Archive for the ‘Web Apps’ Category
When those world camera were big craze a few years ago (I.e. you could watch your friend wave to your from TGI Friday’s in Time’s Square) I thought that would be that last of it. But recently, most notably with Google Street view which enables you to walk around a city, a new kind of virtual presence technology has taken off. I guess people want to see where they’re going or just take a look around if they’re bored. You can now view Prague in full 360 panorama.
“The creation of this image represents my previous five years’ obsession with all things panoramic,” says Jeffrey Martin, founder and CEO of 360 Cities. “If you’re stuck at home over Christmas, feeling humbuggy and don’t feel like hanging out with your family, you can explore Prague instead.”
360 cameras enable you to view a panoramic scene on your computer and move in 360 degrees. 360 cities is a Dutch company and they created this 18GB panoramic picture of Prague. It was taken from an SLR camera which rotated very slowly for a number of days. In total, hundreds of thousands of pictures were stitched together to form this wonderful creation which has over 18 billion pixels.
“The final image exists as a 120 Gigabyte Photoshop large (PSB) file,”
You can view the image for yourself right here.
Analytics360 plugin allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress. You can visualize your site’s traffic trends and see how blog posts and email campaigns affect overall traffic. You can also isolate traffic coming directly to your site from email campaigns with the “campaign traffic” tab.
Check the growth of your mailing list over time. Compare new and existing subscribers. And if you’ve got multiple lists, see how they stack up to each other. Curious how all that new traffic ended up on your site? Wondering if more people are finding you through search or direct referrals? Analytics360 will break it all down for you with Google Analytics.
You can use the Analytics360 plugin without a MailChimp account, but users of MailChimp will see data about traffic sent to their blog via email campaigns aggregated with other stats.
While YouTube is definitely your best bet if you want top videos, it can be a little to constantly search and scour in order to find them. Yes the featured video sections helps, but I think I know better solution.
It’s called Vidque. It’s basically the most popular video sites all combined (or syndicated) into one with a touch of social media plopped on top. Here are the basics:
When a video from a popular service (Youtube, Viddler, MetaCafe ec…) reaches the Vidque it can be viewed by clicking on it. You can see a sample of this below. To the right of the video screen you can see options enabling you to either boost the videos rankings of deem it not worthy. This is how Vidque ranks its videos (along with taking the current rankings from the parent sites).
You can also choose to add a video or series to your page and see what your followers and people you follow have added to theirs. This is where the social media aspect comes into play. This idea (like so many others on the site) is once again incorporated into the videos rankings. The more people who choose to add the video to their page the higher it climbs in the rankings.
You can check it all out here.
In what was practically the unplug heard around the world, imeem users were rudely awakened when upon loading their favorite playlists, they
imeem playlists moving to MySpace Music
were nowhere to be found. MySpace’s acquisition is not responsible for imeem going away, as the suffering company would have surely gone the way of the dinosaur on its own, but rather, shutting off the API killed a lot of apps, desktop and mobile alike. The impact was felt the world over as no word was even given, no warning, not even an explanation was made at the time of this event.
Recently MySpace has done right with the imeem community by assuring them that their playlists are fine, and are simply being ported over to MySpace music playlists. While I’m not entirely sure of MySpace’s music porting capabilities, I’d have to assume this is not an overnight process. Nevertheless, MySpace’s imeem acknowledgement provides some comfort to avid imeem users, but little those that have already migrated to other platforms. The service’s dedicated fans were the most spurned by this transition in ownership, and perhaps MySpace’s assurance comes too little too late.
In the announcement MySpace encourages users to use the existing music service provided by said company while the transition is taking place. It states it has the largest licensed digital catalog of music, hoping to lighten the blow even more, but for some of us, MySpace is not a site we thought of when we thought of music. Will the acquisition of imeem, will this change? Should be interesting to see the response once the imeem playlists have been brought over.
There’s a lot of social search options out there, but Nsyght has launched t
Nsyght is a social search engine.
o not just offer up social search possibilities, but also offer up some great discovery methods for new content. When I first discovered Nsyght, it reminded me of an earlier company I reviewed called Worio which was a discovery search engine that had a lot of great social community aspects.
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It wasn’t that long ago that social networks were popping up like they wer
Plurk weighs legal action against Microsoft.
e going out of style. API’s had opened up and similar social networks sprang up, each offering their unique twist to the game, with names that followed the web2.0 trend of dropping vowels. Some others were truly unique, Plurk is a
good example. Now admittedly I am not a fan of Plurk, never found a use for it, never liked the way conversations were held, but it had its following and it did what it did well.
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OneForty is a new Twitter App Directory that has been around for a while now. Today, it has been announced that they have received $1.6 million in funding. I would like to congratulate the team on receiving funding, but what the hell are the investors thinking!
A Twitter app directory seems like an addon to an already developed site and not a project in itself I dont see why someone would fund this project because it just seems very limited. A Twitter directory can gain decent traction but no where near what is needed to get the returns on advertising, thus they must be after an exit eventually. However, the only company that would be interested in purchasing such a site is probably Twitter, and Oneforty just seems to poorly developed and designed to get an exit to Twitter.
Am I missing the point here?
wi.nr is a link shortening service, much like bit.ly, tinyurl.com and dwarfurl.com, except that after you’ve signed up, every time you create a link and post it in an email, tweet or webpage, people click on it, you’re entered into a sweepstake to win a prize. You also get an entry when you click on a wi.nr link, more clicks, more entries – each entry is given a time stamp, and the first one clicked on after the randomly generated winningtime gets that day’s prize. At the moment they’re giving away 8 gig iPod Nanos, but if you’ve already got one, fear not, the prize will change on the 11th of Dec.
The cost of these prizes is funded by the ads served when you click on a wi.nr link, so if you feel like your online day is already overstuffed with ads then you should probably steer away; not ideal for sending links to business acquaintances! On the other hand, if you’re forwarding that video of the sneezing panda to your circle of friends, then you might as well give it a go, if you win, it’s one less Christmas present to buy, and no-one else offers you a free lottery entry to do something you would do anyway.
There’s a great many of us who have not hit the end of the internet. I’ve heard strange tales of people who have come across a site that warns them that
Instapaper helps you save your online searches to read later.
they have reached the “End of the Internet.” The thought scares me quite frankly, but for the rest of us, we’re always finding useful information and stuff we want to come back to later. There’s always the faithful bookmark, but let’s be honest, our bookmarks are probably filled with items we’ve not gone back to in a very long, long, long time. So that does not seem very functional.
We’ve also got apps like Evernote that seem to capture instances of our online searches and saves them allowing us to share them, sync them, or just read it later. But for some it’s a heavy app that most of us just don’t want to mess with, so there’s an alternative to all of the above, and the answer is Instapaper.
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If the name of this post turned you off, I don’t blame you, what’s fun about flow charts? If your’e still reading this, you’re nuts, because honestly, what’s fun about flow charts?
But seriously, from time to time whether for school, for personal projects, or for work, flow charts are visually appealing to many and offer a clearer view than perhaps a report detailing the same information. So in order to get people on board with visually appealing processes, you need an application that works exactly to that point and that application is Lovely Charts.
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What’s amazing in these times of new and innovative web applications is the ability to share your knowledge, your processes and your abilities without having to get out of your chair. Screen casting has been an extremely popular way to explain something to someone using desktop visuals and such to relay the message. The type of cam you’re using is irrelevant since screen casting actually takes place internally with regards to what you see on your own screen.
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Apple devices come with a native recording device, and even social networkslike Utterli have functioned as a way to capture audio and share it, but none have been as easy as and intuitive as Audio Boo for the iPhone and the iTouch is. The application takes voice recording to a whole new level with a press of a button. Before you know it, you just might start audio recording a whole lot more than you think.
Audio Boo is both a desktop and mobile app. The desktop app allows you to configure your account, asking you where you’d like your “Boo’s” to post. You can choose from a variety of social networks but it’s also stored in the audio stream for others to interact with and comment on.
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