A few of the more interesting web sites / services I’ve come across recently.
Telephony
I’ve just started using Jajah, and it seems quite powerful. I can’t imagine that it will save me much on local and national calls, but I suppose anything is prefereble to giving money to the incumbent.
Music
Amie Street is a DRM-free music download site, where individual tracks become more expensive (after starting as free downloads) as they become more popular. I’ve just started using it over the last few days, so I don’t have a great feel for it yet, but it’s certainly a new model for music sales. Of course, it suffers from the same drawback as all rating / ranking systems that rely primarily on user input. For example, "Sounds Like: James Brown, Otis Redding" is helpful, "Sounds Like: this music reminds me of my papa" is not quite so helpful.
Last.fm beats out Pandora because it played me more interesting music, and integrated Allmusic.com artist information.
Personalised startpages
Netvibes for functionality, Pageflakes for looks, Google for sheer volume of widgets. To those people who are developing widgets for these services, please be aware that I have a perfectly good clock and calendar on my desktop. It’s down there in the bottom-right hand corner. I don’t need you to write me a clock widget that takes up another big chunk of space on my screen.
Other startpages
Popurls offers a handy jumping-off point to serious and not-so serious content, whilst Original Signal now has five main categories (Web, Technology, World, Business and Entertainment) with additional subcategories in each.
Design resources
Veer.com is very useful, although stock photography is still bloody expensive considering the amount of stuff available through various far more cost-effective licensing models (YotoPhoto is the best search engine I’ve come across for this, since it returns results from multiple sites and has a very handy ’search by colour’ feature).
Web OS
Goowy.com is by far the best of these that I’ve seen, with file storage from box.net (1GB free), straightforward contacts import from GMail, a powerful email application with POP, loadsa widgets and even games. Seem to be a few issues with the feed reader, which is all feed but no reader, but I’m sure that’ll be sorted out. Nice to see they sorted out their spam issues as well. Roll on the Google equivalent, because it’s got serious competition here. However, there’s no sign of any of these Web OS products adding office applications such as word processing or spreadsheets, which Google already has.
