My favorite web sites:

Communications

Person-to-person communications platforms: E-mail, chat, voice. 

AOL Instant Messenger, known commonly as AIM, is one of the most popular and oldest instant-messaging services around.

Gmail is Google's Web-based mail service.

GrandCentral is a catchall voice mail and messaging service that you can monitor right in your browser.

Meebo is a multinetwork IM service that runs in your browser window.

Skype is a text, voice, and video-chatting platform that works using your Internet connection.

Trillian is a multiclient instant-messaging software program.

Yahoo Mail is Yahoo's free, Web-based e-mail service.

Yahoo Messenger is Yahoo's instant-messaging client and chat protocol.

Community

Online gathering places and group-powered content.

Bebo is a not just another MySpace, it's a one of the fastest growing social-networking Web sites on the Internet.

DeviantArt is a service that hosts user-created art, be it a photograph, written word, or digital creations.

Digg is a user-driven site that employs social democracy to bring new and upcoming stories to its front page.

House pets can now join the social networking scene, assuming their owners feel like making profiles for them.

Facebook is a popular social networking service.

Friendster is an incredibly popular social network, and also one of the most talked-about in the Web community.

Gaia Online is a mix of social networking and massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG).

LinkedIn provides a way for people to keep track of connections, both business and personal.

Me.dium shows you who else is on the site you're visiting.

MySpace is one of the most well-recognized social networks in the world.

Entertainment

Tools for taking time off: Games and contests.

Your desk is under attack by invaders coming from both land and air.

Eventful is an event-finding and listing service to find fun things to do in your area.

GameGum is a Flash-based gaming community and portal service.

You may not even realize it, but you're likely to have seen Homestar Runner or one of the site's characters before.

Line Rider is a free, Web-based Flash game that's one-part entertainment, and one-part creativity

Newgrounds is a free portal site for Flash games.

Revision3 has more than a dozen original shows that you can get only on the Web.

Stardoll is a Web-based version of dress-up dolls.

Yahoo Bix is a fairly simple idea.

You Don't Know Jack was a popular computer game in the 1990s, and has since lived on in Internet form.

Media

Places to consume and share videos, photos, and music.

Flickr is a popular photo-sharing and hosting service.

Fotki is a photo-sharing and hosting site.

Last.fm is a music discovery and listening service.

Netflix is a DVD rental service that's run entirely on the Internet.

Pandora is a music discovery and recommendation service.

Photobucket is a photo-sharing and hosting site.

uStream.TV lets almost anyone with the right equipment and some gusto put together a live broadcasting network.

Yahoo Video is Yahoo's answer to YouTube and other similar video-hosting services.

YouTube is one of the most well-known video services on the Internet, and more recently the battleground for copyright and intellectual property protection.

Zooomr is a free photo-sharing and hosting service.

Publishing

Tools for producing your own site: Blogging and Web content services.

Adobe's Flash has grown into a powerful and lightweight platform for delivering video and other media-rich pages to users on multiple computing platforms.

Blogger is a Web-based blogging platform owned by Google.

Drupal is a powerful publishing and content management system.

FeedBurner is a service for blog or Web site owners to keep track of who is subscribing to their RSS feeds.

Google Analytics is a free tool that gives Web site owners a relatively easy system to keep track of how people are accessing content on their sites.

PollDaddy offers a simple approach to making polls, which you can post nearly anywhere on the Web.

Silverlight is a framework for providing rich applications to the Internet browser.

TypePad is a Web-publishing tool for bloggers.

Vox is half social network and half blogging tool.