In the United States, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade - now in its 82nd year - is a traditional Thanksgiving morning activity. And while everybody loves a parade, few people love the so-called "witty repartee" of the anchors hosting the parade coverage. If only there were some way to see all of the inflated commercial icons and marching bands without having to suffer through commentary.
...And The Best Substitutes We've Come Up With So Far
There's so much content online every day that it's totally overwhelming. That's where good recommendation technologies and media outlets come in handy. As a blog that seeks to share the most interesting web technology and trends with readers, automated help with the discovery process is of great interest to us. Below, we discuss some tools we wish we had and the closest makeshift substitutes we've been able to come up with. Maybe you'll find some of them useful or have even better recommendations to offer us and other readers.
On Monday we reviewed the state of health 2.0 and it was also the topic of this week's RWW Live, our live podcast show. At the end of the podcast, I asked all the panelists to list their favorite health 2.0 app (about the 58:30 mark if you want to listen to it). I've listed all the apps the panelists chose at the end of this post, but I wanted to highlight my own choice in this post. I selected MyMedLab, an online lab testing service - despite it being only available in the U.S. There appear to be two key benefits to MyMedLab, and similar services such as MedLabUSA. One is that a doctor's prescription isn't required because the test requests are approved by in-house physicians. The second is that tests can be completely confidential to the user. Both of these benefits have drawbacks though, which we'll discuss below.
OpenID has had a lot of big supporters, but this week President Elect Barack Obama's Change.gov added the ability for users to log in using an OpenID account and to post comments to sections of the website using OpenID. That's big news and is going to introduce a whole lot of people to the concept of federated identity.
Every other major player that has announced support for OpenID has in fact only allowed accounts with their company to be used as an OpenID elsewhere - they have not allowed other OpenIDs to be used to log in to their own sites. That means Barack Obama is cooler than AOL, MySpace, Google (except for Blogger.com comments) and Yahoo!. Maybe you already knew that, though.
Wikileaks.org, a website that publishes classified, confidential, censored or otherwise secret documents for anyone to see, put out a call last night for help in advancing the site beyond its remarkable early success. Just a week after publishing one of its most high profile documents yet, the organization sent an email to subscribers last night asking them to "tell us your most radical ideas for our vision of justice and how they might be economically, politically, legally, technically and socially sustained."
During the U.S. presidential elections, one of the campaigning methods which got a lot of attention was President-Elect Obama's in-game billboard ad inserted into the Xbox 360 racing game, Burnout Paradise. Now a similar technology for embedding images is making its way into online, user-gen video. Instead of pre-rolls, post-rolls, or overlays, this technology allows for inserted images to be rendered onto any planar surface in a video, whether wall, floor, or ceiling. Oh, and they don't have to be images, either - the technology supports embedding videos within your videos, too.
If there's one thing city search sites have in common it's their predictability. Looking for something to do? You can plow through the various categories: movies, theater, dining, concerts, museums,...yawn. It's always the same. And heck, if you knew what you wanted to do, you won't be bothering with a city search site in the first place, would you? You would just be doing it already. Maybe it's time for a better way to explore your city: by mood.
We all use search engines day in and day out to find things that we're seeking. And while traditional searching techniques are great, sometimes you can't quite put what you want into words. But you're sure that you'll know it when you see it. At those times, a picture is worth a thousand word-based searches. If this sounds familiar, PicClick - a new visual search engine for eBay and Amazon listings - may be your answer.
To use PicClick, simply choose either the Amazon or eBay tab, enter a basic search term or drill down using pre-selected topics, and add price information if you like. Then, hit search and - voila - your browser is suddenly filled with a series of thumbnails, giving you a visual representation of the available products matching your criteria.
One year ago we ran a contest asking you to tell us your favorite Mobile Web apps. From the resulting comments there were 5 Mobile Web apps that clearly stood out, with multiple mentions: Gmail Java app for mobile phone, Google Maps for Mobile, Opera Mini, Fring, Shozu.
Well, a lot has changed in the Mobile Web application world since then. The Apple App Store launched in July '08, prompting a wave of new third party iPhone apps. And we've seen innovation from Apple's mobile phone competitors: Google's Android (which has multiple app stores), Nokia, and Blackberry, and others. So what are your favorite Mobile Web apps and sites circa November 2008? The ReadWriteWeb authors list their faves below, plus we polled our friends in Twitter (subscribe to our Twitter account @rww).
Google Maps underwent a major redesign today and the new street view is pretty fantastic. Now users can drag a little human figure named "Pegman" over any streets that light up blue and get a preview of Street View for that location. When Pegman lands, the whole map view turns into a Street View viewer and there's a button to expand that view to take up the whole horizontal length of your browser.
These are very welcome changes that really help take advantage of the eye candy that is Street View in Google Maps. There's a whole lot of changes that were made today, all with the long-term fight for map users and their ad-viewing eyeballs in mind we're sure. Today's changes are great, though.
