19 sites you shouldn't be without

Sites come and sites go, however it's rare that one makes enough of an impact on your life to revolutionise how you use the internet.

These range from keeping up with social networks and backing up photos and documents to weeding out the important emails from the morass of special deals from shops and reminders about internet services you signed up to five years ago.

Wouldn't it be nice to cut through all that and make the internet work for you? For it to do these tasks automatically, or tell you when something happens that you are genuinely interested in?

These channels include a great variety of common tools - social media sites just as Twitter and Facebook, photo services including Instagram and Flickr, note-making apps just as Evernote and Instapaper, and even phone-based services just as generating text messages and making calls.

Back in April 2010, four computer science students from New York University were so unimpressed by Facebook's lack of privacy controls that they decided to create their own decentralised open source social network.

To do this they tried to raise $10,000 on kickstarter.com, however the idea of a more controllable network was so popular that by June they had raised over $200,000. This caused a flurry of media interest that talked it up as the straightway big thing and at that time, as so often happens, it was quietly forgotten. Since at that time it has gone through a buggy alpha developer build and is just about to appear in beta form. So why are we championing it as a new way to use the internet?

Diaspora was built as a reaction to the privacy issues of Facebook, and these issues are after all a worry today. What's more, with the latest changes to Facebook taking furthermore control away from the user, perhaps it's time for a site that's described as "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network".

Diaspora wants to make privacy key to social networking - it doesn't plan to share any of your information. You control every aspect of your Diaspora experience, without having to wade through pages of settings to keep your profile secure.

What you see

You can as well control what you see and how you see it. Diaspora came up with Google+'s Circles previously Google did - except it calls them Aspects - so you can choose to share your posts and photos with only those groups of friends you choose. It as well enables you to integrate other social networking services, including Twitter and Facebook. It's a actually open social experience that puts you back in the driving seat.

Although it calls itself a note-making site, Evernote can be used for much more than that. Taking everything into account, Evernote lets you quickly create a searchable database of all your interests and aide-mémoires, whatever form they take - from photographs and audio clips to screenshots and webpages, Evernote will keep it all for you, and has some clever little tools to let you find them again.

Much like services just as Dropbox, Evernote will as well sync all your information between any of your web-enabled devices, so the same notes and information are accessible whether you're on your work PC, on your phone or using a laptop on the train.

Evernote syncs automatically each time you turn your device on, so it all happens in the background without you having to think about it. It as well changes the way it works slightly according to whether you're using it on a desktop PC, phone or tablet so that its functionality suits the platform. For note-taking on the go, Evernote may mean you never forget or lose anything again.

Creator Brandon Kessler came up with the idea afterwards seeing a blog post that offered $100 to anyone who made a program that would run Windows on a Mac. Other people as well had the same problem, and added to the prize fund to the tune of a staggering $14,000. A programmer before long came up with a solution to the challenge, which he wrote in three days. Kessler was so impressed with the idea that he decided to create an eBay of challenge-based problem solving and hired the blog post writer as his chief of product.