Tag: WEB2.0

In recent years, there has been a massive surge in popularity for audio-visual communication. Driven by an ever-increasing flow of data, the audio and visual channels are really our only recourse; reading text simply isn't fast enough. YouTube videos, Flash games and sites, infographics -- all of these, and more, are popular because of our limited bandwidth for the written word. It's almost like ...

In most cases, by the time you hear about a cool beta test that you'd like to be a part of, it's too late. When sites like TechCrunch or Mashable break the news of a startup with an exclusive, the sign-up queues are inevitably flooded with wannabe testers, leaving you with a very big chance that you'll be left out in the cold. What you really need is an insider site, something that might warn you ...

TuneCrank is another crack at a familiar problem: How do you make people listen to unfamiliar independent artists, and help the good stuff float to the top? Uvumi tries to do this, and so does Bandcamp in a completely different take. TuneCrank is yet another attempt, with a stress on bare-bones simplicity and minimalism. It's basically just a player with "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons, and ...

WorkFlowy is deceptively simple. It's just an outliner – a list-maker! You click on a new line, write whatever you have to write, and hit Enter. Done – you now have a bullet, a "to-do item," or whatever you want to call it. Hit Shift+Enter, and you can add some text as a note for that item. There is nothing revolutionary about it, except for one key difference: it lets you drill into ...

For a Web 2.0 application, Is it raining in ... follows the book pretty closely. It is: Minimalistic: This thing couldn't possibly be more bare-bones. There isn't a single image on the page. Simple: Just go to http://isitraining.in/ and type a city's name. It will try to figure out the country on its own. Nerd-friendly: The app URL format is very friendly, obviously meant to be used right ...

Flickriver was briefly mentioned on Download Squad back in 2007, but it really deserves its own post. It's a very simple interface for browsing Flickr photos which displays a bunch of photos on the page, and you scroll down to view them. As you near the bottom, more photos are loaded so that you can just keep scrolling. This is by no means a new trick, but I find it very convenient and easy to ...

Peg.gd is a one-trick pony: go to the site, enter a title, type your text, and you're done. You now have a short URL with text that you can share and edit (or have others edit). The whole thing has a zen garden, forced minimalism feel to it, the kind seen on a lot of Ruby-based projects (I bet this thing is a Rails app, but I may be wrong). I happen to like it, but that's really a matter of ...

I have recently been experimenting with CSS3 box properties for my own personal site. I was thrilled with how easy it was to create a box with rounded corners, some shading and a border – it was really trivial. That was even before I found CSS3 Playground. Had I found this neat little tool before, I would not have had to hand-code a single line of text. Like so many other showcases and ...

When you register to Send To Dropbox, it doesn't require your Dropbox username and password. It simply asks permission to hook into Dropbox's API. Once you agree, you get an email address that ends with @sendtodropbox.com. Anything sent to that email address ends up in your Dropbox, sorted according to date, subject, or From address. You can either give this address to people that you trust, or ...

We first covered Glass back at SXSW, with a video interview. Glass is a very aesthetic and tight combo of website plus Firefox add-on; it allows you to place notes ("Post-it" style) over any website, and then share those notes in a Tumblr-like stream so that your friends can see them (and comment). Glass is very social; you can send a note to your friends, and you have a "feed" that shows ...

Many developers know that technically, you can create CSS-only buttons with rounded corners and nice gradients. Since it's often such a hassle, though, they may not bother with it. Button Maker is a tool that takes all of the hassle out of creating buttons for the Web. Button Maker lets you play with three sliders and some color pickers, and you end up with comprehensive CSS for your ...

Okay, so four CS majors get together and say, "hey, why don't we create something that is like Facebook, but with no privacy concerns?" Two weeks later, they've raised over $100K in pledges. This could either be hyped-up vaporware (as my DLS colleague Matthew Rogers believes), or it could be something truly great. To see why, and how, it can all work out for the best, continue reading after the ...

Jason Clarke did it first, and now I feel the time has come for me to say goodbye to Facebook. For me, it started getting creepy when I kept getting status updates from people who are not even my friends, and who have no idea they're broadcasting their status to "friends of friends". Sure, you can control that through the privacy settings. But how many people actually know all 170 privacy ...

No, it's not another RSS mix-up. The reason you're seeing an Ellen-related screenshot is because that happens to be the playlist vote that I stumbled onto in SongVote. It's all quite straightforward, really; SongVote lets you create a topic or an event ("Shloime's Bar Mitzvah") and then have people vote on what music they'd like to hear at the event. You can either vote for one of the songs ...

0to255 it a very slick, well-designed tool for quickly finding color variations for borders and color gradients. You dial in a Hex color code (say, "de40d5") and instantly get a long palette with light-to-dark variations of that particular hue. Every variation has its hex color value written across it, and when you hover over it you get a small swatch showing your original color along with the ...