Which web sites do you really need? I mean, REALLY need....

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Every day in the PlusNet office somebody will post a “Have you seen this great website?” forum post, a “How cool is this?” message will go around or you’ll see a Twit from a friend claiming that this new site makes the whole Internet as we knew it redundant. I’m sure you’ve been there yourself. Yes, there are a million and one interesting/cool/impressive things floating around on the Internet, but how many of these sites do you personally need? Do you have particular web-sites and web-tools that are so useful that they have actually become an integral part of your life, or as cool as something may be, is it really just time-wasting flotsam? Personally, I really couldn’t do without the trusty old HSBC Internet banking website. I know it hasn’t really been upgraded for 6 or 7 years, but who cares? It tells me how much money I have (or otherwise) and I can pay my credit card bill without having to go through the pain of an automated phone system or posting a cheque in the mail. I find that iGoogle is extremely useful; it aggregates the RSS feeds from all the news sites that I read, and provides me with rudimentary ToDo List functionality and access to all my bookmarks, on whichever of the 3 devices I access the web on. Apart from that, what else is there that I really need? Yes, Facebook is useful when planning my social life and seeing what my friends are up to, Flickr is useful for sharing my photos with family and friends (and also a useful backup of many years worth of photos), and apart from that, cool does not seem to equal necessary. Twitter, Plaxo and Pownce don’t really do anything for me, do they you? Google Grand Central may be of use when they open up the service to the UK, but for now I’ll stick with Skype on my laptop and Fring on my phone. I don’t really watch a lot of TV due to being too busy with other things, so BBC iPlayer isn’t something that I need. I’ll wait for the day when TV stations decide to provide 1 minute summaries of their programming in the style of ZeroPunctuation - much more efficient... So, I suppose that all sounds a bit like Mr Grumpy, but if I don’t need something then I’m not going to waste my time on it. How about you the PlusNet Community Site reader, what web-sites and web-tool do you really rely on as part of your life? Matt Grest Head of Future Development PlusNet