We’re always looking for new tools, techniques and ideas to share with the BLOOM community. If you know of new applications or innovative methods that might be helpful – or just plain cool – please let us know so we can spread the word.
Social Media Tools
As social media becomes integrated into more and more of our daily lives, powerful new web and mobile applications have arrived to help us manage the avalanche of both incoming and outgoing information. Among the most popular are Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Seesmic.
Tweetdeck (which was purchased by Twitter on May 2, 2011 for $40-$50 million) allows users to manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace accounts all at once, saving time and resources. TweetDeck allows users to:
- Update Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts
- Retweet others’ Tweets
- Manage conversations with @replies and direct messages
- Record, share and watch video clips, and view YouTube videos within TweetDeck
- Manage multiple Twitter accounts
- See what’s hot with local trends and Twitscoop
- Add, create and manage Twitter Lists
- Follow topics in real-time with saved searches, editable from within the column
- Organize and update Facebook, including multiple Facebook Pages
- Preview short URLs from the TweetDeck dashboard
- View LinkedIn for professional contacts
- See who’s following you
- Locate your friends
- Avoid Twitter spam
Hootsuite is a web-based social media communications dashboard often used for online brand management. It provides a central location for all social media activity in one spot. It enables you to stage content for the future with a simple scheduling tool, and to publish to websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, and WordPress. HootSuite users can manage followers, schedule tweets, monitor Facebook, create streams for keywords and twitter lists, view their home feed, view their mentions and direct messages all at the same time. Hootsuite offers a robust analytics tool and its own Ow.ly URL shortening tool. For businesses conducting social media marketing campaigns, an application like Hootsuite is a must.
Seesmic’s Twitter client capabilities are separated into three sections: web, mobile and desktop. Enables organizing companies and individuals (customers?) into groups. The Seesmic directory organizes posts by topic (i.e. news, sports, entertainment, etc.). Seesmic allows users to view photos within posts, and entire Facebook albums without ever leaving the main Seesmic dashboard. Seesmic also allows users to shorten URLs and offers automatic translation in 35 languages. The Seesmic mobile suite provides Twitter management users with access to their favorite social networks and instant news and entertainment updates from mobile devices.
Design Tools
Adobe’s free Kuler application generates color themes that designers can use to experiment with a myriad of color palettes. You can use color extraction tools to generate color themes from an image, or browse thousands of themes created by the Kuler community. Try it… it’s fun!
Another color theme site is COLOURLovers, a popular online design community.
Project Management Tools
Effective project management tools can save time and resources, i.e. money, and many are now available at no or minimal cost. Here are six project management applications that we’ve taken a look at. We haven’t yet had extensive experience with all of them, so please let us know if you run across bugs or limitations.
Jxproject is a free project management application that enables online project sharing. It supports Linux, Windows, Solaris and even Mac OS. All major features are available in the free version, but a premium upgrade is available for $20.00
Dotproject is an open source project management application, which means there is no company support available. The application has been developed by a loose-knit group of programming professionals, and offers support forums that discuss bugs, features and other issues.
Ganttproject is a free, easy-to-use, open source project scheduling and management tool. The application runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS, and allows for the allocation of personnel and other resources to specific managers. The Ganttproject website offers a slide show tutorial.
TaskJuggler is an another effective and powerful open source project management application. The program helps to manage costs, tasks, and resources, and offers a nifty report tracking system. TaskJuggler offers some bells and whistles, including time zone change, csv export, profit/loss analysis support, and more.
Clockingit is a free, hosted, project management application that tracks time spent on specific aspects of projects. It offers interactive Gantt chart scheduling and flexible reporting. Clockingit offers easy communication via email, rss and iCal, and is available in 14 languages.
Project HQ is an open source collaborative project management tool. The application offers documentation as well as community forums.
Similar Web Applications
