Dare to Think Beyond just Google, Gmail, Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia

The internet is the best thing that human beings have invented (at least until 8 pm tonight). But still, millions of internet users all over the world do not visit more than 5 websites on an average day. (Those being google, gmail, facebook/orkut, youtube and rarely wikipedia too). Considering the fact that there is probably more than 182,226,259 sites out there, this is a pretty small number though certainly not negligible, because most people get whatever they need from those few sites.
If you are someone who love to break out of the pack and venture into the internet, here’s what to do.
First of all you must know that google is the answer to all your questions. If it hadn’t been for google or similar search engines, internet would have been a grand failure. And we should be grateful that google does exist because it is such a huge thing (the god of internet). Just think it without google. How would life in internet be? No mail, no scraps, no videos, no news, no search, not even me… Horrible life.

So, google

It’s analogous to human life. People are born into the internet knowing about a single site – google, then they learn everything about the web.

With google there is gmail, orkut, youtube, blogger,  (and since you are reading this blog I know that you know about these already)
But these are not the only services that google provides:
There is even more
News : An automatically updating database of news. Finds the latest news matching your query. Can even substitute your newspaper.
Translate : You know what it is. Does an excellent work, you can even put in url and it does the rest. It can even detect language (so you needn’t know the language you don’t know in order to know what is being told)
Groups : The best and easiest way to do something together with your friends, colleagues. Share files. Anything.
Docs : Though I don’t use it for creating documents, it is great help for viewing attachments in my mails.
Reader  : The best and easiest way to read and subscribe to feeds online. What are feeds?

Now I shall start about sites that are meant to be read, and not used. And before that I must tell you what feeds are. Feeds are also called RSS feeds or Atom feeds (RSS and Atom are different types of feeds. But either can be used without much problems). They are usually seen as links under the title RSS or subscribe or Feed or in websites.  Now, what you must do is to copy the link and paste it in your feed reader (by the way feed reader is a software used to read feeds) But since there is google reader, you just need to go to google reader and add a new subscription. But nowadays, you needn’t do even that. There is feedburner that adds extra functionality to feeds. The feedburner feed links takes you to a page where you can select which online feedreader to use and you will be automatically subscribed to that feed. Just click on this link to test it

So now that you are familiar with feeds, you can go to the sites I’m going to tell and subsribe to them one by one, or alternatively subsribe to a bundle of all those feeds in just one click, which is available at the end of this post.

Now some personality development websites.
zenhabits : my personal favourite. The biggest guide to simplicity available on net. Leo Babuta is bound to simplify your thoughts, likes and life after you start reading. (start here)
PluginID : Another nice one from this niche. Written by Gen Allsopp who have firsthand experience in dropping out and freelancing and so on. (start from this post)

Dumb Little Man: Tips about productivity, simplicity, etc and the real reason why it’s a cracker? The articles in it are submitted by great bloggers around the world trying to gain a bit more publicity, and therefore are bound to be top-notch.

Now, a bit about technology:
Lifehacker is a site that gives you tips, tricks and links to various great things out there. It’s written by a group of people and at least 20 posts are made a day. (start with these)

After all, there are some sites you’ve heard of but haven’t started using.
Twitter : From Barack Obama to Shashi Tharoor there is everyone in twitter tweeting about what they are doing.
Entrecard : If you are a blogger you’ll find this a handy tool to gain traffic to your blog by advertising on other blogs in the network without money, but with credits that you can gain by displaying others’ ads on your blog.

And wait a minute, did I tell you about stumbleupon? The basis of stumbleupon is simply a firefox toolbar. It has a few buttons called stumble, I like this, I don’t like this, etc. When you click stumble, after creating an account at stumbleupon, you will get to a website you haven’t heard of but you must hear of, based on the areas of interest you chose while signing up for an account. And if you like that site, you can click I like it. Then stumbleupon will see what other websites people who liked this website liked and brings you another website you may like on the next click of stumble. It’s fun when you start using it.

If you are a google reader user, you can just subscribe to this bundle and subscribe to many sites I’m subscribed to in a single click.