Best Websites 2007 & 2008

Times Vote 2007 http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/0,2875 7,1633488,00.html   www.glimpse.com One part style guide and two parts shopping portal, Glimpse lets you browse for high-fashion apparel and accessories by look, category, store or brand. Search results conveniently pop up as a series of thumbnails displayed on the same page, and the "featured looks" pages—guides to how to dress like Drew Barrymore, Sienna Miller, America Ferrera and other celebs/style icons—are well designed, with tools that link you to where to buy Halle Berry's two-button blazer, let you request a sales alert via email or tell a friend about it. Featured stores include many of our favorites, like shopbop.com, Bluefly and Piperlime, the Gap's new shoe shop. ShopStyle, another chic shopping hub, lets users post images and links to items they like, and the SheFinds section (written by the site's fashion editor) offers outfit guides and trend alerts. The hot swimsuit this season: the monokini.   www.last.fm Type in the name of a favorite artist and, in a matter of seconds, music by that artist (and similar artists) will be streaming to your desktop — and it will keep playing as long as that browser window stays open. If you take the time to register and download the last.fm application, the service will dig deeper into your musical life, hook you up with its rapidly-expanding social network and match you with other users who share your musical tastes. Every time you play a song on your computer, last.fm takes note, adding the metadata to your profile. These "scrobbles" are shared with those you designate as your friends; they also help make last.fm a better DJ. MOG, another music site-turned-social network, works in a similar way, keeping tabs on what you listen to, making recommendations and connecting you to other “moggers” who share your tastes. MOG TV (click the Watch tab on the home page) adds music video mashups to the mix. Pandora, another personalized radio service — and a Time.com 2006 best-site pick — recently launched a mobile version that turns your Sprint cell phone into an MP3 jukebox for $3 a month. Use your handset„s Web browser to go to Pandora.com to download it.   Part Farecast (see below) and part Del.icio.us, Yapta lets you track airfare prices and share the information with others. See a flight you're interested in? Bookmark it, and flight and fare data is stored in your Yapta account. If you find other options, you can bookmark those too, then go back and compare them all. Yapta will automatically update the store info if fares change; Yapta will also alert you if a fare dips even after you've already bought your ticket, so you can request a refund from the airline. Honorable mention goes to Airfarewatchdog.com, where fare researchers verify "lowest" listed prices and check if seats at that price are really available. Meanwhile, Farecast, the airfare shopping service and Time.com 2006 best-site pick, has added 20 markets to its service area; the site now provides airfare predictions (based on market trends) for 75 airports across the U.S., and has new search filters that let frequent fliers sort results by type of flight (red eye, short connection, etc.). The site reports an accuracy rate of 75%. If you're uncomfortable with those odds, you can buy a $10 insurance policy called Fare Guard that lets you lock in an advertised fare price. If Farecast predicts the fare will drop or stay the same—and it goes up—then Farecast will cover the difference.   www.stumbleupon.com StumbleUpon, a startup recently snapped up by eBay, lets you tag sites you think friends should check out, and will recommend sites to you based on what other users have tagged in your areas' interests. When you register to download the StumbleUpon program, you get a handy toolbar for your Web browser. It includes Thumbs Up/Thumbs down buttons, and a "Send To" button you can click to email a link to a friend. When you're in the mood for something new, click the "Channel" button; like a channel-changer, it immediately takes you to a new site, one it figures you might like. When we tried it, many of the sites it pushed to us were pleasant surprises, and made sense based on the topics we selected at sign-up: photography, music and movies, to name a few. As for the site that showed a photo of a small rodent clutching a miniature machine gun, we suppose that one qualified as "Humor." With nearly 2.5 million Stumblers already feeding the network, the fun, we suspect, never ends. Google also offers its own website recommendation tool, represented by a dice icon that, when clicked, takes you to a site Google thinks you'll like based on your past searches. You'll need the Google Toolbar to get that one.   www.linkedin.com A social network for business professionals and career-minded folks, LinkedIn gets respect from the corporate world. Employers use it to recruit new talent; employees use it to network with others in their field. When you create a profile, treat it like a resume. You can build your personal contacts list by searching for, reaching out to and adding individuals who work for the same company, went to the same business school or know you from a previous job. Ask an old boss or partner to post a recommendation that others can view. The site's search filters help you find experts and contacts by company or industry. Basic accounts are free, but you can pay for premium service that grants you greater access to the network, which now boasts more than 11 million users. There are corporate memberships too, and all 500 of the Fortune 500 companies have signed on. Looking for a general-interest MatureSpace? check out Gather.   www.fatsecret.com This social network is dedicated to helping people who are trying to lose weight. The site, which is free, uses pie charts and graphs to provide concrete information about what works for its members—and what doesn't. It lists the most popular diets and provides details about their particular approach and stages, and bar charts show progress made by the members who are following it. Read up on Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, the Fat Smash plan and the Fat Flush. Make friends to create a support system; create your own diet and share it with the community. Member-reported weigh-in amounts are posted on the home page, tagged with either a red arrow pointing up or green arrow pointing down along with links to their journal entries. Individual member pages include a weight history, plotted on a graph.   www.twitter.com Broadcast where you are and what you're doing right here and right now by texting from your mobile phone. Your pithy posts will pop up on all your friends' cell phones so they can keep abreast of everything you do, in real time. Each "tweet" must be brief—no longer than 140 characters. The service, created by Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, exploded onto the moblogging scene earlier this year. There have been some bugs—big ones like vanishing accounts and mysterious spikes in individual networks—but none of these hiccups seemed to have dampened the public's enthusiasm. In fact, membership reportedly doubles every two to three weeks. Meanwhile, a number of third-party tools have launched to enhance it: Twitterific, Twitteroo, Tweetbar, Twitterholic, Twittervision... Kyte.tv's kyte Mobile service takes things even further, letting you broadcast your own "kyte show" in real time with photos and video shot with your (Web-connected) cell phone. Times Vote 2008 http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article /1,28804,1809858_1809957,00.html   www.howcast.com There's a reason no one ever reads the instruction manual. Ho. Hum. That's why the video how-to site Howcast is such a gem. It breaks from its more staid counterparts, such as Expert Village and eHow, by injecting a necessary dose of humor. Come here to learn "how to make a move on a girl while watching a movie on a couch" and "how to become a saint." Each video is rated — often by thousands of members — so you won't waste bandwidth on the boring ones. We also like WonderHowTo, which neatly indexes and ranks how-to videos from hundreds of other sites.  Anita Hamilton   www.iliketotallyloveit.com Social shopping is a buzz phrase you'll be hearing a lot about soon. To see it in action, head to iliketotallyloveit.com. Shoppers post photos of items they like, then solicit opinions and comments from others. The most popular items bubble to the top, serving as a way to spot trends early. Recent faves have included a pair of limited-edition sunglasses worn by rapper Kanye West and a really cool spork (a spoon/fork). For a more curated view of special products, check out Things I've Bought That I Love — "things" run the gamut from chocolate to lip gloss.  Anita Hamilton   www.thenest.com Here's a lifestyle site designed for newly wedded yuppie couples. The Nest — a clever customer-retention device, brought to you by the creators of the wedding site The Knot — covers key topics from design tips for your new home to advice on merging financial assets, to preparations for having a baby. The Nest makes good use of readers' wisdom. There's a "casting call" for couples who want to share their personal stories, plus local guides to restaurants, personal trainers and mortgage brokers that the site's editors cull from submissions.  Anita Hamilton   www.geni.com For an exercise that's all about family, researching your genealogy can be an oddly lonesome affair, filled with long hours spent sifting through records and making awkward phone calls to far-flung relatives. But Geni turns tree-building into a collaborative effort: the free site gives you the basic tools for diagramming your ancestry, and it also lets you invite others to contribute. If you're serious about tracing your lineage, you'll probably still click on stalwarts like Ancestry.com, Family Search and the USGenWeb Project for their vast digital archives, but Geni makes it easier — and more fun — than ever to create and share your family tree.  Anita Hamilton   www.nextag.com It may be the plainest comparative-shopping site on the Web, but we like NexTag because of its speedy, comprehensive search results and integrated product reviews. Sure, there are plenty of other good comparison sites out there, including BizRate, Shopzilla and Yahoo! Shopping, but we dig NexTag for its nononsense approach that's all about finding you the best deal. And unlike its competitors, NexTag graphs the price history of each product you research, so you can see if prices have gone up or down in recent months.  Anita Hamilton   www.mint.com Can't afford a personal financial planner? Here's the next best thing: the free site Mint pulls information from all your online financial records, including your 401(k), bank accounts and credit-card accounts, then neatly graphs your cash flow and expenditures. Mint's Trends section shows you a pie chart of what you spend and where (on food, travel, shopping, etc.) and suggests money-savers like lower-rate credit cards. The site will even send you mobile alerts to remind you to pay your bills. For a similar service that doubles as a social network where you can share financial goals and tips, check out Geezeo from TheStreet.com.  Anita Hamilton   www.nymbler.com Choosing a baby name just got more inspired, thanks to an ingenious calculator that uses phonetics to give you fresh ideas. Type in up to six names you like, and Nymbler will suggest dozens of similar-sounding suggestions. When we typed in June, Jada, Jenny, Josie and Jenna, Nymbler came back to us with names like Jasmine, Janie and Jayla. You can save suggested monikers to a favorites list and read about the origin and popularity of each one. If you want to know how common your chosen name has been through history, head over to NameVoyager, which charts the rises and falls of the top 1,000 names since the late 1800s.  Anita Hamilton   www.carbonrally.com Vie to go green by making it a competition. CarbonRally posts challenges, like cutting your shower time by two minutes or line-drying your laundry for a month, to motivate you to reduce your carbon footprint. Never cleaned your refrigerator coils? Neither have we. CarbonRally shows you how to do it and explains why it helps. You can compete on your own or, for added incentive, as part of a team. For extra enviro-credit, check out Zwaggle, where you can donate used clothes, appliances, books and other merchandise to members, then "buy" stuff from other Zwagglers with the points you earn.  Anita Hamilton   www.freerice.com If you want to do a good deed and build your vocabulary, you've come to the right place. Other sites give away charitable donations for little more than a mouse click, but FreeRice makes you earn them. The site challenges you with word quizzes and pledges to donate 20 grains of rice to the U.N. World Food Programme for each definition you get right. (The words get harder the longer you play.) To do more, check out the Hunger Site, which donates to relief agencies Mercy Corps and America's Second Harvest in exchange for your visit.  Anita Hamilton Best of the bests   www.Del.icio.us An immensely popular place to share your favorite Web links and see what other people are bookmarking. Search the site by keyword (each link is tagged with descriptors both general and specific), create your own list of favorites to share with everybody else, or add to an existing collection. It's all about the tags. To see the most popular ones, click here.   Digg.com The leader in social news, where users determine what's important and interesting by submitting it, "digging" it and posting a comment. Click "Top in 24 Hours" to see the most popular articles, blog posts and other Web pages of the day. In recent months the site has expanded beyond tech news, adding separate sections for Science, World & Business, Sports, Entertainment and Gaming. Digg Labs continues to roll out new and visually interesting ways to view the links and find out immediately what's hot (and what's not). On BigSpy, stories pop up at the top each time they get another digg, the moment they get it. The bigger and bolder the headline, the higher the digg count. Arc, meanwhile, arranges stories in a circle; mouse over a piece of the pie to preview the link.   Facebook.com This social network is not as popular as MySpace, but it also hasn't been corrupted by marketers and fake friends. Once available to students only, Facebook has opened its doors everyone and has made dozens of third-party applications available for members to use on their pages, from iLike (music sharing) to Graffiti (lets you draw on your friends' profiles) to Flixster (movie reviews) to Wis.dm (poll your friends!).   Flickr.com More than half a billion images are now posted on Flickr, a superbly designed sharing platform and social network for photo enthusiasts that, since June, also offers French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese and Korean language options. (Next up: video.) Upload and tag your images and make them available for community consumption, and see how they rate on "interestingness" and "gorgeousity;" join a group (there are more than 300,000 of them, and each one has its own theme); comment on other people's images or subscribe to a photo stream. The cool Maps feature shows where photos were taken. For more private sharing and straightforward printing services, use Shutterfly or Kodak EasyShare Gallery. Or try the new, no-frills Picupine; it doesn't offer printing or long-term storage, but it allows you to share your photos quickly and easily, without forcing you to create an account first. Once you've submitted your photos, the site creates a Web link you can then send to friends and family.  HowStuffWorks.com Easy-to-read explanations of how things work, from plasma converters to antibiotics to E-Z Pass. Now the site lets you upload photos and video to help supplement its written content. UNICEF sent in a video clip about land mines; NASA on sonic booms; and GE on photovoltaics.    YouTube It's amateur hour! And we love it. This monster videosharing hub has more visitors than all of its many competitors combined. Upload your own footage or just watch and enjoy the weirdness. There is some truly good stuff here, if you can find it. Browse by channel or category, or click to view the clips that are Top Rated or Most Discussed or Most Linked. Copyrighted material tends to come down just as fast as it goes up, so don't be surprised if that link your friend emailed to you doesn't work anymore.   National Geographic.com There's a ton of great content here — about animals, world adventures, the environment, the sciences, space — plus educational stuff too. Also check out National Geographic's My Wonderful World, which aims to boost your geographic literacy, offering daily quizzes to test your global IQ — and be sure to see the special section for Kids & Teens.   WebMD.com A big portal packed with information about health and related issues. A recent redesign introduced a nifty new tool called Symptom Checker, which lets you self-diagnose—sorry, "pinpoint potential conditions"— in seconds by clicking on body parts and selecting from a list of specific complaints (just be sure to check with your doctor for a real diagnosis). The new WebMD Health Manager lets you store your personal medical records online and make them available to doctors. The new Revolution Health portal, which launched in April, has many of these same tools and features, including its own symptom checker (but WebMD's has cool graphics). Other trustworthy sources of information about disease and other health matters: the Medem Leaning Centers, which aggregates top articles from leading medical societies on a wide range of topics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health.   Wikipedia.org The people's encyclopedia, with millions of articles written in hundreds of languages. It's free, and anyone can edit. Its pages dominate Google search results, and the site is in the top 10 in terms of traffic. A vigilant group of volunteers helps maintain quality control. And now there's Wikia, where you can create a wiki of your own and get help managing it. Other offshoots include the Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikispecies, a "directory of life." Other great  www.99polls.com 使用您的免费 99polls 帐号，现在您可以为自 己的网站、博客以及社交网络创建定制的调 查和投票。 使用 99polls，是获得即时反馈以 及增加您的网站在网民中的知名度的一个强 大而有效的方法。 