Johan Lieu, maker of products

Services I Can’t Live Without (and Some I Can)

(edit: added in “Dead” as a last category. hat tip @dromano)

I was just thinking about this the other day and wanted to break down what services I use and love and those that I only begrudgingly continue to use.

I’ve broken it down into three groups: services that are here to stay (i.e. I’m not leaving them unless you pry them from my cold dead hands), on the border (close to here to stay status but some days I forget to check it), obligatory (everyone else is on it so I have to keep it but it has lost its grip on me) and dead (uh, dead). I’ve also ranked them by my love/addiction to them.

Here to stay:

1. Twitter - Considering how skeptical I was when I joined Twitter nearly five years ago (I thought it was just a service where you tweeted about your lunch and bowel movements and, wow, it’s been that long?), I am genuinely surprised at my level of addiction to the service. I can honestly admit that I’ve had to deliberately keep my Twitter client closed on my computer so that I can focus and work because if I left it open, I’d probably be checking in on it every other minute, which isn’t the greatest for productivity. Right now, I check it on the break phase of my pomodoro timer. You know it’s a problem when you have to create rules around it.

1a. Tumblr - I give credit to my wife here; she found Tumblr before me and introduced it to me. I also assign her blame for the thousands of hours and posts and likes and reblogs that I have tallied over the years. Tumblr is such a close second to Twitter that I had to assign it 1a because I have the same rules setup around it that I do for Twitter. I only check it during my breaks, because otherwise, I’d spend hours and hours on the site, liking and reblogging and going down the rabbit hole and never coming out.

2. Reddit - I used to be a Digg fanboy but when their v4 rolled out which killed almost all community, I transferred over. And I’ll freely admit that it does the whole social news aggregation service a lot better than Digg ever did. Subreddits, meta-humor, political movements, the depth of Reddit knows no bounds. Glad I finally saw the light here.

3. Steam - The de facto PC gaming platform, Origin be damned. I can barely understand how I used to buy/play/build a community around any game I used to play before Steam came along. Just a great example of how building a better service and treating your customers right is the best way to battle piracy.

4. Instapaper - the best, very best, tool of upping my productivity. I no longer break up my work day by reading random things that I find but instead save it for later and consume it at the end of the day. It’s like curating my very own newspaper. Easily one of my favorite services. You should use it, and you should buy it and support it; Marco Arment is a great developer and deserves it.

5. Feedly - My RSS reader. Lightweight, iPhone and iPad versions, great look and feel, and the user experience gets out of the way so you can read your feeds. Even better after the hackjob Google pulled on Google Reader. I tried Flipboard and other RSS apps, but I like this one the best.

6. Dropbox - A no brainer. I move between my PC, my Macbook Air, my iPad and even my iPhone for work and couldn’t do it without Dropbox. Use it every day without even thinking about it. Worth paying for extra storage to keep everything in the cloud.

On the border:

7. Instagram - My go to service for sharing photos, or as I like to call it, “I am doing something cool, look at me, aren’t you jealous”. It’s great to see all the experiences in photos from all around the world without the noise of apps, status updates, shared articles to muddle the experience. See: facebook.

8. Spotify - Pros: I love having nearly every song in the world at my fingertips. Well worth $9.99 IMO. Cons: iPhone app is horrid; no native iPad app; can only sync playlists and not albums; using clients as P2P nodes to alleviate streaming load on Spotify servers while hosing end users upload bandwidth is super lame; missing a lot of the classics (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan). The cons outweigh the pros just enough for me to consider trying Rdio.

9. Band of the Day - Recently started using this; so far, it’s part of my morning ritual, firing it up and listening through to the tracks from the band of the day a couple times as I get ready. The bands are often hit or miss, but I like that I’m being exposed to new music consistently.

10. NPR for iOS - I work from home and don’t have a commute any more, so this is how I get my morning news. I listen to the news segments after I listen to Band of the Day and get caught up. It’s a good way to keep on top of events.

11. Foursquare - I check in a lot less now (probably due to the reduced usage of the app within my immediate social group) but I do like using it for Explore. There was a time I was addicted to getting points and badges, but that time has long passed.

Obligatory:

12. Facebook - Everyone I’ve ever known is on here and is my friends, so I have to keep using it. But I don’t like it for the very reason why I have to keep using it; Facebook changed the definition of friend from “whom I am friends with now” to “any person I’ve ever might have been friends with in my whole entire life”.

Using Facebook feels more like a chore than fun, sifting through inane status updates, app invites, app shares, etc. The very nature of Facebook (“what all of your friends are doing at any point in time”) makes it a crazy experience for me. My feed can go from someone posting baby pictures, to a sports update, to a political news article being shared, to a game share/invite, to birthday wishes, to a chain status going around (“make this your status if you’re against FB charging users!”).

It doesn’t seem like a service to keep updated and connected with your friends so much as a voyeuristic service to peek in on the lives of any person that you’ve ever met; a better method of comparing your life against that of everyone you’ve ever met. That may say more about me than it does about the service, but it is what it is.

That said, I have to keep using it because every damn person I’ve ever met in my life is on there and my friend. They have social lock in.

Dead:

13. Pinterest - I am using this service because everyone else is on there and I wanted to see what the fuss was about but uh, is this a service for a) wedding planning, b) women’s fashion, c) cute objects and a) wedding planning? Because that’s all that that ever shows up in my feed. It honestly feels like a really nice online version of Vogue or Vanity Fair or something. That’s great, just not exactly what I was thinking of when I signed up.

14. Pandora - Sorry Pandora, you got cannibalized by Spotify; when it comes to listening to music of my choosing or doing it radio style, the former wins out. I used, loved, and paid for you for years, but Spotify won out.