In the high-tech world, it is very tough to answer this question : What are the Internet sites you can’t live without?

100s of sites are launched daily with something interesting and may be better than the other. You use them or not but at least they are there. Lots of websites send invites to their users and then only they can use those services. Some websites are there forever even when you didn’t know what Internet is. So here I ask again : What are those sites you can’t live without?

Answer to this question will be different for different people : based on priorities, geographical locations, interest, knowledge and lots of other parameters. I am trying to consolidate those few (though there are a lot) based on the purpose and definitely based on their popularity. I discussed with a lot of people in my office, my family and friends and below is the essence of what I got in return. The most important thing on Internet is obviously email followed by searches and then other less important stuff.

  • For Email:
    EmailBack in old days when people didn’t even know what email was, they started using Yahoo! and Hotmail for email. Slowly other platforms emerged like AOL, Gmail and all. So people can’t live without either Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail or whatever they like for email purposes.
    Recently, people have started using Gmail as their primary email client instead of Yahoo and Hotmail. There is an increasing concern among people loosing their important mail on Hotmail and Yahoo because of inactivity. People have simply shifted from Hotmail to Gmail and others just because of this one issue. And people hate Hotmail and Yahoo for that.
  • Search Engines:
    Search For finding information and to search any random thing, most of the people use Google – The search engine God followed by Live and Yahoo!Search. People also use other engines which have become available recently like Ask.com, Wikipedia, About.com and many others based on the purpose.
  • News:
    News For news actually it depends on the geographical location, though the most preferred Internet sites are CNN.com, Foxnews.com, The New York Times and then news aggregators like Google, Yahoo, MSNBC and all. Lots of people from Indian origin read The Hindu, The Times of India, Rediff, The Economic Times and all.
  • Social Networking and Online Communities:
    Now, that’s a tough question as people have lots of lots of choices. Read this post for the most popular options available these days and the number is increasing day by day. Generally people visit Orkut, Windows Live Spaces, Hi5, Friendster, Linkedin, twitter, myspace, Yahoo 360 and recently became popular Facebook. Other social websites related to blogging are Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Furl, Blogger, Xanga and Vox.
  • Shopping:
    image Recently because of e-commerce, online shopping has become fun among people. For shopping who won’t know about eBay & Froogle. Other than that there are 1000s of sites where people buy stuff online. In U.S. people generally find deals from Deals2buy, edealinfo and others and then follow the links to those providers. There are online stores where people find stuff like CircuitCity, Best Buy, OfficeDepot, CompUSA and so on and so forth. But eBay is the most popular among all. Every manufacture now also maintains their own websites where people can directly buy from manufacturer like Apple, Creative, Dell, Sony, Canon, Toshiba and HP etc etc…..
  • Banking:
    Banking has also revolutionized because of the Internet. Online banking is the most convenient thing people do online. People transfer money from one place to other, pay bills online, send money internationally and the most common use is the checking your bank balance. This list will vary very much from person to person and place to place so there is no one website people go for banking. Every bank now a days have to have a website where people can manage their money otherwise people don’t like that bank.
  • Job Search & Career:
    Jobs Most important thing in life is career. So if you don’t have a resume online on any Job Search Engine then may be you are missing something. Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, Yahoo! Hot Jobs & Indeed to name the few job search engines. Depending on the geographical location the engines might vary. In India people generally uses Monter India, JobsAhead, Jobstreet and Naukri.com.
  • Blogging:
    Those who know blog or plan to create a blog for themselves use Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, Movable Type, WordPress, Xanga, myspace, Windows Live Spaces or Vox. There are 100s of other blogging platforms but the few listed are the ones popular amongst bloggers. For an exhausting list of blogging platforms read this post.
  • Travel, Fun and other stuff:
    There are unlimited number of website for fun. Games – Yahoo Games, AOL Games and a wide variety of gaming sites. People use Internet for dating, file sharing & photo sharing with friends. Picasa & Flickr to name the few. Mapquest, Google Maps, Live Maps etc. for finding maps and directions in U.S. For travel arrangements people prefer to use Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotels, Expedia, Hertz, Enterprise – Rent a car and Dollar etc.

Basically even after this exhausting summary, I am sure there are numerous reasons people use Internet and there are 100s of sites now a days people can’t live without. So it is very tough to list all those websites. But if you notice carefully, Google, Yahoo and Live rule the web.

At last I will say, “Internet has become a integral part of our life, without which Life is IMPOSSIBLE.”


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