Foursquare – Back in the day, the Internet was thought to keep people at home rather than encourage them to go out. We all know this is not the case today, with mobile devices keeping us connected wherever we go. Pleasant online experience on the go is becoming more common than ever before at an accelerating rate. Foursquare is based on that cherished mobile connectivity, inviting people to explore their neighborhoods and then rewarding them for doing so.
Foursquare is a location-based social community and/or game – depends on how you look at it – where users earn points and badges for visiting various locations in their neighborhood. Users who become ‘regulars’ at one location or another may even win the Mayor title. What’s in it for you? The instant gratification would be honor and fame; Foursquare produces real-time updates on recent badge winners and newly elected Mayors of different cafes and restaurants. Moreover, businesses are using this service to reward their devoted clientele, giving out free drinks to the regulars visiting their place more than X times, for example.
According to Jennifer Van Grove from Mashable, this might be the next twitter. What do you think?
State of Your Art – State of Your Art offers high quality printing services. Their swanky website is straightforward and easy to navigate through. You can order a print of a picture you photographed yourself or choose one from their free gallery and artist collections. Their print-on-canvas option is something I believe would appeal to many, so be sure to check it out. The ordering process is simple, just follow these three steps (excluding payment): choose or upload your desired photo, specify size measurements and provide a shipping address. Twelve days later, your chosen piece of art will be hanging on your wall. The only downside to State of Your Art is nailing down your selections….. As for me, I would go for one of my own photographs, although SYA’s gallery offers very attractive alternatives such as the one below.
Mother Nature Network – Mother Nature Network is a one-stop green resource offering original programs, articles, blogs, videos, and how-to guides along with breaking news stories. Mother Nature Network wasn’t designed for scientists or experts. It was created for all us lazy persons seeking to-the-point information on green related issues. My visit to this wonderful site taught me a great deal of environmental facts, but one particular news story made the most impact. On September 20, one city did the unthinkable — it banished cars from its streets for a whole day. Click here or scroll below to see where this happened. I seriously think all major cities worldwide could use the same strategy to raise public awareness. Don’t you?
Serious Wheels – I was a huge fan of Hot Wheels as a kid, and could play with those small cars for hours on end. Why am I sharing this with you? Because exploring the Serious Wheels blog filled me with the same excitement as did my car toys in my youth, and I relived that auto-love once again. All grown up now, I still think one should keep on dreaming…. My dream cars would be the 2010 Hamann Ferrari California F149, the 2009 Alfa Romeo Spider, and a fine collectible car to complement my list, the 1941 Cadillac Fleetwood Sedan.
SpareFoot – SpareFoot offers an easy way to find storage space for whatever you need stashed, locked away or simply, stored at another location for any period of time. The SpareFoot marketplace has storage listings of all shapes and sizes, with everything from available units at your local storage facility to the garage, bedroom or parking spot at your neighbor’s house. In the same way that Expedia.com makes it possible to find the best deal on airplane tickets and hotels, SpareFoot makes it possible to find the best deals on self storage, all from the convenience of a single location on the web. If you have a space you’d like to rent for the storage of someone else’s stuff, SpareFoot can help out. Here’s how.
Food 52 – How many times have we seen those recipe sites where users submit their favorite dish and rate other submissions? Too many, if I may say so myself. Unfortunately, most of these sites suffer from one or more of the following deficiencies: poor quality of recipes, a user group that’s too small, insufficient ratings for submitted recipes and many others.
Food 52 is entirely different. Yes, it plays the same user-generated recipe tune, but it’s nothing short of enticing and unique. All submissions are rated by users and fellow home cooks, producing weekly winners. Each weekly winner enters Food 52’s much-anticipated cookbook, a fabulous collection of year-round (52 weeks) winning dishes that will be published at the end of the year. Feel free to submit your gourmet forte and maybe it will make its way into the cookbook!
Click the below play button to see how Amanda and Merrill prepare the two finalist recipes for Best Potato Gratin.
11 Points – Each and every post in this blog includes a list of 11 things. Doesn’t make sense? Creator Sam Greenspan takes different subjects and breaks them down to a list of 11 pointers. Why 11? Look at this post’s title again, which is Greenspan’s blog motto. To be honest, the number’s importance is rather trivial. What you should focus more on is this blog’s excellent content, and yes, the lists are right on the money. My favorite lists are: 11 Yearbook Photos That Musicians Wish We’d Never Seen, 11 Most Ironically Banned Books Of All Time and 11 Things The Bible Bans, But You Do Anyway.
Wittygraphy – One of the most familiar tourist attractions in different locations around the world is caricature portraits made upon request, exaggerating noses, lips and eyebrows to make you (and others) smile. If you’re still longing for that vacation memory or, if you’ve never had one done to you before, check out Wittygraphy. This cute site is “a fast growing social network dedicated to the Art of Caricature. It’s a place to discover, share, discuss, promote, buy, and sell caricatures. Think of us as Facebook meets eBay for caricatures.” Start exploring with my suggestion of favorites: French President Sarkozy, Amy Winehouse and the famous Dr. Spock.
Beautiful Life – Websites and blogs concerned with design are all over the Web, but the really good ones are often hard to come by. At AllMyFaves we’re huge fans of good quality and innovative design, which is why we have a special Design Faveline on our Blogs page. Nevertheless, Beautiful Life is a blog totally worth discussing separately. Why? Because when you stumble upon first class design, you just know it immediately. Not only does this blog offer amazing and inspiring design ideas on a daily basis, but it covers the entire design industry gamut, including art, fashion, graphic, industrial design and loads more. Here is a quick taste: check out Smart Grid in Interactive Mode and Absolutely Unique Rings.
Crush the Castle – The name says it all. Use the trebuchet to throw rocks at the castles. Kill everyone in one shot and earn a golden medal. For daily updates of our most favorite games, click here.
Clikthrough – Watching an online video is a no brainer. You click on the play button and watch. But what if you wanted to get more out of a video, like learning more about an artist’s apparel brand or knowing who is that gorgeous babe standing behind the drummer? Sounds impossible, I know, but Clikthrough makes such quests possible by offering videos where everything is clickable. This unprecedented feature allows you to see products, people, places and more, and receive all the relevant information on a side menu. I tried out this technology on several videos, and especially enjoyed the info I was able to retrieve from the Hot and Cold one. I learned for example that Alexander Rodriguez, the groom in this video clip, is a high school friend of Katy Perry. It made me think about the power of good networking…
All in all, I think this a great application. Its only downside is its current limited variety of videos. I wish it included more than just music videos, because it would have been wonderful had it offered full length movies using this amazing technology. Although this might be too much to ask for at this point, I am quite sure that with time and increased exposure, Clikthrough will have a much larger database users could enjoy.
360 Cities – There are many ways of exploring our wonderful world, and doing so online is possible via maps, stories/blogs, photos and videos that circulate the Web. That’s all nice and dandy, but is it enough? Despite the copious number of tools and applications one can use to learn about locations and cities around the world, it’s impossible to get the true ‘sense of the place.’ Personally, I think that technology, however sophisticated and advanced, will never be able to substitute the experience of one’s actual presence in a physical environment.
As of today, the only two exceptions to this are the Holodeck on board the US Enterprise (Star Trek) and 360 Cities. The latter does a wonderful job at bringing us closer to the ‘being there’ feeling. How do they do it? As the site’s name suggests, they provide 360-degree views which are possible thanks to their network of panoramic photographers. The site’s admirable concept and good execution made me spend a couple of hours in this site, which actually felt like 10 minutes. Although all locations featured on 360 Cities are spectacular, my personal fave is Roof4 in New York City.