Products I loved in 2009

As I look back on 2009 I’m surprised how, in a year of incredible innovation digitally, I actually found myself using fewer technology products – but using those few intensely.  These are the products that I really dug into in 2009 and feel like add great benefit to my life.

EVERNOTE: An amazing note-taking application. I run it on my Mac and iPhone and the syncing is flawless.  You can take pictures, jot notes or leave voice notes. Hoping in 2010 that they improve the ability to share folders/notes with other Evernote users, but hard to complain about this application other than that.

FEEDLY: A few years back I made the switch over to Google Reader as my preferred RSS reader (thanks to @interpolate for pushing me to do that).  This past year I found Feedly, which takes your Google Reader account and creates a presentation layer to it that drastically improves the experience.  As an example, here’s a screen shot of my Feedly page and my Google Reader page, so you can see the difference.

TWEETIE: The gold standard IMHO for tweeting, both on the Mac and the iPhone.  I also use HootSuite depending on my mood, but primarily default to Tweetie as the UI is perfect.

GOOGLE WAVE: For collaboration purposes this tool, though still in beta and the UI could use some serious work, is the best tool going.  For brainstorming with a large group there’s nothing better.

FRIENDFEED: Although its been gobbled up and probably will be killed off soon, for me its the ultimate content aggregator (my content).  I’m posting soon on the way I have my Lifestream set up and will explain how I use Friendfeed to facilitate that.

GOOGLE CHROME: I wanted so badly to stay mad at Google for waiting so long to make Chrome available on the Mac, but I’ve been using it for a few months and love it.  Best browser going, no doubt.  Only reason I still use Firefox is because Feedly runs on it and Mac Chrome won’t run it…yet.

DROP7: This is an iPhone app that I can’t stop playing and I’m like six months in.  Any other Drop7 addicts out there?  Personal best on the “Hardcore” level is 544,935. No idea if that’s good or not but nevertheless, I’m addicted.

And then there are things I’m playing with that have potential, but I’m not ready to vouch for them (though they’re on my iPhone’s first page of apps so that says something I suppose).

TEUXDEUX: Super simple, no frills to-do list.  Been using it for a few weeks, love the simplicity.  If they don’t get an iPhone app soon though I’ll have to try something else.  I prefer it to Remember the Milk, for instance.

FOURSQUARE, GOWALLA, WHRRL: Still trying to figure out which of these “check-in” apps I like the best.  Check that, I actually like Whrrl the best but more of my friends seem to be on Foursquare, so if the adoption doesn’t take with Whrrl I might have to focus my efforts on Foursquare exclusively.  Oh, you might be wondering why Loopt isn’t here.  I played with it for a while but really disliked the service entirely, so I dropped it. @scobleizer disagrees with me that Whrrl is the best of them, so we’ll see which wins in the long run.

SCRIVENER: This one is something I’m just now playing with. It’s blog writing software so you can write your content offline and in an organized manner and then upload to your blog.  Writing this post on it actually.  Recommended by @atlantajones.

Anything you’re using that you think I should check out?