Chatterous, RescueTime, and Faves - Social Tools for StartPad Members

One of the pleasures of being at StartPad is meeting the founders of some pretty cool new web services. I've recently been trying two of them and finding them to be really useful.

RescueTime has been a StartPad tenant for a couple of months, and several of us in the office have been using their service. RescueTime is great for productivity nerds - it will tell you how many hours per week your spending on different applications and web sites. I've found it really interesting in helping me focus on spending more time on actual software development, and less time on email and web surfing. It's pretty eye opening to see just how few hours per week I can be "inside" my dev tools when I thought I had been working pretty hard at it.

Chatterous is working at StartPad just for the month of July, and then heading down to the Bay Area. Their product lets you set up group chats and will direct communication to your choice of GoogleTalk/Jabber, email, or cell phone. We've tried in the past to set up a group chat room for StartPad members (using CampFire), but I've gotten out of the habit of opening up the web site to use it. Since Chatterous integrates with my existing IM client, I'm more likely remember to use it. Come join us at: StartPad chat group.

P.S. A while back I set up a Faves.com account called StartPad. Members are invited to send a friend request to that account, and this will allow you to bookmark sites of interest to our other members which will then show up on the sidebar at right.