Little-known services you'll wonder how you lived without
Mixwit's easy to use Flash applet reinvents the mix tape for the 21st century
The internet has changed the world, mostly through big sites like Google, Amazon, MySpace and Facebook.
But other smaller sites can, if anything, be even more useful, if only you can find the right ones.
There's no need for you to spend ages doing that, though, because we've tracked down 20 of the best little-known sites, some of which could also change the way you use the web.
1. Meet people half way
It's time to catch up with that distant friend you've not seen in ages. But where can you get together? Enter their address and yours at MeetWays, choose where you'd like to meet - coffee shop, pub? - and this helpful site will suggest some convenient half-way points.
2. Extend Twitter
Microblogging sites like Twitter are fun, but sometimes you'll want to say more than will fit into a 140 character post. That's where TinyPaste comes in. Type your lengthy message into a box, click submit and you'll get a short link like tinypaste.com/471ca. Paste this in your Twitter feed (or anywhere else) and anyone who clicks it will read your full comments. Quick, simple, and no registration required.
3. Access your email from anywhere
NutshellMail makes it easy to access, manage and monitor messages from all your email and social networking accounts through one personal inbox. So you can say goodbye to the hassle of logging in to all those individual accounts. Parents can add their kid's email addresses to monitor their incoming messages. And it'll let you get at your MySpace or Facebook messages at work even if your company firewall blocks social networking sites, because you don't log in to them - NutshellMail does that.
4. Find great live music
MP3s are great, but live music is better, and HearWhere is the perfect tool to find out what's going on near you. Choose the type of music you like (pop, acoustic, punk, soul and many more), your location, and in seconds you'll have a detailed list of all the closest shows. We tested the site by asking it to list all shows on 6th December within 40 kilometres of Derby, and it returned 43 - that's impressive. Well worth a look.
5. Keep up with Google
Google is such a big company that it's easy to miss all the services and products that they offer. Like the web directory that allows you to browse the web by topics like Arts, Business or Health, the notebook that can store clips from web pages as you're browsing, and software downloads including one of the best 3D modelling tools around. If you'd like to catch up with everything Google has to offer then visit Simply Google, where they've provided all the links you need on a single page.
6. Declutter your Inbox
Organising your emails can be tricky, as the interesting personal messages quickly get drowned in a flood of newsletters, social networking messages and updates from shopping sites. But an OtherInbox webmail account could be the solution. Create new addresses like amazon@JohnSmith.otherinbox.com for Amazon, facebook@JohnSmith.otherinbox.com for Facebook, and so on for other sites, and OtherInbox then sorts all their incoming mail back into the appropriate folders. And if a company sells your email address to spammers than you'll immediately know who's responsible. You could do much the same thing with rules and filters, but OtherInbox is much easier - recommended.
7. Raise money online
If you're looking to raise money for a charity or club then you could just add a Paypal 'Donate' button to your website, but the chances are you'll have much more success with ChipIn. This clever free Flash applet can be embedded in most web pages, on MySpace, Blogger and more, where it'll tell your visitors what you're collecting for, how much you need to raise, and by when. They can donate via ChipIn's secure service, the applet will update to show how many people have contributed and what you've raised so far, and the money goes direct to your PayPal account.
8. Expand a short URL
Sites like TinyURL do a great job of translating lengthy web addresses into something manageable. But in the process they also hide the real address that you'll be visiting, which can be a concern if you get a short URL from a source that you don't really trust. There's now a simple solution, though. Just enter the short address at LongURL and it'll tell you exactly where the link goes.
9. Get your own virtual assistant
Got some important appointments or anniversaries coming up? Sendible makes it easy to schedule reminder emails, SMS texts or social networking messages, and have them posted at the time you choose. But I Want Sandy is even better. You can ask for reminders by email, using natural language ("remind me to pick up the plane tickets in three days"), and the service will also manage your contacts and bookmarks, take notes and more.
10. Send confidential messages
Email isn't always a good choice for personal, private messages, especially if someone else has access to the recipient's PC. There's just no way to tell who else might read it. Create a Privnote message, though, and it's deleted immediately after being read - much more secure. As a bonus, if you send a Privnote message and then regret doing so, you can click the link to it yourself. The message will be destroyed, preventing the receiver from reading it.
11. Defeat picture piracy
It doesn't matter how many threats or copyright messages you post, if you produce great artwork or photography and put it online, then someone will steal it for their own purposes. They feel safe, too, as there is virtually no chance you'd ever find out, but that could be about to change. Upload one of your images to TinEye and it will search its database, then report on any sites that are using that picture (even if they've cropped or resized it, tweaked the colours or added text).
This isn't quite as good as it sounds. TinEye's database contains only a billion images, small by web standards, so it'll still miss most pirates. They're adding more pictures all the time, though, so if you're looking to protect your online images then TinEye must be worth a look.
12. Record your expenses
Paperwork sucks. But it's sometimes essential, especially with travel expenses - if you don't make careful notes and hand them in then you won't get reimbursed. Expens'd helps by providing a simple online interface that lets you record your expenses from wherever you might be, then email the information to whoever needs to know. It's free for single user accounts, but even if you've 50 people who need the service then it's still only $49 a month.
13. Manage your online media
The web is packed with sites that want to store your images, videos, and pictures, so why do you need Oosah?
One reason might be the way it connects to other sites. You can move images between your Flickr account and Facebook just by dragging and dropping, for instance, and Oosah also works with YouTube and Picasa.
Oosah offers more than just storage. You can play your music from the site, for example, so your MP3's are accessible from anywhere. And you can also create slideshows, galleries and playlists, then embed them in your web pages.
But best of all is the capacity, a whole one terabyte (one thousand gigabytes) for no charge at all. If nothing else, use it to back up your digital photos, home movies and music collection - there's no other online backup service offering such a great deal.
14. Protect your email account details
You're travelling, and need to send a quick email - but is it safe? If you're in an internet cafe, or other unsecure network, then there's no way to be sure that someone isn't logging usernames, passwords and whatever other confidential details you might enter. And that's why you need note2email. Enter the recipient's email address, title and message text, follow the other instructions, click Send It and the mail will be despatched. Your mail log-in details aren't at risk as you never enter them.
15. Make specialist web searches
Google is an excellent all-round search engine, but if you need more specialist results then it makes sense to turn to Search.io. In a couple of clicks you can choose to search for books, fonts, lyrics, recipes, stock photos and more. It then submits your key words to the best search engines for that categories, and displays everything they return in a series of tabbed results pages. It's a powerful tool, and highly recommended if a regular Google search returns too many hits.
16. Synchronise your profiles
Creating several social-networking profiles usually seems like a good idea, until you realise the effort that goes into maintaining them. Atomkeep is ready to help out by updating all your account details from one central location. It works with more than 30 of the most popular sites right now (MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, digg, last.fm, Linkin and others) with more to be added soon, and if you've accounts on four or more of these sites then Atomkeep could be a real time-saver.
17. Hold online meetings
You might be writing a report for work, organising an event for your club, or planning a wedding - the details don't matter. What's important is that you need to chat with several people to discuss what you're doing, and there's no better web solution for that than Yuuguu. It allows you to hold an online meeting for up to 30 people, share your screen, and even work together on producing documents, while integrated instant messaging lets everyone join in the chat. Corporate sites charge big money for this kind of thing, but inexplicably Yuuguu are offering it for free. So hurry, try it now, before they change their mind.
18. Send huge files
We love email, but there's one area where it's seriously limited: attachments. The technology isn't designed to move large files at speed, and so many accounts don't allow email attachments greater than 10MB in size. If you want to send something larger then you could upload it to a file-hosting site like RapidShare, but these have size limits, too, and usually apply other restrictions and hassles in an effort to persuade you to buy a premium account.
PipeBytes takes a different tack, creating something like a private P2P connection. This means you can only send the file to one person, but they start downloading the file while you're still uploading it, and there's no size restriction - the file can be as large as you like.
19. Never forget anything again
Remember the milk is the ultimate 'to do' list manager. Adding new tasks is as simple as sending an email, even from your phone. Flexible management options let you prioritise tasks, postpone them if necessary or set them to repeat at the frequency you need. Google Maps can be used to show you where your task is located in the real world, and you can get reminders via email, SMS and all the main instant messengers, as well as on the BlackBerry, the iPhone/ iPod Touch, or any web-enabled mobile phone.
20. Create an online mix tape
Mixwit is absolutely the easiest way to create a custom online mix tape. The process starts by using the built-in search engines to locate the artists and tracks you need (or you can point it at music files of your own, if they're available online). You can then add photos, images, or custom artwork of your own. Add a skin, maybe some text, then share your work by posting the mix tape to MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and more.