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Get social on your desktop

Cyril Roger

Cyril Roger

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web-20.jpgSharing is what the web is all about these days. Innumerable web sites have popped up that allow you to connect with other people and share photos, videos or just daily chatter. Yet you can also find a number of “traditional” applications that let you engage with other users from the comforts of your desktop that can provide real value.

If you’re a music lover, the Last.fm player is an excellent way of discovering new musical genres and artists. You can also make new friends based on similar tastes and create groups based on artists and the tunes that get you going. All of this leads to a steady stream of music that becomes more refined to your personal taste, the more you participate.

Chat clients were probably one of the first tools developed to connect users. While most people will stick to their preferred client and close group of friends, there are some compelling alternatives to engage with new people. Meetro is a bit diffferent from typical IMs because it connects people close to each other geographically. Great to hook up on a date or clinch business deals, Meetro is fastly building a dedicated community. imeem is another alternative messenger that caters to the social crowd. Like MySpace, this chat client can become an effective tool for aspiring artists. You can share tracks and videos, find new blogs and chat with your fans and friends.

But at the end of the day, your trusty browser will always unlock the most social content that the Internet has to offer. Flock is built on the same engine as Firefox and it allows you to quickly post to your blog, send photos to your Flickr account and tag favorite sites for you to share with friends. If you’re feeling slightly anti-social, you can stick with plain old Firefox and install the excellent del.icio.us Bookmarks extension. If you haven’t heard of it yet, del.icio.us, is a social bookmarking site where you can share links with the community and organize them by tags, which is great way to keep track of where you’ve been and discover new corners of the Net. You should also add the Firefox StumbleUpon extension, an original way of sharing your bookmarks with the community and browsing what other users have uncovered on the web.

Cyril Roger

Cyril Roger

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