This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum

Web forms can be a great asset on your business site. They let you collect pertinent data and contact information from your visitors without exposing your direct e-mail address to the world. They also set specific boundaries on the type of data you receive from customers so that the information fits nicely into a spreadsheet or database as needed.

Building a web form used to require a bit of coding and “wiring” on the back end of your site. These days, there are some great free and low-cost resources on the web that make building and integrating forms into your business website a breeze.

1. Wufoo

Wufoo is a great web-based form generator with a very intuitive interface. Forms are extremely customizable with simple drag-and-drop commands and many style options.

The forms you create “live” on Wufoo, but they are fully embeddable into your own website or blog by pasting a bit of code. But what makes Wufoo especially useful is that your account on the site serves as a hub for all the data that flows into your forms.

While you can download and configure your form to function with your own database, you may not want to when you see all the great looking reports and widgets you can generate just by logging into your Wufoo account. By hosting your data with them, everything is DIY, and easily accessible, with no need to hand your files over to a database expert to get your form up and running. In addition to viewing entries on the site, you can configure Wufoo to e-mail or text you when a user completes your form.

A free Wufoo account allows one user to generate three forms with three corresponding reports. Additional forms, users and reports come at a few price points, starting at $9.95 per month.

2. Icebrrg

Icebrrg has nearly identical features as Wufoo, and similar price points for paid accounts. You can host your own files or integrate the forms easily onto your business website and receive notifications when they are filled. A nice feature is that embedded forms are rendered in HTML, and will comply with the CSS styles of your website to match the look and feel automatically.

Icebrrg no longer has a free account, but at $9 per month, you get 10 forms, 500 entries, and 100MB of storage for customers to upload files.

3. Formsite

Formsite has a focus on a few more complex features that not every business may need in a form, but some will find extremely valuable, such as payment integration for credit cards, PayPal, and Google Checkout. They also offer multi-page and “skip/branch” surveys, which allow you to control the flow of questions based on certain rules and user responses.

Formsite has all of the customization, embedding, hosting, and notification options as the sites mentioned above, and their free account lets you create five forms, with 50 items per form.

4. Google Docs

If you’re already using Gmail, Calendar, and other Google Apps for your business, you may want to take advantage of the forms function within Google Docs.

This form generator is pretty bare bones, but the dead-simple interface and integration with your existing Google account make it useful for internal employee surveys or even the daily lunch order.

Once you create your form document, it’s tied to a spreadsheet and data summary that also live in your Google Docs. The data feedback, in the form of a response counter and various charts and graphs, is extremely detailed and easy to read (similar to Google Analytics), and the timestamped spreadsheet is exportable for whatever your database has in store.

A Google form is embeddable in an external website, but its cumbersome formatting and limited customization means that it probably won’t agree aesthetically with your sites. For now, linking to these forms is a quick and dirty way to gather data on a simple, clean interface.

Fans of the popular Seesmic Twitter client’s web-based interface have some good news today. A major update to the web interface brings in a brand new contact manager, drag-and-drop full Twitter list management, photo uploads with geotagging, Tweetmeme support and a conversational threading feature that lets you call up back-and-forth exchanges you’ve had on Twitter into a collated conversation pop-up view.

We had a chance to check out the new features and are especially excited about the conversational threads feature. Pictured below, the new option aggregates Twitter conversations into a pop-up chronological view of @replies that transpired during the Twitter exchange between you and user user(s). It’s a great way to pull in a cohesive view of a Twitter conversation, available wherever you see the “in reply to” link beneath an individual tweet. It doesn’t even have to be your own conversation thread; you can enable it to get a clearer picture of conversations among those you follow as well.

The other big new addition is a contact manager, a new feature exclusive to Seesmic (pictured below). At the top left you’ll see toggle buttons between Home, Messages and Contacts. Clicking the Contacts button takes you to the new address book-like tool that collates information about your followers, the people following you, and members of any of your Lists. You can send messages and follow or unfollow individual Twitter users from here, see their bios, and drag and drop them into existing lists (or create new lists).

List management is another new feature in this Seesmic Web update, and the drag and drop functionality is intuitive and easy to use. Inline photo uploading is also now supported, with the status update entry box containing a “Picture” button at the bottom allowing you to include a photo in your tweet from either your local machine or the web. The “Location” button next to the Picture button also allows you to enable the geolocation information to be sent with your update (requires Google Gears to be installed).

In addition to the new functionality, Seesmic Web also got a number of design tweaks and improvements for an easier-to-use interface. Are you a user of Seesmic Web? What do you think of the changes?

KommandCore is an innovative and absolutely new SaaS web service designed for project and communication management.

KommandCore makes working on group tasks — even with people outside your organization — easy.

Most project management systems give you a limit on the number of projects you can create and participants it can support. We like that KommandCore doesn’t impose those limits. Depending on your pricing plan, you have different levels of available space to store files and documents inside KommandCore, but you can have as many users and projects as you want. Users can be assigned different roles and can be given access to only the parts of the project the manager wants them to see.

Another feature we like in KommandCore: You can upload and attach files to messages, just like regular e-mail. You can also preview files within the program. That makes making notes or adding comments much faster than having to open the file separately before commenting.

We also appreciate the slick interface that KommandCore utilizes. Try out the demo on its site and play around — it’s intuitive and has a great look and feel. But what we really appreciate is that there are separate workflows and dashboards for each project member. The whole structure is much more similar to a GTD program than a tradition web-based project management app.

Pricing starts at $5 per month for 1GB accounts and goes up to $40 a month for 10GB accounts with phone support. Small companies that might want the benefits of a web-based system, but don’t want to have user limits or pay high monthly prices, should give KommandCore a try.

It’s official: Google has just announced Google Buzz, its newest push into the social media foray. This confirms earlier reports of Gmail integrating a social status feature.

On stage revealing the new product was Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president for product management. While introducing the product, Mr. Horowitz focused on the human penchant for sharing experiences and the social media phenomenon of wanting to share it in real time. These two key themes were core philosophies behind Google Buzz.

“It’s becoming harder and harder to find signal in the noise,” Bradley stated before introducing the product manager for Google Buzz, Todd Jackson.

Here are the details:

Google Buzz: The Details

Mr. Jackson introduced “a new way to communicate within Gmail.” It’s “an entire new world within Gmail.” Then he introduced the five key features that define Google Buzz

• Key feature #1: Auto-following
• Key feature #2: Rich, fast sharing experience
• Key feature #3: Public and private sharing
• Key feature #4: Inbox integration
• Key feature #5: Just the good stuff

• Google then began the demo. Once you log into Gmail, you’ll be greeted wiht a splash page introducing Google Buzz.
• There is a tab right under the inbox, labeled “Buzz”
• It provides links to websites, content from around the web. Picasa, Twitter, Flickr and other sites are aggregated.
• It shows thumbnails when linked to photos from sites like Picasa and Flickr. Clicking on an image will blow up the images to almost the entire browser, making them easier to see.
• It uses the same keyboard shortcuts as Gmail. This makes sense. Hitting “R” allows you to comment/reply to a buzz post, for example.
• There are public and private settings for different posts. You can post updates to specific contact groups. This is a lot like Facebook friend lists.
• Google wants to make sure you don’t miss comments, so it has a system to send you an e-mail letting you know about updates. However, the e-mail will actually show you the Buzz you’ve created and all of the comments and images associated with it.
• Comments update in real time.

• @replies are supported, just like Twitter. If you @reply someone, it will send a buzz toward an individual’s inbox.
• Google Buzz has a “recommended” feature that will show buzzes from people you don’t follow if your friends are sharing or commenting on that person’s buzz. You can remove it or change this in settings.
• Google is now speaking about using algorithms to help filter conversations, as well as mobile devices related to Buzz.

The Mobile Aspect

• Google buzz will be accessible via mobile in three ways: from Google Mobile’s website, from Buzz.Google.com (iPhone and Android), and from Google Mobile Maps.
• Buzz knows wher you are. It will figure out what building you are and ask you if it’s right.
• Buzz has voice recognition and posts it right onto your buzz in real-time. It also geotags your buzz posts.
• Place pages integrate Buzz.
• In the mobile interface, you can click “nearby” and see what people are saying nearby. NIFTY, if I say so myself.
• You can layer Google Maps with Buzz. You can also associate pictures with buzz within Google Maps.
• Conversation bubbles will appear on your Google Maps. They are geotagged buzz posts, which lets you see what people are saying nearby.
• They just showed off a video for Buzz.

Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday]

As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter.

Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.

If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.

An issue with the latter, however, is that Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

All right Tweetdeck fans, rev up your engines and prepare to update to Tweetdeck 0.33, which adds a slew of new features, better API management and more in-Tweetdeck media previews.

We could list all the new features in Tweetdeck0.33, but the company was nice enough to make this little video that shows everything off:

Some of the highlights:

Tweetdeck Can Manage Your Twitter API Usage — This means that the program can delegate how to use your available API calls so that the most important info gets to you as easily as possible. Plus, Tweetdeck now uses OAuth and can request up to 350 API calls an hour, and that is expected to increase soon.

Better Column Management — You can now view Flickr, YouTube and Posterous media within Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck is free.

bookmarklet is a tiny JavaScript application contained within a URL, designed to add a one-click functionalty to a web page that will allow you to alter not just your own web page but any page that you choose.
The functions that they can perform vary – you could do perform a quick search for you, they could even extract some data from a page or they can change the look and layout of a web page – which is what we are focusing on in this article.

There are, of course, many extensions and addons for the major browsers, that can perform similar tasks, but none will work with the simplicity as the bookmarklets below, and all of the extensions will use far more resources to function and load and will in some way slow down your browsing experience.

Each of the bookmarklets below, have been developed with one thing in mind: Make your web browsing experience better, quicker and easier.
It is really amazing how much usefulness you can take from such a small Javascript URL… You will be surprised…

Quix Syntax

Quix is an extensible bookmarklet, that allows you to easily access all your bookmarks and bookmarklets, across all your browsers, while maintaining them in only one spot.
Quix gives you a simple prompt, which allows you to type easy to remember commands and perform the actions you want to perform when you want to perform them. It comes with a huge set of built in commands (Social commands, WordPress, SEO, Webmaster, Analytics, URL Shortening, App Integration commands and Mac Integration commands), but the real power from Quix comes from the option to extend it by using your personalised commands files as well.

The Quix Syntax Bookmarklet

To install the Quix App bookmarklet drag and drop the button below to your bookmarks toolbar and type “help” for a full list of all available commands.

An introduction to Quix from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.

Shortwave – An Extensible Quick-Search and Shortcut Bookmark

Similiar in functionalty to Quix Syntax (above), Shortwave also responds to predefined commands and does include a number of useful defaults. Like Quix its real power lies in the option to add your own by simply pointing to a custom command file. Once you create your command (easy to follow docs are available), upload it to somewhere web-accessible and enter your commands URL on Shortwaves homepage, and you are good to go.
Shortwave is perfect for iPhone/iPod touch and anyone using multiple browsers/computers on a regular basis. Because no data is stored in the bookmark (other than the url of your custom commands file) every browser you use stays in sync automatically.

The Shortwave Bookmarklet

To install the Shortwave bookmarklet drag and drop the button below to your bookmarks toolbar and type “help” for a full list of all available commands.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a great app, it really is. It works like this: When you are viewing a web page and don’t have the time to fully read it, click the Instapaper bookmarklet and it will save the page (in text-only format removing all those cumbersome graphics and functionalities) to your Instapaper web page. You can view the page via most smartphones (this web app is very popular within the iPhone community) online, or you can choose to download them and view them at your leisure offline.
To access this service all you will need to do is submit your email address.

The Instapaper Bookmarklet

To install the Instapaper bookmarklet drag and drop the button below to your bookmarks toolbar. Don’t forget to visit the Instapaper homepage and register your email address to access all your saved pages: Instapaper Registration.

Google has a cool little surprise in store for heavy e-mail users (and Mac owners): Google E-mail Uploader for Mac. It’s a free app that can archive your old e-mails from Apple Mail, Eudora and Thunderbird on your Google Apps e-mail account.

It’s actually a great idea; chances are that in the pre-cloud era, you’ve had tons of e-mail stored somewhere in your desktop e-mail client. Now, you can move everything to the cloud in one easy step.

If you’re a Windows user, check out the previously available Google E-mail Uploader for Windows Unfortunately, you can only upload your e-mails to Google Apps e-mail accounts, not your gmail.com or googlemail.com accounts.