If you haven’t stopped by Hunch.com, it’s worth a visit. The first thing the site will do is ask you to answer some questions. No, not your social security number – questions about your likes and dislikes, so it can learn about you. Then it will let you do one of two things. You can [...]
Posts under ‘Site reviews’
4,000 hours of online foreign language instruction… free!
It almost seems too good to be true, but from what I’ve seen so far, this web site delivers on exactly what it promises. LiveMocha, which bills itself as a “social language learning” site, offers the ability to learn foreign languages either in conjunction with someone you’ve met on the site or by yourself. Best [...]
Yahoo! Answers: Disappointing and addictive at the same time
It’s a great idea in theory. A web site where you can go ask any question. It will be seen by thousands of users, and you’ll get lots of answers. To make sure everyone pulls their weight, you have to have points to ask questions, and you earn points by answering other people’s questions. So, [...]
Are you dead? Never fear, the Web can inform your loved ones for you
Now the Web can help you reach out to family and friends from beyond the grave.
Once convinced that you’ve moved on, Deathswitch.com and Slightlymorbid.com will send messages you prepare in advance to anyone you specify. The threshold of proof that you’re in the hereafter is rather low, so these services seem vulnerable to manipulation or accidental error. [...]
Newspaper Death Watch: A blog that both laments and celebrates journalism's revolution
Newspapers in their current form are dying. Only the most desperately optimistic old-guard print journalist can deny this now. And what’s more, they did it to themselves.
I’ll be writing at length about this, because I was on the front lines when it started, working at a daily newspaper as the Internet burst onto the scene. [...]
Glassdoor: Skip the brochure, find out about that company from employees
We’ve all been there — interviewed at a company and heard the utopian spiel, only to find out after we get hired that it’s a nest of vipers. It’s difficult to get past the facade the company presents to prospective employees, unless we happen to know someone who works there.
Glassdoor.com lets current and former employees [...]
Think your life sucks? Need a pick-me-up? Visit a site that knows misery loves company
Here’s a fun one, if you enjoy reading other people’s depressing stories. Especially if it makes you feel better about your own depressing stories.
FMyLife is a site where visitors can post brief accounts of incidents that illustrate the pathos, the injustice, the sheer suckage that is their lives.
Here’s an example: “Today, I was trying to [...]
How nerds can hook up with fellow nerds
I’ve discovered social outcast networking. Stumbled across a site that helps individuals of the nerdy persuasion find groups of people of similar bent anywhere around the world and arrange dinner meetings, during which they can discuss the political and religious aspects of Battlestar Galactica, proper conjugation of nouns in Klingon, or whether the ending was [...]
Get 2 Human: How to sneak past automated phone answering services
The get2human web site has helpful instructions for how to quickly get through to a human being when you’re calling certain companies’ customer service lines. It lists hundreds of companies and shows what keys to hit on your phone, without waiting to listen to the droning messages, to reach a human from that company. Examples: Keep hitting ‘0′; Say ‘Agent’ [...]
Viewzi and the movement toward what's next in search
It’s hard to imagine a world in which Google is not our first go-to site when we need to find something. Google’s bare-bones front page may be the best Web site design out there in terms of functional elegance, and it’s so ingrained in our consciousness now that its name is a verb in the [...]