Foreca – One of the purposes of our Weekly Faves is to bring you the best of what is new on the Web. Having that said, it is seldom that we stumble upon a weather related site we feel deserves the Weekly title. Why? Because it seems weather forecasts online have maxed out in terms of visual appeal and, well, accuracy… However, Foreca did manage to stand out from the rest by offering something new in this all too bland meteorology field.
Foreca uses an extremely easy and intuitive interface – try it for yourself and see what the experience is like compared to other online weather forecast services. One Foreca feature I really enjoyed is that on any given day, they present the hottest and coldest locations on Earth on that day. This way, when it’s cold outside I can always dream of taking a vacation to a tropical destination, or I can simply take comfort in the fact that there are much colder places than my city of residence. Should we add Foreca to our weather faveline? Your comments always have the power to influence what’s featured on All My Faves!
Geekologie – As a blogger I always read the About us section of featured sites before writing my review. The reason I do so is that it’s important for me to understand the rationale or vision of the people who created the said websites to begin with. In the case of Geekologie, I found out that this site is “a geek blog dedicated to the scientific study of gadgets, gizmos, and awesome. There are a lot of shiny new things out there, and Geekologie is dedicated to finding every last one of them for you.”
This description led me to expect to see numerous gadgets with boring scientific specs and features – boring! But the truth of the matter is that Geekologie is far from that; it’s more about having fun with all the geeky stuff out there. In order to understand what I am talking about, check out 20 Life Lessons Learned From The New Mario and the Booty Pop.
Dog Fight 2 – The term Dogfight emerged in World War I and is defined as an aerial combat between fighter aircrafts. Is this what the game is about? Yes. In Dogfight you are required to perform aerial maneuvers and shoot down enemy aircraft. You will also have to destroy ground forces if you want to proceed in the game. For more superb games, click here.
Best Games of 2009 – Many of our users, once on the All My Faves homepage, choose the Games page as their next AMF stop. These large volumes of visitors is what prompted us to create the games version of our Weekly Faves, called Weekly Games, the highlight of every week’s top games. As 2009 is drawing to a close, we asked you, our users, to rate your top Weekly Games of 2009. To make it easier for you, we narrowed more than 500 games down to the best 32 games, and invited you to nominate your champions.
Your votes produced the ten winners, and Click Play 2 is at the top of those 10, scoring the most votes, and thus making it the best game of 2009. Runner-ups are Crush the Castle and Fat Slice. See the complete list of kings and queens below. I would appreciate your comments; let me know which game is your personal favorite -mine is Dog Fight. Before we opened users’ access to voting the AMF team did some guessing on what games will be chosen, and we were were surprised to see that Bubble Spinner and Little Wheel didn’t make it to the ten winners’ list. Then again, that’s the beauty in giving power to the people.
So we are heading strong for a new year, and I know 2010 will be even more exciting than 2009. I can assure you that we will keep on sharing the best games out there. So stay tuned, and don’t forget to follow us on our games facebook fan page.
– Click Play 2
– Crush the Castle
– Fat Slice
– Learn to Fly
– Bunni
– Meeblings 2
– Dog Fight 2
– Growbox
– Toss the Turtle
– Papa’s Pizzeria
GivesMeHope – When I entered into the GiveMeHope website, it reminded me of Fmylife, ItMadeMyDay and MyLifeIsAverage. Out of curiosity I checked out their about us to see if it was somehow connected to one of these sites. Guess what? Turns out “GivesMeHope.com was founded in May 2009 in response to the popular site, FMyLife.com (FML). On FML, people share stories explaining how their day was completely ruined, we love FML, but FML can be a downer…. That’s why we created GivesMeHope.com. GMH is where people share with the world their most hopeful, uplifting moments and allow others to draw strength from their experiences.”
I truly admire the GMH approach, but will it work for them? I certainly hope so, even though I personally believe people favor ranting over giving positive praises for something or someone. Only time will tell if GiveMeHope will be as successful as Fmylife. In the meantime, here’s my favorite hope: “Today when I was working an adorable older couple came through my line. When I asked if they had found everything they needed, the woman looked at her husband and said ‘I found everything I needed 43 years ago.'”
You AUGHT To Remember – Can you believe we’re at the end of the first decade of the 21st century? As with any end point, 2009’s finish is a good time for bottom line conclusions, all the more so when we’re at the closing of a decade. You AUGHT To Remember has taken up the task of counting down “the 100 trends, fashions, memes, personalities and ideas that shaped the first decade of the 21st Century.”
The list is quite remarkable and fascinating, involving posts accompanied by an explanation on why this or that entry made it to the list and constituting an influencing factor during the second millennium’s first decade. I went through the list (as of today, 95 out of 100 entries are listed), and my favorite ones are Wii, Lacoste Polo Shirts, Reality TV, Vitamin Water and Sex & The City/Desperate Housewives. As I am writing this post there are five more to go, so stay tuned.
Oddly Specific – While waiting in line at the Post Office (had to run some errands), I played around with my cell phone’s camera but there wasn’t anything of real interest to shoot. To keep myself occupied during the wait, I started taking pictures of different signs I saw, with the No Smoking sign doing a special appearance in my shoot. Then I started thinking about the variation of No Smoking signs in all the different places I visited in my lifetime…. I think this could be a great idea for a website, don’t you? If you find interest in signs, especially the ones that mean well but are poorly executed, be sure to visit Oddly Specific. It’s a “strangely particular website about peculiarly exacting signs.” The best part about Oddly Specific is that their collection of signs from all over the world is absolutely hilarious. Caution: a wave of humor is just around the corner….
Pigeon: Impossible – It took Writer/Director Lucas Martell five years to create Pigeon: Impossible, but it was well worth the wait. Pigeon: Impossible is an amazing short animated video, and I was mesmerized throughout the entire 6:15 minutes of it. What is it about? “Pigeon: Impossible is the tale of Walter, a rookie secret agent faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase.” If by any chance Lucas is reading this post, I would like to ask him when he plans on releasing the sequel to this most adorable creation. I hope it won’t take him five more years. Enjoy!
Christmas Cannon – A wickedly fun seasonal treat for all those keen on helping Santa test his experimental Christmas Cannon. Using Santa’s elves as human cannonballs, this Christmas game is OK, but not fabulous. If you are looking for the best game sites featured this year on our Weekly Games, check out our list of the 32 games nominated for Best Games of 2009. But be sure to vote as well as play these great gems of recreation! Winners will be announced on December 30th on our Weekly Games page.
Holiday Toy List – When we listed the Amazon Toy List on All My Faves last year, I tried to decipher the origins of the gift-giving custom, so I won’t discuss it again. I would rather talk about what defines Toys. According to Wikipedia, “A toy is an object used in play. Toys are usually associated with children and pets, but it is not unusual for adult humans and some non-domesticated animals to play with toys.” Having this concept in mind, I expected to see conventional toy items in this year’s Amazon toy list for the holidays. Well, it seems this year the e-commerce giant is focused solely on people, offering numerous toy ideas to children from the baby to Big Kids stages, which pretty much includes everybody. Good luck with your holiday gift hunting, and I wish you an especially Happy Holidays season.
Bizmore – When AllMyFaves first aired three years ago, it was a one page website. Since then we expanded to more countries and provided theme specific pages such as entertainment, kids, blogs, education, shopping, travel and weekly faves. You might wonder where our designated Business page is. Although the idea of creating such a page did come up in several team meetings, we never received an explicit request for a Business page from any of our users as of yet. Do you think we should create it? Would you find it helpful? Let us know.
If we did have a business page, Bizmore would definitely be there, under the Advice or Blogs favelines. So what is Bizmore about? It’s “an online business advice community that helps people build their businesses and succeed in their careers. Whether you work at a startup, a small business or a large corporation, you can quickly find practical answers to your business questions from peers and industry experts.” Sounds useful, doesn’t it? I was impressed by the post The Key to Understanding Gen Y Employees? Their Parents. This article made me fall in love with the quote: “Don’t be just a painter, become an artist.”
YouTube CountDown – If someone were to ask me, “If you could have access to just one website of your choice, which one would it be?”, I’d have to say it would be allmyfaves.com -not only because I am one of its Co-Founders- but because it truly is the website of websites. If AllMyFaves didn’t exist my answer would be, without a doubt, YouTube. Speaking of the Google-owned video website, I admire their Newyears CountDown page. It’s a list of the year’s most memorable videos. Between December 1st and 31st, YouTube adds a new memorable video on a daily basis to determine 2009’s absolutely best videos. It sure does deserve a daily visit.
Even though I do appreciate the videos they chose, I disagree with one of their picks (you should know YouTube doesn’t disclose of the manner by which videos are selected). For the best stop-motion video, YouTube picked Eye Popping Post Its, which is great – no disagreements there. However, I do think Her Morning Elegance is much better, and it’s not on the list. I discovered an interesting fact about this: while the Post-It stop-motion video received a little over 3,000,000 views, Her Morning Elegance received three times more exposure, with over 9,000,000 views.
This doesn’t make sense – how come the latter isn’t listed? For the record, there are still ten more videos that will be added to the list by the end of the month, so maybe I am just jumping to conclusions and ranting for no reason. I certainly hope I’ll be disproved because if I’m right, something is rotten in the state of YouTube. At any rate, I’m positive you’ll appreciate the two videos below.