New web apps often make a lot of claims that just don't hold up under testing. When I decided to put Quarkbase.com through the paces, I fully expected to be underwhelmed. After all, their motto is "Everything About A Website."
Holy information overload Batman, this one really surprised me.
Pick a domain and hit search, then give Quarkbase a chance to dig up its research. They say to wait about 30 seconds, though my successful searches worked more quickly. I did get a few failure notices because of high traffic, but I understand why. Quarkbase finds so much information about your website that it's mindblowing.
What does it find? The domain owner, registrar, creation date, primary language, similar sites (*yawn* so far), traffic rank, blog rank, countries in which it's popular, description and "official" contact info, people involved, incoming links, and more. Unlike the "similar pages" Google search returns, the Quarkbase suggestions were pretty much right on the money.
But wait, there's more. It'll track down numbers on Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Delicious, and Yahoo Answers. Quarkbase even knows how many times the site have made Digg's front page. It also generates a list of the most popular recent page and five popular pages of all time based on these stats.
Quarkbase is an incredibly informative tool and undeniably useful for anyone working the web.
I rarely get as excited by a Web 2.0 app or service as I am by ProofHQ, which is an innovative and platform-independent way to manage the whole review and approval process for creative documents. At least for me, the most tedious part of the design process is getting feedback and approval. First you have to make sure the file is in a format that a client or collaborator can read (so that you don't accidentally send out a Word 2007 document to someone who is using Office 2003 and doesn't have the Office 2007 viewer software), then if you are sending something by e-mail, that the e-mail size isn't too large for their mail server. That process has to be repeated for every change or for every new element.
ProofHQ was designed to streamline the entire creative review process, making much of the above process unnecessary.This is how it works: You upload your proof, document or design concept to ProofHQ and enter in who you want to send the proof to. ProofHQ then creates a web-optimized, Flash-based proof that your reviewers or collaborators can view. They just click on a link in their e-mail and have access to the proof or document.
From there, they can add notes, draw in markup and immediately reject or approve a design. You can even embed a "Miniproof" in a blog or wiki, and any comments made either at that site or via the ProofHQ dashboard appear alongside one another. This makes it really, really easy to get feedback and collaboration from lots of different people. As the document creator, you can see who has reviewed or commented on a proof and instantly eyeball if something is approved or if you need to bug someone to give you an answer.
Once upon a time, it looked like MapQuest was on the same path that TiVo, Kleenex, and Xerox had taken before it. If you were looking up directions using any web site, there was a good chance you said you were "mapquesting it." But now the pioneer in online directions faces stiff competition from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others. But it looks like AOL (the company that owns both MapQuest and this blog) is trying to play catchup by rolling out many of the same features you'll find at those other sites, and a few new ones to boot.
The first thing you'll notice in the new MapQuest beta is that the company has finally added a map to the front page. You no longer have to enter your data and click to a secondary screen. The map will automatically show information based on your preferences or your physical location.
You can do all the things you'd expect with the map, like search for addresses or business, zoom in and out, or view arial images. You can also click on a weather link to overlay weather information, or click a gas link to pull up gas price information for various locations. There's also a traffic button that shows live traffic conditions for more than 85 cities.
Some of these features have been available for months. For example, MapQuest introduced live traffic information back in March. But AOL is really pushing the redesign now, by providing a link to the beta at the top of the main MapQuest page. The plan is to promote the beta for a few months before flipping the switch and killing the older version of the site.
At the beginning of the summer, a new sales tax law went into effect in New York State, requiring online retailers who have some sort of presence in the state (like shipping centers or affiliate programs) to charge sales tax on any item shipped to New York residents. Big e-tailers like Amazon.com and Newegg complied with the new law, although Amazon is still suing the state of New York, claiming the tax law is unconstitutional.
Today, Newegg, a favorite shop amongst Download Squad's staff, has decided to stop collecting those taxes. According to PC Magazine, Newegg wrote an e-mail to customers, explaining, "After careful review and consideration, we are pleased to inform you that we have stopped collecting New York sales tax, effective August 21, 2008."
Although Newegg will no longer be charging sales tax on orders shipped to New York, New York residents may still be required to pay sales tax for those purchases (usually when filing annual income tax statements). Much of the rationale for the tax bill in the first place, as I understand it, was to force businesses to do what residents were not doing: paying sales tax on online goods ordered from out-of-state.
It will be interesting to see if Newegg's decision has any trickle-down effect on any other shops that are currently complying with the law. Although I can't see Amazon following suite -- that could potentially harm its legal case -- perhaps retailers like Overstock.com, which temporarily suspended affiliate-agreements with New York residents as a way of avoiding the tax issue, will re-evaluate the situation.
Image sharing site Flickr has allowed users to view attractive slideshows of search results or image sets for a while now. But for some reason, up until now you had to rely on a third party service if you wanted to embed that slideshow on your own web page. Or you could create an iFrame and figure out how to create the code yourself. But who wants to go through the trouble?
This week, Flickr finally added the ability to share a slideshow with other users. Just click the Share link when viewing any slideshow on Flickr. You get two options: a URL that links to the slideshow you're viewing or HTML code that will let you embed a smaller version on your web page.
The slideshow embedded at the top of this post shows search results for the word "compiz."
Online auction site eBay has two things that make it different from every other online store. First, it's a virtual bazaar where anyone can hawk their own goods rather than a traditional storefront where a company maintains and sells its own inventory. Second, as an auction site, there's a chance that buyers will get a real bargain, or that sellers will get more than an item is worth.
For a while now, eBay has been offering sellers the option of selling items for a fixed price. This way both the buyer and the seller know exactly how much money will change hands up front. If you search eBay for pretty much any item now, you'll find a ton of "buy it now" listings amidst the sea of auctions.
Make it easier for customers to simply place an order for an item at a specified price instead of waiting a week to find out if they won an auction
Help eBay compete with the thousands of other web stores offering items for fixed prices
Kill off one of the things that really made eBay special
Now, eBay isn't really going to emphasize that last bit. But the truth is, the move sort of turns eBay into half.com (which is already owned by eBay). Sure, a few sellers might decide it's worth selling their items in auctions, hoping that some buyer will forget to comparison shop and pay way too much for an item. But if it's cheaper to just list the item for the price you hope to get, why wouldn't you? And that takes a way a bit of the excitement involved in the bidding process.
Then again, with so many people using eBay, when was the last time you really got a bargain as a buyer?
YouGetSignal provides a bunch of tools for looking things up. You can find the location of a phone number on a Google Map, find open ports on your internet connection, or perform a visual trace route (which traces the route packets of data make on the internet when traveling from your computer to another destination).
We recently discovered a new YouGetSignal tool: a reverse IP domain check. Just type a URL in the box, and YouGetSignal will attempt to discover other web sites using the same server. This comes in handy if you want to find URLs registered to a certain company, or if you have a shared hosting plan for your own web site and you want to see what other sites are sharing your server space.
For example, I discovered that there are 856 domains hosted on the same server as www.google.com, and 841 hosted on the same server as www.downloadsquad.com.
If you're a heavy Twitter user, you've no doubt accumulated a huge collection of tiny text messages. Losing all that information would be a giant pain, but how do you save a copy for yourself? Have a look at Tweetake!
The interface is dead simple: enter your Twitter username and password, select what you want to back up, and press Get 'em! to release the hounds.
Within a few seconds Tweetake presents you with a CSV file containing all your valuable messages. Tweetake grabs the sender's name and screen name, their location and description, timestamp, and the tweet text, along with just about all the other info that Twitter stores.
How many of you back up the files on your PC regularly? I'd wager the number backing up online data (like Twitter) is even lower. Play it safe, and back up your tweets!
Online file sharing service Drop.io already provides one of the easiest ways to share documents and media files. Now the company is making things even easier with a Firefox addon that lets you drag and drop files to your browser.
Here's how it works. You install the somewhat cleverly titled Drag & Drop.io extension and create a drop point by visiting Drop.io. Then you can just drag any files from your desktop to your web browser and watch while they're uploaded and in some cases converted for easy online access.
Too busy to actually create a drop point manually? Just drag your files over the little red check box in your status bar. The plugin will automatically create a drop point and open it up for you. So you can be browsing your favorite web site (like, say Download Squad?) and uploading files at the same time, without bothering to visit the Drop.io web page first.
The plugin is cross-platform and works with Firefox for Windows, OS X and Linux.
I have a hard time reading some of my favorite blogs, including Eee PC News and Blogeee because, well, I don't speak German or French. Not fluently anyway. Historically, I've tried to deal with this limitation of mine by subscribing to each site's RSS feed and trying to figure out what articles are about by squinting at the headlines, scratching my head, and looking at the pictures. Every now and again I find something I think might be interesting and I pop it into Google Translate. But I'm fairly certain I'm missing some interesting stories this way.
Mloovi is a new service that makes it much easier to follow a blog or news site published in a language you don't speak. Mloovi basically takes the contents of the feed, runs it through Google Translate, and then syndicates a new feed.
There are a few limitations to Mloovi-generated feeds. First, you'll occasionally be confronted with an advertisement, but Mloovi needs to make money somehow. Second, Mloovi strips images from RSS feeds and only shows a partiel feed even if a web site's original feed was full text. But Mloovi can still be big time saver if you want to follow some foreign language sites. Mloovi works with any languages supported by Google Reader, including Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Hindi, Norwegian and English.
Mlovi also has a handy widget that lets web publishers offer subscription links in mulitple languages.
Some days it's all good and you're enjoying reading the news for the masses on Digg or Reddit. Other days you want something with a bit more substance. Maybe you're having dinner with your future in-laws and you need a good, solid, grown-up conversation starter. Check out Polymeme, which bills itself as the "experts' take on what's important on the web."
Polymeme tracks information in 20 areas, from Green & Energy to Books & Poetry with things like TV & Cinema and New Media thrown in for good measure. Top news stories are gathered from Polymeme's database of 25,000 blogs using algorithms that monitor the most viewed and linked to stories in each of the 20 categories.
By having the 20 different areas of news to monitor, Polymeme is able to find the hottest articles, blog posts and information from mainstream, alternative and citizen-driven media sources in each area instead of just the hottest news on the web as a whole. Site information calls it the "wisdom of clusters and not just the wisdom of crowds."
If you enjoy reading articles from places like Scientific American, MSNBC and Slate or you just need to step up your RSS feeds, Polymeme might be just what you're looking for.
I've seen my share of bad web products. Some are bad because they are poorly implemented, others are bad because they are ill-conceived. The new Private Label Custom Domains product from FeedBlitz definitely falls into the latter category.
To be honest, I'm not even sure where to start here. From what I can gather, FeedBlitz wants me to pay them for the privilege of syndicating my content onto their domain. They're basically trying to sell subdomains on the feedblitz.com site at prices that are higher ($9.99 per year) than what you can pay to register your own real domain.
This is clearly a product without a market; I mean, who is this mythical customer that is out there wishing they could syndicate the content from their already-existing site onto a subdomain that they pay for at some other site? Nobody, that's who.
And I think FeedBlitz knows this. Follow me through the break for a few more thoughts on this.
There are plenty of great places to upload and share files, so why not use a bunch of them all at once?
Rapidspread is a a simple file upload site that automatically forwards your files to as many as 10 filesharing sites. From the upload page, simply browse for your file(s), agree to the terms of service, and click share. Once the upload is complete, RapidSpread displays a URL to send to your friends as well as direct links to your file on the supported hosts it's been transferred to.
My test rar file successfully uploaded to eight of the ten possible hosts - not too shabby. When I chose to upload several images, RapidSpread was even smart enough to limit mirroring to the media-sharing services (ImageShack, Badongo, ZShare, and ZippyShare).
Anyone that uploads files on a regular basis will appreciate the simplicity and power of RapidSpread. If the developers would just intergrate a short URL service like bit.ly, this would be a truly killer service. Give it a shot, and see how it stacks up against your favorite service.
