Vendr is quite possibly the quickest and easiest way to add an online store to your website or blog. All you have to do is sign up for an account, enter in your store information, add products, tweak the format to your liking and then grab the code.

Drop the code into the header section of your site, and you get a “Store” button. When visitors click on the button, the store appears as an overlay on top of your web site. Visitors can browse products, create a shopping cart and check out using your choice of PayPal, Google Checkout or a credit card processor like Authorize.net.

That’s really all there is to it. I was definitely impressed with how easy a Vendr store is to set up and how polished the finished product is. Vendr doesn’t take a percentage of your sales, and you have a choice between a limited, free plan that lets you list 5 products, or paid plans that let you list more products and that include extra features like digital download support, coupons, search and inventory tracking. Paid plans range from $9.95 per month to $29.95 per month, with discounts for paying a year at a time.

What do you think of Vendr?

Have you ever wished that Twitter’s search feature had a little bit more pizzaz? The Archivist takes Twitter search and spices it up with a number of cool features and enhancements. First of all, as the name suggests, if you sign in using your Twitter account you can save search results for easy access in the future.

For each search, The Archivist also creates 6 different “visualizations.” These graphs let see you see at a glance how the volume of tweets about a certain keyword has changed over time, who’s tweeting about a specific topic the most, what URL is being shared the most in the tweets, what words are associated with specific tweets, and what Twitter clients are being used to tweet the most.

You can also download the data from each search as a zip file or view it in Excel.

All in all, The Archivist seems like it could be quite useful to marketers, or to anyone using Twitter for research purposes. Although it lacks more advanced features like sentiment analysis, it’s free and easy to use. What do you think of it?

Need a simple, free program to help you set goals and map out how to reach them? Achievr just might do the trick.

Achievr is a pretty basic goal-setting programs with several nice features. First, since you can sign in via your Google account or Facebook, getting your account set up takes no time at all. Second, adding goals and tasks is easy and intuitive. Achievr prompts you to measure your goals against the SMART criteria (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) when you set it, as well to evaluate what potential obstacles are and what resources you might need to achieve them. However, you don’t have to fill in all the boxes to save a goal, which is nice when it comes to little subgoals that you don’t necessarily need to think through as much.

The tasks you need to do to achieve each large goal can be listed as sub-goals, nesting inside each other like Russian dolls. If you’re the reflective type, there’s also a diary where you can record how well you stuck to the plan each day, y0ur accomplishments, obstacles you encountered, etc.

Achievr is easy to use, but it lacks helpful features like iCal integration (or even the ability to see your goals in Calendar format) and the ability to set reminders. Still, if all you want is something basic, you might want to give it a try. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Twitter is a great way to connect with people all over the world, but if you’d like to use it to keep up with what’s going on in your city or town, you might appreciate being able to drill down to a more local focus. Streamd.in is a Twitter client that connects you with other Twitter users in your local city or town.

To use Streamd.in, you need to enable Twitter’s geo-location option and then use OAuth to sign in to Twitter. Once you’re in, you’ll be able to see and respond to tweets from people you follow, as well as see the avatars and recent tweets of other Twitter users on a map of your local area. If you see someone who looks interesting, you can check to see if you’re following them and then follow them if you aren’t already.

As you might be able to tell from the pics, this app becomes a lot more interesting if you live in an area that has a high number of Twitter users. If you’re out in the sticks like me, you won’t get as much out of it.

If you have a webcam, Streamd.in also has a video chat option. You can either broadcast your willingness to video chat with your entire Twitter community or invite another individual user to chat with you. You can also easily view and share Youtube videos, Slideshare presentations and more using the video chat box.

I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of Streamd.in’s functionality, but there are still a few features that I feel are missing. First of all, there needs to be a way to monitor Twitter for keywords and display the results. If you could choose to limit the search to tweets from your local area, that would be even better.  Twitter list support would also be awesome.

What do you think of Streamd.in?

When you’re managing a team, it’s important to keep everyone on the same page.  CentralDesktop is a robust collaboration app that helps keep everyone on task and connected, whether you’re all in the same building or scattered across the country.

Like BaseCamp, CentralDesktop has a dashboard-style “home” screen that gives you an overview of what your team members have been up to and the projects you are currently working on. There are also tabs for sharing and discussing files, setting milestones and assigning tasks. A calendar lets you keep track of events, and the meeting tab lets you host a live online meeting in just a few clicks.

CentralDesktop is available in several versions, depending on the size of your team. Plans range in price from free to $99, and enterprise and community plans are also available.

What do you think of CentralDesktop?  Would it work for you, or is there another collaboration app you like more? Leave your responses in the comments!

More and more research is showing that most humans are simply not built for multitasking. I’m especially poor at it, a problem that plagued me back in the dark days when I worked customer service for a cell phone company.  Nowadays, I generally don’t have to try to talk and type at the same time, but I still have to battle with distractions, especially since I work online from home.

Email is both my primary means of communication and my biggest distraction aside from Facebook. Oooh, look, this store I like is having a sale! Ooh, look, someone posted a new picture on Facebook! You get the idea… I use filters and Gtriage to sort my mail and move the most important stuff to the top of my Gmail inbox, but temptation lurks below and is easily accessible with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Awayfind is a cool app that has a unique solution to this problem…simply close your inbox down completely and let only the most important emails find you. Basically, the service lets you filter your messages by sender, subject or keyword and then lets you decide what to do with them: You can set up an autoresponder, have AwayFind notify you via text message, have AwayFind call you and read you the message, or receive notifications via Twitter or IM. If you work on a team, you can also delegate the messages to other team members to deal with.

If you use Firefox, there’s also a browser extension that lets you set up filters and tell AwayFind how to respond in just a couple of clicks, right from your email inbox. Nice!

I can see using this with Toodledo to put responding to email messages on my to-do list-just set them to be forwarded to my Toodledo email address automatically.

Worried about missing something important? AwayFind also lets you set up an emergency contact form on your AutoResponder message, so if someone is emailing you with something urgent and it isn’t being forwarded, they can fill out the contact form and AwayFind will notify you to contact them immediately.

AwayFind is super-handy and the filters are easy to set up. The only problem I’ve had is that I can’t seem to get it to verify my voice number-it called once with the verification code but the phone hung up when I answered.  Repeated attempts to get it to call back have thus far been unsuccessful. However, once that issue is resolved, I’m looking forward to shutting down my inbox and letting the important stuff find me.

What do you think of AwayFind? Do you think it would make you more productive?

One of the reasons Twitter is growing in popularity so quickly is that it is such an excellent source of information. However, to really make that information useful, it needs to be curated and formatted. MyTweetmag lets you create a collaborative “magazine” with other editors.

All you have to do is set up an account, designate co-editors and designate a hashtag for your magazine. Then, MyTweetMag will pull the headlines from any links that you and your co-editors tweet with that hashtag. MyTweetMag also has a Wordpress plugin so you can display your “magazine” on your blog.

It’s a nice idea, but so far the implementation is a little bit lacking. It took overnight for links I tweeted to show up in my magazine, which kind of goes against the “real-time” nature of Twitter.  (To be fair, I suppose that could also be Twitter’s fault, given how often the Fail Whale has been visiting us as of late.) Also, this is totally subjective, but I have to say I’m not a big fan of the design.

Still, the app has a lot of potential, and could be quite useful, especially if the tweets could be imported more quickly.

What do you think of MyTweetMag?

Want to make your website more social? Envolve lets you turn your site into a conversation piece with Facebook-style chat. Unlike Facebook, however, your visitors can all chat with each other regardless of whether they are Facebook friends or not. Creating an account is easy-it takes just a few seconds for your visitors to sign up.  Once they’ve signed in, members can join public or private chats with each other, start new topics and send messages.  They can also quickly and easily log out of chat and browse your site privately if desired.

Envolve also uses Google translate to provide real-time translation for 50 languages to break down the language barrier between people from different parts of the world.  Like most machine translation, it’s not perfect, but that’s to be expected, and it’s a really neat feature.

Another goodie for web owners is the ability to see statistics on old chats to gain insight into the interests of your visitors.

Envolve is easy to sign up for and easy to use.  The chat bar follows you as you browse through the site, and you can share chats with people on Facebook and Twitter by sending them the chat URL. For site owners, installation is easy and simply involves cutting and pasting some code in the appropriate place.

As you can see, it works great on this page. And if I can install it myself, you know it’s not hard…

What do you think of Envolve? Would you use it on your site?  As a user, would you be more likely to frequent a site that had these features installed?

MyLocalTribune makes it easy to find information on news and events in your local area. The website locates you automatically using your IP address, but if that’s not the area you’re interested in, you can also enter in your location manually.

Once you’ve clicked on your location, MyLocalTribune presents you with a list of tweets from/mentioning your town, a list of blog entries and a list of events. In my case, the “events” tab was blank, but of course  that would be different if I lived somewhere where things actually happen.

All in all, I think MyLocalTribune is a nice presentation of local data. It was not particularly useful for me, but I could see how it would be useful in a larger town or city, or even as a way to track tweets and blog reactions during a major event. Maybe pulling local police booking information would liven it up a bit for those of us in rural areas, LOL.

Seriously, though,  I would suggest pulling information from more sources, local news, in addition to Twitter and blogs.

What do you think of MyLocalTribune?

Since Apple killed Lala, I’ve been looking for a worthy successor. This is especially important since virtually all of my music is currently stuck in the old hard drive of my now-dead computer, so my choices have been either listen to Pandora or listen to an infinite loop of  Trent Reznor’s new EP until I can get my husband to recover it for me.

So, when I got an invite to try out Rdio, I was super-excited. Rdio lets you stream the music of your choice on-demand to your computer, sort of like Lala did.  To help you discover new music, it also includes a social aspect similar to what Lala had going, where you can find people to follow and then see what they are listening to.  You can write reviews for albums, make playlists, and research artists.

You can get instant, on-demand access to songs for free simply by adding them to your Rdio collection. If you want to own a copy of the song. you can pay for a download. Prices range from .99 for a song to $10-$16 for an album. Stuff from some artists, like Metallica, is only available as a download.

Plus, Rdio has a nifty desktop app that syncs with whatever you’re doing in the browser but keeps playing music even if your browser crashes.  If you, like me, tend to have a zillion tabs open at once in your browser, you’ll like the desktop app because it makes it much easier to pause the music if you get a phone call.  There are also mobile apps for the iPhone and Blackberry, so you can listen to your music on the go.  I can haz Android app, please?

Also, when you download the desktop app, Rdio will scan your hard drive and add all the music you have that’s part of their collection into your Rdio collection. However, unlike with Lala, if it’s not already available for streaming/purchase on Rdio, you can’t upload it to your Rdio account to include in your playlists.  Rdio seems to have a pretty decent collection overall, but there are some pretty big holes in it as well. For example, they don’t have anything by Tool, and the inability to create playlists that include Tool just might be a deal-breaker for me. I haven’t decided.

Also unlike Lala, Rdio is a subscription-based service. It’s $4.99 month for unlimited web access, and $9.99 for web and mobile access. I have 10 invites to the private beta, and I think I’ll give them away to the first 10 people who retweet this post on Twitter.

What do you think of Rdio?