10 Must Have Web2.0 Services! (And 100+ More)

I think a lot of people are waking up and realizing the internet isn’t a joke. At least it’s not anymore. Create a useful tool or web product and people will be handing over their credit cards faster than you can say e-commerce. You can make a living on the internet, spread a message, find your future spouse, raise 4.2 million dollars worth of presidential campaign money in 24 hours, and stay updated with current events to the second.

With recent phenomena like Ron Paul raising 4.2 millions of dollars in a 24 hour period (that’s approximately 3 thousand dollars donated every second) and the plentyoffish.com creator making millions of dollars a year from internet advertising, everyone (even Hillary Clinton) is waking up and smelling the potential! Too bad Hillary’s party didn’t do their research on YouTube before posting a campaign video for internet enthusiasts without watching it first! Using the internet and social networking as leverage to spread your message is becoming a powerful tool in your company’s arsenal. Growth can spread more rapidly with the viral marketing effect and travel far and fast without the cost of using the traditional mass media.

What all of this means is, if you want to get your company or your name out there, you need to get started with social networking and using web2.0 services. Internet Marketing geniuses like Ed Dale and Brad Fallon are teaching everyone the importance of web2.0 with free courses like Thirty Day Challenge and paid programs like StomperNet. Joel Comm found the Next Internet Millionaire by creating the first internet marketing reality TV show (like an online version of the Apprentice). RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your message over video, audio, or text. In combination, these tools can accelerate the process of establishing yourself and they can give you significant amounts of traffic, allowing you to use that traffic and convert your visitors into buying your products!

To begin establishing your online presence, you need to start signing up on social networks. Like investing, diversifying your name and spreading it in as many places possible is a good ingredient to becoming established and driving people to your website. Services like Digg can send massive surges of traffic to your website (sometimes enough to crash your server!), while del.icio.us and stumbleupon can deliver loads of balanced traffic over a long time period. This helps people recognize your name and deliver targeted traffic. Below is the list of bare essentials with bunch of extras (over 100 in the lists), and aggregating services to help you keep track of them all.

The Essentials

1. Digg - Find great articles here. The community decides what stories make it to the front page of the website by digging (voting for) or burying (voting down) stories. If one of your blog articles makes it to the front page, you’ll see huge spikes in your traffic. Just make sure your server can handle the load from thousands of people visiting your website at the same time. Sorry, that means paying more than $2.99 for hosting!
2. del.icio.us - The original social bookmarking site. You bookmark pages you like with a description and list of relevant tags you create. Then you can network with people who have similar interests as you to share and exchange links that interest you. If you use this service a lot, you can even get the RSS feed for your newly bookmarked sites and put your recent bookmarks on your blog!
3. Technorati - The original blog aggregating service that allows you to syndicate your blog articles. This site takes all of the blogs on the internet, crawls them regularly, and feeds them to you on their site. It keeps account of who’s talking about who and gives sites an authority ranking based on the number of people talking about that blog on their own blogs. This is a great way to discover other bloggers with your interests and syndicate your own articles for everyone else to read.
4. BlogRush - A new, innovative way to rush people to your blog by syndicating your article headlines on other blogger’s sites. You get a widget that you put on your site and you get credits based on your amount of traffic, referral traffic, and other various variables. It’s a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site from other bloggers’ websites. In a way, it’s like free advertising that leverages your existing traffic to get ad space on other websites.
5. Twitter - A microblog even more informal than the Tumblr microblog, Twitter allows you to blog about everything you do. You can blog from your phone, house, car, airplane, taxi cab, movie theater…you get the point. You are limited to 140 characters per entry, and you just tell Twitter what you are up to at the moment. You can make friends and follow them to see what everyone’s up to at the moment. It’s strangely addicting, check it out!
6. Facebook - Many people think of Facebook as a time-wasting website you visit to keep up with your friends. While Facebook is great for keeping up with old friends, they are inventing new ways to get your business name out in the world using a popular social networking platform. Now you can develop software products purely for Facebook and even start making money from your facebook application!
7. StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon is an addicting service to find interesting and entertaining articles, videos, and photos on the internet. StumbleUpon is different because you are directed to different websites randomly rather than you choosing where you navigate. Of course, with SU comes a profile page where you can add friends and share links.
8. YouTube - It’s a lot easier to watch a video on something rather than reading a long article about it. That’s why video and audio will be a main ingredient to internet marketing in 2008. If you aren’t afraid to start video blogging or creating entertaining or educational videos, you should start. You can reach millions of people in days with this new platform and it’s a fun community to discover and learn through video.
9. A Social Network/Community of your choice. I am a member of the CodeIgniter forums for PHP/MySQL programming that uses their MVC php framework and I try to participate in there when I have time. I also always find awesome new stuff in different niche interests at 9rules.
10. An Aggregating Service - There are so many social networking, bookmarking, and article websites now that it’s really hard to keep track of it all. The popular ones that I use are MyBlogLog, Lijit, and FriendFeed. FriendFeed, for example takes the RSS feeds from all of the popular services like Digg, delicious, twitter, and youtube, and makes a news feed similar to the facebook feed. It’s a good way to have one RSS feed for everything you do online instead of one feed for each individual service. MyBlogLog takes your blog and social bookmarking services and makes a community out of your own personal internet presence. You can join communities that you like and network with other bloggers. Lijit does something similar and they both provide a widget for your blog that helps keep traffic stats from other community members.

Blog Platforms/Hosts:

1. Aeonity
2. Blog
3. Blogates
4. Blogetery
5. Blogger - Google’s blogging platform. There are many built in widgets but not much flexibility.
   
6. Blogr
7. Blogsome
8. Blogster
9. Bravenet.com/webtools/journal
10. Clearblogs
11. Easyjournal
12. eHow
13. Googlepages
14. Hubpages
15. Iseekblog
16. Myspace
17. Sampa
18. Squarespace
19. Thoughts
20. pbwiki
21. Wikispaces
22. Squidoo - A cool platform to create pages about anything you’re an expert at.
23. Stikipad
24. Tumblr - An awesome personal blog platform that Google likes.
    
25. Typekey
26. Livejournal
27. Socialogs
28. Wordpress - A great blog platform that BizWidgets is using until our own blog platform is released

Social Bookmarking and Submission Sites (like del.icio.us):

1. Sphinn - If you add a bookmark button on your blog besides digg and delicious, sphinn is also a good one.
   
2. Google Bookmarks
3. Furl.net
4. Diigo
5. Wirefan
6. Bibsonomy
7. Blinklist
8. Blogmemes.net
9. Bluedot.us
10. Myjeeves.ask.com
11. Simpy
12. Spurl.net
13. Netvouz
14. Folkd
15. Blinkbits
16. Bmaccess.net
17. Shadows
18. Smarking
19. Blogmarks.net
20. Plugim
21. Linkagogo
22. Mister-wong.de
23. Sk-rt.com
24. Webride.org
25. Connotea.org
26. Kick.ie
27. Thoof.com
28. Corank.com
29. Megite.com/discover
30. Metalz.info
31. Emodrama
32. Musigg.org
33. Screamfeed
34. Yample
35. swik.net
36. Backflip
37. Dotnetkicks
38. Jumptags
39. Fark
40. De.lirio.us
41. Explode
42. Relevantlogs
43. SocialPoster - An aggregating service so you can post to tons of bookmarking sites in one trip
44. SocialMarker - Another aggregating service so you can post to tons of bookmarking sites in one trip

News Article Websites (like Digg):

1. Upcoming
2. Propeller
3. Reddit
4. Indianpad
5. Newsvine
6. Slashdot.org
7. EZineArticles - Submit articles and get traffic to your own site

Social Networking and Community Websites:

1. Google Groups
2. LinkedIn - A professional networking service like Facebook, except for business professionals.
3. Flickr - a cool photo sharing community site
4. Last.fm - A music community that gives your iTunes music a feed that is syndicated on last.fm’s website.
   
5. Bebo
6. Friendster
7. Google Calendar
8. Jaiku - A microblog like twitter.
   
9. Pownce - Another microblog like twitter.
10. Jumpcut
11. MySpace
12. Plaxo
13. Metacafe - Video sharing community like YouTube but with less restrictions and ability to monetize.
14. Bumpzee
15. Orkut

Cool Extras:

1. eBay
2. Amazon
3. Alexa - A Traffic Ranking/Analysis website. Very cool.
   
4. Wikipedia - If you can find relevant articles to your blog or pages, Wikipedia articles have high page rank and can deliver traffic, just make sure your site is relevant before you add a link!
5. RSS Feeds - Use these to keep up with people and their blogs! Almost everything has an RSS feed you can subscribe to now.
6. Netflix
7. OpenID - Use one username and password for everything.
8. Second Life - A game where you have a second life. It’s truly changing how games work and you can actually make real money in this game.
   
9. Shelfari
10. Textamerica
11. The DJ List
12. Amazon UnSpun - A list ranking service.
    
13. Squidoo Plexodex - Another list ranking service.
    
14. 30 Boxes
15. Wakoopa
16. Wink
17. Zorpia
18. Taggly
19. Teenwag
20. Lipstick
21. Rawsugar
22. Hi5

Wow, that was tedious creating all the hyperlinks. I know I probably left a lot of cool services out, so feel free to add services you enjoy in a comment below.

Try to use the same username on all of the services. This can help search engines know that the username is really you. Also, add avatars, fill out personal information, post pictures, and add friends! This will help expand your online presence and people will feel more welcomed at your profile pages. They will be more likely to add you as a friend and you will stand out from other users who don’t have profile pictures or information attached to your username’s profile.

Also, make sure you have a tracking service like Google Analytics or StatCounter so you can keep track of what parts of your website that your visitors like, and you can figure out what’s bringing traffic to your blog and what’s not.