Jessamyn West 2

From Social Software Showcase

              Socially Portable            

[first page, second page] 

As for the social, let's just say that trying to keep your network groove on without all of your bookmarks, passwords, email and settings is a poor excuse for a 2.0 existence. Sure you can be all up in your 2.0 apps, but if you're still doing things locally (or lolcattily) you could use a boost to get you more of the way there. 

 

Application Examples

• If you bookmark with del.icio.us you might want to try Firefox Portable (6MB, 25MB installed, also Mac version) and keep your browsing experience the same on all computers. Save bookmarks, themes and plugins all without leaving anything on the host computer.

• If you log in to seventeen social sofware sites and aren't a dork like me who uses the same password for everything, you might want to keep those passwords 1) with you; you never know when you might need to add someone to your Top Friends, Top Eight or add them to your network(s) 2) secure; you have enemies and spies and jealous lovers and impostors! KeePass (1.1MB) is for you. Encryptalicious!

• Maybe you don't have enough friends to really benefit from the co-editing afforded by Google Docs but you want to hammer out a new resume for LinkedIn or the perfect mash note for your buddy at OKCupid and you always misspell a certain subset of fiendish vocab words so you'd like your own dictionary, thanks. Enter AbiWord (6.3MB, also Mac version) for lightweight lexical output or the OpenOffice Suite (65MB, also Mac version) for when size doesn't matter so much

 

More Resources

Portable Apps (for PC) - lightweight versions of your favorite open source apps

Portable Apps for Mac - better late than never

Wikipedia list of portable software

Portable Apps list by category

 

References

Thanks to Dave Boyer for most of the USB images. The first one is from Wikipedia.