URL:

http://www.topsy.com

What is Topsy?

Topsy is a search engine that uses Twitter’s tweets to determine the popularity of a link.  This means you can quickly find trends and hot topics across the internet using Topsy.  Instead of basing its results off of a much slower determining popularity system such as search engine bots and link popularity.  Think of each Twitter user itself as a website.  Their popularity helps determine the popularity of topics tweets across the Twittosphere.  This is an excellent way to find and discover things on the internet, different from the conventional search engine method.

What you may not know about Topsy

Since Topsy is based on Twitter tweets, you can find newer content faster on the internet.  This means you can search results using their time filter (found on the left after a search query) and get newly popular topics within the last hour!  Amazing.

Watch this quick video and check it out for yourself:

http://www.fansnap.com

What is FanSnap?

FanSnap is a service to find event, concert, and sporting tickets.  FanSnap actually aggregates ticket data from across a network of ticket selling sites and makes the ticket purchase experience much better.  Using FanSnap you can easily select your event and it will show you the venue that is interactive.  From here you can actually zoom in and pan around the venue to see what tickets are still available.  Next you click on an available set of tickets, and make the purchase.  Now you’ll know exactly where you’re sitting when you get there!

What you may not know about FanSnap

FanSnap allows the users to upload photos taken at those different seats.  This will give you an actual view from those seats at that venue.  Can this get an easier?

Here’s a quick video on FanSnap for you:

lala.com

URL:

http://www.lala.com

What is Lala?

Lala.com is an online music store and compact disc trading website created by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bill Nguyen. The service allows trade-enabled members to legally create online shareable “playlists” (formerly known as “radio stations”) of their own uploaded music which can play full length songs for other registered Lala members, purchase MP3s, stream music on a one-time basis or as inexpensively purchased “web songs.”  New members can upload their own music, create playlists, purchase MP3s and web songs, buy new CDs at the Lala store, leave blurbs, and can change their personal account settings to activate trading privileges and also be able to trade CDs and use the community forums. Apple, Inc. acquired Lala on December 4, 2009. (via Wikipedia)

What you may not know about Lala

Lala is great for listening to music from where ever you are, but did you know that you can have Lala create a playlist for you baed on your favorite artists?  Using their “Mix it up” feature you can easily search for an artist, then on the right click [Mix it up].  This will take your current artist and similar artists and create a playlist for you.  It can’t get much easier than that!

Watch the video for more details on Lala:

URL:

http://www.vevo.com

What is Vevo?

Vevo is an online music video website owned by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, EMI and Abu Dhabi Music Company.  Basically its a website full of “official” high quality music videos.  All music videos are played on an oversized video screen in high, music video quality.  The site is powered by Youtube, yet is the first site to use Youtube technologies offsite.  Vevo has a large selection of music videos, playlists, channels and more, destined to be the most popular music video watching website on the internet.

What you may not know about Vevo

Vevo has many features, but a couple that really stick out is the ability to easily create playlists of music videos on the bottom panel.  Here you can add up to 75 music videos to a playlist and just let it play.  Second, with some videos, you can enable lyrics.  This means while the video plays, the lyrics will show in sync with the song. This is a unique, but great feature of Vevo.

Here’s a quick video on Vevo:

URL:

http://www.alternativeto.net

What is AlternativeTo?

AlternativeTo will help you find alternative software applications and websites to some of the most popular ones you may already know.  The best thing is, you can use AlternativeTo to find popular free replacements for programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office!  Next time you’re looking for software options, use AlternativeTo to see what other programs are similar and popular.

What you may not know about AlternativeTo

You can quickly login with your Facebook account and start sharing your favorite program.  Not only that, you can search for keywords related to the type of program you’re looking for and see which ones are most popular.

Here’s a short video on AlternativeTo.net:

URL:

1. Google Maps: http://maps.google.com
2. Google Books: http://books.google.com/
3. Google Squared: http://google.com/squared
4. Google Sets: http://labs.google.com/sets
5. Google News Timeline: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
6. Google Similar Images: http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/
7. Google Audio Indexing: http://labs.google.com/gaudi

What is Google?

I would hope by now anyone on the internet has at least heard of Google, if not, here’s some history…Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google has also developed an open source web browser and a mobile operating system. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 (2009 -03-31)[update], the company has 19,786 full-time employees. The company is running millions of servers worldwide, which process about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour. Google conducts hundreds of millions of search requests every day. (via Wikipedia)

What you may not know about Google

Google is more than just a company trying to organize the world’s information and making it easily searchable.  Google offers a variety of methods of obtaining content on the internet, such as the 7 methods mentioned above.  Furthermore Google also offers a variety of web tools and services such as email clients, advertisement options, web analytics, and ridiculously much more.  Its actually quite remarkable what can be done with Google.  I’m done talking, go play.

Here’s a video on 7 Google search techniques that are really cool:

URL:

http://www.bing.com

What is Bing?

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine.  Bing is an intuitive search engine that tries to assist you in better searching.  It does this by offering suggestive terms and providing you content preview of your search results to help you refine your search of content on the internet.

What you may not know about Bing

Bing has multiple search features to not only search for articles and news related content.  Bing features an extensive search for multimedia such as images and video.  Bing has a collection of search refining tools for images and video.  For instance, you can search images and filter out images of people only by head shots.  Or hover your mouse over video results to see a preview of the video.  Bing is putting up a strong effort towards Google and their domination of finding content for users on the internet.

Here’s a quick video on Bing:

URL:

http://www.slideshare.net

What is Slideshare?

Slideshare allows its users to upload, share and collaborate on powerpoint presentations and Microsoft Word documents.  Many times speakers at differente events and seminars put up their presentations on Slideshare to share with its viewers.  This means you can search thousands upon thousands of powerpoint presentations from many popular events and seminars held worldwide.

What you may not know about Slideshare

Not only can you find powerpoint slides and Word documents, you can favorite and tag them to quickly create your own library of presentations.  Furthermore, on the right side of the presentation is the option to view related presentations to further your learning.  So stop using Google and Wikipedia as your only news source and start being more intuitive on your content learning.  Download powerpoint presentations on your topics and continue to broaden your knowledge presented by others.

Here’s a quick video on Slideshare:

URL:

http://www.wikipedia.org

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia.  This means that all of the content on Wikipedia is written and updated by it’s users.  Virtually anyone can add/remove/change content on Wikipedia.   Having this kind of power with collaborative content.  The contents of Wikipedia is very large and continously expanding, quickly.  You can find virtually anything about nearly any topic on Wikipedia.

What you may not know about Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a feature for logged in users called My Watchlist.  This allows you to monitor different pages on any subjest you want.  Since content about different topics on Wikipedia is updated so frequently and fast, its possible to use Wikipedia as a news source.  So by adding your favorite topics to your Watchlist and monitoring the changes, you can get the newest knowledge about a topic your interested in, directly from the authors of Wikipedia, millions.

Here’s a quick video of Wikipedia:

URL:

http://www.recipematcher.com

What is RecipeMatcher?

RecipeMatcher is a recipe website based off of the idea of revese recipe lookup.  What this mean is you first create a pantry of ingredients that you have in your home and then find recipes of things you can make without grocery shopping.  Even if you wanted to make something that you may not have all the ingredients, you’ll be quickly given the missing ingredients to add to your grocery list.

What you may not know about RecipeMatcher

RecipeMatcher gives you the option to add your own recipes to their library as well as favorite the ones you like the most.  This allows you to create a recipe book of your own that you can quickly go to to see what you can make from your current pantry. It also allows you to expand on the recipe library giving the community of RecipeMatcher users more options with their iPantry.

Here’s a quick video on RecipeMatcher: