Tuesday, March 16, 2010

What Do You Suggest?

If you like the offering of Google Suggest, then you should check out this What do you suggest. Basically, What do you suggest is a very simple site that used Google data and allows users to get the real-time suggestions as they type or click on its interface.

On the “What Do You Suggest?” interface, it is essentially divided into a search bar and three buttons: Obviously the search bar is where you can enter your query and the other three buttons are the randomly word, letter, and question that Google suggests to you whenever you click on any one of those. However, the funniest part is the result that you can get a visual exploration of the collective searches done by our fellow humans.

what do you suggest

Tweetag

There are a plethora of new Twitter applications across the Web right now, though all these apps are all specifically for certain functionality each, but very few are able to show to the individual users that they should try them out, one of them is Tweetag. Tweetag is a newly released Twitter mashup that show promise that it can helps users to search the Twittosphere via tag. Created by Commentag, which developed a WordPress plugin that used to tag comments automatically, now developing a Twitter search tool that allowed users to browse through tags in the Twittosphere.

On the Tweetag site, you’ll find the popular tags in the Twittosphere in the form of tag cloud. Though you can enter your own search term, however the form of tag cloud definitely will be a better and more efficient layout for those who want to stay on top of the latest topics without having to enter a single keyword search. From the tags appeared on the front page, the general idea is that the biggest the tag font size is, the more popular this tag is as compare to the others. Nevertheless, I still very much prefer the live tag cloud, as rendered by Twitscoop, where I can see the tags are growing or shrinking in real time on its front page.

Twit Links

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Twit Links, dubbed as “Tweets for Busy Peeps” is a site that aggregate tech tweets. On the site, you’ll find all the cool stuff that the tech people talked about, and latest links from the world’s top tech Tweeters. Twit Links was in fact launched in this year, using the API of Twitter, and the purpose and display of the tech news of this site meaning that it is an alternative to another automated tech news aggregator site called Techmeme.

For some people that subscribed to a lot of feeds, but do not find the time to read all the tech news, this site will serve as a centralized site for them to find all the latest tech news that are of interest to them. However, the tweets they’re pulling from are not the real-time tweets, all of which are in the lag time of minimum ten (10) minutes.

Nevertheless, though the purpose of this site sounds great, it is still not manage to gain enough traction to be noticed on the Web.

Searchcube

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Searchcube, a project of Symmetri that built on Google AJAX Search API, now has options to create an unique, three-dimensional cube interface of your search results that fetched from Google. Each time you enter a query, and the search results to be shown are add up to thirty-two (32) results per cube, and since it renders a three-dimension cube interface, the maximum total number of results return is ninety-six (96) results.

Searchcube’s primary aim for users is search in graphical format, and the results show up on the Web browser is in a visually attractive, and appealing 3D fashion. The search results rendered is a mashup from several third-party programming tools, such as thumbshots.org, Sandy 3D Engine Actionscript library and Tweener Actionscript library. Each tool is deployed for a specific purpose, respectively.

This type of 3D display is becoming quite popular nowadays, mainly because it allows you to sift through stacks of search results. With a simple mouse or keyboard click, you can flip cube, drag and rotate or turn the cube, and etc. You also can mouse hover to one of the results; a brief information about that particular result will be shown in your right-hand side of the Web browser, see example below.

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TwittFriends

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TwittFriends is a new third-party service that based on Twitter API. As the name suggests, TwittFriends is a service where Twitter users can find out the connections barely related to their friends in Twitter, and not so much about the tweets.

After you signing up for the service using your existing Twitter username and password, it will provides you with an obvious results of all your friends and each of your friends are being represented by her own avatar in Twitter. In actual fact, the display of your Twitter friends list is fairly good. Select any friend will bring you to a specific page which listed the friends connection with whom you selected with – the ones you have in common and the one you are unshared. TwittFriends also want to gives you the depth of any connection with your Twitter friends. This site also includes a brief statistics so that you will roughly know the one you followed is following you on the other end, and whether or not she is favoritized any of your tweets at this moment.

In short, TwittFriends is about “How are you connected?” Its features allows you to drill down to a specific Twitter friend and explore any connection from there.

Mixwit

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Mixwit is a simple Web site that enable users to create a mix of their favorite music, and then share it amongst their friends. This Mixwit, is a mashup that truly special and user-friendly. There are only three (3) steps involved in order to create a mix, making it possible for even a novice user to complete the mixtape creation process.

To create a mixtape, you can search your favorite music by placing some keywords such as name of the artist, song, album or genre to the search bar, Mixwit will then return the songs available through some MP3 music sources across the Web. From the songs, you can drag-n-drop the songs in order to create your own library of playlists. However, not every song you selected would be available for you to compile a track since Mixwit is only working on the APIs of Skreemr, Seeqpod, and ccMixter. In other words, it does not guarantee the availability of the songs as Mixwit does not store the songs in its back-end engine. Nevertheless, the songs that are not available at any point from the URL link repository of Skreemr, Seeqpod, and ccMixter will be labeled in yellow color for the user attention. The idea was that the song files will always be stayed in the original location on the Web.

In addition, Mixwit also taken into account flexibility. It means you are allowed to add style, i.e. in the forms of any skin, color and style, including glossiness, edges, and shadow to the mixtape. Besides, you also can upload your own pictures, photos, artwork, or drawings instead of the basic skins that prepared by Mixwit. Also, you can alter the text format or add the title and description of the mixtape. After you finishing any of these style adding actions, you can save your work and publish it to the Mixwit community.

In July this year, Mixwit has rolled out a fans/following feature. It was Mixwit’s first foray into the social networking activity. As the feature name implied, if you like the playlists someone is making, you can become a fan and following what they do. This approach is known for connecting users in a basic and yet simple manner. In this way, whenever you’ve made a mixtape, your fans will receive notifications. By the way, if you come across any mixtape you like, you can add it as favorite for bookmarking purpose.

To encourage users register themselves in the system, Mixwit has implemented a way to assign a mix path URL in a readable format, i.e. in text form. For anonymous users, the mixtapes they created will receive an usual ugly 32-character codes, and the username appeared besides the mixtape will be “Guest.” For anonymous users, they will not get the second chances to edit their mixtapes after they finishing the aforesaid three (3) steps. In contrast, registered users have more options in terms of editing and saved account capabilities.

Nevertheless, any public mixtape can be shared across the Web as a gigya widget, allowing you to direct posting to a number of sites such as Blogger, MySpace, WordPress, Bebo, Friendster, just to name a few.

Mixwit is a startup that went public beta in March this year, as well as being funded by Y Combinator.

Update: Mixwit has been closed down on May 2009.