Sunday, March 14, 2010

Archive for July, 2009

Tinysong

Want to find a song you’re in love with and share it with your friends? If so, you’re in luck, because Tinysong offers a one-stop feature for songs searching, and a URL shortening service for the song you have selected.

For the fans of popular music streaming service Grooveshark, they probably heard of this Tinysong. In fact, Tinysong is doing a decent job for its back-end music engine Grooveshark. It is gaining momentum since it is taking advantage of the large database of music that Grooveshark have. For every song you search and select on Tinysong, the URL will automatically be copied to your clipboard and this greatly helps you when you want to share the song URL with your friends via emails or Twitter. But if you put it on your Web browser, you’ll listen the song through Grooveshark.

In overall, Tinysong has a very clean look and it is easy to use. Though there are many URL shorteners on the Web, but you know for the song URL shortening service with a Google like interface, at least now you know which site you’re going to look for.

Card.ly

It’s imperative that personal branding is more important than ever. These days, almost everyone are promoting their own personal identity through social networks, or go to some social Web tools in order to build their personal Web sites.

But if you are wondering is there an online virtual business card service that can helps to complement some of the popular Web services you’ve joined, you have to check out this Card.ly. Indeed, Card.ly is an online service that allows you to create your virtual business card. When you create your card, you can add your personal details to your profile, and choose a skin that suit your profile. After you creating your business card, you can automatically share your contact information by embed the business card, so-called vCard to the Web sites you’ve joined, or even send it to your followers via Twitter.

On top of that, another good way to use Card.ly is that people that want to connect with you can do so without having to exert much effort, since Card.ly provides a streaming page which helps to import the latest updates from the popular Web services that you’ve joined.

Like other Web businesses in using the freemium model, Card.ly encourage users to upgrade to the premium account, which cost $2.99 per month or $24.99 annually. For example, if you want to have a more “pro” skin for your vCard, or use your own domain and even remove the advertisements on your card, you must upgrade to this paying plan. But if you can get by with some of the aforesaid limitations, you probably don’t have a need to upgrade.

Questioon

Questioon is an interesting and slightly more useful search engine that combine Web search and people answer for the queries you type on its search bar. At first glance, Questioon features only two search bars, one is the “Search Google” button and the other one is “Ask real people”, making it abundantly clear that users can either get the results for the text word from Web pages, or some answers from the real person.

Basically, to ask a question from a real person, you’ve to log in with your Facebook credential. If you only scour the site to generate results for Web sites, Questioon definitely not the best search engine out there by any means, not to mention that it have any differentiation advantage. However, you can narrow your results with the help of real people, and you will find it most useful if you find some answers that aggregated from Yahoo! Answers, or via the tweets, provided your query is a hot topic keywords in Twitterverse.

In overall, Questioon is worth a try, but it seems that it will not easy for them vying for the top spot in the search industry. As shown in the below picture, search for “are arsenal going to spend this summer?” was a flop; Some irrelevant answers such as “Arsenal Jersey” and “Premier league 09-10 predictions?” are also appeared and Questioon is not always successfully in weeding out such an irrelevant link.

TypingWeb

I think there are two things that I always want to improve on this site; the first one is the frequency of posting, and the other one is to learn to type better and faster in no time.

Interestingly, to address the typing problem that I have; most of the time I use middle finger of my right hand and index finger of my left hand in typing, I’ve came across a new tool called TypingWeb. TypingWeb is an online typing tutor which includes 23 lessons, ranging from beginner course to advanced and specialty course. Besides, it also provides real lessons on how you can learn more finger placements during the news headline exercises. In other words, when you begin your Google News Headlines exercises for instance, this unique typing exercise will allow you to catch up on world news, by following the screen, and you start practicing to type according to the letter shown in the highlighted color.

What’s more, when you are all done some of the typing lessons, there is a statistic page in which you can learn some of your problem keys. In addition to the typing lessons, you also can play around with several typing games that prepared by TypingWeb.

Followformation is Launched

A new Twitter tool called Followformation is launched this week. With this service, it will let you follow the tweets from the top people in the respective category that you’re interested with. As the motto of Followformation suggests, “Make following make sense,” Followformation has attracted a pretty large group of users as there are over 14,000+ follows are made through this decent tool on the launch day, as stated on its Tumblr blog.

At first glance, I still not very sure whether this newly launched tool is able to gain the traction, when there are several other tools are offering the same help in tracking the right tweeters to follow for us, such as WeFollow, Tweetsourcer, and etc. Quite the contrary; the stats showed on its blog has somehow clear my doubts.

From what I can see, Followformation is a tool too good for the novice tweeters. Since a new user joined Twitter, to get some benefits out of Twitter is to join the conversation. But before one can take part in the conversation, the only way is to start following someone, and Followformation can help you to do that right out from the gate, though it still didn’t have any differentiating factor from other tweet following tools out there on the Web.

Creately

Diagram is one of the core of an application, but many of the programmers are found it hard for creating their online diagrams. Now, thanks to Cinergix, a Melbourne, Australia based startup, Cinergix has developed a Web app called Creately that makes it easy for programmers to design and collaborate on online diagrams, UML designs, flowcharts, UI mockups, and many other visual objects in particular.

Creately, currently in private beta, not only helps their beta users in creating online diagrams, also offering all kinds of visual treats. Users can drag-n-drop the objects, or multi-select, resize, rotate, skip and skim the objects on the Creately’s interface. Also, interaction between the objects is also enabled by an one-click connection, or by using the arrow symbol. What’s more, the viewing pane looks as attractive and well designed, for those of you who are not programming nerds, Creately makes it very easy for you to create online diagram with a three-steps, that are choosing the name, and the type and template, you can start to play around the diagram on the viewing pane.

In short, there are a lot of impressive and robust features offered by Creately. So if you’re looking for an app for creating online diagrams, you won’t want to miss out this tool. Perhaps if you want to collaborate a diagram drawing project with your team-mates, Creately offers some collaboration tools that allow members of your project to work, share, and edit the diagrams that you all have made.