Though you, elite readers, might consider getting excited about apps that are a year or two old to be painfully behind the times, the fact is that there is huge demand for training in use and application of web apps old and new.

Yuuguu

You can show people how to go through multi-step processes by sharing your desktop in a tab of their browser with Yuuguu. It's free, no downloads required, get sharing in seconds. Old versions of the software can be a bit buggy but the newest version has worked great for me.

There's absolutely nothing like getting to watch someone else work on their own desktop - it's a magical learning experience for people. I use it while talking to people on the phone, after IMing them the login and PIN to see my screen. I haven't tried recording the sessions yet, but that could be really useful too.

ViewMyPC will release a version of its screensharing app that lets viewers watch from inside their browsers as well, later this month.

Multi-platform IM Client

Multi-platform IM services let you IM with anyone almost anywhere, without worrying what IM network they are on. Just sign up for an account on AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk, give your client the login info for each account and you'll be set for good. Mac users can check out Adium (pictured, but souped up), Windows users can try out Trillian or Digsby and anyone can use Meebo on the web.

If you're going to work with a wide variety of people online, you should be able to easily IM with them no matter what service they use.

IM during phone calls or even in person is the fastest way to share URLs, it's a great way to take shared notes and, as consultant to international Communities of Practice consultant John Smith says, it's a great way to clarify communication between people who don't speak the same languages natively.

Jing

Jing is the fastest, easiest way to record a short screencast demonstrating how to do something online. It's not particularly robust but for a quick tutorial to send to a client, you'll probably like it a lot.

The ability to watch again and again makes screencasting a particularly useful tool for consultants to offer their clients. If you're teaching any tangible skills, as opposed to just marketing fluff (or even genuinely useful marketing strategy!) then making screencasts all day long could prove very useful.

Annotated Screenshots with Screensteps or Skitch

ScreenSteps was the app we used to make this post in a jiffy, Skitch is another app we're totally in love with. Both are for Mac only - can anyone recommend a good PC equivalent? Update - we were wrong ScreenSteps has a Windows version after all!

The idea is that both make it really easy to grab screenshots, annotate them and then upload them to the web. For many clients, a screenshare or a screencast will still move too fast and it's really nice to be able to read text explaining how to do things at any time.

AideRSS: Filter RSS Feeds for Popularity

We write about AideRSS here all the time. Consulting clients love it, though. Tell them you can give them a feed, or run a feed through email for them, that delivers just the most popular items from any news source and they will adore you. Plug in any feed and it will score items by number of comments, inbound links, saves in delicious.com etc.

You can do this with almost anything. In the above screenshot, we've performed a Google Blogsearch for posts that link to a company's website, then changed the RSS URL to output 50 items instead of 10 (the default in the URL), then run that feed through AideRSS and grabbed the "best" feed. The goal here was to identify bloggers who had written about the company and gotten a big reaction from their readers. This is a good way to try and find a blogger for a company to hire if it's looking for one, among other things.

Those Are Our Favorites, What Are Yours?

Everyone's probably got a different list of "must-haves" but apps vary in terms of performance and functionality. If we're missing anything here, please let us know. What's more fun than learning about new ways to most effectively teach other people about all the exciting things going online these days?

Photo: Little Birdies, by Flickr user IanMatthewSoper

The 30 day trial of ScreenSteps Pro took us just a few minutes to learn how to use and we're already excited to use this service for product reviews and tutorials.

We would guess that many people have different export preferences, so it would be nice to see those options expanded even further. See below for some other examples of presentation type services you might also find useful.

Asset management, or changing the order of the images in a presentation, could be easier to do too.

The video below looks much better when viewed full-screen; hit the TV button to view it that way.

Other Services to Check Out

Last weekend Corvida wrote here about a number of online presentation tools, and readers offered even more suggestions in comments.

A few services that could be of interest that weren't mentioned include:

• Screenflow is the hottest new screencast video capturing tool on the market. It's Mac (Leopard) only but tough luck Windows users, you've had all the good screencasting software for years.


• JingProject is a free, quick and dirty screencasting service from the makers of Camtasia. It's Mac and Windows friendly. We've had it crash a lot and direct access to the files is not as simple as it should be, but when it works it's really easy to use.


• There are probably hundreds of other services that combine powerpoint, video, audio and other media types to let you create presentations. What are your favorites?

The two mentioned above capture moving images, which can sometimes take way too long to get right. We think that ScreenSteps looks like a very intelligent entry into this field as it only captures screenshots and is really easy to use. If you'd like to learn more about the application, check out the interview with its developers posted today at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Thanks to Jason Glaspey for bringing ScreenSteps to our attention.