Online bookkeeping/accounting programs are a dime a dozen, but Kashflow has a nice collection of features that makes it stand out from the crowd.  It does everything you’d want an accounting program to do: track customers, create quotes and turn them into invoices, track payments, and generate reports.

Invoices are customizable-you can change colors, layout and upload your logo.  Kashflow also offers spiffy extras like Paypal integration, credit card processing (as long as you have an account with ProTX or Secure Hosting to process payments), and, for an additional fee, Paypal imports. Unlike some other accounting services that offer Paypal imports, Kashflow lets you confirm which items you want to bring over-handy if you use PayPal for both business (receiving payments) and personal use (buying stuff on Ebay). And yes, Virginia, you CAN import both financial data AND contacts.

Kashflow is a UK-based company and offers some UK-specific services like sales tax and VAT support. So, if you live on that side of the pond, you’ll get even more value out of it.  However, it’s an awesome accounting program no matter where you live.

Kashflow is easy to set up and intuitive to use. The company offers a 60-day free trial with no credit card information required, which reflects well on them in my opinion.  They are also conscientious about security, with two different servers located in two different areas to make sure that the service is running when you need it and your data is backed up.

What do you think of Kashflow? Are you already using an online accounting program, and if so, how does Kashflow compare?

Want to set up a personal homepage that combines all the different aspects of your online life? Flavors.me can have you up and running in about 10 minutes, for free.  This service lets you set up your own personal homepage that brings together your social networking accounts, videos, photos and blogs, all in one place.

Signing up is quick and easy-just enter your email address, choose a password and you’re good to go.  Once you have an account, write a quick paragraph about yourself and start adding the services you use. You can connect your Flavors.me page to your Twitter account, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Vimeo, Etsy, Netflix, GoodReads, Wordpress and Last.fm account. You can also enter in the RSS feed to your blog to have your  blog posts imported.

Basic services are free, but if you’re using Flavors.me as a professional homepage, you’ll want to pay $20 a year for premium service, which gets you a custom domain name, analytics and the option to add a contact form.

I know that simplicity is one of the main selling points of Flavors.me, but I still wish there  were an option to add additional text boxes, besides just the “About me” paragraph.  That’s not necessary if you’re going to use it for life-streaming purposes, but if you’re using it to attract clients it would be nice to able to let potential clients know about things like your payment policies, etc.

What do you think of Flavors.me?

TrAvid is a website that helps users arrange and publicize local meetups. The site has two separate audiences: people who just want to meet new people and socialize, and small business owners looking to promote their businesses.

Individual (non-business) users can set up a profile on TrAvid indicating where they live and what their interests are.  Then, they can either set up an event of their own or search the site for local events to participate in. Currently, most of the social events are in Vancouver, where the site’s founder lives, but that will most likely change if the site grows and gains additional members.

Small businesses can use TrAvid to set up events to promote their business. For example, if you owned a winery, you could use TrAvid to arrange and publicize a free wine-tasting for customers. You can create events very quickly, and with Facebook and Twitter integration, you can promote them via social media, too.

One issue I noticed with Twitter integration is that it appears the only way to integrate your Twitter account with your TrAvid profile is to use your Twitter account to create your profile . I initially signed up using my email address, and once I was in, I couldn’t find a way to connect my Twitter account to the account I had created.

I didn’t get to try out many of the features for small business owners because I don’t really have a small business to list, but some of them seem pretty powerful. For instance, in addition to listing your business and offering discounts through TrAvid’s directory, TrAvid will help you use Twitter and Facebook to find local people interested in whatever it is your business sells. Then, you can contact them and tell them about your promotion. TrAvid also offers tickets sales and event management services for small businesses.

TrAvid’s service is easy to use, and setting up an event is fast. However, it seems like it would become more useful to both individuals and business owners if  more people used it.

What do you think of TrAvid?

Starting a conversation between your customers/visitors is the first step to building a strong, healthy community for your business or website. A Q and A page is a great way to do that, and Q-Hub lets you set one up quickly and easily for free.

With Q-Hub, you can have a free Q and A page up in about a minute, maybe two or three minutes if you decide to customize the header colors.  You can connect your Q-Hub page to your Facebook page via Facebook Connect, and to your Twitter account. Q-Hub also offers three different easy ways to integrate your Q-Hub page with your blog or company website: a page-side tab, a widget that displays recent questions and answers, and a widget that allows users to ask a new question. All of these widgets can be customized to match your web site’s color scheme, and when you’re done you can just cut and paste the code.

The header, text color and background of the Q and A page is fairly customizable-you can choose a specific template and match the colors to your specifications.  For $20, you can run your own advertisements on your Q-hub page or make the page ad-free, and for another $20 a month you can remove all Q-Hub branding and replace it with your own.

What do you think of Q-Hub?

If you’re a freelancer or a small business owner, keeping track of invoices and payments is important.  The good news is that there is now a plethora of easy-to-use invoicing and accounting apps out there.  One of the many choices available is Invotrak.

Invotrak is a pretty standard invoicing app. It’s not a full-featured accounting app like Freshbooks, but it will help you create and send invoices and track payments. It also has a timesheet feature to make it easy for you to track time for your clients. You can choose to enter your time in manually or just punch in and out as you work.

One feature that I particularly like about Invotrak is the ability to track projects to see if you are running ahead or behind in terms of the time you’ve budgeted for them.  This is a great way to make sure that you are staying on track, so that you don’t lose money on a project or irritate your client by going over budget or over deadline.

Invotrak lets you create PDF invoices using templates-you can include your company’s logo as long as you have a paid plan. The service is priced based on how many invoices you need to send in a month- you get two per month with the free trial plan, $10 with the Basic Plan ($9 per month), 25 with the Premium plan ($18 per month)  and there is an unlimited plan that’s $45 per month.

Invotrak also integrates with Basecamp, making it easy for you to create tasks and invoices using info from your Basecamp account. Apps for the iPhone/iPod touch make it a good choice for people who spend a lot of time out of the office.

What do you use to create and track invoices? And what do you think of Invotrak?

Is keeping up with your  various social networking accounts keeping you from getting things done? Some people are great at multitasking, going from Twitter to Facebook to doing actual work and back again every half hour.

Not me. I work more efficiently when I focus on one project exclusively until it’s done.  Constantly switching tabs to check Twitter and Facebook  because I’m afraid of missing something makes me less productive.  Like a nicotine patch for social networking addicts,  Nutshell Mail monitors your social networking accounts and sends you a summary of what you missed while you were away being productive.

You can use Nutshell Mail with Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and MySpace, plus you can forward messages from secondary email accounts to your primary email account.  The service offers multiple account support, search support and   for Twitter users, and you can customize delivery times and what type of information is forwarded.

Of course, if you use Twitter for business or for networking,  you may need to at least check your @replies more frequently-after all, the whole point of Twitter is to have conversations with other people in real time. If you wait a few hours to respond to someone, they may lose interest in the conversation.

What do you think of Nutshell Mail?

Are you looking for a cheap but thoughtful gift for a friend or family member? Pixable lets you create cool photo mosaics using photos from Facebook, Picasa, Flickr or your computer. All you have to do is select the photo you want to use as your main photo, upload the photos you want to use to make up the mosaic, and Pixable uses a spiffy  algorithm to create a photo mosaic for you automatically.

I used Pixable to take pics from my hard drive and make a mosaic of my honeymoon, but you can just as easily grab photos from your Facebook albums and your friend’s albums. One nice thing about Pixable is that they make it easy to upload entire folders of photos at once. Once they’re up, though, you can’t edit them-so make sure they are all facing the right direction before you start creating your mosaic.

Even better, you can upload the mosaic to your Facebook page or download it free of charge-it only costs money to have it turned into a poster or a calendar. This is a really neat gift idea.  So, guys, if your gift of sickly-sweet nougat-filled chocolates failed to impress this Valentine’s Day, for about $10 you can surprise her with a photo mosaic made from all of your cute couple photos.   Instant redemption!

Like Glydo, Red Panda is a browser extension for Firefox that guides you to additional relevant content based  on what you are currently reading.  Red Panda can uncover Wikipedia entries, blog entries, tweets, news stories, items from Digg and more.

There are a couple of differences between Glydo and Red Panda. First, Red Panda is a sidebar, while Glydo sits on the bottom of your browser window in your status bar. Second, Glydo is always on, while you have to toggle Red Panda’s sidebar on and off using the “View sidebar” option on your browser’s menu.

While I like the way Glydo is set up much better, Red Panda offers a more comprehensive selection of information. In addition to the sidebar, you can right-click on a page to bring up a menu that lets you easily search Wikipedia, Google, the IMBD movie database and more.  You can also use the right-click menu to find locations on maps and translate words, phrases or even entire web pages.

Plus, Red Panda does a better job than Glydo of pulling relevant, recent information from Twitter (Glydo is often a few days behind-not exactly “real-time.”)

Red Panda is a little bit more of a hassle to install-instead of going through the normal process for installing a Firefox add-on, you have to save the file, then drag it into an open Firefox window, and then go through the normal installation process.

In my opinion, Red Panda would be easier to use if it sat on top of the bottom status bar like Glydo, or at least if there were a quick keyboard shortcut to bring up the sidebar when you need it.  Still, the right-click menu is handy enough that I’m planning to keep it installed (although I’d prefer if it opened new pages in a new tab instead of a new window).

What do you think of Red Panda?

Press releases are an important tool to help you get publicity for your business. However, they also tend to be kind of boring…just a plain page of snooze-inducing black and white text, followed by some boilerplate about your company at the bottom.

Presslift is a service that lets you give your press releases a much-needed facelift by including multimedia like pictures, videos, audio files and documents, plus links to your company’s social networking profiles.

Presslift is easy to use-basically, you just write a standard text press release, upload it to the site, and then attach your multimedia items.  Presslift creates a website for your multimedia press release with an SEO-optimized URL.

Include the URL on your standard press release and distribute it as usual, and anyone who reads it will be able to quickly access the multimedia version of it.  Plus, you can use Presslift to distribute your multimedia press release via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.You can also include your Google Analytics tracking code to get analytics to help you measure the performance of your releases.

Creating a press release with Presslift takes a few extra steps compared to writing and distributing a standard text press release, and you have to pay for Presslift credits to publish it, but I think  it’s worth it when you consider how much value it adds.

What do you think of Presslift?

Gravity, still in private beta at the moment, is a website that connects you with other people who have similar interests.  Basically, it’s a lot like a collection of forums, with the main difference being that you  can join conversations about a variety of different topics from the same website.

The Gravity website is divided up into general topics, called worlds. For example, there’s a world for foodies, a world for music, a world for gadgets, and much more. Even Jersey Shore has it’s own world, if you want in on that train wreck.

More worlds will be added in time, and it looks like users will eventually be able to create new worlds themselves, too. Right now, you can create a new conversation about any topic, plus you can follow (”orbit” in Gravity terminology)  as many individual people, worlds or conversations as your heart desires.

What makes Gravity stand out from a conventional forum? While the design on the site is nice,  more attractive and easier on the eyes than many forums, the main difference is that enabling you to connect to all of your interests through one site allows Gravity to build a picture of what you are interested in and how your interests change over time. TechCrunch has an excellent writeup of  Gravity’s analytics.

This data will be valuable to advertisers, of course, but Gravity could (and hopefully will) also use it to recommend new worlds and conversations that you might be interested in. If you have a website of your own, you will also be able to add Gravity widgets and such to provide your visitors with a place to converse and socialize.

Oh, and like Foursquare, you earn “Badges” for signing in and participating in conversations.  I’ve never been especially excited or motivated by the desire to earn badges. Perhaps that’s why I never joined Girl Scouts, instead joining Indian Princesses to make a mockery of Native American culture on a weekly basis with my dad and my little sister. But your mileage may vary- a lot of people seem to really enjoy earning virtual badges, so maybe I’m just weird.

For me, though, it’s not about the badges, it’s about the quality of the conversation and the information that’s shared. As long as Gravity is able to keep that up as they exit private beta and allow more users in, I’ll probably keep coming back.

What do you think of Gravity?