When I say mobile, you think “phone.” Stop. Nike+ is a mobile device. So’s your GPS. So, technically, is a Chumby.
Money
- Banking on the net is here. Have you tried Mint? Also, if you haven’t broken down and done it, get a PayPal account. Tie it to a small checkings account with limited funds if you want.
- If you’re hoping to help a charity, try a ChipIn widget to help raise funds. It shows progress nicely.
- Timing is funny. Christopher S. Penn wrote about money as trust as I was compiling this list. Worth checking out.
- You should be eagerly awaiting Chris Anderson’s Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price
- Explore the Freemium model. See if it makes sense.
- Affiliate marketing will be a $13 Billion dollar market in 2009. Check it out. (I’m keynoting Affiliate Summit West this fall in New York.)
- Have you seen StockTwits? Real time stock talk.
That’s all I’ve got. Here’s hoping we get tons of interesting add-on links and ideas on the comments. Oh, don’t forget that comments with URLs often get flagged as spam. Give me a little while to fish you out.
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