Those of you who have been reading MakeUseOf know that Google isn’t the only search search engine on earth. We have talked about some cool search engines to remember and also how you can create your own search engine with ROLLYO. Hittery is a new app which joins this league of websites. It isn’t a new kind of search engine but in fact a custom search dashboard with some unique features which could prove to be super helpful.
Recently, there was a minor earthquake in Los Angeles and even before the news channels could broadcast the information, the news spread like wildfire through different mediums on the internet such as Twitter, social media sites and news aggregators.
In fact breaking news is in itself a fully fledged business on the internet and a huge number of blogs and websites work around the clock to get the news to its audience. Consequently, there are a huge number of news aggregators which claim to deliver the latest news to their visitors. Newsflashr is one such website which claims to be the all-in-one news search engine.
With all the social media sites available to us now, it’s very easy to go into social media overload. There’s no possible way that one can keep up with even 10 sites, let alone the hundreds that are created each month.
In order to keep up with the social media phenomenon, there are numerous aggregation sites & applications popping up on a regular basis. It seems like most people are now using FriendFeed to stay updated with things but what about the other social aggregators out there that are less publicized? Do you use any of them?
 There’s no doubt that Friendfeed, in a short space of time has gained immense popularity as the best social media aggregator and also as a prominent networking and interaction tool. Friendfeed has also done a great job in successfully leveraging the user base which was frustrated by Twitter downtimes and looking for an alternative micro-blogging platform. |
Friendfeed is a cool service no doubt and if you use certain Greasemonkey scripts (which I am about to mention), Friendfeed can turn into a really awesome tool. So if you haven’t been bitten by the Friendfeed frenzy yet, sign up for a free account and install these user scripts and start rocking with it!
Retaggr is a new online service that lets you build a mini-profile that can attach itself to comments or photos that you post. Another way of looking at it is that Retaggr is your online business card. It gives a summary of all the different types of social networks or websites that you work with or on and it provides a great way for people to connect with you.
Once you sign up for Retaggr, you must fill out a few different things in order to give Retaggr enough information to populate your Profile Card. This Profile Card isn’t just limited to screen names and basic information. There is a lot of room for customization.
The internet is undoubtedly the biggest information resource available to mankind today. Irrespective of where you are and what you do, you can visit Google News or any other such website to get the latest news from around the world.
Considering the huge information overflow online, you can have some excellent tools which help you to effectively organize the information flow and help you stay informed and up to date everyday. Let’s take a look at some of them.
So far I have not been a huge fan of any social site. Don’t get me wrong, I love social sites like Digg, Del.ico.us, Flickr, Twitter and so on, but that list is one reason I haven’t used them much. I need to visit four different sites to manage myself, not to mention additional stuff like StumbleUpon, Youtube and some more I use. Even if I use desktop clients, I still need to download separate tools for most of these sites.
There has been much confusion in the past as to what exactly a podcast is. To ease some of the confusion, it is basically an online show which can be in the form of audio or video that is downloaded on demand. Most notably, podcasts utilize RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS might even be how you subscribe to Make Use Of and podcasts work the same way. However instead of text posts you would be downloading audio or video.
Here on Make Use Of, we’ve talked about start pages several times before, and we’re doing it again now. This time, it’s about Feedly.
Nick mentioned Feedly in the comments of this Make Use Of article and the fact that it’s just a Firefox extension caught my eye. I checked it out immediately and I was pleasantly surprised. Feedly is like a browser start page – but it works from your local computer. It’s touted as a social and magazine-like start page and I must say it lives up to its name.
There is no dearth of online personalized news aggregators, the most prominent ones being My Yahoo and start pages like iGoogle which allow you to add different widgets and view customized content in one page. The motive of DailyMe is the same - to deliver you latest content and news from various sources in a way that it’s convenient for you to go through them quickly and easily.
The problem with having so many social networks is that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of them all. Plus it also becomes increasingly difficult for your online friends to keep track of you. So what’s the answer to this conundrum you ask? The answer is to aggegrate all your social networks into one feed which is then given the blindingly original name Friendfeed.
When I first heard of Friendfeed, I will admit I rolled my eyes and moved onto the next site. But gradually I was won around by the positive reviews that the site received so I went back for a second look. On my third visit, I made an account. Now I’m handing out my personal feed to anyone that wants it.
I really like for the sites and tools I use frequently to be kept together in one place, and not just as shortcuts on my desktop or in my Favorites (who’d ever find anything there?)
Two very useful and time-saving web services I use for this purpose are Only2Clicks, which was profiled on MakeUseOf before, and Hyperigo, both of which allow you to organize your favorite websites on one tab-supported page. They come equipped with a few token sample offerings in place, but both are easily customizable for the main purpose: adding your own stuff!
Five highly-automated online services to help you out with your daily life and new year resolutions. Nothing complicated or time-consuming, only apps that truly deliver.
FINANCES
Mint - Get control of your budget and finances with minimal effort. Mint is a fully-automated, all-in-one online personal finance tracker.
Here are some of the things that Mint can do without your intervention:
There are literally hundred of new Web 2.0 sites that appear every month and many of them sound interesting, but only a few actually get people excited and anxious to get their hands on the goods! Most of these sites start out in private beta, so only a few select people get to play around with them.
Here’s my list of some of the popular and most anticipated Web 2.0 sites that are still in private beta, but already have a pretty large following!
Being the type of guy that burns through money I jumped at the opportunity to review Mint. Mint is a finance tracking and budgeting platform much like Microsoft Money or Quicken. But the main difference is it is Online – if you don’t have a problem adding your banking information to Mint.com you can have access to a complete financial overview from any web browser.
Mint has been in Beta for about 3 months now and is showing somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 early adopters throwing in over 2 billion dollars of their hard earned accounts into Mint’s databases. 2 fricking billion dollars? That’s a lot of moolah…
Looking for a place to find some good deals or bargain discounts while shopping online for electronics, clothing, accessories, etc? Well, there are a good number of sites out there other than Fatwallet, which everyone in the world knows about. I’m going to list as many really good deal-finding shopping sites that I can, so check them out and see what you think!
 |
A very cool site that’s a mashup of deals from other sites like Slickdeals, Fatwallet, Gottadeal and lots more. Mostly tech-related stuff, but there are other things also. |
Alright everybody, I’ve tried at least 10 of these, and I was going to go on a site by site basis and rank each one, but to be quite honest there are too many different factors involved that this post would’ve been 5+ pages long, so here it is, my list…
