How in the world are you supposed to remember what song that really is? And how are you supposed to figure out when you’ve got duplicate songs taking up space on your computer?

The answer to both those questions is one word (well, really two, but one in a Web 2.0 kind of way) – TidySongs.

TidySongs is a brand-new Adobe AIR app, for Windows and Mac OS X, that hooks into your iTunes and goes bananas all over your music library, helping you to finally organize your iTunes collection.

Before I go any further, a disclaimer: TidySongs isn’t free. It’s got a fully-functioning free trial, that’s perfect for a one-time cleanup of your songs. The Genre Renaming feature remains free, but to continue to use the rest costs $30. It’s a bit hefty, but I found the benefit of one use well worth the time to install. If you download like crazy, you might want to consider purchasing the app.

Once you’ve installed the app (it’s small, and requires Adobe AIR – which it will automatically install if you don’t have it already), open up iTunes and TidySongs. You’ll immediately get three options: Fix Your Songs, Find Duplicates, and Organize Genres.

Let’s start with the big kahuna first: Fix Your Songs. Select a playlist (If you pick ‘Music‘, TidySongs scans your whole library), and check a couple of options before you start. I recommend, at least for the first pass, making sure “Fix Songs Manually” is selected – that means you review every change TidySongs makes before it makes them.

A nice medium, though, and one that worked for me, was to select “Automatically fix songs if confidence is greater than 80%.” Every time TidySongs fixes a song, it gives a confidence level of how sure it is that it’s making the right change – my experience was that, when it’s over 80%, it’s actually right about 99% of the time. Once your options are set, click “Fix Songs” and let TidySongs go to work!

TidySongs brings up the list of all the songs it wants to update for you, with all the info (it finds album art, track #, genre, and so much more) in the window. You either choose “Skip” or “Fix,” and TidySongs takes its action, and moves you to the next one. Once it’s finished, you’ll find you’ve got tons of new album artwork, better organization and ordering of albums, and a much more information-packed iTunes. This is a good first step in organizing your entire iTunes collection.

Your next option is “Find Duplicates.” TidySongs checks the Name, Artist, and/or Album of the track to see if you’ve already got it – if so, it keeps either the longer one or the better quality one, and can either delete the duplicate or just mark it as a duplicate.

You can’t actually delete anything from TidySongs without paying, but that wasn’t a problem: the "Simulate" option worked fine, and manually deleting duplicates was super easy. In one pass of my library, TidySongs found no fewer than 225 duplicates (out of 8,000 songs, not so bad, but still). Of those, I ended up deleting about 200. That’s a great percentage, but I’d still recommend checking TidySongs’ findings. Once you run this, though, you might be surprised how much space it frees on your computer.

Organizing Genres is a more simple affair – it presents you with a list of all the genres you have in your iTunes library. Select one or more, and choose what you want to rename it to. This lets you consolidate your genres into a smaller number, based on a system you’ve devised, rather than the insanity that makes Pop Rock, Rock/Pop, and rock_pop three different genres.

As a serial music downloader, having TidySongs around to run once a week or so is a lifesaver – no manually hunting for album artwork, or renaming songs – TidySongs does it for you. Even incorrectly named songs get found, for the most part, and are updated properly. It’s an impressive app, and has kept the audio-OCDer in me happy.

iTunes users should also grab a free copy of our The Ultimate iTunes Manual. Lots of great tips there.

How do you keep your music organized?

Photo Credit : Mikey

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Now, there are plenty of ways to do a song search by lyrics. Brad has already shared with you the Top 5 Sites to Find Song Lyrics Online

For the most part, Google does wonders in trying to find songs online. If you type in the lyrics you know, in quotation marks, followed by the word lyrics (something like “mmbop bop bop doowop” lyrics), you’ll usually get what you’re looking for. But, you’ll also get pages loaded with popups, tons of advertisements, and lots and lots of incorrect lyrics.

If you’re looking for an easier, better song  search engine, check out LyricRat. LyricRat is a new application attempting to make sure you always find that song you heard and liked.

Let’s start with the coolest feature: LyricRat is on Twitter. You can send any lyrics snippet to @lyricrat, and you’ll get a reply back with the name of the song, as well as a link to more information about it. This, in itself, makes LyricRat a better way to do a song search by lyrics than a Google search – when you hear a song you want to know, just send the lyrics in a text message, and the answer will be waiting in your Twitter feed when you get back.

If you’re not a Twitter user, there’s still plenty to like about LyricRat. When it finds the song you’re looking for, you’re taken to a page about the song. There’s a link to preview the song (to make sure it’s actually the song you were looking for), a link to buy the song, and another link to more information about the song or band.

There’s even a list of possible alternatives (just in case the one you want is a cover, or you entered common lyrics, or something like that). They’re all Amazon links, but Amazon’s certainly the best source of information and products for most bands, so it’s a sensible integration.

If you’re not even right about the lyrics, LyricRat can often still figure it out. No idea what Sting’s saying in any song by the Police? Just guess what it sounds like – you’re probably wrong, but if you’re hearing the same wrong lyrics as most other people, you’ll be given the right one. I tried a bunch of commonly misheard lyrics, and LyricRat got the song right more than half of the time.

As I said before, Google usually handles these things quite well. If do a song search by lyrics a lot though, as I do, you’ll appreciate a simple, attractive site that’s not totally cluttered with ridiculous popups, malware, and “buy this ringtone!” ads. LyricRat, especially since it plays so nicely with Twitter, is a great way to quickly and easily find that song that will soon be forever stuck in your head.

How do you hunt for your favorite song?

Image Credit: Kevin Lawver

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But how do you get a talk show? And how do you use it to make millions of dollars? Well, I can’t help with the second part (let me know if you figure it out), but I can help with the first. It’s called BlogTalkRadio, and is a fantastic Web app for becoming the host of your very own Internet talk show.

BlogTalkRadio is really two things: it’s a place to find talk and radio shows (sort of like a podcast library, really), as well as a way to create your own show. There’s tons of great stuff on BTR, but for now, we’ll just stick with creating your own show.

First things first: create an account with BTR (don’t worry, it’s both free and easy). The link’s a little hard to find at first, so I’ll help – it’s the “Register” link, at the top right of the home page screen.

Once you’ve created an account, you’ll see your Account central; it’s probably pretty empty at the moment. No worries, we’ll fix that. Click the “My Account” tab, and then select “Become a host now!” on the left side. Then, create your Host account – give it information like your Twitter account, Facebook account, show category, and all that jazz.

You get to personalize your show like crazy (though it’ll still be hosted by BlogTalkRadio) – add a logo, a link to a website, lots of links, and an audio clip to play at the beginnig; you can also change the link to the show (http://www.blogtalkradio/somethingorother) which lends to much more branding and personalization.

Show created, go back to the “My Account” page, and select “Add New Episode.” Add information about your soon-to-be-hit show’s first episode, as well as a time and date for the show. There are even a few ways to make some money with the episode, like showing related Amazon books. Once you’re done setting it up, you get a link to the show to share with the world.

When you’re ready to begin the show, the real beauty of BlogTalkRadio shines through. To get the show started literally couldn’t be any simpler. Every show has a phone number. You give out that number to one person, or a million, or make it public – totally up to you. During the show, people call the number to get connected to the show. You, as the host, can, with the press of a button, allow them to talk. Otherwise, they just sit in the queue, listening to the show and waiting for their turn. When you allow someone to talk, they’re connected with you as if you’re in a studio together – until you mute them again. Then they go away.

People can listen to the show either by calling in, subscribing by email or RSS, or just hunting you down and listening on your BTR page. After the show is completed, it gets archived on your page, where people can still listen to it or download the show.

BlogTalkRadio probably isn’t going to be your one-way ticket to super-stardom. But it’s a great place to create a show, talk about what your interested in, and get some real experience being a talk show host. And hey, who knows? Maybe you’ll be the first “straight from BTR to Late Night” story.

Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!

Are you already an Internet radio star? Have you tried anything like this before?

Photo: John Edwards 2008

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Email can be a huge time-drain, particularly for those of us who get a lot of it – it can be overwhelming, difficult to deal with, and a huge pain in the you-know-what. Or, with the help of a few tips, tricks, and applications, it can be a productivity powerhouse.

Gmail seems to be the cool kid on the block, and it’s one of the best free email services that’s taking over a huge portion of the email market. So, in an effort to help this rapidly-growing crowd, here are seven tips, tricks, and tools for making Gmail into a productive, getting things done machine:

1. Use Quick Links

Quick Links, a little white box that lives in the sidebar of Gmail, can be hugely useful once you figure out how to use it. All it does is store links – these links can be to just about anything.

If you’re always referencing a particular page when you write emails, or always copy and paste a particular Web address, don’t put it in your bookmarks, put it in Gmail’s Quick Links; that way, it’s available to you anywhere Gmail is – which is pretty much everywhere.

The sky’s the limit with these links – I have a particular email I send often (resume attached, cover letter in body) set up in my links, and can open it, edit it, and send it with only a few seconds.

2. Use Tasks

Tasks just became a fully-fledged feature of Gmail, and with good reason – it’s a super-lightweight, simple way to manage the things you need to do, and it lives right within Gmail itself.

With Tasks, you can add an email right to the list, and get it out of your inbox. You can create subtasks, due dates, multiple lists, and more, all from within the Gmail window.

3. Use Your Own Task-Manager

Maybe you’ve already got a system you use for tasks, like Remember the Milk, or Todoist. Because so many people consider it to be the best free email service, more and more of these applications have ways of integrating with Gmail, whether by an extension for Firefox or a gadget within the Gmail sidebar (here are RTM’s and Todoist’s). A quick search with Google, or through your task manager’s site should find exactly what you’re looking for.

4. Make Gmail Better

There are three or four reasons I can’t stop using Firefox, and they’re all extensions. Number one on the list, by a country mile, is Better Gmail. This extension adds tons of useful things to Gmail that really ought to be there anyway – showing the number of unread emails first in the title (or even in the icon), automatically showing message details, creating hierarchy among your labels (they’re more like folders this way), and much, much more. It makes Gmail much more smooth and functional, not to mention more productive.

5. Close Gmail More Often

It’s easy to get sucked into the trap of keeping your Gmail window open all the time, constantly checking and checking to see if you have a new email. I’m as guilty of that as anyone, and I know how much of a waste of time that can really be.

Instead of playing that futile game, try downloading a notifier that tells you when you’ve got new emails, so you’re only checking Gmail when you actually need to. There’s one for Firefox called Gmail Notifier, one for the Mac Desktop called Gmail Notifier, and one for Windows called Gmail Notifier. They’re not clever namers, these developers, but they do good work.

6. Send it all to Gmail

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I click on an “email me” link, and then my computer tries to open Outlook Express, or Outlook, or Entourage to send the email – none of which I’ve ever used, so I have to exit out of three different setup windows just to get to where I wanted originally, which is Gmail.

Thankfully, there’s a solution in Firefox. Go to “Preferences,” and then click the “Applications” Tab. There, find “mailto” under “Content Type.” Using the dropdown, select “Use Gmail.” From then on, anytime you click on a linked email address, or something that says “Send me an email!” it’ll open directly within Gmail. (This works with Yahoo Mail too.)

7. Use Talk Productively

Everyone says IM clients are a waste of time and energy, and are just a huge distraction. I say nay! Google Talk, if used right, can actually be really helpful. First, try adding IMified as a friend – you’ll be able to add tasks, calendar events, send updates on Twitter, and more.

Or, try Ping.fm, which is a social networking powerhouse – you can update almost any network you can think of right from within Talk, once you’ve set up your account with Ping.fm. If you’ve got questions, you can ask and answer questions with real people over IM, thanks to Aardvark.

How do you turn Gmail from a time-sink into a lean, mean productive machine? Would you call it best free email service out there? Share your thoughts in comments.

Image Credit: KatieKrueger

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Apparently, it’s not an easy thing to do, though – something about practice, and talent, and not making any money. I forget. Either way, most of us are probably doomed to forever listening, watching and reading brilliant comedy than creating it ourselves.

If you’re looking for some hilarious jokes and great stand up comedy, check out The Laugh Button. It’s a site, kind of like the Hype Machine or We Are Hunted, except for genius stand up comedy. It’s a huge database of stand-up performances, from hundreds of different comedians – from the most famous to the total unknowns.

The Laugh Button gives you three options – Listen, Watch, and Read. “Listen” brings you to a playlist of audio tracks that the Laugh Button recommends, varying in length, creator, and subject. “Watch” is mostly YouTube videos, in a similar format. “Read” is full of funny stories, as well as stories about and related to comedy.

Under “Listen”, you can see a Recommended Playlist from the Laugh Button, a Popular playlist full of what everyone else is listening to, and a list of My Favs (if you sign up for a free account, you can star certain tracks as favorites, and easily come back to them later).

Where all the material comes from is hard to figure out – the team behind the site isn’t exactly forthcoming with how they do it. It appears that there’s no algorithm or crawler, but that they actually go out and manually find the best stand-up comedy out there. That means that there’s less of a database (though it’s awfully big), but it means that what you find is almost always pretty darn funny.

To keep updated on the latest and greatest from The Laugh Button, check out their Twitter and Facebook pages. Those two are the places where the Laugh Button team posts new material, information about shows, and all sorts of other things about comedy and comedians. There’s new stuff coming from the Laugh Button all the time, and most of it gets posted in the statusphere; I love getting updates through Twitter.

The site itself doesn’t do a great job of helping you find a particular artist – it’s more focused on keeping you constantly finding new people to listen to. You can, however, search through the list of artists by clicking on any single artist. Once you get to the artist page, you’ll see a dropdown menu of all the comedians on the site – pick one, and you’ll be listening to them in no time! You’ll only see one track at a time on the artist’s page, but every time you refresh the page you’ll get a new one.

Since the search in The Laugh Button is awful (and by that I mean currently non-existent), you’ll have to rely on Google to find exactly who you’re looking for. In Google, enter this (without quotes): “site:thelaughbutton.com search term“. That’ll return a Laugh Button widgets page, with your comedian’s material on it.

There’s still a lot to come from the Laugh Machine – like search, for instance, as well as more community tools. But even now, it’s a great resource for some hilarious stand-up comedy. In particular, the “recommended” playlist under “Listen” is a great way to find new comedians, and new great listening material for when you need a laugh. And come on – we all need a laugh every once in a while.

Where do you go when you need a laugh online? A while ago Aibek recommended Youtube as the ultimate place to watch stand-up comedy online. What are your favorite sites to watch stand-ups?

Image Credit: henke

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Increasingly, you’ll turn to Twitter. Twitter is rapidly becoming a place for people to share and discuss music, and is a great way to find new and interesting things to listen to. Lots of artists are active on Twitter, as are countless fans. But Twitter presents a new problem: how do you weed through that to find the good stuff?

Well, for a long time, according to The Hype Machine, a tracker of popular music around the Web, there was no good answer. There were answers, sure, but none did what they were supposed to do.

So The Hype Machine created the Twitter Music Chart, a brand-new way of tracking what is the most popular type of music in the Twitterverse. It’s the Billboard Hot 100 meets what you actually care about – a winning combination, in my book.

The Twitter Music Chart is created based on a very particular formula, simply described on the website: “Each tweet gets points based on the user’s influence, then we add them up to find what’s hot in the past 3 days.”

This is a novel, and smart, way of creating the charts. It’s not just measuring what people are talking about (though it’s certainly doing that) – it’s figuring out how many people are likely to be listening to a song that got tweeted. If Ashton Kutcher tweets a song, odds are some of his 2.5 million followers are going to listen to it – thus, it gets more points from The Hype Machine than if I tweeted it.

When you go to the Twitter Music Chart, you’ll see the most popular songs on Twitter over the last three days. You can see the title and artist of the song, who originally tweeted it, who else has tweeted it, the number of points it got (the number used by The Hype Machine to figure out where the song belongs), and even gives you a chance to listen to the song.

If you click on a song, it’ll take you to a page that lets you share the song on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, as well as see more of who’s talking about it and how to buy it. If you vote for the track on Twitter, it’ll immediately get added to the votes on the Twitter Music Chart.

The biggest problem is that the list is only pulled from, and The Hype Machine only cares about, links from Twitter to The Hype Machine. Because of that, the list tends to be very niche-heavy, but I’ll say I still loved a lot of the music that came up. Tons of remixes and mashups, as well as some old classics – the music really runs the gamut.

If you’ve got an account with The Hype Machine, you can log in to favorite a particular song to your account, for easy access later. Otherwise, pretty much everything on the page is available to you. Across the bottom of the screen lives the player, where you can play, pause, or even buy a track from a variety of sources.

If you’re a Twitter user, you can follow the Hype Machine Twitter Account for tweets of the latest popular songs – delivering the popular stuff right into your Twitter stream.

One other thing I enjoyed about the Twitter Music Chart was the link, on the right side of the page, to check how many points The Hype Machine would give you for a tweeted song. It’s another measure of your Twitter influence, but is fun to cross-check with all the other people promoting songs.

It’s not a perfect chart, and nothing will be until it deals with all the music around Twitter, but it’s a great step in the right direction, and a cool way to find new music online.

What other online music charts are out there?

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Instapaper has, over the last several months, become my only source of bookmarks – I’ve ditched Diigo, which I loved; I’ve ditched Evernote, which I still use for everything else. Everything I find on the Web that I want for later now goes into Instapaper, which was made possible by some fantastic updates to the site, and more importantly, to the companion iPhone application.

Instapaper is a winner right from the sign-up. It can take all of two seconds to sign up – you don’t need to specify a password, or verify anything. Just pick a username, a password (only if you want one), and you’re set!

Then, drag a bookmarklet called “Read Later” from the Instapaper site to your bookmarks bar in any (did you hear me say any?) Web browser. From then on, any time you click the “Read Later” bookmarklet, the page you’re currently on gets saved by Instapaper. A little window pops up to tell you “Saved!” and then goes away – it’s simple, unobtrusive, and darned fast.

Once you’ve saved a few pages (or a few hundred, like me), go to the Instapaper website. From there, you can launch any of the pages you saved, read them in a text-only version, or send them to the Archive (better than deleting them, because they’re still available if you want them later – and with no storage limit, who cares?).

You can sort your pages into as many folders as you want (another new feature that makes having tons of bookmarks a whole lot easier), and then read through them one by one. For instance, I have three folders: one called “Multimedia,” for things like videos to watch and songs to download, one called “Mobile Reading” for text-only pages I can read anywhere, and “for Computer” for things like apps to try and sites to check out. Your folders can be anything you want, and sorting your pages into them is easy – just click the folder icon next to any given bookmark.

Instapaper allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of websites, if you want to pull them directly into your reading list – it skips a step for you, if you tend to read everything a particular site has to say. You can also subscribe to the reading list of another Instapaper user, and anything they star (the universal symbol for “I like this,” which pulls it into a new menu within Instapaper) will be automatically synced to your account.

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch owner, you can read directly from your iDevice. By downloading the free Instapaper app for iPhone (there’s also a $10 version that does cool things like remember your position in every page, preserve your folders, and let you tilt to scroll), you can sync your pages, and read them either online or off. Pages are downloaded text-only by default, but whole pages can be downloaded and read.

In short, Instapaper makes saving, syncing, and reading your bookmarks easier than any app I’ve ever seen. Having the ability to read on the go is crucial for me, and I couldn’t live without the iPhone app. Even without it, though, Instapaper’s features new and old make it the perfect, low-maintenance, way to make all your bookmarks online.

What do you use for all your bookmarks?

Photo: takomabibelot

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The Twitter website is rapidly improving, but there are other applications, both Web-based and desktop-based, that come with more features, more usability, and more fun.

TweetDeck is definitely the most popular of these apps, and it’s the one that I’ve bee using for a long time. But not anymore – I’ve officially, once and for all, switched over to Seesmic Desktop. It’s a new product from Seesmic (a company that used to be known for its social video network) that is taking the Twitter world by storm.

Seesmic Desktop is a small application that runs on Adobe AIR, the ever-popular runtime environment for apps that could, and often are, Web apps converted to run more conveniently and powerfully on your desktop. It can manage multiple Twitter accounts, plus your Facebook account, all seamlessly within the same window.

Seesmic Desktop, at first glance, looks a lot like TweetDeck (or any of a number of other apps) – it’s got a bunch of columns with all your tweets in them. On the left side of the window is your navigation – one click opens up your Direct Messages, or your Replies, or even the tweets you’ve sent recently. Having these separated makes it easier to find everything directed at you, instead of weeding through the masses of tweets.

Nothing unique so far, but now it gets interesting. Seesmic Desktop lets you create “Userlists,” groups into which you can put various people on Twitter. For instance, I’ve got a “Personal Contacts” list that’s all the people I know personally, and their tweets all get filtered into their own column.

That way, instead of having to go through my whole timeline to find the people I’m interested in, I can sort them into their own space. The number of groups you can have is limited only by your imagination (and attention span). Setting up these lists takes a little time, as you have to do it manually, but they all get saved, and can be accessed or edited at any time.

There’s also a section for saving searches, if you want to track a particular phrase or topic. Every time someone tweets and matches your search, it shows up whether you’re following them or not. Searches can be overwhelming, but they’re a great way to track what’s happening on Twitter.

Seesmic Desktop, feature-wise, is a lot like TweetDeck. TweetDeck without the crashes, the massive resource hog, and with better multi-account management and tons of customization, gets pretty close to Seesmic.

But recently, Seesmic Desktop stopped being just Seesmic Desktop, with a Web-based version released. Now, you can get all the great columns and interface points of Seesmic, but on the Web, wherever you have an Internet connection. Even if you don’t have the desktop version, simply logging in to Seesmic through your Twitter account lets you immediately take advantage of the better application.

There’s also an iPhone app coming soon from Seesmic, which will do even more to make your Twitter information and contacts ubiquitously available, all through one application. There’s also the promise of a way to take pictures and videos straight from your webcam, and immediately upload them to the Twitter-sharing service of your choice.

Seesmic Desktop is already the best Twitter app I’ve ever used, and it seems to get better and better every week. If you’re following a lot of people, being followed a lot, and want to make the most of life as a Twitter power-user, make the switch to Seesmic. You’ll be glad you did.

What’s your Twitter app of choice?

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We used to say that about the rest of the Internet, but social networking has lead many of us to talk as if the rest of the blogosphere and Web has become some antiquated dinosaur of information sharing.

The truth, however, is that the rest of the Web is still ridiculously fast as a source for information – if you know where to look. All those tweets and Facebook updates? They tend to come from stories or notices on the rest of the Web. But for breaking news in more than a couple of sentences, the Web is the dominant presence by far.

That’s what OneRiot, a real-time search for the whole Web, is taking advantage of. Instead of tracking what people are saying, as Twitter search engines like Scoopler do, it tracks what they’re talking about.

The OneRiot team describes what they’re trying to do quite well

When you search for a popular subject using other realtime search engines, your search results will show you a stream of chatter happening around that subject. Essentially, those search results are saying, “Your query is a hot term! Lots of people are talking about it!” However, what can be hard to find there is the actual source of the chatter – the news stories, blog posts or Web pages that started it all. If you were to search for that same popular subject using OneRiot, you’d find the actual content people are talking about – search results that say, “Check out this page, or blog, or video! Lots of people are talking about it!

OneRiot isn’t a traditional search engine, nor does it pretend to be. It’s not a place to find static information, or look up something interesting; it’s a place to find out who won the big game, or who got voted off of American Idol (not that I love that show or anything…). Information is sorted by timeliness as much as relevance, meaning newer material, even if it’s not the most complete source of information on a given topic, rises to the top.

You use OneRiot like you would any other search engine: go to the site and enter a search term. You can search either Web or Video (which is smart, because videos tend to be more viral than any other medium), and pick almost any topic. Underneath the search bar, there’s a list of “Trending Topics,” which tracks some of the most popular stories at the moment.

Once you’ve searched, you’ll see a list of results, formatted to help you figure out what to see. The results page gives you a headline, a snippet of the page, as well as a few useful “real-time” tips: who shared it first, when it was most recently shared, and how many people have shared it. OneRiot gets these numbers from Twitter and Digg, as well as a number of popular OneRiot apps, like the Shareaholic plugin for Firefox. You can see, at a glance, how many people are talking about a story, and even expand the window to see what they’re saying.

You can see the results truly in real-time, or choose to see the “Pulse,” which lends more importance to popular stories, by clicking at the right side of the top of the results. Either see things as they’re coming in, or see what’s hot (and still pretty brand-new). On the right side of the page is the “Most Shared Today” list, sort of like the Digg frontpage. It’s got five hot stories, and is itself a great way to figure out what’s going on.

As events unfold and stories develop, it can often be hard to track what people are talking about, and what is being said about important issues. OneRiot sifts through it for you, and lets you tap into the whole popular Web to see what’s really breaking news.

How do you find what’s popular and breaking on the Web?

Photo: Ben Sutherland

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It’s called Aardvark, and is a brand-new application that just came out of the SXSW conference this year.

The site was in private beta for a while, then was invite-only. Recently, it’s become publicly available and is now open for questions. It’s available to anyone who logs in through Facebook Connect (If you have a Facebook account already, you’re all set. If not, Facebook accounts are free to everyone!). The Facebook implications of Aardvark are pretty impressive, but even logging in with Facebook is a great tool. If you haven’t had the privilege of owning a Facebook account, read on — we have exclusive invites and we’re giving them out to MakeUseOf readers!

Signing up for Aardvark is simple, as is getting it running – just add some information about where you are, the IM client and username of your choice (as long as it’s Google Talk, AIM, or Live Messenger – for now), and the types of questions you’d like to answer for other people. You can also use the service by email, but I’m going to focus on IM because it’s so much cooler.

Once you’re set up, Aardvark lives in your IM window, and anytime you want to ask a question, just IM Aardvark with your question. Aardvark parses the question to figure out what it’s about – which it does a remarkably good job with – and then sends it to someone who it thinks is able to answer your question. You’ll get an answer back quickly, and be able to have a brief chat with the person who answered your question.

From the other side (the answerer), Aardvark is even more ingenious. When you sign up, you choose how often you want Aardvark to ask you questions; I chose “a couple of times a day.” When that time comes up, Aardvark sends you an IM saying “So-and-so has a question about ‘Some Topic You Can Answer.’”

You can respond one of a few ways – “Sure” to see and answer the question, “face” to pass it on to a Facebook friend who might be able to answer, or “pass” to just make the question go away. If you pass, you can then mute a given topic to not get any more questions based on that topic.

The cool thing about Aardvark is that the questions are limitless. For instance, I’m listed as able to answer questions about New York City, where I live. I periodically get a question like, “Where should I go for dinner near Union Square?”, and I’m able to offer a recommendation. The questions I get rarely require factual answers, and that’s one of the fun things about Aardvark – it’s a great way to find out what other people are into that I might like as well.

One of Aardvark’s sample questions is, “Where’s the best place to buy running shoes in San Francisco?” It’s this kind of question, one that Google wouldn’t know but an actual local person might, that gives Aardvark awesome potential. Instead of services like ChaCha, which essentially just replaces a Google search when you can’t do one yourself, Aardvark goes beyond the capabilities, and sets you up with an expert in their field – even if that field is running shoes in San Francisco.

As you use Aardvark more, you get a sense of people who are able to answer certain questions for you – maybe you have a friend in Utah who you trust to answer such questions. You create these connections, and Aardvark uses them to narrow down your respondents even more, to try and get you the best possible answer. From the get-go though, Aardvark’s always done a good job of finding me the right person to answer my question.

Once you set it up, it’s incredibly simple to use. It’s unobtrusive, and lives right in your IM window; nothing to install or download, or remember to run. There was a lot of buzz around Aardvark as SXSW got underway, and a few minutes using the app makes it easy to see why.

As a MakeUseOf reader, you can now sign up to Aardark without using your Facebook account. Just hit this link and sign up! It’s now open for questions, but there are only 300 invites so grab one quickly!

Is there anything else like this out there? Can Twitter do this better? What do you think?

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The problem, though, is that Twitter does essentially nothing to help you find interesting people. There was the whole @replies debacle, where Twitter took away the ability to see who your friends are talking to – that was almost a disaster for discovering new people.

Even after that was fixed, Twitter made it easy to search for interesting tweets but not as much for doing a Twitter search to find interesting people. That’s what TwitterHIT is out there to remedy. TwitterHIT is all about finding new people and new friends on Twitter, by providing some unique search options.

The first thing to do is log in – you use your Twitter account credentials – which always makes me nervous – but in a few hours of using it, TwitterHIT didn’t ever tweet anything or take information I didn’t want it to. It appears, at least for now, trustworthy. It does send one tweet when you follow people (a super-cryptic one at that), but it’s harmless enough, and easy to delete.

Once you’re logged in, you’re brought to the “start” screen (above). On that screen, you get two different boxes – a space for keywords, and one for locations. The keywords are essentially like any other Twitter search, but the location-based search is what makes TwitterHIT great.

Let’s say, you want to find people in your city who like to play squash. Type “played squash” or “playing squash” into the keywords, and then your location in the bottom field. All the people on Twitter who are near you will be returned to you, and they are the ones who have tweeted about their squash-playing activities.

TwitterHIT conducts a Twitter search, finds the results and presents them in a list on the results page, with usernames, pictures, and latest tweets all on that one page. It returns 20 results, and with an upgraded account – 200. The free account always did me fine, though. Browse the list, and toggle the checkbox next to anyone you want to follow. At the end of the list, click the “Follow These People” button, and TwitterHIT automatically follows them for you.

If you want to, you can then repeat the whole process. There are some seriously annoying ads that come up after each “Follow These People” session, but they go away after a few seconds.

Also part of TwitterHIT’s upgraded account (which you get either by paying $147 or completing a trial offer through an affiliate like Blockbuster) are several other tools – following back your followers automatically, automatically retweeting things with certain keywords, and the like. These all sound like ingredients for a spammy Twitter account to me, or may come in handy for someone who uses Twitter for business purposes – the free version’s got the one feature I really want to use.

TwitterHIT is great for making Twitter a more localized version of itself, and helping to bring you into contact with people you might actually develop a relationship with outside of Twitter. There are more and more people on Twitter every day, and TwitterHIT offers one great way to find the people near you who might actually be relevant to you both on and off Twitter.

How do you find interesting people, not just interesting tweets, on Twitter? Don’t forget to share with us in the comments.

Image Credit: the trial

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But sometimes, a review doesn’t need to be long-winded or full of adjectives and summaries. All you want to know is this: what is it? Is it worth my time? For such things, check out Blippr.

Blippr is essentially reviews in Twitter-style; short reviews of apps (software and Web), books, games, movies, and music in less than 160 characters. Other than the name that doesn’t make any sense, or the crazy noun (”blips”) that’ll never catch on, it’s a great application that will save you loads of time when searching for product reviews.

Blippr is quickly becoming a popular destination for people looking to read and write simple, quick reviews on all kinds of products. If I’m going to see a movie, I frankly don’t really care what critics say – they don’t appreciate the wonder that is childish humor. What I want to know is simple: do people like me enjoy this? Twitter’s great at this (and Blippr plays really well with Twitter), but Blippr’s a more robust and more put-together version. You won’t get New York Times-caliber reviews, but most of the time you don’t need them anyway. If all you want to know is “should I check this out?” then Blippr’s got you covered.

You can sign in to Blippr with Friendfeed, Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Facebook, Google, Yahoo and OpenID. The advantage here is two-fold: you don’t need a new set of credentials, and most of the linked networks allow you to choose to publish your blips every time you review an item. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Blippr’s integration with other services is one of the best parts of the site, and isn’t just limited to the login screen. One of the best, and smartest thing about Blippr is that it integrates with other media-related services. Blippr can add your Netflix movies to your “Stuff,” see what you’re reading on GoodReads, and pull your listening habits in from Last.fm. Once you link these accounts to Blippr, it will automatically create a library for you.

Once you’re logged in and set up, start poking through the site’s categories – movies, books, music, games, and apps. Each of these categories has sections for reviews, “recommended” (based on your reviews, and what similar people are reviewing — something like Last.FM’s artist recommendations), and several other sections that let you look through and add to the database on Blippr. You can search through the site’s coffers to see what people are watching, reading, listening to and playing with. For each item you come across, you’ll see a series of short, 160-or-fewer-character reviews along with the users’ overall opinions of Blippr.

If you bump into something you’ve seen, read, heard or tried; posting a review is easy. You get four options: “I love it!” “I like it,” “I dislike it,” or “I hate it!”. Then, you have 160 characters to explain yourself. This makes the reviews short, easy to read, and easy to sort by people’s opinions – sort of an “out-of-5″ review but with a better set of choices.

The brevity of the reviews is the best part of Blippr – you can figure out what hundreds of people think in the time it would take to read only a few on a site like Amazon or Newegg. Blippr’s like Twitter in that aspect – nothing in-depth, but perfect for figuring out what’s on the tip of everyone’s tongues. If you’re trying to figure out which movie’s perfect for you this Friday, or which album you should buy from the Beastie Boys, Blippr’s a quick and easy way to take the pulse of a product, without tons of leg work on your part.

Every product, book, movie, or whatever has links to buy it and be saved it to “My Stuff”, which will then helps Blippr figure out what you like and tailor recommendations suited to your taste, or look through similar products to the one you’re looking at. It’s a great way to find new products, and to figure out what other people like you are enjoying.

The more you add to your “Stuff” and the more items you review, the recommendations will automatically get better and you’ll have a great organizer of all your media on Blippr. Knowing what you’ve seen, what you’ve read, and what else you might like is a great tool. With these integrations, Blippr works even faster to bring you suitable recommendations closer to your choice in movies, books and lots more stuff!

Where do you go to figure out what to read, watch, hear or use? We’d love to know where you get your recommendations and reviews from. Share them with us in the comments — 160 characters or less!

Like to shop online? Find out how you can save money with 5 saver shopping sites.

Photo: Andrei Z

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Luckily for me, OpenTable’s got my back. OpenTable is a massive (and still growing) system of restaurants, foodies and tools for helping you find the right restaurant as well as always getting a table.

First, you’ll see this screen below (which looks an awful lot like a parking screen for an ad company, but really isn’t). Pick your locale – most major American cities are well-represented by OpenTable, as are a number of international cities. Then, you can refine your search even more: by a more narrow location, by type of food, or even by date and time (eliminating any restaurant that might be closed when you want to eat).

If you still can’t decide, let the users of OpenTable help. Every restaurant you’ll see has reviews from OpenTable users who have been there, and the site even aggregates some of the most popular and best-reviewed restaurants in a variety of categories, from “Good for Groups” to “Best Ambience.” Of course, there are also tons of “Best ____ Food” lists as well, for every locale you choose.

To further aid you in finding the right restaurant, every listing comes with useful information: price range, accepted cards, whether there’s a bar or not, where to park, and lots more, all based on giving you as much information as possible to make your food run even better.

Once you’ve narrowed it down to the perfect spot, you choose your date, time, and size of party that you want a table for. OpenTable then does a search, and looks for the best available reservation times, and comes back to you with some options. I tried a place for Sunday brunch at 12pm, and got three reservation possibilities back in only a few seconds.

Choose your reservation time, log in (you can create a temporary account, or create a free account on OpenTable for this part), and you’re done! OpenTable sends you an email confirming your reservation, and you’re all set. Cancelling or changing your reservation is easy, as is exporting the event to your Outlook calendar.

OpenTable also lets you publish your reservation information to Facebook, or send invitations by email to your event – this makes OpenTable into a one-stop event planner, at least for the basics.

The reason OpenTable’s so great, as I see it, is that it’s better than you at knowing what’s going on. It’s connected directly to all the restaurants, so its information is as up-to-date as the restaurant itself, and reservations are made internally and easily, rather than OpenTable just acting as a middleman. Your reservation is always certain, and always correct.

OpenTable makes a once-annoying and complicated process extremely simple. Just log in, click, and you’re set – no phone calls, no guessing game about when to arrive; OpenTable does the work for you, and you just show up when you’re supposed to. That’s my kind of dining experience.

Are there other great apps that making eating even better? If you know any, please share them with us in the comments.

Other foodie articles on MakeUseOf are:
3 Recipe Sites For The Post Fast Food Era
Desktop Dining – The Best Places To Order Pizza Online
FOOD Love: Top 5 Recipe Websites

Photo: wallyg

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One of my favorite stories regarding this topic just happened a few days ago. Shaquille O’Neal, a popular basketball player and a popular Twitterer, found out via Twitter that he was being traded. Funny stuff. But the point is, if you want to know what’s happening, immediately, Twitter’s where you want to be.

Unfortunately, Twitter’s search engine leaves a lot to be desired. The native search frequently brings up incomplete results, both in a current search and going back. Plus Twitter search seems to frequently be down, and always be shoddy.

The best alternative, and a great way to track and search Twitter, is Scoopler. Scoopler is a fast, real-time or in other words live search engine for Twitter – that’s also got some cool features of its own. It does its main job well, and adds just enough features to make it miles ahead of Twitter’s own search.

For the sake of full explanations, Scoopler also searches results from Flickr, Digg, Delicious, and a few other sites – given the relative slowness with which these sites are updated, Twitter tends to both dominate search results and be the most functional use of Scoopler’s search.

Scoopler’s search is truly real-time. When you search for a word or phrase (pick your own, or use one of the popular ones Scoopler suggests), you’re taken immediately to a waterfall-looking column of tweets, that updates as new ones come in. Frequently, it’s too fast to read, especially if you’re tracking a popular subject; you can easily pause the updates if you need to catch up.

In addition, Scoopler does an excellent job with multimedia stuff – videos, images, links, and the like. Within the stream of tweets on your topic, Scoopler extracts all the videos, image, and links to a convenient sidebar, where it organizes them by type, and by the number of shares. If a video is being passed around, you can see it without digging through the stream to figure out what it is you’re looking for. You can easily share anything on Scoopler, too, just by clicking “Peek.”

One thing I like to do periodically is click the “view all” button on the home screen – this tracks all of the most popular topics at once. First of all, the speed at which they update is crazy. Second of all, it’s a lot like skimming news headlines, and is a great way to get caught up on what’s happening.

One day, I predict, Twitter will fix its search – it’ll probably look a lot like Scoopler, actually. But for now, Scoopler seems to be one of the best of a small number of Web apps that let you search and track what’s happening on Twitter and in the world, pretty much at the speed of light.

As Twitter becomes even more of a source for breaking news, editorial opinion, and the like, keeping tabs on what’s hot on Twitter will become even more important and useful. Scoopler’s an excellent and simple way to do exactly that.

How do you search Twitter? Is there even a need to? Go ahead and discuss in the comments.

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About a week ago, I installed Windows 7 on my primary computer – it’s now the operating system I use all day, every day. We’ve already talked about how to install Windows 7, as well as some of the great things about the operating system. No nagging menus, for a start. But in the week or so that I’ve been using it as my primary OS, one thing in particular about Windows 7 has stuck out to me: the taskbar.

Now, the taskbar is that crazy thing that lives on the top, bottom or side of your screen, and lets you launch and switch between applications. There’s also a system tray, with a bunch of applications you can access that way. But all that existed already. The Windows 7 taskbar added a bunch of useful features and tweaks to make it even more useful.

The first thing you’ll notice is my favorite feature – there’s an almost dock-like quality to the new taskbar. Indeed, by right-clicking any application icon and selecting “Pin to taskbar,” you can add an icon to your taskbar that’s ready to be launched with just one click.

When an application is running, you’ll see a square around the icon in the taskbar. If there’s more than one window, you’ll see the edge of two squares around the icon (like the Firefox icon in the screenshot above) – or, you can choose to have different icons for every open window. Click the icon, and you’re taken to the application’s window. Launching a new window is easy, too – just hold Shift as you’re clicking on the icon.

These two features give the taskbar a Mac OS X dock-like quality, and make launching and switching applications a lot easier. That means, you can clear your desktop a bit, get rid of some icons, and use the taskbar as you would any other application launcher. By right-clicking on the Taskbar, selecting “Properties,” and then clicking “use small icons,” you’ll be able to fit a ton of icons.

And that’s not all. If you hover over an icon on the dock, little thumbnails show up of every active window of that application. This feature is called “Aero Peek,” and is a perfect way to figure out which application you actually want to change to. The thumbnails are live, which means that if you’re watching a video, the thumbnail shows the video in real-time. Roll over a thumbnail, and you’ll see the window, full-size, with everything else transparent. It’s the best way to switch applications I’ve ever seen, and the fastest way to figure out what you’re looking for – the more applications you run at a time, the more you’ll appreciate the taskbar.

Right-clicking on an icon like Microsoft Word or Windows Explorer brings up a list of recent items, that you can easily open with a single click. Apps will flash when they want to get your attention, rather than the annoying blinking that used to happen in Vista.

I used Quick Launch on Windows for a long time to launch apps, and the taskbar to switch. It was clunky, slow, and difficult to maneuver if I had a lot of apps open. With the new taskbar, opening, closing, switching and managing windows and applications is a breeze. Forget all the other stuff – that’s worth the upgrade right there.

Want to install Windows 7? Check out Jim’s Ultimate Upgrade Guide.

What are your best Windows 7 features? What’s missing? Share them with us in the comments.

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But the coolest thing about Adobe AIR apps is that they often add new functionality to web apps and allow you to interact with those apps just like you do with desktop programs. Adobe Air Apps often make those websites even more useful.

For media junkies like myself, this is fantastic. Watching movies gets easier, as does looking for photos and listening to music. Here are three of my favorite media-based AIR applications.

Bookmash

Bookmash does a little bit of everything – it’s got media on the Web pretty well covered. It’s basically a multi-platform search engine that lets you search through YouTube, DailyMotion and Metacafé for videos, Last.fm and Seeqpod for music, and through most social networks and news sites to find what’s going on around the Web.

The social stuff is great, but the media is where Bookmash shines. The search is impressive, and everything can be watched, listened to or downloaded right from within the Bookmash interface. I wish it offered more search possibilities, but between YouTube and Last.fm, you’re pretty set for most of your media needs.

My Media Player

One of my favorite sites on the Web is Hulu (unfortunately, it’s only for the US at this point but you can learn how to access it from other countries here). It’s a fantastic portal for legally watching TV shows, movies, and clips of great shows like Saturday Night Live that have historically been unwilling to share their material on sites like YouTube.

My Media Player plugs into Hulu, and doesn’t offer playback of anything that Hulu doesn’t already. But what it does do is: make it a separate window, with no toolbars or anything like that, that appears just like any other media player and can be resized or docked to fit your needs. It makes watching Hulu videos (particularly if you’re a multi-tasker without a huge screen) a much easier proposition.

Stefan wrote about Hulu Desktop, even if it isn’t an Adobe AIR application, you should give it a whirl.

My Media Player also hooks into Twitter, which means you can tweet about what you’re watching – making TV and movies a lot more social.

(A bit of warning: Hulu appears to have made a change that is causing some issues with My Media Player. I’ve used it with no problem, but it sounds like some have. If it doesn’t work immediately, that’s why – stay tuned! I’ll find announce a workaround in the comments if I know about it)

zflick

According to all three browsers I use regularly, Flickr is the site I visit most. I use it for blog posts, wallpapers, and a whole host of other things as well. It’s a great tool, but isn’t the easiest to navigate.

zFlick makes finding and downloading images easier than ever. Search for an image, or browse through the impressively attractive interface of photos, complete with awesome transitions. Once you’ve found the photo you want, you can just drag-and-drop to download it. You can drag it straight to a number of other applications as well – Photoshop, AIM, and the like – if that’s where you’re using the photos. The more I use Flickr, the more I appreciate how simple, quick, attractive and useful zFlick is.

For a more powerful Flickr search tool, Ann Smarty has the lowdown with 16 Flickr Search Tools That Are Fun to Use.

Increasingly, I’m watching, listening, and viewing my media on Adobe AIR, using a growing number of applications. These are the three I couldn’t live without, though – I need my music, my zone-out videos, and the incredible resource of pictures that Flickr has become. Adobe AIR makes all of those better.

What’s your favorite AIR app? Share with us in the comments.

Photo: YngveNilsen

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And then, I got that fun-filed message saying,”You have less than 200MB available space on your hard drive. Please free some space, or your computer will begin to die a slow, painful, bitter death.” I paraphrase, but it’s not a fun message to read. And it was a shock to me because I wasn’t downloading tens of gigabytes of stuff – so where did my space go?

One quick download later, I figured it out. TreeSize, a great and simple application that helps you find those bulky folders and recover hard drive space. There’s a free version and a paid version, but for the basic purposes of getting rid of all the cra… I mean junk, on your computer, the free version is great.

Once you download the app, run it. It automatically scans your whole hard drive (and any other attached drive you choose), and then sorts the folders by how much space they’re taking up. It searches through hidden folders, system folders, literally everything on your hard drive, to give you a complete look at the size of every folder there is — much like WinDirStat, which was covered by Jimmy a while ago.

TreeSize tells you how much space is being taken up by each folder, and which subfolder is the largest one. It doesn’t isolate a particular file, as the tree in the free version just doesn’t go down that far. But once you get to the offending folder, it’s usually pretty easy to figure out.

TreeSize can open a folder for you, or even delete it for you right from within the application. This is where the warning comes in: don’t delete things just because they take up tons of space. A quick Google for most folder names, particularly ones you don’t recognize, usually provides information on what a folder holds and whether or not you can afford to delete it.

The reason I love applications like this is because most of the space on my hard drive isn’t devoted to music, or movies; it’s devoted to old system restores, leftover logs from applications that I don’t use anymore, and more useless files that happen to make their way onto my system. I don’t need them, I don’t notice they’re gone, and about ten minutes ago, I freed up over 16GB of space by deleting a few of them.

The paid version, which costs $23 for a single license, provides even more detailed and visual information about how your hard drive is set up and filled, as well as a few useful features like a duplicate file search (though DoubleKiller can do this as well and free). But for finding and deleting those black holes on your hard drive, the functionality and usefulness are essentially the same.

TreeSize can make your computer run faster, free up space for more music, documents, and fun things, and avoid the disastrous slow-down and crash of your hard drive as it constantly spins, looking for massive files you don’t need anyway.

Am I the only one with this problem of random, huge files taking up all the space on my computer? What do you use to fix (or better yet, avoid) this problem? I would love to find out if there any better tools out there to recover hard drive space, so let me know in the comments!

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Somewhere in between those two lies this funny thing called live-blogging. It works like Twitter or Friendfeed, but is all in one place in a coherent way. It lives on a blog or website, where it’s easily found; that’s a pretty serious advantage over Twitter or Friendfeed, where things tend to get jumbled and stored in a number of places, and become hard to find after a while.

Live-blogging definitely has its place, and there’s at least one great application you can use to do it: ScribbleLive. If you’re not sure how to have a blog that you live-blog updates to, ScribbleLive is a fairly basic application with some great features to it, that lets you simply and easily live-blog just about anything you can think of. It’s mostly used for events and conferences (Apple’s WWDC was a popular choice for live-blogging), but the uses are only limited by your imagination.

You can log in to ScribbleLive with a Facebook, Twitter, MSN, Flickr, or OpenID. There might be an option for a site-specific login, but who’d want that? If you’ve got at least one of the accounts I just mentioned (if not – get on that), then logging in is simple with your existing credentials.

Once you’re logged in, set some basic preferences like background and text color, size, and whether or not to show avatars. Then click “Save,” and congrats – you’re live-blogging! If you’re so inclined, you can embed the app into your own site (awesome if you have one), and you’re set to go. Type something into the box or upload an image, press Enter, and you’re off!

Adding content is both quick and easy. There’s no clicking around – just keep typing and pressing Enter, and your data keeps updating. Ever wonder how to have a blog where multiple people can post instant updates? With ScribbleLive, you can invite others to join in the fun, either as commenters or authors themselves. ScribbleLive can also be connected to Twitter and have a particular person’s tweets shown during the live-blog. Each event even has its own unique email address – so feel free to send texts or emails to the address, and they’ll get posted as well.

Everything you write gets translated on the fly, and is available in a huge number of languages – your audience can truly be worldwide, and be involved across countries and languages.

From my own tests, there’s about a five-second delay on all updates made from the site (which is pretty good, actually). You don’t ever need to refresh anything, as all the data is automatically updated for you. Here’s what a particular stream looks like to the readers (this took me all of 15 seconds to set up).

Live-blogging’s certainly not for everybody and every occasion. What it IS great for is creating a coherent narrative around an event. If you can’t be somewhere that you want to keep tabs on, a live blog is much more coherent and put-together than trying to track a disparate Twitter stream from hundreds of different people. ScribbleLive’s events can be written by as many people as you want, making the event as open or closed as you want it to be.

As a blogger, I think live-blogging is a neat way to engage readers in real time. As a reader, it’s a great way to keep updated even when you can’t be in the room. For both, I’ve got nothing bad to say about ScribbleLive.

What do you use live-blogging for? Do you use ScribbleLive, or something else?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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More than a couple of you suggested JamBase, a site I’ve become a huge fan of. It’s a great tool for tracking concerts, festivals and more, and a useful community based around live music.

JamBase is all about live music – in fact, the tagline of the site is “Go See Live Music.” Funny how that works. Once you create a free account with JamBase, you’re opened to a bunch of different ways to track artists and shows, and even discover new shows you might just love.

On the homepage, even if you don’t have an account, there’s some cool features to be used. In the (kind of compact) interface, there are album and show reviews, articles about artists, a news ticker full of music headlines, and even a widget called “JamBaseTV” that’s full of podcasts and videos of live shows. In the mood to see a show today? There’s a “Show Finder” right on the home page to show you what’s playing nearby.

Once you’re logged in, the first thing to do is pick some favorite artists. You can do this manually through the site, or by uploading a file from your iTunes that lets JamBase know who you’re listening to. If you upload through iTunes, you can pick and choose among the artists JamBase finds, so you’re only tracking your favorites.

If you don’t use iTunes, finding artists on JamBase is easy, because JamBase provides you everything from sample songs from to lists of a band’s other fans – it’s easy to figure out who you like, and who you’d want to make sure not to miss.

Once you’ve got some artists to track, you’ll be able to easily see who’re playing live shows, when, and where. When you find a show you’re interested to go to, you can add it to your JamBase calendar. JamBase wants to act as your own personal hub for the music you’re going to see.

If you don’t want to keep everything on JamBase (personally, I don’t need another calendar), the site also offers the option to send the concert information to a friend (or yourself, presumably), or to save it directly to Outlook, Google Calendar or Facebook.

JamBase also provides you with a widget of all the artists you’re tracking, that you can embed into your website or blog. For any music junkie, it’s a cool way to display who you’re listening to or watching live.

The community within JamBase is another useful part of the site – despite my constant wariness about niche social networks. You may look around to find out what other people with similar music taste are going to see. JamBase also has periodic giveaways of concert tickets and other music-related prizes, which is more than enough to keep me poking around the site for a while.

The biggest reason to use JamBase is that it smartly integrates with the other apps you use – it plays nicely with iTunes, where most of us have all our music; it works with Google Calendar, ever the popular schedule-holder; and you can do a lot just by email, for those of us outside of it. JamBase is a great way to find your favorite artists, and make sure you never miss them coming around.

How do you find concerts near you? You may also want to check out Renee’s article on Keeping Track of Live Music In Your City, it’s worth reading!

Photo: Anirudh Koul

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• How To Broaden Your Musical Horizons Online (8)
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Who’s coming, who’s going, who’s subscribing? It’s a fun boost when there’s a spike in traffic, and lets you know when you’re doing something right.

But that’s just the fun part. Tracking your visitors can also be hugely useful – the more you understand who your visitors are, the better prepared you’ll be to give them the content they want, and keep them coming back for more.

For the most part, the standard application for all of this is Google Analytics – and with good reason. It’s a great, simple, and free program that provides you with a lot of useful information. But if you’re looking more real-time, detailed information about who’s coming to your site and what they’re doing, give Clicky a look.

Clicky is an alternative to Google Analytics and a real-time traffic analytics tool that couldn’t be easier to set up – just insert a bit of script into the header of your website, and you’re set to go! Clicky then tracks, down to the crazy and useful minutiae, what’s happening on your site.

Clicky tracks all the basics, right on the homepage for your site. The number of visitors, the pages they’re coming from, the pages they’re looking at, and how much time they’re spending on your site. I like, in particular, the “Actions” category, as it shows how many people are clicking around within the site, rather than just coming and going. One action means they come, they read, they leave – higher numbers mean more activity within the site.

On the “Visitors” tab of the (beautifully designed) site, it gets into the nitty-gritty. You can see the IP addresses of your visitors, what they searched for or clicked on to find you, and where in the world they are. Who’s coming and leaving? Who’s spending hours on your site?  How are people finding you? The visitors page answers all of that.

There are too many other ways to analyze traffic to name them all, so I’ll just name six: By country. By the page they view. By the page they view after leaving your site. By what they click or download within your site. By type of traffic (direct, social media, etc.). By Web browser (my own blog gets mostly Firefox users, interestingly enough).

Knowing your audience, what they like and don’t, and even what else they read and how they find you, is a critical tool in building your site. You can promote yourself in the right places and ways just by knowing where people might look for you, and even tailor content based on, say, what Web browser people use to view your site.

For a few dollars a month, Clicky offers a bunch of other features, most notably Twitter tracking – you can see who’s talking about you on Twitter and what they’re saying. In a world in which Twitter’s becoming a hugely viable marketing tool, Clicky does a great job of keeping tabs on activity surrounding your site on Twitter, as well as providing a bunch of other analysis tools.

The free version of Clicky (which I still use) is a fantastic alternative to Google Analytics, for the casual or power user. If nothing else, its real-time reporting gives you a better sense of what’s happening that Google Analytics does. It’s easy to sign up, easy to use, and fun to see what’s happening on your site, right now.

For other ways to analyze your site’s traffic, read “Free Traffic Analytics Tools you Should Know About” and Woopra.

How do you track who’s on your site? Let us know in the comments.

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The Web offers a bunch of options for this type of application – personally, I’ve been a fan and user of Evernote for a fairly long time now. Many others use Google Notebook, or any of a number of applications that let you capture and organize everything in your head and your life.

3Banana is another application that’s in essentially the same realm – letting you take, sync, and store all your notes online. It’s got a couple of unique features, though, that make it worth a look even among the more established and popular choices.

The coolness, as I see it, starts from the very beginning: you can sign into 3Banana with your Google account. No new credentials to remember (or forget), just sign in with Google.

Once you’re signed in, start adding notes to 3Banana. Adding notes is as simple as you might think – type or paste something into the box, and click “Save Note”. What’s cool about 3Banana is that it accepts all kinds of tags and text – it’ll recognize phone numbers as phone numbers, links as links, and even supports embedded codes so you can watch movies within 3Banana.

There are a bunch of ways to add a note to 3Banana, and they’re all simple and easy. There’s a bookmarklet for adding notes from other websites, as well as an iPhone app and an Android app. They’re all free, all simple, and all support the same great features as the regular 3Banana interface.

One of my favorite features of 3Banana is the sharing – it’s great at letting you create and share everything from a single note to your whole notebook. At the bottom of every note, there are links to share it in a huge number of ways – email, Facebook, Twitter, or even just by a link. This makes 3Banana perfect for sharing information with friends, colleagues and anyone else in your life.

One other thing I like is the tagging system. Instead of tagging individual notes by dragging and dropping or manually adding tags, 3Banana uses something like Twitter’s hashtags. At the end of a note, if it’s a task, typing “#task” adds it to that category and makes it searchable under the “tasks” category.

3Banana isn’t the only application that does what it does, but it offers enough new features that it’s worth a look. The ability to recognize and use HTML code to create something of a rich website within every note, and to easily share the notes you want, are only a couple of the great reasons to check out the super-portable, super-simple 3Banana.

What’s your favorite note-taking app? Share your wisdom in the comments.

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Other than my Tuesday fix, though, I try to not spend too much time tracking bands and albums all over the place – talk about a time drain!

Thankfully, I’ve set up a pretty loophole-free system to make sure everything I need to know – album releases, concert dates, and the like – gets in front of me when it’s supposed to.

Here are the three apps I use:

BandsinTown

BandsinTown has a couple of great features that make it a useful one-stop spot for finding all your favorite bands. The site works almost completely by search, in one of two ways: either by band, or by location. Location’s a great one: Bandsintown automatically figures out where you are by your IP address, and then lets you search based on your spot. You can choose how far away you’re willing to go, how much you’re willing to pay, and whether you want major artists or indie acts – Bandsintown weeds it all down for you to show you only what you really want to see.

Searching by bands is great too – a quick search for, say, “Coldplay” brings up all kinds of useful information. You can see bios, your dates, discographies, and tons of other information that might be of interest.

If you create an account with Bandsintown, you can set a few artists as your favorites, and be notified any time one of your favorites is coming to do a show near you. Personally, I get a weekly digest, in my email, of all the bands I like and might like who are going to be nearby. It’s a great way to stay on top of the game, particularly if you’re a die-hard fan of a particular band.

AlbumReminder

It’s sad how excited I get about new albums coming from my favorite bands. I pre-order, sit and wait, and then go nuts when the download finally starts into my iTunes. Only problem is, I’m always worried I’m going to forget, and not be the first to hear the new albums! We can’t have that now, can we?

With AlbumReminder, my worries are gone. By signing up with AlbumReminder and then adding a few of your favorite artists into your account, you can get notifications of new albums from your favorites by email or by RSS. AlbumReminder features over 140,000 artists – just about anyone you can think of will be there.

You can get notified either on the release date, or set it to a time before the date. AlbumReminder’s also great about not sending you notifications of each and every version of an album (unless you want it, that is), so you’ll only get the notifications you actually want. AlbumReminder’s a simple way to make sure you know who’s making waves, and whose new album you need to get all giggly and excited about.

Oodle BandTracker

This one’s a lot like Bandsintown, but with fewer features – and that’s a good thing, if you’re just looking to stay on top of the concerts in your area. Oodle’s BandTracker lets you search 752,634 bands playing 258,370 shows, to make sure you get to see the ones you want. You can track your favorite bands across the country and always be notified when they play near you.

Once a week, you’ll get an email from BandTracker letting you know who’s coming, who’s cancelling, and what’s going on near you. That’s all there is to it – which is great.

Would you like to broaden your musical horizon? Tina has the scoop.

How do you stay on top of the music world? Are you a music lover or audiophile? Let us how you keep track of your favourite artists, in the comments.

Photo: Jeremy G.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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There is. Well, sort of. There’s going to be. It’s called Presentations, and is the latest offering from the folks at Adobe’s Acrobat.com, the makers of (among other things) Buzzword, a fantastic online word processor.

To get to Presentations, go to the Acrobat.com site, and look at the bottom. There’s a link for Presentations near the bottom – this is Adobe’s way of making sure you know it’s not a full-featured release yet. But it’s still darn good.

I was able to have a brief discussion with the folks at Acrobat.com before Presentations was launched, and they mentioned something that’s critical to Web-based apps being successful. There are three basic principles and points on which Presentations was founded: ubiquity, collaboration, and user experience. In all three realms, Presentations scores high.

The basic product is the same as any other presentation software – it lets you create slides, and then show them to other people. Adobe’s offering, though, offers a bunch of stuff that’s different and better. The best thing, in my opinion, is how much better the collaboration features are – better than PowerPoint, and better than any other online presentations tool.

A huge number of people can be working on the same presentation, or the same slide, or even the same word or image. You’ll see avatars for each person working on the presentation, listed next to the slide they’re currently editing. Conflicting changes are presented to the users, just in case your work overlaps with another collaborator.

There are a bunch of other great features to Presentations – the little things are what really shine. There are a number of themes available, which are easily customized to your liking (great for corporate use, where they tend to mandate a template). Diagrams can be created separately, and then moved around and edited together.

The navigation system is also a major upgrade from other applications. Even when you’re in presentation mode, you can bring up a small dock-like list of all your slides, letting you easily choose the one you want – avoiding that terrible “scrolling-through-everything-to-find-the-right-slide” moment. You drag the window to change the view of the slides, depending on how you want to edit them.

But it’s not all candy and rainbows, unfortunately. Acrobat.com notes frequently that Presentations is very much an early, unstable release, and it has some major notable features missing. There’s no spell-check, no support for importing movies other than .FLV files, and no import and export with PowerPoint – you can only save a Presentation to PDF.

There’s also no sharing of themes, no way to invite someone to view the presentation as anything other than a co-editor, and no way to make comments or notes on slides and presentations.

For now, Presentations is a slick, usable application. But as bugs get fixed and features get quickly rolled out, Presentations is going to bring ubiquity, collaboration, and user experience to a new level within the world of presentations. They’re easier to create, easier to navigate, and Presentations is a gorgeous app.

Worried about your next presentation? Tina shows you have to blow your audiences minds away with 10 Powerpoint tips.

What tool do you use for giving presentations? Present them to us in the comments.

Photo: garethjmsaunders

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Last week, WebNotes released a new product called “WebNotes Pro.” It may not be the most cleverly-titled project ever, but WebNotes Pro offers some fantastic new features for a whole new demographic of users.

Whereas the original WebNotes (which still exists, is free, and works great) was designed for a more social group, allowing you to share annotations and use WebNotes as something of a social-bookmarking service, WebNotes Pro is geared more toward the professional user.

As WebNotes sees it, the professional or student doesn’t need to share notes and highlights, they just need to be able to find and access them again, quickly and easily. To that end, you can create multi-colored highlights (fantastic if you’re cross-researching or stumble across something interesting but unrelated), as well as add sticky notes to pages.

Notes and highlights are automatically saved to your WebNotes account as you go – no saving or refreshing necessary. From your WebNotes box, you can view the original web page, the page with your annotations on top, or just your notes and highlights. If you don’t want to highlight anything, WebNotes can just be a bookmarking service.

Once you’ve got a bunch of annotations and notes, WebNotes lets you easily compile them into a document that you can share with your friends or colleagues – it creates a nice, simple page that you can email or distribute.

But I’ve saved the best feature for last – PDF markup. For students or professionals, reading PDF is an all-too-frequent occurrence. Memos, books, and the like all seem to come in the ubiquitous PDF format, leaving you with two options – either waste the paper printing, or go without any highlighting or markup. In order to do either of those things on a PDF, you’d need Adobe Acrobat, which isn’t exactly cheap.

With WebNotes Pro, you can now mark up PDF files to your heart’s content, in exactly the same way as you would any other Web page. PDFs are saved to your organizer, which creates for a browsable, annotation-friendly interface for all your PDF documents.

WebNotes Pro comes in one of two formats – either a toolbar (for Firefox or Internet Explorer) or a bookmarklet (which works with most browsers). Either one is simple to install, and makes annotating and saving pages much easier.

For me as a student, WebNotes Pro is a fantastic tool – it’s great for taking notes on reading, doing research, and keeping all my relevant material in one place that’s accessible from anywhere. As a professional, it’s nice to have a way to organize and mark up the PDF documents and websites that are relevant to what I do. WebNotes has brought me even closer to being totally paperless, and is saving me tons of time daily.

WebNotes Pro costs $9.99/month (again, there’s still the great free product), and there’s a two-week free trial. Students with a .edu email address get an automatic 50% discount.

And YOU, as a MUO reader, get an even better discount – we’ve got 100 invites for 3 free months of WebNotes Pro. Try it out, decide how you feel, and either sign up or drop back to the free option.

The first hundred people to click this link, will be taken to the WebNotes website, where you can activate your 3-month subscription, courtesy of your friends at MakeUseOf!

What do you think? Are you sold or are you sticking with Evernote? Share with us in the comments.

Photo: Megapixel Eyes

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The thing is, the best way to learn about these things is just to get involved. Put some money into the pot, and call it a learning experience. Since that’s easier said than done, there’s a way to play with what’s essentially “Monopoly” money – it’s called  UpDown.

UpDown gives you a virtual portfolio of money to manage and invest, while teaching you about how finance, stocks, and the like really work.

Creating a free account with UpDown is easy – just supply usernames and passwords, and you’re set to go. You’ll have to wade through a bit of advertising, but it’s a pretty simple process to get UpDown up and running for you.

Once you’ve got an account, you get to start investing! UpDown provides you with $1,000,000 USD that you’re free to invest any way you want – you can make trades and invest by clicking the “Trading” tab. Buying and selling stocks is easy because, well, it isn’t real money.

The rest of the whole system is real, though. The stock prices are a reflection of the real market, and the process of buying and selling works much like it would elsewhere. There are tons of tools to track how your stocks are doing, what’s causing their rise and fall, and how your money would be faring if you were investing real money. Your goal is to make as much money as possible by investing. That’s really the only difference between UpDown and say, eTrade – you’re not using money you can lose.

UpDown’s whole purpose is education – it’s a super-low risk way to learn a lot more about the markets, and how money and stocks really work. I’ve found that even things like the vocabulary of finance is difficult; UpDown helps you figure out what the heck an annualized return really is. The site provides a constant stream of news and information related to both the markets as whole, and the particular stocks and companies you’ve invested in.

The “Home” tab provides a great overview of what people are talking about on UpDown, as well as what the markets was like and how your stocks fared in the last day. You can compare companies by their critical statistics – things like revenues, earnings, and more. UpDown tries to give yo (the fake investor) a sense of the numbers and data you’ll need to make informed decisions, and teaches you how to read the information as well.

The really cool part of UpDown, though, is how well the community works together. It’s easy to see what other people are buying and selling, to get a sense of what the UpDown market is doing at any given time. There are also groups and networks that you can join based on your interests or background, both of which help you with investment advice, lots of tips and a greater understanding of the whole process.

You can add friends on UpDown as well, and communicate with them about anything you’d like. It’s always nice to have someone looking over your shoulder as you invest, and UpDown allows your friends to do just that.

In reality, that’s just the tip of the iceberg – UpDown hosts tons of contests, keeps a variety of educational tools on hand, and does a great job of keeping you actively investing by providing a stream of tips and tools for improving your skills in (fake) investments. And that’s the beauty of UpDown. It’s a no-pressure, easy-to-learn, simple way of gaining an understanding of how the financial world really operates. There’s no risk of money loss, no gaming of systems – just a plethora of tools designed to help you better understand how to invest your real money wisely.

UpDown has been described as “fantasy football meets the trading floor” and that’s exactly what it is. It’s a way to learn the players, learn the system, and see how the game works before (or while) you get involved in a meaningful way. If you play it well, you can even make a few real bucks through contest and referrals.

Not into stock markets? How about spending your money wisely?

Are there other sites like this to help you with your investment skills? What’s your favorite?

Photo: Donald1976

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Thankfully, I’ve got the Internet. There are a couple of great sites out there that are devoted to doing nothing other than providing simple answers to all of your questions – whether it’s meaning of OPEC or how a United States Presidential election takes place.

These sites provide video, articles and more to help you learn easily. Here are two of my favorites:

CommonCraft

CommonCraft is all about simple explanations. And frankly, CommonCraft does great work. The site features videos on tons of different subjects, from Twitter to borrowing money, all showing you how they work in simple, everyday terms.

The videos are all done in a low-tech yet interesting way, mostly by moving little drawings around to help you figure out what in the world is going on. They’re only a few minutes long but do a great job of breaking down potentially complex things into simple, bite-size pieces.

The videos range across a number of topics, within four broad categories – Green, Money, Society and Technology. For now, the Technology section has the most videos, but CommonCraft seems devoted to getting more videos up on a whole variety of topics.

In addition to just watching the videos, you can purchase them for your own use, or share and embed them elsewhere. Each video teaches a few important things, in a way that anyone can understand because frankly, everyone should know how the World Wide Web works.

WiseGeek

Got a question burning in your brain? Want to know what a Smoking Gun is? Either way, the Wise Geek knows the answer. WiseGeek is a site boasting over 40,000 articles covering a ridiculous range of topics, all answering the questions you may have.

When you first get to the site, you can either search the articles for a particular keyword or phrase, or click through the rotating slides of the various categories. Once you’ve found a suitable topic, you’ll have access to all kinds of new information.

The articles are concise, easy to read and informative. Many of them, to be honest, read a little like a Wikipedia page but they’re all useful pieces of information. WiseGeek is a step away from being a question and answer service, giving simple and easy answers to all the things you’re looking up.

Articles can also be discussed, which turns it into a forum debating a given topic – a great spot to further your knowledge of a subject.

There’s a new site out there, Wolfram Alpha, that’s poised to become the best way to get a lot of questions answered quickly and easily – for more, check out Guy’s article. But for answering questions that are just slightly more complex, CommonCraft and WiseGeek both do a great job of providing simple answers to questions that often just get complicated, convoluted answers.

Where do you get all your nagging questions answered? Let us know in the comments!

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The Google Maps API has opened up a ton of different uses of Google Maps, and some fantastic applications have been built on top of and use Google Maps. Below are nine of the best.

They range across a huge variety of categories and uses, but all can be both interesting and useful ways of using Google Maps. I’ll warn you in advance, a number of these are US-specific but most have good international alternatives.

Mapdango

Mapdango is a tool for total exploration of a given place. When you search for a city or a country, Mapdango pulls photos from Panoramio and Flickr, as well as information about relevant and important places from Wikipedia, Eventful and Google Local; in order to give you a great way to explore a city. You’ll see pictures of the city, get helpful markers for hotels, museums, parks and more, and generally have a ton of useful information to work with.

If you’re looking to spend some time in a city or country, definitely give Mapdango a try – it’s an event planner all by itself.

Hotspotr

More and more, I find myself walking around with my computer open, hoping and praying that I stumble across a WiFi hotspot that I can use. I always thought to myself, “there has to be a better way.”

Turns out there are a bunch, and one of the best is called Hotspotr. It’s a user-generated list of WiFi hotspots that is growing at a pretty huge rate, with over 15,000 hotspots being searched in over 3,000 cities. A simple search brings up Google Maps pegs for every hotspot, which can be narrowed down to only show free hotspots, or even only the ones in cafes.

Diaroogle

Gotta go? In an unfamiliar place, having to find a bathroom can be a nightmare. That’s what Diaroogle was created for. It’s a community-driven database of public toilets in three different cities (currently New York, San Francisco and London), complete with reviews of the bathrooms, in order to help you find an actually sanitary alternative to the nasty fast food bathrooms.

Live Sports Map

The Live Sports Map is full of live-updated sports news and scores, which can be seen and accessed based on where they’re located. Only care about Denver sports? Just hover your mouse over Denver, CO, and you’ll be updated in an instant. The site shows news around the world but is most heavily concentrated in the US. It’s fast, easy, and even provides color-coding by sport just in case you couldn’t care less about hockey scores.

NYC Bike Maps

As a New York City resident, I know that there are tons of great places to ride a bike in the city. But I have no idea where they are – that’s where NYC Bike Maps comes in. It’s essentially an overlay of bike routes on top of Google Maps, showing you which bike paths are on a street, which have special hours, and more importantly, where they all go. There are a bunch of different maps, and you can even search to find the ones nearest to you. This is something that needs to exist in every city, for every biker.

ZIP Codes and Area Codes

I get tons of phone calls from area codes I don’t know. Equally often, I’m sending a letter or a package, know the address but don’t have a clue what the ZIP code is. For both situations, there’s the USAnaviguide’s Area Code and Zip Code maps. Both use Google Maps to create overlays of the codes by their location, as well as make them searchable. Want to know where area code 660 is? A quick search tells me it’s in Kansas City, MO. The searches are quick, easy and useful more often than you might think.

Twittervision

Okay, these last three are more fun than useful, but all prove how cool applications can integrate with Google Maps. Twittervision shows, in real-time, Twitter updates from around the globe, by location. It’s a growing service but has huge implications – real-time breaking news, as well as seeing conversations as they unfold. Twittervision indexes everyone with a photo and location from their Twitter bio, and has tons of interesting people and tweets featured.

Real World Racer

Ever wanted to drive cross-country? Well, with the Real World Racer, you can. You select a start point and an end point, and suddenly you’re in a high-speed car race all over the world! The game is surprisingly difficult, but a lot of fun and a great way to kill a few minutes seeing the sights of the world as you drive through them in your super-cool red car.

Dig a Deep Hole

Did your parents ever tell you that if you dug a hole deep enough, you’d end up in China? Well, unless you live in Chile or Argentina, it’s a huge lie. That’s what I learned from the Big Hole application, which does but one simple thing – lets you pick a point on a map, and then tells you where, if you dug a hole to the other side of the Earth, you’d end up. Me? I’d end up in the middle of the Ocean – so I’m probably not going to try it any time soon. It’s a fun application, though, and a nice way to ruin all childhood wishes to dig to China.

What’s your favorite use, tweak or mashup of Google Maps? Let us all know in the comments!

Photo: thejourney1972

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Realizing this, a few great applications have come out of the woodwork to make Twitter into a better way to have and follow a conversation. They thread tweets, track replies, and make sure you can understand the whole dialog, rather than just one small and insignificant part.

Here are three of the best ways to keep conversations under control on Twitter:

Twitoaster

Twitoaster is probably the easiest of the bunch to get started with – all you have to do is follow @twitoaster on Twitter. Then, Twitoaster goes to work for you. Every time someone responds to one of your tweets, the conversation is threaded on Twitoaster. You can see the number of replies (a number that’s frequently updated) to a given tweet, as well as see what people said. You can also log in to your Twitter account on Twitoaster, which lets you reply to your replies right from within the conversation.

Twitoaster also offers a couple of cool features – it tracks the number of replies a given account gets, as well as how you rank among Twitoaster users. It’s a full-featured way to track replies, as well as see who’s responding to your tweets.

Tweetree

Tweetree is really two great services in one – it creates conversation threads for replies, and it’s a total overhaul and improvement on the Twitter interface. First, the interface. Tweetree allows you to pull in external content – videos, images, and the like – and experience it directly within Tweetree. It also takes all shortened URLs, and shows where they actually go – a nice touch to avoid RickRolls and the like.

The conversation threading, too, is a great feature of Tweetree. It brings in all conversations you’re a part of on Twitter (even showing the tweets you replied to), and puts them in tree form, nesting the replies throughout the conversation. If you’re getting the “oh, how cool” tweets a lot, or replied about something you can’t remember for the life of you, Tweetree keeps track of it for you. You can do everything in Tweetree you’d want to do in Twitter, and actually a whole lot more.

ThreadedTweets

ThreadedTweets rocks the world of real-time conversation threading. You can sign up for ThreadedTweets without having to give your Twitter password, because it uses Twitter’s OAuth system to authenticate, rather than asking for your password. Once you’re signed in, you’ll get real-time monitoring of all the replies to your tweets, which are threaded into a conversation for you.

ThreadedTweets also keeps a list of Popular conversations, which you can read and view easily. Every conversation has a permalink, which makes it even easier to keep monitored and updated. There’s even an embeddable widget for tracking a conversation on another site – this makes ThreadedTweets both a conversation tool and a real-time search, which is a great combination.

One of Twitter’s best features is its ability to create quick, simple conversations. Twitter itself does a poor job of tracking them and keeping conversations intact, but these four applications do it incredibly well. What’s your favorite way to keep track of your conversations on Twitter?

Oh and make sure to follow MakeUseOf on Twitter as well. We are now going to start using for distributing beta invites to publicly closed websites and giveaway license keys to commercial software (when available).

Photo: respres

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There are a lot of times that I’ve wished Google Reader was available on the desktop, and available offline. Google Gears has helped with both of those things, but I still find that there’s some usability that’s lost when reading on the Web versus on the desktop – not to mention Gears has failed me more than a few times. Being able to save up feeds, and read them all when I’m on a plane or train, is a great feature – one that’s driven me away from Google Reader before.

The application I always wanted to use instead of Google Reader was FeedDemon, a great desktop- and web-based RSS reader from NewsGator. The desktop version is great, the Web application is awful. I hated having to choose, and always ended up going back to Google Reader.

Now, with the brand-new FeedDemon 3.0, we all get to have the best of both worlds. FeedDemon now syncs seamlessly with your Google Reader account, essentially making it a desktop version of Reader – and an awfully good one at that.

FeedDemon is a great application in its own right, and one that was featured on MakeUseOf by Laurence back in August. Even if you’re not a Google Reader user, FeedDemon’s worth a look – this new update, though, makes it worth revisiting again for everyone.

When you download FeedDemon, you’re walked through a short setup process. One of the questions you’ll be asked is which service you want to sync FeedDemon with – make sure you pick Google Reader! FeedDemon will ask for your Google account info, and once you’re logged in, it syncs up for you.

From then on, FeedDemon pulls all your feeds from Google Reader instead of its own NewsGator service. That means anything you read in FeedDemon will be marked read in Google Reader, and vice-versa. If you’re reading RSS feeds offline, your FeedDemon items will be available, and as soon as you connect to the Web, everything will get synced again.

You can organize your feeds, add or delete them, and all changes will be mirrored across both applications. It won’t matter any more which one you use, because the functionality and content will be the same – it’s just a question of taste at this point.

FeedDemon 3.0 is still in beta, and it has it bugs, but I have yet to encounter a deal-breaker issue. NewsGator is updating it frequently, and the application keeps getting better and more stable. FeedDemon is Windows-only, a fact that I know Mac users are hoping changes in the very near future. NewsGator does have an application for Mac OS, called NetNewsWire, and it’s a great application, but doesn’t work with Google Reader like FeedDemon does.

Though I’m still primarily a Google Reader user, having FeedDemon around for offline and desktop reading is a welcome development – my train rides just got a whole lot more interesting.

What’s your RSS reader of choice?

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Thankfully, there’s Sporcle – a site full of games that’s the best way to learn cool things, and make it fun, for adults (or really anyone). Sporcle is a site of what it calls “mentally stimulating diversions,” and it’s exactly that – games that are fun, exciting, and actually educational.

There are a ton of different games on the site, most following a similar format. You’ve got a blank list to fill out, and a time limit to do it – when you finish typing a correct answer, it’s automatically added to the list. Name all 50 US states – Go! How about all the elements of the periodic table? Go!

What’s funny is that these games don’t actually sound that much fun- until you start playing. They’re incredibly addicting, and I’m always surprised how hard it is to recall all kinds of similar information all at once. What’s that darn state next to Louisiana? But I did name all 44 US Presidents in 85 seconds (true story). Can you beat me?

The games range over a ton of different categories, from geography to television to religion, and everything in between. There’s a whole range of difficulty levels as well, ranging from the incredibly easy to the unbelievably difficult. The one I’m playing right now is called “The Great Game,” and it asks you to come up with a whole series of things with the word “great” in the title. Wayne Gretzky’s “The Great One” – things like that.

My favorite part of Sporcle is the “Random Game” button – it’s like StumbleUpon for brain stimulation. Every time you click the button, it picks one of the 1349 games currently on Sporcle for you to play – like maybe the “Crayola Colors” game.

If you start to Sporcle on a regular basis, you might want to create an account. It’ll track your stats for you, and help you figure out just how great you are at naming all the classes offered at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books.

For the real Sporcle addicts, there’s both a Twitter feed and an RSS feed from Sporcle that updates every time there’s a new game available. The library of games is growing surprisingly fast, and there’s always a new game to be played on the site.

Sporcle’s a pretty dangerous site – I’ve had more than a few occasions of looking at the clock at realizing I just spent three hours trying to name all the corporate logos (Safeway and Atari threw me off) on Sporcle. The way I see it, though, if you’re going to waste some time, and find a fun diversion from all the other things you have to do, why not do it in a way that helps you learn something? That’s Sporcle’s thought, anyway.

I got all 32 NFL teams in 1 minute, 19 seconds. Beat me. Go!

What’s your favorite online game or time-waster?

image credit: damclean

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