SOCIAL NETWORKS
1. bix.yahoo.com
Bix, a natural extension of the current public obsession with American Idol, plays host to all sorts of contests—beauty, comedy, dance, karaoke, lip-synching—even Capitol Records is using the site to conduct its search for its "next great country singer" (winner gets $50,000 and a three-song demo deal). Contenders upload original audio and video recordings or digital photos to enter; viewers vote, and, just like on Idol, the fans decide. Anybody can start a contest, and anybody can enter a contest—unless it's made private, which is an option. The Battle of Bix's Best Video Karaoke, for example, invited the top four from five different contests for a final face-off (it ended June 11, with songbird82 declared the champion. View the winning entry). Members can create top 10 lists (their 10 favorite entries), leave comments and email contest links to friends or post entries on their own websites (the site gives you the HTML code to copy and paste). There is mature content, but only registered members who declare themselves over 18 on their profile page can access it. Contest pages present a randomly selected face-off between two entries, and this changes each time you visit, so be sure to click "view all entries" before you pick a favorite.
2. Fatsecret.com
This social network is dedicated to helping people who are trying to lose weight. The site, which is free, uses pie charts and graphs to provide concrete information about what works for its members—and what doesn't. It lists the most popular diets and provides details about their particular approach and stages, and bar charts show progress made by the members who are following it. Read up on Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, the Fat Smash plan and the Fat Flush. Make friends to create a support system; create your own diet and share it with the community. Member-reported weigh-in amounts are posted on the home page, tagged with either a red arrow pointing up or green arrow pointing down along with links to their journal entries. Individual member pages include a weight history, plotted on a graph.
3. Prosper.com
Prosper is a community of lenders and borrowers—or social lending network—operates outside of any bank, so the rates are better. Post a request for a loan, including desired amount and the maximum interest rate you'd be willing to pay; potential lenders place bids for the amount they are willing to lend, and at what rate. Prosper combines the best offers and puts together a loan plan (multiple lenders, lower risk) and manages the repayment over three years (the standard term). The site also does credit checks, and charges transaction fees and servicing fees.
Prosper loans are not secured by collateral, but the loan agreements are legally binding. You can join a group to get the benefit of that group's positive payment history; as a member of a group, your timely payments help improve the group's overall rep, and that can lead to lower rates for everybody. There are loads of rules for borrowers and lenders—members are forbidden to arrange loans outside the Prosper marketplace, for example—and violations can get you booted. Zopa based in the U.K., operates along similar lines (and its site has prettier graphics) but its network is not as big as Prosper's, which boasts more than 300,000 members and nearly $66 million in active loans. Also worth noting: CircleLending which helps manage private loans between relatives and friends.
4.Mozy.com
Backing up all your computer files is like flossing: it's a chore, but you know you should do it, or you risk losing something forever—not your teeth, of course, but your digital photos, music, financial records or that rough draft of your first novel. Mozy can keep all of that stuff safe and encrypted on its own servers. It will store 2 gigabytes worth of your files for free (enough to cover, say, a couple thousand pictures, depending on the image resolution), or an unlimited amount for $4.95 per month. You download and install the Mozy program and it does all the work; you tell it precisely what you want to protect. The first backup can take hours, but after that, Mozy will continue to work behind the scenes to backup new files. (Fortunately, this little backup engine is trained to take a break when you are using your computer, to avoid slowing everything down.) Mozy also lets you view your backed up files from any PC, and let you restore files as needed.
5.WEB SERVICES
Tumblr.com
Blogging
Bloggers have long lamented the constant pressure to post daily, even multiple times a day, or risk becoming irrelevant or losing their audience. Well, it's Tumblr to the rescue: this service helps you feel good about your blog, even when you have nothing much to say. A "tumblelog," as the company home page notes, is more like a scrapbook than a journal; images and text are displayed rather large to help pump things up, and the posting process—basically working buttons on a "dashboard"—couldn't be easier. Vox also stands out among the many blog builders out there. This service, from Six Apart, lets you set a different privacy filter for each post if you want, so you can opt to make some of your blog public and other parts of it private.
6. Twitter.com
Broadcast where you are and what you're doing right here and right now by texting from your mobile phone. Your pithy posts will pop up on all your friends' cell phones so they can keep abreast of everything you do, in real time. Each "tweet" must be brief—no longer than 140 characters. The service, created by Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, exploded onto the moblogging scene earlier this year. There have been some bugs—big ones like vanishing accounts and mysterious spikes in individual networks—but none of these hiccups seemed to have dampened the public's enthusiasm. In fact, membership reportedly doubles every two to three weeks. Meanwhile, a number of third-party tools have launched to enhance it: Twitterific, Twitteroo, Tweetbar, Twitterholic, Twittervision... Kyte.tv's kyte Mobile service takes things even further, letting you broadcast your own "kyte show" in real time with photos and video shot with your (Web-connected) cell phone.
7. Weebly.com
This clever WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website building tool for non-techies offers a one-step process for adding content that's already somewhere else on the Web, such as Flickr photos, YouTube videos and Google maps. You can also add RSS feed readers that will display headlines that link back to the latest posts on your favorite blogs (just be sure to type in the site's feed URL, not the home page URL). When you click-and-drag a YouTube video onto your page, a flash player appears with it, and you can adjust the viewing screen size. (This is different than posting a link that takes you back to the source; you're literally copying the content and pulling it into your site.) Creating a blog is as easy as creating a new page, and the page design templates let you hit the ground running; you can mouse over a particular layout to get a preview. Weebly also lets you use your own domain name, if you've got one, otherwise your site URL will be yourname.weebly.com.
For those who want more flexibility, one of Weebly's click-and-drag elements is Custom HTML, which lets you copy and paste chunks of code—helpful if you want to add an element that the Weebly editor program does not yet offer as one of it's presto-it's-there features.
Weebly doesn't charge anything to host your site, and there's no limit to the number of pages or amount of material you put up. What's the catch? Founder David Rusenko insists there is none (Weebly will someday go vertical to make money, he says) and we couldn't find one. Users are not obligated to put ads on their pages, Rusenko adds, but they can if they want to by adding an "AdBrite ads" element to their pages. AdBrite delivers the display ads automatically (and makes sure they are relevant to the subject matter of your site) and turns over 100% of any revenue.
Note to Mac users: Weebly will work for you too, but try Apple's iWeb first. It uses the same click-and-drag, template approach and works with iPhoto and other Apple iLife programs to make the whole process seamless.
Soon to be hitched? WedOrama.com will host your wedding website for $70 for one year. Share every moment, from the proposal to the post honeymoon hangover, with video uploads, unlimited photos, multiple guestbooks, RSVP tracking and a personalized URL.
8. Netvibes.com
Netvibes puts everything you need on one web page, in neat little boxes that you can rearrange, reposition and rejigger to your heart's content. Display your email, weather, top stories from your favorite news sites and the latest posts from your favorite blogs; direct links are embedded within. User-created modules are listed in the "Ecosystem" public directory, and are available free for you to drag and drop into your own page. (You can make your own modules available to other Netvibers by clicking the share button next to the editing toolkit.) There's a general Web search box as well as a video search box, which pools keyword search results from YouTube, Metacafe, Google's video search engine and MySpace. To repopulate it, just click the refresh button. The Email wizard that synchs up with Gmail in a snap, but if you have Yahoo Mail it has to be a POP3 enabled account (which is not free). Hotmail, AOL and .Mac email accounts link up easily too. Honorable mention: Pageflakes.
Bix, a natural extension of the current public obsession with American Idol, plays host to all sorts of contests—beauty, comedy, dance, karaoke, lip-synching—even Capitol Records is using the site to conduct its search for its "next great country singer" (winner gets $50,000 and a three-song demo deal). Contenders upload original audio and video recordings or digital photos to enter; viewers vote, and, just like on Idol, the fans decide. Anybody can start a contest, and anybody can enter a contest—unless it's made private, which is an option. The Battle of Bix's Best Video Karaoke, for example, invited the top four from five different contests for a final face-off (it ended June 11, with songbird82 declared the champion. View the winning entry). Members can create top 10 lists (their 10 favorite entries), leave comments and email contest links to friends or post entries on their own websites (the site gives you the HTML code to copy and paste). There is mature content, but only registered members who declare themselves over 18 on their profile page can access it. Contest pages present a randomly selected face-off between two entries, and this changes each time you visit, so be sure to click "view all entries" before you pick a favorite.
2. Fatsecret.com
This social network is dedicated to helping people who are trying to lose weight. The site, which is free, uses pie charts and graphs to provide concrete information about what works for its members—and what doesn't. It lists the most popular diets and provides details about their particular approach and stages, and bar charts show progress made by the members who are following it. Read up on Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, the Fat Smash plan and the Fat Flush. Make friends to create a support system; create your own diet and share it with the community. Member-reported weigh-in amounts are posted on the home page, tagged with either a red arrow pointing up or green arrow pointing down along with links to their journal entries. Individual member pages include a weight history, plotted on a graph.
3. Prosper.com
Prosper is a community of lenders and borrowers—or social lending network—operates outside of any bank, so the rates are better. Post a request for a loan, including desired amount and the maximum interest rate you'd be willing to pay; potential lenders place bids for the amount they are willing to lend, and at what rate. Prosper combines the best offers and puts together a loan plan (multiple lenders, lower risk) and manages the repayment over three years (the standard term). The site also does credit checks, and charges transaction fees and servicing fees.
Prosper loans are not secured by collateral, but the loan agreements are legally binding. You can join a group to get the benefit of that group's positive payment history; as a member of a group, your timely payments help improve the group's overall rep, and that can lead to lower rates for everybody. There are loads of rules for borrowers and lenders—members are forbidden to arrange loans outside the Prosper marketplace, for example—and violations can get you booted. Zopa based in the U.K., operates along similar lines (and its site has prettier graphics) but its network is not as big as Prosper's, which boasts more than 300,000 members and nearly $66 million in active loans. Also worth noting: CircleLending which helps manage private loans between relatives and friends.
4.Mozy.com
Backing up all your computer files is like flossing: it's a chore, but you know you should do it, or you risk losing something forever—not your teeth, of course, but your digital photos, music, financial records or that rough draft of your first novel. Mozy can keep all of that stuff safe and encrypted on its own servers. It will store 2 gigabytes worth of your files for free (enough to cover, say, a couple thousand pictures, depending on the image resolution), or an unlimited amount for $4.95 per month. You download and install the Mozy program and it does all the work; you tell it precisely what you want to protect. The first backup can take hours, but after that, Mozy will continue to work behind the scenes to backup new files. (Fortunately, this little backup engine is trained to take a break when you are using your computer, to avoid slowing everything down.) Mozy also lets you view your backed up files from any PC, and let you restore files as needed.
5.WEB SERVICES
Tumblr.com
Blogging
Bloggers have long lamented the constant pressure to post daily, even multiple times a day, or risk becoming irrelevant or losing their audience. Well, it's Tumblr to the rescue: this service helps you feel good about your blog, even when you have nothing much to say. A "tumblelog," as the company home page notes, is more like a scrapbook than a journal; images and text are displayed rather large to help pump things up, and the posting process—basically working buttons on a "dashboard"—couldn't be easier. Vox also stands out among the many blog builders out there. This service, from Six Apart, lets you set a different privacy filter for each post if you want, so you can opt to make some of your blog public and other parts of it private.
6. Twitter.com
Broadcast where you are and what you're doing right here and right now by texting from your mobile phone. Your pithy posts will pop up on all your friends' cell phones so they can keep abreast of everything you do, in real time. Each "tweet" must be brief—no longer than 140 characters. The service, created by Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, exploded onto the moblogging scene earlier this year. There have been some bugs—big ones like vanishing accounts and mysterious spikes in individual networks—but none of these hiccups seemed to have dampened the public's enthusiasm. In fact, membership reportedly doubles every two to three weeks. Meanwhile, a number of third-party tools have launched to enhance it: Twitterific, Twitteroo, Tweetbar, Twitterholic, Twittervision... Kyte.tv's kyte Mobile service takes things even further, letting you broadcast your own "kyte show" in real time with photos and video shot with your (Web-connected) cell phone.
7. Weebly.com
This clever WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website building tool for non-techies offers a one-step process for adding content that's already somewhere else on the Web, such as Flickr photos, YouTube videos and Google maps. You can also add RSS feed readers that will display headlines that link back to the latest posts on your favorite blogs (just be sure to type in the site's feed URL, not the home page URL). When you click-and-drag a YouTube video onto your page, a flash player appears with it, and you can adjust the viewing screen size. (This is different than posting a link that takes you back to the source; you're literally copying the content and pulling it into your site.) Creating a blog is as easy as creating a new page, and the page design templates let you hit the ground running; you can mouse over a particular layout to get a preview. Weebly also lets you use your own domain name, if you've got one, otherwise your site URL will be yourname.weebly.com.
For those who want more flexibility, one of Weebly's click-and-drag elements is Custom HTML, which lets you copy and paste chunks of code—helpful if you want to add an element that the Weebly editor program does not yet offer as one of it's presto-it's-there features.
Weebly doesn't charge anything to host your site, and there's no limit to the number of pages or amount of material you put up. What's the catch? Founder David Rusenko insists there is none (Weebly will someday go vertical to make money, he says) and we couldn't find one. Users are not obligated to put ads on their pages, Rusenko adds, but they can if they want to by adding an "AdBrite ads" element to their pages. AdBrite delivers the display ads automatically (and makes sure they are relevant to the subject matter of your site) and turns over 100% of any revenue.
Note to Mac users: Weebly will work for you too, but try Apple's iWeb first. It uses the same click-and-drag, template approach and works with iPhoto and other Apple iLife programs to make the whole process seamless.
Soon to be hitched? WedOrama.com will host your wedding website for $70 for one year. Share every moment, from the proposal to the post honeymoon hangover, with video uploads, unlimited photos, multiple guestbooks, RSVP tracking and a personalized URL.
8. Netvibes.com
Netvibes puts everything you need on one web page, in neat little boxes that you can rearrange, reposition and rejigger to your heart's content. Display your email, weather, top stories from your favorite news sites and the latest posts from your favorite blogs; direct links are embedded within. User-created modules are listed in the "Ecosystem" public directory, and are available free for you to drag and drop into your own page. (You can make your own modules available to other Netvibers by clicking the share button next to the editing toolkit.) There's a general Web search box as well as a video search box, which pools keyword search results from YouTube, Metacafe, Google's video search engine and MySpace. To repopulate it, just click the refresh button. The Email wizard that synchs up with Gmail in a snap, but if you have Yahoo Mail it has to be a POP3 enabled account (which is not free). Hotmail, AOL and .Mac email accounts link up easily too. Honorable mention: Pageflakes.
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