1. Yodlee Moneycenter

Online financial account aggregation. Lets you see all your activity and balances on bank accounts, credit cards, loans, investment accounts, frequent flyer programs, and more on one screen. It lacks some of the features of a standalone application like Quicken, but I find it much quicker and more convenient. Plus you can access it from any computer (which may scare some of you, but is a bonus to me).

One of the first things I do in the morning is login and update all my account and check spending, account balances, and stock/mutual fund performances. I think my financial world would be lost without it.

2. GMail

The email app that changed them all is still my favorite. Nested conversations, excellent spam controls, quick interface, powerful search. And of course over 2800mb of storage. Plus their mobile email software for the Blackberry is stellar.

Yahoo mail has made some progress with their latest version. But the interface is slower, and they don’t offer an important feature that GMail does - free domain accounts (ie: being able to send from chuck@thissite.com). Yahoo charges $20/yr for this.

3. Google Reader

Google made great strides with the redesigned Google Reader and I have changed all my RSS reading to it. It has easy to navigate and customizable interface with the familiar Google app feel.

The one major deficiency is a search (come on Google!) but that can be fixed with a Greasemonkey script. The main attraction of a standalone RSS reader would be you could read your feeds when you are offline, but I’ve never really had the desire to do this.

4. Flickr

Unlimited online storage for your digital photos, how can you go wrong? Its simple enough for just about everyone to use and lets you store and share all your photos with friends or the world. The social aspects of the site also differ it from simple galleries.

I was a little hesitant to post this because the free version does have some limitations - 100MB/mo upload limit (which should be reasonable for most users), 200 picture limit that will be shown on your page (all pictures are still stored) - which may get you thinking about shelling out the $25 for the pro version. But the free version offers enough features for the average user.

5. Last.FM

Last.FM is an internet radio station that plays songs based on your listening habits and preferences. The more songs you listen to it builds your profile and creates a station of songs it thinks you’ll like. It also lets you play songs based on tags - so if you are in a gansta rap mood you can listen to songs tagged Gangsta Rap.

You can listen either through the web client or there are numerous plugins for your favorite music player (Winamp, ITunes, Windows Media Center, etc.).