Pandora- Internet Radio

Recently I started using Pandora. It is a service that allows you to listen to free internet radio. It is amazing because it allows you to listen to what you want to hear. When you listen to normal radio they don’t know you. They don’t know what you want to hear and so when they play songs you don’t like you have to endure. No longer. With Pandora you can create various stations and tell them what sort of music you like to listen to and they play it. You can enter artist names or songs and they find music by those artists and also find music that is similar to the music you entered and play it for you.

This is a great way to find new artists to listen to and to expand your musical horizons. I love it. If it plays a song I don’t like I click the thumbs down button and it stops the song and starts playing a different one. Now I don’t have to worry about that song every again. Likewise songs that I like get the thumbs up and it keeps playing them and songs like them.

The only thing is that Pandora is radio not music on demand. Due to legal restrictions they can’t play a song you specify on demand and you can’t backtrack and listen to specific songs over again. But you can’t do that in normal radio anyway.

I think that Pandora is a great service and use it all the time to spice up my web browsing.

Intuu: Interest Networking?

Intuu, a new social networking site, is centered around your interests. Intuu lets you create pages for your various interests: cooking, gaming, sewing, programming, underwater basket weaving; whatever they may be. The idea is that you publish your interests and then find other people with the same interests. You can choose a main interest out of your interests that appears next to your name when you post a comment. There is also a useful interest search bar at top of the page so you  can find all the people with a particular interest.

My Opinion

In my opinion Intuu doesn’t really accomplish anything. All you can do is post pages about what you like, not really anything revolutionary. There are probably thousands of sites out there were you can talk about what you like, pretty much every social network does this. So why do we need a social network dedicated to this. Others offer this and other features while as far as I can tell Intuu does nothing. There isn’t anything to do other than find people who like the same stuff as you and comment on their page. Granted it is still an early release and only in beta testing but if this is all it is going to be there is no reason to visit the site.

Also for a site supposedly all about sharing your interests it doesn’t have very intuitive interest pages. Basically you have the title of the page, your interest (ie. blogging), then you have three fields that you can title and then give a description. The default titles are: How I got into it, Why I like it and What I plan to do with it. These aren’t particularly good prompts and thus most people won’t use them or write very little. Granted you can change these titles but for a user trying to find the purpose of this site there isn’t a whole lot of inspiration there. Also at the bottom of every page you can create a list and add headlines. The lists can be of anything ( goals for your interest, random facts, etc.. ) and the headlines are basically a status update for the interest. For example if you are into programming then you could make headlines for when you finish a new program, start a new project or learn a new language.

As the site stands currently I find it rather useless. Hopefully it will release some revolutionary new feature that will make it worthwhile but right now there is nothing like that. There are other sites that provide a much better venue for sharing your interests for example StumbleUpon or Twine. To visit my intuu click here.

Other Sites to See

Mashable’s take on Intuu

Privnote: This message will self destruct in…

Privnote, an application created with Django and Python, allows you to send self destructing messages to people. Now before we get too far I’d like to say that your computer will not actually combust and spew smoke. Privnote is for sending sensitive messages via email or any other communication means that allows you to send a link. The link can be clicked only once. After it is clicked the message is deleted and can never be read again. So make sure that if you have read a message sent through Privnote remember what it says because once you click out of that page there is no going back.

Privnote is useful for sending messages that you only want one person to read. We all know that email is not 100% secure, so using Privnote makes it a little safer. Also Privnote records the IP address of the person that clicked the link so if the link is prematurely clicked you’ll be able to trace it to the person that clicked it. Another useful application of Privnote is if you sent a message that you regret and the recipient hasn’t read it yet you can click the link yourself therefore detonating the message.

I think Privnote is a cool little application that many people could use. It isn’t exactly necessary but it is fun to use and definately more secure than some methods and I’m sure creative people around the world can find a good application of it to make it useful. For now I just enjoy feeling like a spy when I send my self-destructing messages.

OTHER READING

Read Write Web

MMM Del.ico.us

In case you don’t know del.ico.us is a social bookmarking site. I also will probably not be reviewing it and its competitors because it is so freaking awesome. If you thought you were fine because you have that cheap little ”add to favorites” button or the ”bookmark” button you were wrong. Del.icio.us provides a much better system for keeping track of your bookmarks. It also allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer that is connected to the Internet, rather than just being able to use the bookmarks that are on a specific computer. Really a quite useful feature.

I highly recommend heading over to del.icio.us and creating an account. Also make sure to grab the bookmarklet for Internet Explorer(IE) or the del.ico.us add-on for firefox. I recently started using firefox and since I already had a del.icio.us account I downloaded the del.icio.us add-on and wow was I amazed. To me it is a must have. In IE the bookmarklet consists of two buttons. A “tag” button and a “del.icio.us” button. The tag button is used for adding sites to del.icio.us. The del.icio.us button is for going to your del.icio.us homepage and viewing all of your tags. In firefox this is brought up to the next level because not only do you get the tag and del.ico.us buttons but you also get a ‘bookmarks’ button. The bookmarks button opens up a side panel in your browser similar to the favorites bar in Internet Explorer, except this bar is powered by the functionality of del.icio.us. This sidebar allows you to sort through your bookmarks by the tags you assigned them without even leaving the page you are on. Also if you click on the small triangle next to the tag then it gives you a list of all the tags that are on the bookmarks under the original tag. Now I know that sounds confusing but it really isn’t.

Now you might be thinking, “Oh this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. My bookmarks sidebar is just fine!” Really it isn’t. Del.icio.us adds a level of organization that you just can’t get with your normal bookmarking system. There are so many ways to keep organized and keep track of webpages that you might need in the future. All the uses for del.icio.us are a little hard to explain so I recommend checking out the Mahalo page. It has all the information and more than you need to know about del.icio.us. It also has a very good guide to how to optimize del.icio.us. The link is on that page “How to use del.icio.us like a pro.”

Social Del.icio.us

Another one of the great things about del.icio.us is that it is social bookmarking. This means if you find other users that share your interests you can add them to your network and find new sites to look at that you wouldn’t have been able to find otherwise. It really is just a unique and useful service that I think everyone should use.

This video from the common craft show. Is very helpful in explaining how del.icio.us works and why it is so useful and popular.

Hello World

Hello World!

Yesterday, I launched three blogs on three different services. Blogger (view blog), Vox (view blog) and WordPress (view blog). They all have the same name and I will be publishing the same posts to all three blogs. One of the purposes of this blog is to review sites and web services so readers have a lot less research to do when deciding on a service to use. Since I am rarely decisive and always want to make sure I am picking the right service I check out multiple services before making a decision. Well I launched these three blogs and will be evaluating which one I think is the best for my purposes and deleting the other two. :0

I will also post reviews of the sites individually since just because they don’t serve my purposes doesn’t mean that they won’t serve yours. In the future I will review all sorts of sites so that you, the reader, can make a more informed decision and don’t decide to go with a service that is inferior.