The Internet is full of entertainment, but if you’re looking for more amusing ‘lol’ images or other priceless images and other goodies, be ready to unleash your inner procrastinator and check out the following list of websites. They’re bound to entertain you with tons of hilarious pictures for at least a couple of hours.

theCHIVE

theCHIVE is a booming photoblog with many recurring posts, most of which are collections of hilarious, bizarre or otherwise, potentially viral images. Some of these posts include the Daily Afternoon Randomness, which is a highly popular set of either edited or unedited, random and funny pictures, as well as the Daily Morning Awesomeness, another popular post with a variety of either inspiring, cool or sometimes, even jaw-dropping but hilarious images.

There are also other sections on the site, which feature themed posts for certain weekdays, viral videos, as well as, photos of random hot girls or actual female readers of the site that may sometimes be NSFW. The site’s also done pretty well when it comes to donating to readers, or Chivers, in need, but it has also created some Internet hoaxes that have even fooled network shows and other media outlets. Still, theCHIVE is highly addicting and serves a ton of photo galleries that will satisfy the palate of those who are hungry for raw comedy in picture form.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed shows viral videos, images, links and general content in real-time, submitted by the staff and users of the site, which was actually started by a cofounder of the Huffington Post. The posts range from human interest stories to celebrity gossip news. You will still catch plenty of funny pictures for different types of humor on this site, as well as interesting and useful information once in a while.

Cracked

Cracked started out as a humor magazine, first released in 1958, and eventually saw itself on the web, continuing the works of the print edition (which was discontinued in 2007). It features lots of compilations (e.g. 8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite Of What You Think), weekly image manipulation contests, and daily contests to allow users to submit their creative captions to bizarre photos.

CollegeHumor

This site has been active for 7+ years and is known for having plenty of helpful articles for college survival, and creating original comedy shorts, like the web series Jake and Amir, and ones even including celebrities, such as Michael C. Hall (the lead of Dexter) and Malin Akerman (from Watchmen). When it comes to funny pictures, CollegeHumor also has picture galleries with lots of bizarre and hilarious images you can’t miss.

FailBlog & Icanhascheezburger [Both From Cheezburger Network]

FailBlog features lots of hilarious videos and pictures that can either belong in the fail, the more intense “epic fail”, or win categories. The site’s Youtube channel has over a million subscribers and it’s almost like a “America’s Funniest Videos” show for Youtube. Icanhascheezburger is of course, its sister site that shows cat pictures with witty captions in lolspeak, generally for different categories. These “kitteh” videos and images have exploded on the web in the recent years because there’s always a new cat video or photo these days, but it never gets old to see some cute animals doing
innocent and hilarious things.

Funny Or Die

Founded by comedian and actor Will Ferrell, Funny Or Die, launched this website to feature comedy shorts submitted by users, and sometimes, even original short films starring Ferrell and his colleagues, and sometimes even other actors. Though the site is known for its video content, it also has photo caption contests for users to vote on and funny picture galleries to entertain everyone.

Geeky Fun

Our site co-founder, Kaly, has been scouring the web in search of hilarious pictures and posting them for a while, so be sure to check out our very own Geeky Fun section. It’s mostly material that even tech-savvy users can enjoy. If you use Google Reader or any other feed reader, add the Geeky Fun RSS feed! You won’t regret it!

Did we miss any site? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Scott Clark

Next time you find yourself with an evening up your sleeve, refreshing Reddit and PopURLs with some vague hope something new will happen, you can instead catch up on all the memes you missed using Rrrewind. This will quickly become one of your favourite haunts because it is just so good at letting you browse all the popular stories on the web.

What’s Rrrewind?

Rrrewind lets you see all the popular stories on the best services on any given day. Although that sounds a lot like the PopURLs archive, it’s not exactly that. The PopURLs archive is a snapshot of the day, showing you exactly what PopURLs looked like that day. Rrrewind is more focused on the content you like best, and is far more browsable for exploring just your favourites.

The services Rrrewind covers include Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, Reddit, Hulu, Yahoo Videos, YouTube, Dribbble, Flickr, Amazon and Yahoo Buzz.

Rrrewind goes back as far as 2009, so there’s plenty of link goodness for you to peruse. Videos and pictures are shown as embedded media, so they’re compelling and interesting to view.

How Do I Use Rrrewind?

The way it works is quite simple. You click on the service you want to look at, then you browse through that service’s popular items of the day as you wish. When you’re finished, click on the big arrow on your right and it will go back a day. Repeat ad infinitum.

If you want to go back further, just click on the “Archives” link in the top right. There you can choose the day you want to start on, then continue browsing normally.

As you can see, this can get quite addictive. Hours of your life might get sucked into this void. But it is a great way to browse the best content so you can’t really knock it for doing that well.

Thoughts On Rrrewind

I’m sure there’s more that can be done with Rrrewind. More services could be added easily. I would also appreciate it if you had the ability to stay on the day you reached when you change services. But neither of these are necessary ideas and they would both detract from the simplicity of the website.

The direct competitor here is PopURLs. PopURLs have a great number of services covered, going back as far as 2008. If PopURLs were to offer left/right archive navigation arrows such as the Rrrewind arrow it would be just as easy to navigate as Rrrewind. So if PopURLs were to add these arrows, Rrrewind might well fade into obscurity. In the meantime though, we can enjoy its simplicity and handy browse features.

More Internet!

If you’re mad keen to find new and interesting stuff online, try reading these articles:

• 9 Websites To Show You The Hottest Stuff on Twitter Now
• 10 More Websites To Show You The Hottest Twitter Topics Now
• 12 More Websites To Show You the Hottest Twitter Topics
• 21 Sites To Find Out What’s Hot Online

What’s your favourite way to find interesting content online? Let us know in the comments!  Bonus points to the first person that says “MakeUseOf”.

In this article, we’ll take a look at search Twitter for the most popular stories by the number of retweets or favourites a tweet receives, as well as how to find specific kinds of interesting information on Twitter.

Search Twitter For Information Based On Popularity

TweetMeme

There are a variety of services for finding the most retweeted blog posts, stories and articles linked on Twitter, the most popular and influential of which is TweetMeme. Stories on TweetMeme can be browsed by the most popular from all categories in the past 24 hours, the past 7 days, or by specific categories including Entertainment, Comedy, Gaming, and Technology amongst others.

Content can be further broken down by News, Images and Videos. TweetMeme also allows you to keep up to date with the content on their site by subscribing to their RSS feeds. TweetMeme is also searchable if you want to find the hottest stories on specific topics.

Logging into TweetMeme with your Twitter account will then enable you to retweet the stories that you want to share with your followers directly from within their website.

TweetMeme also have a few extra goodies for users including a bookmarklet, a retweet button or chicklet for your blog posts, and plugins making it easy to incorporate the button on your blog.

DailyRT

DailyRT takes a similar approach to TweetMeme, by ranking the most popular Tweets in the past hour, 24 hours or 7 days. The difference however, is that the content is not limited to blog posts and articles, but also includes the most popular tweets in general.

This does have its downside of course, as the most popular tweets are not necessarily the most informative. Using their search feature however allows users to harness the information found on DailyRT and get the most out of it. One interesting feature found on DailyRT includes the ability to search for the most retweeted items from specific users.

Logging in with your Twitter account allows you to retweet directly from the website, but gives you no choice in the wording, and each retweet includes a direct link to the DailyRT homepage. DailyRT has a list on Twitter of the 50 most retweeted members on Twitter.

Thoora

Thoora is another site that plugs into the information on Twitter letting people know what the most popular stories are, but it also gets its statistics from the number of blog posts and news articles covering a certain topic. Each article is accompanied by the number of retweets as well as the number of articles or blog posts found online.

Information is broken down into categories including Business, Controversy and Sci/Tech, amongst others. Stories can also be browsed by the newest developing stories, stories that are currently popular and by those that have been popular for the past week.

Signing up for an account allows you to share the content on Facebook, Buzz, Twitter and via Email, and discuss the stories on the website. Opening up any given story is where Thoora truly excels in comparison to other similar sites. It provides users with statistics on the story, recent tweets about it, links from blogs and official news sources.

Finding Tweets With The Most Favourites

Favstar

Another method of tracking popularity on Twitter is keeping track of how many favourites any given tweet has. Favstar does just that. This might not necessarily lead to a wealth of information and links, but it’s interesting and funny nonetheless. The website gives users a way to pass some free time, reading jokes, interesting witticisms and commentaries on current affairs, and you’ll even find the occasional link to an article or video.

Tweets are divided into popular, rising and new. Signing in with your Twitter account allows you to quickly follow interesting users featured on Favstar, add tweets to your favourites, and even retweet. Favstar should however come with a warning that it is not at all PG. Favstar also has a three lists worth following – Tech and Social Media Tweeters, Celebrity Tweeters and Funny, Entertaining or Insightful Tweeters.

You can also search Twitter for specific users to see which of their tweets have received the most favourites. The website is available in English, German and Japanese.

Finding Job Listings

Micro.Vois

Micro.Vois features tweets relating to freelance work. Tweets listed on the site are divided into users looking for freelancer work, and users who are looking to hire freelancers – and it does so in a very simple way. Micro.Vois uses Twitter’s hashtags to label the tweets, using #havework or #wantwork to distinguish the tweets from the rest of the chatter online.

The listings can also be further narrowed down by profession, with web development, programming, graphics, writing and miscellaneous jobs.

TweetyJobs

TweetyJobs is another site that features job listings mentioned on Twitter. One main difference between Micro.Vois and TweetyJobs is the fact that the latter is searchable. You can search for a specific job title in a specific city or zip code, and filter the results into either listings from corporate sites or Twitter.

Finding Items for Sale

TwitShop

TwitShop is another listings site that uses Twitter’s hashtags to aggregate its information. If you have an item for sale, appending the hashtags, #forsale, #4sale or #auction, will ensure that your tweet shows up on the site.

TwitShop is searchable, so if you want to buy something in particular from another Twitter user, it’s easy to find.

CheapTweet

CheapTweet, like TwitShop, aggregates items that are for sale on Twitter. It features listings in a variety of categories including Tech, Food and Home & Family, amongst others. Not only does it provide you with listings, but users can also vote on how good a deal each listing is.

Finding Popular Music

We Are Hunted

We Are Hunted is a slick site which combs Twitter, along with other social media sites like Facebook and MySpace to give you a list of the 99 most popular songs at the moment. If you want to listen to all 99 songs, simply start at number 1, and it will automatically play through the entire list. You can also limit the results to only the songs that are popular on Twitter.

It also allows you to share any given song on Twitter, Facebook or via email. If you want a more extensive list of what music is currently popular on Twitter, check out David’s article on using The Hype Machine to do just that.

In the the future, we’ll take a look at more ways to search Twitter to get the most out of the content, including finding out what new movies are popular on Twitter, how to find personalised content for you, and sites that list all the information available on specific topics.

How do you find the content that matters to you on Twitter? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: Dave Smith

There’s no denying the popularity of sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, but there are a ton of other options available, each with an interesting twist, whether it’s in the way the content is presented, or by gathering popular content from specific social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Find The Most Popular Online Content With The Bus Ride

The Bus Ride is an aggregator of sorts that gives you a simple and unique way to navigate through information on your preferred topics, much like being on a bus and going from one stop to the next.

The Bus Ride frontpage features popular stories from all around the web in a variety of categories. You can choose to display different types of stories, from the newest, to the most creative, entertaining and educational. You can also browse through specific categories such as News, Products, Sports, Technology and Travel.

Selecting any given story, you will then be taken on a route of sorts. Each stop consists of a post related to that story from a different website. So opening up a post on “alternatives to the iPad” takes you to an article on Wired, with the next stop on Engadget, followed by The Huffington Post.

By the end of the route, you should know all that you ever wanted to know about alternatives to the iPad.

You can also search for any topic and The Bus Ride will create a personalised route for you to discover articles, videos from YouTube, Wikipedia entries, Gowalla posts, and much more.

Each route consists of 6 stops. Repeating the same search for a personalised route will sometimes result in new content for you to read, although some of it is repeated.

As you go through your routes, you can earn stamps. The stamps are displayed on your Facebook profile, and require that you connect to your Facebook account. Connecting to your Facebook account also allows you  to comment on and ‘like’ posts from a sidebar directly within The Bus Ride.

Find Interesting Content On Twitter With ReStream

ReStream makes it easy to filter through the abundance of information available on Twitter.

What makes ReStream particularly useful is that you have complete control over what kind of information is included in your stream.

Setting up your stream of content couldn’t be easier. After connecting to your Twitter account, you can enter as many keywords or tags as you like. If there are more tags that you want to add at a later date, you can do so by going into your profile settings.

You also have the choice of importing your Twitter favourites as a means of further personalising the content that will be made available to you. You can then look at the Recommended Reading tab based on the tags that you entered when first setting up your account.

Articles can be marked as read, and are also accompanied by ‘comments,’ so you can see who has mentioned these articles on Twitter.

Using ReStream, you can also look through your own Twitter stream, and it will feature select tweets from the people you follow, you can browse content by popularity, or certain featured categories.

Find Interesting Content On Facebook With ItsTrending

ItsTrending is like a Digg of sorts for Facebook, and the best part is that you don’t actually need a Facebook account to benefit from it.

Using this site, you can easily find the most popular online content such as news, tech and sports stories, along with popular videos and images that are being shared on the social networking site.

The front page features the top 5 stories in each category.

Opening up any given category will show a list of the most popular stories with a counter for how many times each post has been shared on Facebook.

If you are logged into Facebook, it will allow you to comment  on and ‘like’ stories directly from ItsTrending.

How do you find interesting content from around the web? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Svilen Milev

Using a website called Zoofs we can see what videos are the most popular on Twitter right now. The website’s creator has this to say about his project:

Zoofs is a new way to discover YouTube videos that people are talking about on Twitter. Zoofs orbits around the Twitter sphere, eating through piles of tweets everyday, in search for the most tweeted YouTube videos, and applies a weighing recipe to rank the most popular Twitter topics.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s go check out Zoofs and see what it has to offer us.

When arriving at the homepage you will see a grid with 7 video thumbnails by 6 video thumbnails. Each video shows you its respective running time in the lower right hand corner of the thumbnail.

We can click on any of the thumbnails to watch the video. Some of the thumbnails are marked with a star and a Zoof’s Pick banner. These videos are hand picked out of the popular videos by the people at Zoofs. I clicked on the image in the upper right hand corner which I instantly recognized from last night’s Simpsons episode.

We see a window that allows us to watch the video in HTML5 format or flash so it is compatible with Apple devices (iPad, iPhone iEverythingElse). You will see statistics in the video window showing you how many views the video has on YouTube as well as how many people have tweeted its URL. The above example was watched 25,346 times and mentioned in 613 tweets.

It also categorizes the video’s genre and this one is entertainment. There are links to share the Zoofs link out on any of the popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Digg.

Clicking on the Zoofs Picks link at the top of the window will bring up all the videos chosen by the good people at Zoofs. This is what you see when you click on it.

So apparently these are the best of the best. I chose the first video to take a look at what the Zoofs team thinks is funny. Then I also clicked on the last 72 hours button at the top of the screen to see what is new and hot. You can see that button in the screenshot below:

I chose one of the videos at random and had a good chuckle over an animated orange doing that whole Wassssssup bit back from 1999″¦

Now I wanted to see what the most popular video on Zoofs were but I could not figure out how to sort them by tweets or views. I was able to show the videos in a list format that did have the views and tweet counts listed as you can see in the shot below:

If anyone can let me know how to sort the videos by views or tweets let me know in the comments!