April 17th, 2008
The best Facebook apps for business and career enhancement
This is a guest post by Aseem Kishore, a technology enthusiast and lead blogger for Online-Tech-Tips.
Even though most people, including myself, use Facebook to connect with friends, family and colleagues, Facebook can also help you become more productive. Yes it’s true, Facebook does not necessarily have to be considered a time sinker. With the thousands of Facebook Apps out there, many of which are useless, there are a few shiny gems that can help you turn Facebook into a super-charged personal assistant.
Keep reading to find out the best apps out there to help you be more productive in your business or career.
Office/Document Writing Related
If you haven’t heard of Zoho, it’s an online office suite on steroids. It has everything you need from an online spreadsheet, presentation, and document program to a full database and form creator. Using the Zoho Facebook app, you can access all of your Zoho documents from within Facebook and also easily share and collaborate on files with your network of friends or colleagues.
Slates is a fabulous tool for creating rich media content quickly. Slates are a new way for creating and editing web pages and documents like blogs, resumes, news stories, press releases, books and papers. You can even start a wiki. You can organize slates by chapter or topic and can edit them using their WYSIWYG editor. Slates even records previous versions of your documents and allows your friends to edit and collaborate on slates.
Are you one of those people who has a hundred sticky notes stuck to your computer at the office? Maybe you should think about using a list management application. My List is a great Facebook app for creating any kind of list you can think of: to-do lists, best movies you’ve seen, things you want to buy, a grocery list, party invite lists, and whatever else! Then you can share your list with everyone you know and allow them to add or edit items.
If you create lots of presentations, then you can use SlideShare to share your presentations and slideshows with friends and colleagues. SlideShare supports many formats including PowerPoint (ppt, pps), Open Office (odp), and PDF. If you use Keynote on Mac, you can save the presentation in PDF format and upload. The presentations can be tagged, commented, rated, embedded into blogs, and downloaded. You can also search SlideShare and find hundreds of presentations from noted speakers and other professionals.
To Do List is another very simple, yet useful Facebook application for managing tasks and lists. You can add a new todo by just typing into the input box and complete a to-do by checking off the box next to it. The program has other features for power users such as the ability to color code your to-dos or add friends to the to-do. You can have private and public lists, which will show up in your profile. You can also re-order the items in your to-do list by dragging and dropping.
TooDooz Project Management
Toodooz is an online project management Facebook app that helps you coordinate, prioritize, and manage projects. You can create projects, invite friends to join, create milestones, track project progress, assign tasks, upload files and link them to tasks, post discussions within projects, set permissions, view overall project summary on a dashboard, and more.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
