We are a team of two: I'm a developer and my cofounder is a designer. We work remotely and constantly looking for ways to improve our communication to make it as close as possible to a real-life interaction when it comes to efficiency.
So far, that's what we've got (we try to stick to free tools):
* Skype for video conferencing
* Screenhero for screen sharing
* Dropbox for file sharing
* Shared ical calendars
* Useful links shared by email/twitter
Works out alright so far, except for the last one. It's difficult to keep track and organize useful content, maybe a wiki would do here.
I've tried to use Asana for task management on previous project with 3+ people and it was quiet efficient. For a team of two I feel like it would be an overkill, as we are always up-to-date with each others progress by having daily skype status calls.
Which tools do you use?
* BitBucket (core app, private)
* GitHub (FOSS projects, public)
* Trello - tracking progress
* HipChat - IM
* Basecamp - dates, discussions, project type stuff
* Google - docs, shared calendars, Hangouts
* Screenhero - screen sharing
We've almost managed to remove email from our daily flow - I very rarely send / receive internal emails now.
HipChat + Trello have become our foundation tools - couldn't live without them. (The new Trello attachments view has plugged a gap, and made sharing designs much easier than it used to be.)
HipChat is brilliant once you move on to building stuff - plug in code commits, deployments, customer service (we have Zendesk alerts) etc.
I would absolutely agree with your last point - sharing links + discussions around links is the biggest problem by far - Google+ is a perfect fit, but (our) people just seem resistant to it. I've tried, and failed, several times to get everyone to adopt it. We have a bunch of iOS people and they often share direct from Flipboard, which may be part of it.