ZCubes: A New Experience
2006-12-22 00:00:00
Zcubes.com is the first site I've seen that does what it does. What exactly it does is an array of all the magical things we already do on the internet. Users can, browse, create media (video, audio, paint), socialize, develop sites, chat and practically browse every website on the internet using a single web-based platform. Basically, it does everything doable on the internet. How it does it is also a whole salad of the most advanced web technologies to date, DHTML, Ajax, CSS, VML, Javascript, ASP.NET and J2EE to mention a few. And that's actually great because these technologies are all browser based so there's no more need to download and install any other programs or plug-ins. As of now, Zcubes is only available on IE. A version on FF is on its way.
Experiences
So let's have a look at some of the magical stuff Zcubes features. They actually have an online demo which you can view (http://home.zcubes.com/Demo.htm). ...more
Winelog.com is a database and social network site for wine connoisseurs, wine drinkers and practically anybody who wants to blog about wine.
Launched in December 2005, they reached their highest traffic rating 6 months later averaging at over 200 million viewers a day. Although everything went downhill from then, Winelog now maintains a database of more than 10,000 wines.
Winelog also features Wine reviews and wine recommendations designed to fit every users tastes.
The wines are tagged by type, region and variety. Users can browse these wines and see how other people liked it or not. Users can also search for a specific wine and see other people's opinions and rating of it. Of course they can also submit their own comments and ratings. Basically the wines become threads of a forum. ...more
More Tags on Videos
Veotag.com is a lot like YouTube but the tagging is more advanced. It's a lot harder to classify and tag videos due to the fact that they are both moving pictures and audio. So usually, videos are tagged by their content. YouTube tags its videos with a couple of words attached to the file much like meta tags on HTMLs in the net's infancy. Veotag on the other hand allows more tags and links on the video. Much like hyperlinks on the video itself, more like Ajax on webpages today.
Ok, if that analogy isn't too clear yet, let me give you another one. Veotag is makes your video file into something like a DVD movie. Veotag adds clickable menus and headings to any part of the video and displays it as an index on the side of the player. It's easy to do, Veotag, lets users upload their videos and tag them all through their www.veotag.com website. Unlike YouTube though, Veotag lets the user tag the parts of the video as it plays and when it's complete, clicking on those tags leads the viewer to that part of the movie. Of course for search engines, more tags means higher searchability.
Free ...more
Webjam hosts and lets users create their personal web pages much like wordpress and myspace. Aside from letting the users choose templates to customize, it also allows them to create and edit their own templates and layouts with an Ajax interface. This interface allows a modular assembly of a webpage so users won't have to edit any CSS or PHP codes if they did not want to. This feature ables users to build websites faster, easier and better. Video and audio streaming become a module they can position and manage by drag and drop.
Over the years, tech people have tried to de-technicalize the internet making it easier for the regular John Doe to make his presence on the web. HTML and PHP is actually easy but the coding part kind of prevented many users from building their own pages. In came CSS that efficiently allowed users to simply choose from millions of pre-made templates, effectively popularizing the blog. Then there's Ajax. Now, not only do the users choose which template to use, they could actually make their own pages from scratch and feel great about it.
Webjam.com is a site where imitators would be in heaven. If creating your own site with webjam's feature interface is still too hard, there's another option for you: copy somebody else's website! All public webjam sites have a button that allows the site to be replicated. A single click on the replicate button and that off-the-hook website becomes yours, you can rename it and fully customize it for your needs. ...more
SMS on the internet is nothing new. There are a wide range of these services readily available on a single Google search. Joopz.com is one of them. Although it's not the first hit on the search, Joopz is yet another web-based text messaging service that's worth going to.
Joopz.com has two plans for their subscribers, one is free and the other one isn't. The free service, allows the user to send 10 SMS per month and receive an unlimited amount. The premium service which has a subscription fee of $2.95 a month, allows unlimited texting and unlimited receiving.
So what makes Joopz different? For starters, Joopz features Text Reminders and Scheduled Messages. These are messages sent to your mobile the way your pocket calendar alarms when there's an entry. Mobile Providers usually charge for this service but on Joopz, its all free and available even on the basic plan. Also, they have SMS forwarding that works like the “I'm on SMS” feature of YahooMessenger, allowing users to receive messages sent to their Joopz account on the their mobiles.
Their best feature is the SMS broadcast or group texting. Furthermore, this group texting has two modes, broadcast and chat. On the broadcast mode, the user sends an SMS from a PC to a whole group and receives any replies on his PC or mobile. The chat mode does the same thing but everybody in the group receives any and all replies to the broadcast. ...more
Just until now, the robot I knew would consist of a machinery and a program. Openkapow defines it without the hardware. Openkapow is a, well, robot maker. Their robots are programs designed to take parts of or whole websites and display that information depending on how the author would need it. These robots are the key components to Openkapow's idea of mashups.
Not too easy, not so hard
Of course, to make a mashup site, one would need different parts, with different functions. Luckily, robots come in different templates too. There some for clipping, some for feeds, some for streams, some for databases and whatever. The great thing about robots is that they are completely customizable for every purpose imagineable.
Although it's not as easy to use robots for a mashup site compared to Webjam.com, they are highly flexible. It's like, Robots is to Flash and Webjam is to SWISH. ...more
The game is written in Ajax, CSS, and a dynamic Flash movie in the center to visualize the whole game ('coz of course, the it's just all numbers and if-then-else's in the source code). Instructions on how to join, play and spectate are on the side in really tiny letters.
The instructions are really easy, in fact there are just two, attack or surrender. Ironically, it doesn't make winning the game any easier. I guess you'll have to play it a couple of times or research on the actual gameplay.
Well, I guess it isn't for everybody but looking at the available rooms and players online, it could really be the “in” thing among math and statistics junkies. The only thing I am impressed about it is its back-end coding, the integration of the flash and the Ajax is so cool, not to mention the real-time chat, not new but not bad!
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