web - Leonid Mamchenkov

fd’s Flickr Toys

For the last few days I’ve been playing with fd’s Flickr Toys. It is an excellent set of simple applications that allow one to utilize a tremendous collection of images – Flickr – in a totally new way.

Basically, you can choose any image from Flickr and easily transform it into magazine cover, billboard picture, inspiration frame, calendar picture, stamp, etc. There are plenty of transformations available and they are really easy to use – just a couple of mouse clicks.

If you are a registered Flickr user, there are even more options for you. There are some games available, like, for example, the one for naming your contacts – you are shown a picture made by one of your contacts and given a choice of three options. You also get an option of uploading resulting images directly to your photostream.

Check this one out – it can grab your attention for some time.

P.S.: I liked some results so much that I’ve uploaded them to my Flickr account. You can see them all here (tagged with “fdsflickrtoys”). There are many picture transformations done by other Flickr users too. You can find them all here.

My Stickies – the missing piece of your browser

By pure luck I cam across a new service, which is still currently in beta, – My Stickies. Within the first second I realized that it was something that I waited for a long time now.

In essence, My Stickies allows you to attach yellow sticky notes to websites. You can have as many of these notes attached to as many websites as you want. Whenever you come back to the website, you will see all your notes at the same place and of the same size as you left them.

Not only this functionality alone is great news, but there is more. You can even see your notes from a different place. This is great, because you can add notes to sites at home, and than see them later on in the office – no synchronizations are needed.

You can also see all your notes at their website. You can tag them, search them, and use notes as a sort of bookmarks.

Getting all this is easy too. All you have to do is register at My Stickies and install the Firefox extension. The service is free and works exactly as expected. Check it out.

The cheapest way of finding the domain name

I came across this post at Blogging Pro. It is about this other guy – Darren Rowse – who is looking for a good (and available) domain name for his new project.

Instead of spending hours upon hours (or was it after doing so?), Darren started a contest for the best domain name suggestion. The prize is $100 USD. He claims that only after 8 hours, with majority of his readership being a sleep (time zone issue), he received a whole bunch of suggestions that will be difficult to choose from.

It struck me as a very efficient way of finding a domain name. If you’ve ever looked for one, you know what I mean. For those of you who haven’t – it involves numerous itterations across the dictionary, thesaurus, and some sort of “check domain availability” tool. Often there is also a good mix of scripts that generate suggestions. The procedure can go on for hours, days, and even weeks. That is, of course, unless you don’t get enlightened, which also happens, albeit rarely.

Many people enjoy looking for domain names. Just for the sport of it. Give them a subject and they’ll occupy themselves for a good half of their corporate time. Throw in a few bucks and you’ve got yourself the best place ticket for a bloody battle.

In this particular example, the prize is $100 USD. It’s a nice number, though people would certainly participate for less. If you are still doubtful, try it. And consider for a moment, what is a $100 USD. In terms of your time.

Pandora – the music box

Listening to Raven’n’Blues show from BFBS I learned about Pandora.

Pandora is a result of Music Genome Project. Basically, what they do is analyze a lot of music for rythms, instruments, vocals, and a whole lot of other criterias and then help you find the music that you like.

Excellent science project with perfect end user appliance. You get a single box to fill in – write the band or album that you like and you’ll get a whole bunch of music that matches your taste. I’ve been playing around it for half a day only and I have to say that it works out great. Maybe my taste is too simple though. But anyway, I’ve heard many songs that I’ve heard before as well as a lot of new stuff.

You don’t even have to register to try it out for an hour or so. If you’ll listen for longer, it will ask you to create an account, which is as simple as giving your email address, adding a password, and specifying your birth year (you can lie, ma). They also aks for a ZIP code, which is USA specific, but you can always use the Beverly Hills’ 90210.

Enjoy! Let it be my Christmas present to all of you.

Update: You can also save your favourites to a list, share your stations, and do a lot of other cool stuff. My favourites page is here.

MySpace anyone?

It appears that I’ve been living under a rock or something for the last few month. Or maybe I’m just getting old and losing the touch. I’ve been hearing about this thing called MySpace and I wasn’t paying any attention.

Today I’ve heard about it in at least four different podcasts. People were saying that MySpace is the hottest, newest, and coolest thing and that all the kids love it. Obviously, I am not the kid – because I had no idea what that was.

So, I went to check it out and registered my MySpace. I looked around. Nothing particularly interesting – it’s just a large portal with a bunch of features like user profiles, friend finder (by location, interests, etc), blogging tool, forums, a bunch of onlines games, image galleries, and so, and so forth. Basically, it’s your average portal of the last centures advanced, polished, and brought into this century.

For some reason, though, it is extremely popular. There are a lot of users and many of them login very regularly. And do a lot of stuff – blog, upload photos, chat, etc. For example, the search for people Cyprus returned an unseen ever before result of 35 users! And the search was limited to women who are between 25 and 30 years of age and have at least one picture in their profile. Not bad. Not bad at all. And there are some really nice women too.

Anyway, with this huge number of people, the value of the portal increases – no question about it. There are always people online, there are people with all sorts of interests, from all over the world – good for expanding your contact list and for killing few hours daily.

Two things that I wrote on a bad list. First one is very obvious – ads. There are so many of them and they are so heavy that browsing around isn’t much fun even with such protecting browser as Firefox. I can only feel pity for people who use MySpace with Internet Explorer. The second thing is, well, probably related to the Firefox itself. During those 15 minutes that I spent on the site, my browser had to be killed twice. It slowed down to a crawl and was abusing the system. Probably, their JavaScripts aren’t optimized for it yet.

Whatever.

After spending about 15 minutes on the site I realized most of its features and the value it has for many people. Am I one of those people? No, I don’t think so. But just in case you want to test MySpace with a real user – you can use me.