Review: The 10 Best (Non-Google) Web Apps

Google's online applications enjoy a high profile, and many of them are great--but they may not always be the best options. Here are some other Web-hosted utilities and sites that let you live large online.

Curious about how a tech-oriented person would survive on a diet consisting entirely of Web-based apps? Then read "Life Without Software," the companion piece to this article.

E-Mail

1 Yahoo Mail: Yahoo's "classic" Web mail provides standard contact, calendar, and spam-filtering features in a utilitarian interface. But click on the link for the new beta version, and you'll be treated to an updated interface that organizes the same options on screen more efficiently, leaving room for lots of advertising. Banishing ads costs $20 per year.

2 Windows Live Hotmail: Microsoft's Web-hosted mail service replicates Outlook's traditional interface, with features such as folders, spam filtering, contact management, mailing-list-like contact groups, and a calendar. Though it lacks some Gmail innovations, including labels and the ability to grab and consolidate mail from other POP accounts, Windows Live Hotmail works well and for free.

Calendars and Lists

3 Planzo: Like Google Calendar, Planzo allows you to share your calendar with other users or with the Web-browsing public. You also get handy to-do lists and notebook features.

4 Remember the Milk: The focus of this awkwardly named but elegantly designed site is on three lists--tasks that are due tomorrow, due today, or overdue--and the locations (pinpointed on a Google map, if you wish) where they occur. You can share tasks with other RtM users, take them offline via Google Gears support, and synchronize them to a Windows Mobile phone with a $25-a-year Remember the Milk Pro account.

Document Creation and Editing

5 Zoho Office: Zoho applications look and feel quite a lot like Microsoft Office apps. They include a word processor, a spreadsheet, presentation software, a database, and a note-taking program. But Zoho doesn't stop there, offering business-oriented CRM, project-management, and Web-conferencing tools, plus poll-taking and wiki apps. Zoho Mail, which is still in closed beta testing, provides a calendar and 1GB of free file hosting.

6 ThinkFree Office: Billed as the free online alternative to Microsoft Office, ThinkFree has Word, Excel, and PowerPoint clones that replicate the classic Office interface, plus real-time collaboration. Users get 1GB of online storage space, too.

File Storage

7 Scribd: Recognized as the YouTube of documents, Scribd lets you upload Word, PDF, text (.txt), PowerPoint, Excel, PostScript, and LIT (.lit) files for private use or public sharing. As on YouTube, files may not appear instantaneously.

8 Windows Live SkyDrive: This site offers 500MB of free file storage. Share uploaded files with the world or with selected friends (Windows Live ID required), or keep them private.

Graphics

9 Pixenate: Adobe plans to provide an online version of Photoshop Express soon. Until then, use Pixenate to zoom, crop, resize, banish red-eye, and otherwise enhance images. When you're done, either upload the image to Flickr or download it to your hard disk. Pixenate even spiffs up Facebook photos.

Audio

10 MediaMaster: Tired of ripping CDs only to realize that the files are then trapped on a single computer? After creating a free MediaMaster account, you can upload MP3, AAC, or WMA music files to the site's server, and later play them back on any PC, Treo, or Windows Mobile phone. Though you can't subsequently download and burn your music (a limitation that probably represents a concession to the record industry), you can turn it into a public Internet radio stream.