After a long break (ah.. Twitter is so much easier to maintain than a blog...), a quick post on a few web services I had to use recently in my job, some of which I found especially great, others I found, well, crappy (you will notice that the range of application is extremely wide, from Twitter apps to online education).
Great ones :
Insanely simple to implement, to get live screencasts on what users do on your website - plus, it's free (at least the basic version). I have also heard of Usertesting, but did not try it yet.
Great idea (you submit your URL in 3 clicks, and receive feedbacks on your website within 1 day - you pay a per feedback fee), great website, and it works ! The content / stickiness of the feedbacks is not alway outstanding, but for the cost it is great value.
Or how to handle multiple Twitter accounts, and switch easily between your personal and professional ones. Online (unlike Tweetdeck), easy to use, well done, with basic but complete features (incl. stats on your clicks).
This is actually my favorite; crazy simple screencasts : create demo videos of your website online, in a few clicks. It KILLS all the other complicated desktop screencasts softwares (Camtasia, etc), plus... it is FREE (why pay XX hundred bucks for a software that you will take more time to understand than to use ?).
I wonder however how they will maintain the service for free (all the videos uploaded must cost a hell lot in bandwidth & hardware).
I just had a quick glance at this one, created by 2 french guys : an online education platform. While I don't really need it for my job, I have been impressed by the technology they have pulled off - the online study board, in Flex, is impressive.
Crappy ones :
On this one I am trying for 3 weeks to activate my account; there was a mess up with my free trial account, which resulted in me, not being able to actually use the service at all. And it took 5 days to come back to me after I mentionned it... The problem being, I could not find another web-based service for phone calls forwarding.
I am being harsh - but honestly, it's not great, is it ? I tried to create a professional looking social network using their platform, but a lot of features are missing, I got a few bugs, Google does not like how they hande 404 errors and can not add my network to Webmaster tools... I was therefore a bit disappointed, considering the great success Ning has.
Well, tried it - but it simply did not work (and I hate it when the support is a users-managed forum, where you can't find anything useful). While Userfly takes 15 minutes to implement, I have spent a few hours trying to make this other "live ergonomics survey" service work, in vain. So we removed it.
Benefits of the doubt :
I have been using Skype 4 for about 2 weeks now, getting used to it; I get the whole picture of putting the conversations in the center of the application - but I thought the changes made were a bit too disruptive. For me, it was basically almost like learning to use a new software.
As for Typepad new platform, I just got a quick taste today : it actually looks pretty good, although I had some performance issues with it, and switched back to the current version.
And that's my list of the day !
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