Websites You Can't Live Without in 2009

This is a list of the products We tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But We use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and We would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer. Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator We check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that We use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

Nine new products, including one gadget (which We've left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

Six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

We tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of our news feed (We use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.