Small businesses, especially webby types, have access to the widest range of free business tools than ever before. We’re no exception here at PeopleMaps, and so we wanted to say thank you to the organisations that give us free stuff we use everyday so we can operate more successfully:

Thank you – WordPress
We build all our websites using WordPress. (We pay separately for  the Thesis theme running on WordPress).

Thank you – Google
What can we say? Email, Sites, Docs, Maps, Spreadsheets, Analytics, Presentations, Chat, YouTube… and more. Google, please do no evil.

Thank you – Skype
Free international VOIP calls. Screen share (have you tried that out yet?). Call conferencing. Instant messaging. (We do pay separately for Skypein numbers and other services).

Thank you – Audacity
Free open source audio file recording and editing.

Thank you – Spotify
Free streaming music to keep us amused and entertained (although some of the team have upgraded to the paid version)

Thank you – OpenOffice
Free open source office suite – exports documents into PDF’s nicely.

Thank you – Twitter
Microblogging they claim, but we find the best use for Twitter is connecting with and meeting clever people. How long will it remain free, though?

Thank you – CoTweet
A tool to manage our myriad of Twitter accounts, and we’ve persisted (even though it is a little buggy).

Thank you – Bit.ly
A URL shortening service we use to keep Tweets short, and track visits to links.

Thank you – Facebook
Don’t you get a hard time Facebook? Sure, you can be frustrating, but you’ve provided us with heaps of value, and ideas and cool people and ways to connect with them. And yes, we really do use you for business.

When I started out with this list, I thought I’d have loads more resources to throw in that you’d never have heard of, but even though I know I haven’t included everything, I am surprised at just how ubiquitous all of these tools/services have become.

What have I missed? What other free stuff is out there that we  should we be using that we’re not?