I’ve had a Twitter account since the early days, but I haven’t really used it all that much. I’ve tweeted occasionally and I’ve even set up several of my feeds to automatically tweet for me, but I never really got twittering. That is, until I got myself an iPod Touch. Now I can’t stop Twittering and I’m seriously considering some type of 12 step program.

When researching possible stories, I sometimes use the Stumbleupon toolbar button but I recently came upon two other toolbar buttons which pretty much perform the same function. You may be interested in using them yourself for surfing the web.

Google’s “Picks For you”

This one won’t be for everyone’s tastes for the following reasons. First of all, you need the Google toolbar installed. Secondly, you need to activate Google search history. You also need a Google account but anyone with a Gmail account already has one of those. So you kind of need to be a bit of a Google fan to have all of that and you also need to trust them with your search history (so anyone that values their privacy may howl with protest).

If you like to play a little guitar in between reading Make Use Of and surfing the internet then I am sure you’ve often wished for a few free tools to help you learn your guitar playing online. Unfortunately most decent guitar software and tools are either commercial or shareware.

Well luckily there is always a free alternative. This list is short, but provides you with all the essential tools and resources to learn and improve your guitar playing.

Guitar Tabs

Do you remember when Facebook was only for college students? It seems so long ago now that anyone and everyone has a Facebook profile. With the addition of website pages, artist pages, and blog tools, I am on Facebook more now than ever. If you have a Facebook profile (as I’m sure most Make Use Of readers do) then you are probably aware of the 20,000+ applications that are available. While many of them are pointless, there are some that are quite good. Here are the top 5 facebook applications that don’t totally suck:

1. Scrabulous

These are my TOP 5 in covering time gaps with more joy and less boredom:

(1) Ask 500 People

One of the many problems trying to actually GET anything done online these days is the multitude of distractions that are available on the internet. Short of unplugging your network connection, there are a few things the undisciplined can do to minimize the sites calling your name.

Over the past few years a new breed of text editors have flourished - so called ‘minimalist’ text editors - which can be used to block out all other distractions and let you focus on the task at hand - crafting words into sentences. These “no-frills editors” don’t offer formatting or many of the other features you see in modern word processors, what they offer is the ability to concentrate solely on your writing.