Uniquely Functional Websites

Uniquely Functional Websites

With a gazillion websites out there, I realize another list of the best websites is ridiculous. But since MySpace is a social networking site, perhaps a short list of the most unique and interesting social networking sites or just plain totally cool and functional sites might be helpful.

First, if you are looking for lists of social networking sites in a number of different categories, such as music, books, movies, cars, whatever, try the following:

Wikipedia article listing social networking websites

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

A list of over 350 Social networking sites in numerous categories

mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/

Just type in “social networking sites” in Google to get all kinds of other info such as reviews of the top ten sites. Etc.

If you would rather socialize by meeting people first, try meetup.com. Here you can find a group that meets locally or regionally, or post interest in getting people to join up and form a new group. You can find groups by searching by subject or searching by city, city area, etc. This will work better if you live in a large urbanized area. These are generally not boring things like city council meetings, church groups, etc. but rather non-traditional groups. Groups are not posted here unless the group wants it posted. Meetup does not find groups and advertse them. It just serves as a central location for groups that are trying to find members or people trying to form new groups.

If you want to create a list of favorite sites that looks like Google Chrome in style and can be shared with your friends, or find friends with similar websurfing interests, try Stumbleupon.com. You create a profile. Then you check off boxes on your interests in a number of categories. Then you click on the stumbleupon icon. If you like what you see, click on thumbs up to put the site in your favorites, or click on thumbsdown or just click on stumbleupon to pop up another random site that matches your criteria. As you add sites, it gets smarter about your interests. Once you get enough favorites, you can see who has similar profiles. Then you can stumbleupon their favorites and if you like them, you can add them to your favorites.

ProjectVulcan is a site that has point source pollution data for individual factories, powerplants, roadways, and neighborhoods updated on an hourly basis. It uses a dataset updated from data obtained from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite. You can download the data as well as a program that integrates this data into Google Earth, so you can look at individual pollution sources within the context of Google Earth or you can look at maps of summarized pollution levels by type of pollution and city, county, state, etc.

Pandora is a unique internet radio station in that you can type in the names of musical artists and turn each artist into a radio station. You can then create a mix of these musicians by clicking on those you want to create a mix for. You create profile and can share or view others profiles. You can also go the traditional routes of picking radio stations by genre and adding those to your favorites.

Digg is a unique website because as an aggregator of lists of various websites, it is created by the votes of users. If you see a website you like, you can vote to put it on Digg. If enough people vote for the same site, it ends up on Digg. Digg categorizes sites in a number of different ways to make it easy to find content.

Shelfari and LibraryThing are a couple of sites for cataloging, inventorying and sharing you lists of books you have read, own, or want to read. Book choices come from Amazon.com or from The Library of Congress or many other choices. You don’t have to type in anything except a partial book title and create your profile. There are also book websites that allow you to exchange books with others. See the mashable.com list of social networking sites above and go to the list of book websites to find these sites.

I Heart Movies is a site for sharing your list of movies you own, have seen, etc. on line with others and getting reviews, previews, etc. It is similar to some of the book websites discussed above in functionality.

IMDB.com is the best source for info on movies, documentaries, etc. However it is not a social networking site. You can list all of your movies on IMDB by creating a password. But to share this info. With others you would have to give people your individual password which would also allow them to edit your list, something you are not likely to want just anybody to do. So if I was doing this I would use something like I Heart Movies for my movie lists and then include a link to IMDB.com so I could get info. I can’t find on I Heart Movies on specific movies.

You can also use some of the websites that allow you to pimp out your MySpace page to create a list on your MySpace page of links to all of your movies. In other words, each title in the list is a link to that movie on IMDB.com. Your list can be in words or as thumbnail images. You can do the same thing for books and music. Books will be linked to Amazon.com. Type in myspace layouts, myspace generators, or myspace editors in Google and a huge number of sites to help you edit your myspace page will pop up.

At this point I have not included websites on Bittorrents, free on-line television, free on-line movies, DVD copy programs, free or almost free telephone services, dating sites, etc. Hopefully, I will update this blog from time to time to include info. On such sites.