Helpful, Free Tools:
Every now and then we come across tools that we think would be helpful for most small businesses and startups. We've decided to list those here.
General Business
Google Apps - Google gives you access to several helpful applications that they've developed. You can get company emails, calendars, docs, chat and more for free.
Development
Pinax Project - A Python script that gives you all the functionality you could ever want in a social network right out of the box. The script can be customized as well to add or remove functionality as you need it.
Social Media
We Follow - We Follow is a "user-powered Twitter directory". If you're starting a new Twitter account, you can find some great, niche Twitter users to follow through their site. It's so easy to use that you'll be finding people to follow in no time.
TweetDeck - TweetDeck is an AIR application that gives you plenty of Twitter goodness on your desktop. Once you've logged in, you'll have access to your friends' tweets, your replies, and your direct messages. The real usefulness comes in some of the additional things you can do with TweetDeck. The app allows you to group the people you follow which makes it easy to keep track of folks when you're following oodles of people. You can also enter search terms to monitor tweets from users all around the Twitterverse
If you're interested in learning more about these tools or having us help you put them to work for you, send an email to nate at orangatank dot com.