Webware

Yellowpages.com vs. Yelp: User reviews compared

This week Yellowpages.com added user reviews to their directory service. Much like Yelp, the new system allows registered users to post one- to five-star reviews of local establishments. I decided to compare experiences using both sites to see how they stack up.

Round 1: User registration and benefits

Registering with Yellowpages grants you a few small perks, such as 100 slots to save your favorite establishments. You also get to save personal addresses and keep track of your last 20 searches. Yelp goes a little bit further with a friends list, a small counter under your name with how … Read more

Weekend Webware: Waste time with Line Rider

If you haven’t tried the Flash game Line Rider, you should. Created by Bostjan Cadez back in September 2006, the “game” is basically a free-form track editor. You draw a course for a sled rider to follow, press play, and then watch the little guy follow your “line” along its gravitational path. Sound fun? Try it out, play with it, then prepare to be amazed.

You can find countless Line Rider videos on YouTube, but no one yet compares to TechDawg (whose own site seems to be down right now). Take a look at “TD & Sons,” an impressive … Read more

Blockbuster courts rogue Netflixers...again

In the face of the juggernaut that is Netflix, lagging movie rental giant Blockbuster has tried many an incentive to convince viewers that it's no dinosaur. Since entering the online DVD rental business in 2004, Blockbuster has instituted "Total Access," a system of online-and-offline rentals geared toward Netflix users who may be disgruntled by the fact that they can't just hop in their cars and pick out movies on the fly.

This week, Blockbuster is taking a sharper jab at Netflix. With the President's Day long weekend underway, the rental company is attempting to capitalize … Read more

Adobe Labs offers myFeedz 'social newspaper'

Adobe Systems released a technology preview version of a "social newspaper" site called myFeedz, which sift through RSS feeds on the basis of user-defined tags. The site had been in public testing since August, but now is an official part of Adobe Labs and an comes with an official logo using Adobe's official typeface.

myFeedz begins with a standard RSS reader format but tailors the feeds according to content tags users can set. In addition, myFeedz suggests tags based on the feeds selected in users' OPML files--which for those of you who don't parse XML in … Read more

Photobucket to launch Flash-based online video editor

Photobucket and Adobe Systems on Monday are expected to announce a Web-based video-editing tool available from Photobucket's media-sharing site. The free service will be in beta this month to its premium customers and rolled out to all customers in March.

The service lets people take existing media, including photos and videos, stored in a Photobucket account and remix them with captions, soundtracks and other effects. Like any video-editing package, people can drop items, like video snippets, and place them onto a timeline.

It requires that people have Flash Player 9, the latest version, on their machines.

"When you … Read more

Yahoo Suggestions: Not a Digg clone

Yahoo just announced Suggestions.yahoo.com, which in some ways looks similar to another social bookmarking and voting site, Digg.

The similarity to Digg was driving the Digg crowd nuts this morning. The Yahoo Suggestions boards were bombed by Digg users with mean or irrelevant posts. A lot of people were complaining about Yahoo stealing the Digg concept.

But Digg and Yahoo Suggestions are quite different. Digg is clearly a destination if you're looking for cool Web sites, videos, and stories online. Yahoo Suggestions, on the other hand, appears to be a feedback mechanism that's getting rolled out … Read more

Gizmoz: An interesting gag video service

Normally I stay away from gag sites like this, but Gizmoz is a guilty pleasure that caught my attention with its eccentric sense of humor. Gizmoz is a "Talking Heads" video creator that lets you make your own gag videos to send via e-mail or embed on your site.

There are a variety of characters to choose from, primarily celebrities and political figureheads, all with matching voice banks and caricature-like faces, many of which are slightly offensive. You also get the option to pick a slightly cheesy animated background. The real clincher for the service is the ability … Read more

Pageflakes CEO wants to take on Yahoo

Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with Pageflakes' new CEO, Dan Cohen. Pageflakes makes a "single page aggregator" service. It's a good site to use as your home page. You can add RSS feeds, widgets, and all sorts of content to the page, and you can set up multiple tabs on your site for different categories of content. [See previous Webware coverage.]

Pageflakes' special power is its community focus. You can easily share your page layouts with other people and even let them modify your pages. Cohen sees Pageflakes as a good service for groups … Read more

Buddywave: Internet Explorer meets MySpace, has browser baby

Buddywave is a free Windows-only browser, based off of Internet Explorer with some MySpace functionality built in. You have access to a MySpace profile builder (which is incidentally the same one we covered in our Mashcodes post) and a messenger that lets you create groups and manage your MySpace friends more effectively. There's also the ability to instant message and a picture viewer.

I'd prefer Buddywave be an extension or toolbar, as I've gone so long using Firefox, it would literally cripple me to use a new browser--especially just for MySpace use. However, Buddywave might be the … Read more