Minus – It was  Leonardo Da Vinci who said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and in the case of Minus this couldn’t be more true. This amazingly simple free service let you create photo galleries in just one click – simply drag photos from your desktop or anywhere else on your computer to the Minus tab (browser mode), and use the short link Minus assigns to you to share your gallery with friends. That’s it.

Why the name Minus? Well, creators Carl and John wanted the name of the service to embody its minimalistic approach, so there you go. By the way, Minus promises that very soon it will offer the option of adding docs, music and videos to your Minus gallery, not just photos. Once these are possible Minus will be my 1st choice content sharing tool. The screen shot below shows a glimpse of my photo gallery on Minus. Click on it to see the rest of the pics.

Academia.edu – This marriage between academic research and social networking is a didactic match made in heaven.  Academia.edu allows academics all over the world to “follow the latest research in their field.” Once you have created your own profile (it’s free!), you can invite your colleagues over, decide which researchers you would like to follow, upload papers you have published, lectures you have given, even posts and status updates you have posted.

When you think about it, Academia.edu’s added value is huge: the free service allows each researcher (regardless of rank) to create their own web page listing all of their material. The viewing and downloads of these, along with key search words people use online to search for any researcher can be tracked via Academia.edu’s system. This is phenomenal and all for a great cause: sharing and expanding the dialogue of research all over. Great job, Academia.edu team! I’ve created an account based on my B.A. major, Anthropology. Here’s a screen shot of it.

Boutiques.com – Visual power has penetrated the fashion realm and now online apparel shopping  is more accurate and individualized than ever. Take Boutiques.com for example, brought to us by Google, which “lets you find and discover fashion goods through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers — celebrities, stylists, designers, and fashion bloggers.” This ‘make-it-your-own’ apparel store uses visual technology that ‘learns’ your taste and style, and offers specific items that you, the users, will likely appreciate and hopefully purchase.

How does Boutiques learn what your style is, and what items to offer you accordingly? Click the Create Your Boutique button on the upper right corner, and start selecting your best outfits out of the ones the system offers you (actual celebrities’ styles). I did this for about 5 minutes, and Boutiques.com informed me my style is ‘casual chic.’

To finish off your own Boutique and have ‘it’s all you’ item recommendations, you will need to go through five more steps, but these are filled with fun and glamor you will enjoy every second of it. These include choosing your favorite (and least favorite) silhouettes, colors and patterns for a variety of clothing categories, and when you’re done, you go to your ‘Storefront’ and check out a huge catalog of clothing and accessories all suiting your personal style. Plus, you can follow other users who have created their storefront, and others can follow you for some added inspiration. I totally understand why Google bought this company. They KNOW style!

Kickstarter – Claiming to be “the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world,” Kickstarter is all about joining hands for good causes. It’s the perfect place for autonomously run pledges “to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.”

Kickstarter seems like the perfect venue for project funding thanks to its zero exploitation policy. That is why each funding goal must be reached within the set deadline to avoid scams and abuses.

So what kind of project do people use Kickstarter for? Think of it as a small portion investment center for tiny yet promising startups. See the TikTok + LunaTik Multi-Touch project as an example, and the project’s video is embedded below.

Do you have a creative project you need genuine funding for? Start your own Kickstarter project page and see the money roll in!

VYou – An innovative and fun idea that makes social interaction much more personal: “you record video responses to messages entered by friends and fans. VYou organizes their messages and your videos into conversations, making the experience feel continuously live even though the content is stored.” Still in beta, VYou offers a unique -and free- tool you ought to make use of, or at least try out.

The traditional concept of video chat is also available via VYou -there are over 55 topics by which you can find video conversation buddies- meaning all the other features I’ve mentioned above are sheer added value.

The VYou tool can be embedded and posted anywhere on the web, which gives it a creative spin in the realm of social interactions online.

Summify – Readers accounts (such as Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.) are a great way to stay connected with news and updates of all your blog subscriptions or RSS. But when you add all your Facebook friends’ feeds and Twitter updates, all that information can be overwhelming and time consuming. Summify is here to break it down for you, allowing you to focus on the ‘more important’ updates, leaving out the trivial ones.

How does it do it? Generally speaking, Summify identifies the most shared and discussed items within your areas of interest, and makes these top priority. I took Summify for a test run and was impressed. See the screen shot below of my Summify page based on my Google Reader account. See the video below for an animated explanation of what Summify is all about.

Page99Test – There’s a good reason why this writing critic community site is called that way. According to Fox Madox Ford, “open the book to page 99 and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” This quote has become a quick rule of thumb for readers evaluating the literary quality of a book, and Page99Test has taken this premise and turned it into a wonderful community effort.

Published as well as unheard-of writers get to submit their 99th page and get feedback from the site’s user community. As you will see in the screen shot below, each 99th page is accompanied by three quick questions: 1. “Would you turn the page?” (yes/no), 2. “Tell the writer why yes/no” and 3.  “Based on what you read, how likely are you to buy this book?”

Influencers – A most inspiring and thought-provoking project, Influencers is a short documentary film by David Johnson and Paul Rojanathara, focusing on the factors that create fads and trends. The film was shot in New York City, featuring different professionals from the creative field who share their opinion on what or who is an influencer or trendsetter. The creative agency R+I Creative came up with the concept of this amazing short.

The film is in HD quality and the post-production editing made it especially powerful and captivating. The film is less than 14 minutes long, but the inspiration you draw from it will be long lasting. And don’t forget: ideas spread just like viruses do!

Quotista – This quotes site is all about collecting and sharing quotes (Facebook and Twitter). All entries on Quotista are submitted by users who were impressed by a sentence, a phrase or an excerpt of a book they have read. The site is simply designed, but that does not mean it lacks elegance and efficency. Although Quotista is here to do one thing only, it does it beautifully.

Here are a few examples of the quotes I’ve found on the site’s Popular Quotes section. My favorite quote is the very first one here in the list:

eBay Group Gifts – Imagine a close friend of yours moves into a new house and you really want to give him a housewarming gift that stands out, like a cool set of rock speakers for his new deck outside. The only thing is, these speakers can cost more than you can afford at the moment. One option would be to do a group purchase with some of your mutual buddies, where one person actually buys the gift online, and the others pay him back later. Well, eBay’s Group Gifts feature takes this basic purchase option and makes it better, super easy and fun.

Simply go to the Group Gifts main page, type in the name of the gift’s recipient and the occasion (you can also pick the friend’s name straight from your Facebook friends list). Next, search for a gift and pick one, just make sure it’s from the ‘Buy it Now’ section (see photo below), and select your contribution’s amount to the gift’s overall price. The following step includes providing an active PayPal account where you and all the other buddies pitching in can make your respective contribution. This cool feature includes setting a time limit, which totally eliminates the entire issue of reminding your friends to pay you back !

Once the payment portion is done, eBay will send the gift to the recipient and voila, he’ll have to figure out where exactly he’d like to position those rock-like speakers. For more information on eBay’s amazing new group purchase feature, see the video below. We loved the Group Gift option , especially for the holidays!

The Incredibles are Landing in Your Facebook – See your Facebook account under a sweet attack of Mr. and Mrs. Incredible. Sign in with Facebook Connect and see the magic happen.

Here’s a screen shot of what my Facebook profile looked like after Mr. and Mrs. Incredible landed in my account. By the way, this cute campaign is a cool advertisement for Disneyland Paris…

blekko – This new search engine is boldly going where other search giants have gone before, with the mission of delivering a spam-free search experience. How do they do it? With slashtags. These slashtags are essentially your search’s focus keyword by which blekko organizes the accurate relevant results, all from trusted sources while leaving out all the irrelevant (and malware) ones. As TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington had written in his review on blekko back in July 2010, slashtags “like /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs, or any combination, make it very simple to quickly filter results to what you are looking for.”

In addition, users are invited to create their own slashtags and make these public so that, similarly to the ‘everyone’s-an-editor’ concept of Wikipedia, other users can later make use of these public slashtags for their own searches, and get curated, high quality results. See the video below to learn more.

I’ve included a screen shot of a blekko search I performed using the slashtags: /science /date to get a filtered list of relevant results, organized by date (from most recent to latest). This, for example, is a search you can’t do on Google. I invite you to try and search blekko using the ‘reday-made’ slashtags to begin with, and then if you’re interested, create your own user and slashtags for future searches by users.

Another feature blekko offers that is worth mentioning is their transparency graphs related to inbound traffic, SEO and other interesting analytical data that has always been free and open, but blekko is the first to make it all easily accessible in one page. Simply click on of the light gray words under each search result and a world of information will open before your eyes. See below the interview by Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch TV, talking to blekko CEO Rich Skrenta, to learn more.