Firefox extension "InvisibleHand" is an on-the-fly comparison shopping tool designed to instantly retrieve and display the best prices from a wide variety of online vendors for the items that you are looking at as you surf. See our Freewaregenius review here. Some of the added features in this new version are as follows:

• Google search integration: InvisibleHand can now grab deals from within a Google search. The cheapest offers for an item are presented discretely above the search results.
• Support for German retailers.
• Notifications are refreshed, presented more discretely.

If you have any feedback, comments, questions or suggestions they would love to hear them!

Why you need this app: although many sites have RSS feeds or email subscription options that can notify you when there’s new content, many sites do not and may require constant follow up in order to keep up with changes. And even if a site supports RSS some types of content may not be supported, such as comments or discussions on forums and the like.

I’ve been looking at desktop-based apps that monitor websites for changes when I found this site. Changedetection.com will monitor a list of websites you specify for changes and send you email notifications whenever it detects them. More notes below:

• Highlighting changes: once it detects a change, Changedetection.com will render a version of the web page that displays new text on the page highlighted in a yellow marker style. Text that is no longer on the page is also displayed in a strike-through style.
• Changes it detects: text changes anywhere at all (including in the sidebar). Images, videos, or other elements such as HTML tags are not detected.
• History: what is truly amazing is that once you create an account, a history of the website(s) you are tracking is kept and can be accessed for later reference (see the screenshot to the right above).
• Schedule: Changedetection.com will check a website for changes once per day.

The verdict: this is a truly great service. I prefer this to local apps that track site changes because the monitoring and detection is performed remotely on their servers, so you do not have to worry about your PC being online, and your computer’s resources are not being used at all times.

I’m also blown away by the fact that changes are tracked and saved, such that you could access older versions of the sites you are interested in.

Compatibility: Browser based. You will need to provide an email address where your notifications will be sent.

Go to the changedetection.com page.

I recently used created clickmaps of my new Freewaregenius theme in order to shed light on what people were doing on my site. The results were very interesting to me and, I would imagine, they would be interesting to a lot of readers, especially those who have their own sites or blogs. I therefore created this post to share these clickmaps as well as some of the insights that came out of them.

Disclaimer: the tool used to create these clickmaps is not free, and therefore shall not be named. The original version of this posting did mention it but I have decided to remove it.

I will present two out of three clickmap options here: heamaps and confetti maps (which appear as little dots). I have decided not to post site overlay screenshots  (little bars next to links that represent the amount of clicking activity). The confetti clickmaps are my favorite, as they can be really insightful, as are the heatmaps, but I don’t care much for site overlays (which are also supported in Google Analytics, btw, although generally speaking I would say the Google Analytics site overlays are crap).

The test:

• I looked at the Freewaregenius home page only
• Monitored 5001 visits which generated 1366 clicks on Jun 8th and 9th, 2009.
• Important note: the current version of the tool used is not able to record clicks on some flash and Javascript elements on the page. Thus it did not record clicks on the “Featured Article” widget on top of the page, or the carousel next to it. It is also unable to record clicks on Google ads, on flash videos, or the “random posts” section in the bottom.

The clickmaps: entire-site JPEGS are too long for me to display in this blog posting without making the clickmaps very difficult to read. Therefore I am showing results for (a) top of the page, (b) middle of the page, and (c) bottom of the page seperately.

Top of page images: see above

Bottom of the page:

Middle of page:

The findings: I’ll split these into three sections A/B/C

(A) Issues that I’d already suspected that the clickmaps confirmed:

1. The searchbox on the top right is used heavily
2. The numbered-page navigation near the bottom is used heavily
3. The thumbnails (screenshots) in the first few postings are clicked heavily
4. Thumbnails in general are clicked on heavily as the primary source of information, even in cases were the posts themselves are not clicked into.
5. Posts that have a more general audience, such as games or email clients, get  alot more clicks than specialized posts (such as WinCdEMu, which didn’t get clicked on one time during the test period).

(B) Insights that are new or that I wasn’t paying attention to:

1. Users click and interact with the tabs in the header under the logo much more than I thought they did. I am glad to see some clicks on the Sitemap; I didn’t think anybody went there.
2. Users click on the “Freeware Top 20″ tab like crazy.
3. Posts near the top of the page and posts near the bottom are clicked on heavily. Posts in the middle are somewhat neglected or skipped over.
4. The tabbed javascript widget in the sidebar (recent/most commended/recent comments), gets some good use, which is interesting to know.
5. Browse by category: only 3 or 4 buttons in the black “browse by category” section are clicked on to any significant extent; Freewaregenius Picks, Games, and (possibly) Media players.
6. “Click to read more”: the red link at the bottom of each posting is not clicked at all. Users prefer to click on the post title instead.
7. Tag cloud: is very seldom clicked, although this may be due to its placement towards the end of the sidebar.
8. Blogroll: the sites in my “favorite freeware sites” section are clicked on heavily. I am giving these guys some serious traffic.
9. Lists in the footer: of the three lists in the footer (”Recent posts”, “Most commented”, and “Popular this month”), only the latter gets any clicks.

(C) My future plan of action:

1. Making better use of the tabs in the header: I may add a second row of tabs and re-test to see how users react to that.
2. Reducing the number of posts per page: given that the posts in the middle are generally overlooked, while the ones on top and bottom get clicked, I will reduce my current 13 posts per page to something that might reduce or eliminate the middle altogether.
3. Freeware Top 20: I’ve decided to stop procrastinating and update the “Freeware Top 20″ already (hopefully by next week). I always knew this was a popular page that needed to be updated, but seeing all the clicks in the confetti map put it in better persepctive relative to everything else on the page.
4. Category navigation: the fact that categories are so seldom clicked on support an idea that I’d been wanting to implement for a long time, which is to reduce the categorization scheme to 8 or so basic categories with no subcategories.
5. Blogroll/links: I will be updating my link exchange policy pretty soon (unless your site is highly trafficked or has a high Google rank, I will not accept link exchanges. However I will give a link in exchange for contributing content to this site, but I haven’t figured out the details yet).
6. Tag cloud: seems to be completely useless. Am considering either removing the tag cloud and not bothering with tags, or creating a limited set of tags that may reduce the tag clutter. Do tags have any SEO value? If you know please share in the comments.
7. Lists in the footer: I will consider removing the “Recent posts”, and “Most commented” lists and replace them with something that may be more interesting to the readers, such as an “about this blog” section with my picture in it, and/or a poll or something of the sorts

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Hulu desktop is a free desktop client for Windows and Mac that connects to the Hulu service and plays Hulu videos and programs within a sleek, feature-rich interface, without the need for an internet browser. It features a spectacular look-and-feel, high-definition video, and offers the ability to resume partially watched shows. It also supports standard Windows Media Center or Apple IR remote controls.

Hulu, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is a web site set up by a group of TV networks in order to publish their programming in high quality, as a means to keep their content under their control and as an alternative to video sharing sites like YouTube.

You might ask: why watch programs on the Hulu desktop client rather than in the browser? The answer simply is that Hulu desktop manages to offer a user experience that is simply excellent, and is far better than the desktop experience. Here’s a rundown of some of its features.

• Quality: unlike the web version, Hulu desktop displays high quality streaming video by default. Very nice indeed. For slow connection low-bandwidth situations you can lower the quality to “medium” or low.
• Control using IR Remote: for those who use their PC as a media center and/or like to use a physical remote control device, Hulu desktop offers full IR support support for both PC and Mac.
• Navigate: the player can display full video unencumbered by controls until you hover with the mouse. Can navigate using the keyboard, mouse, or remote (or combos). Navigation feels very sleek and professional: press Ctrl+F for fullscreen then use the keyboard arrows, mouse and mousewheel for zooming. Breadcrumb-style browsing history makes it easy to retrace your steps and find your way around.
• Ads: Hulu desktop will display some ads in the programming itself (much like watching TV), but it comes without the display ads that are featured on most websites (including the Hulu site).
• Resume shows: at the moment where you last left them. Very cool.
• Personalize: once your register an account and log in you save videos of interest in your queue, you can subscribe to certain channels or programs, rate programs, and look at your viewing history (note: you can do all of this in the website version as well).

Cons: issues that can be addressed to make this a better product

• Memory consumption: is very high at around 250 megs on my machine. It is actually less resrouce intesive to watch Hulu in Firefox3 (apprx 150); surely it should be the other way around? I am hoping that resource consumption is improved once this is out of beta.
• Bugs: this is beta software and in my testing of it had a couple of hiccups where it became strangely unresponsive, but went back to normal after a few seconds. I am assuming these will be eventually ironed out post-beta.

The verdict: a very impressive viewer that will surely become the preferred vehicle for accessing Hulu videos for all but the very casual Hulu users. If you’re an avid Hulu viewer you should check it out immediately; if you are an occasional Hulu user … you should also do the same .

Version tested: 0.9.3.1 BETA

Compatibility: Windows XP or later; Mac OSX10.4 or later. Requires Intel Pentium Core Duo 1.8GHz (Windows), at least 2.0 GB of RAM, a 2 Mbps Internet connection, and Flash 9.0.124

Go to the Hulu Desktop page to download the latestr version (approx 866K).

Twingly, if you hadn’t hear of it, is a blog search engine similar to Technorati with some underlying technology to eliminate spammy or fake blogs. The Twingly screensaver is a screensaver that visually displays blog postings as they are being published all over the world, twisting and turning a representation of the globe to give you glimpses of the geographic location where the postings are coming from. More notes on this one:

• Browse blog posts: can function as a rather unusual browser for new blog entries (if gazing into a continuous ticker/scrolling list of blog postings can be characterized as ’browsing’, that is).
• ’I’ is for vendetta: no of course its not – silly… it’s for “interactive”; which means you can press “I” on your keyboard then swivel the globe around with your mouse or keyboard hotkeys and/or zoom in and out without shutting down the screensaver. Very cool.
• Clicking a blog entry: will produce a small “summary” window on the right hand side, so you can read it without exiting the screensaver. You can click on the summary to open inside a browser though.

The verdict: I don’t have too many screensaver reviews (I just made a quick check and found only one, MappedUp, which in fact turns out to be eerily similar to this one). My feeling is that if you have to have a screensaver it’d better do something interesting and I think this one is pretty darn cool!

The only negative with this one is that looking at it makes me feel a little embarrassed that I have trouble meeting my self-determined quota of four new postings per week on Freewaregenius (what with all the content being generated every second) .

Compatibility: WinAll. Requires a graphics card supporting OpenGL. Enable Asian language support in Windows for a better experience.

Go to the Twingly Screensaver page to download the latest version (approx 2.09 megs).

Travel the world, see sights, become worldly and sophisticated. Yes, you can do all of this with Earth Album. Though you may get a feeling that you’ve seen this sort of thing before (you have, see below), Earth Album manages to deliver a tremendous user experience, and truly a great way to explore the world for those who are interested or curious.

Some notes:

• Click anywhere on the map to display images from that region/country/state. Zoom in to see more map detail.
• Looking for a particular place or location? Use the provided search box. Works extremely well.
• CoolIris Edition: if you have CoolIris isntalled (formerly Piclens, a terrific image-browsing enhancement for IE and Firefox), you’re going to want to check out the Earth Album CoolIris edition.

This site reminds me of a number of services that do similar things that were previously featured on Freewaregenius: Panoye, which offers panoramic images from all over the world, FlickrVision, which displays images as they are being uploaded from random places across the globle, and of course Google Earth a little bit, in that you can navigate a world map and zoom in and out to see pictures.

So, you might wonder, is there room for this mash up of maps and images? You bet. Just try it, it truly is pretty darn cool and extremely interesting!

Compatibility: Browser based.

Go to the Earth Album site.

Just imagine: a stream of the latest freeware software updates with links to cool reviews and information about them. Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t. Go on over to Appnews.net and see for yourself. Here are more notes:

• You can subscribe by RSS feed, Email, or Twitter (soon, the RSS feed will be displayed in the Freewaregenius Sidebar).
• The search box on Appnews.net delivers consolidated results from Ghacks.net, Rarst.net, and Freewaregenius.

Not much more to say, except to give some kudos to Andrey of Rarst.net, who singlehandedly conceived and created the amazing and rather impressive engine that powers it. Thanks Andrey!

Go to Appnews.net to check it out.

[Editor’s note: this post was written by Freewaregenius contributor Gaurav Paul, who introduced the idea of a "featured bookmarks" weekly post].

BackupURL: creates instant cached copies of web pages. The site does the same thing that Google Cache, Yahoo Cache and the WayBackMachine do, but the best thing it allows you to create a snapshot copy of desired webpage on-demand and get a BackupURL link to the same. This is very cool if you require the content of a web page to stay the same while you share the link.The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html, CSS, images) no matter whether the original site is up or down .

[Editor’s note: for a good freeware program that takes a snapshot of a site and saves it locally, check out Local Website Archive Lite].

Odee.com: ever wondered why the human mind hones in on what is “odd” amongst all that is “normal”? Whatever the reason, Oddee is a blog that delivers news and stories on some of the weirdest and amazing things that have to do with people/places/science/web/humour.Very entertaining, take a look !

Tagoo: is a media search engine that searches for music, video, and even downloadable software from a number of good sites around the web to fetch you a simplified list of your searched subject. It gives you information such as file type, BitRate, File Size, Duration, etc. It also gives you the option to PLAY or DOWNLOAD (if available) media in the search results.

Keyboardr: is a simple customized search engine that basically uses an AJAX GUI on top of Google search results in order to dynamically provide instant search results with each additional letter that you type into the search box. Its objective, to quote its creators, is to “replacing the feeling of ’searching’ with the feeling of ’launching’.”

The site is designed for mouse-free, all-keyboard browsing using the arrow and enter keys (hence the name “Keyboardr”). In addition to Google results, it also displays results from “Wikipedia”,”Google images” and “Youtube” in same page, which is pretty useful, and it runs pretty fast too!

PhoneArena: as cell phones ownership increases and as they become more and more integral to modern life, “PhoneArena” is a site that is stepping forward to provide the latest news, detailed reviews, specs and info from the mobile world. This frequently updated site covers all the buzz that surrounds cell phones and mobile manufacturers.

AnAppAday

I was searching Google for something (I now forget what) and stumbled on this blog. Needless to say I was immediately intrigued by the apps on offer and started downloading and testing. Check out the apps section here or click on any of the individual app posts in the list below.

My favorite app is probably the “Jedi Window Dock“, a simple tabbed window that can accomodate any open windows or apps that you would like to remove from the Windows taskbar (see screenshot above). Very handy if, say, you have a lot of open folder windows that you would like to cluster together in groups, or you’re working with multiple command line or console windows that you would like to tidy up. You can dock any kind of window from any app, although I found that Internet Explorer windows can behave strangely once they are docked/undocked (e.g. they minimize and might not maximize if you click on them in the taskbar).

Here’s a list of links for all 30 apps:

Note that the source for all of the apps is made available, and that most of them will require that you download the the MS .NET Framework 2.0

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The Evri toolbar introduces two different (albeit related) functionalities into your browser experience. I will discuss each in turn below:

Evri Search: if you’re wondering why you would need Evri search in your toolbar when you’ve already got Google, I can report that Evri is a slightly different kind of search. Without going into the technology of it (which I’d written about here), you can think of Evri as search for the long term, a place where you would go if you’re following something on a periodic basis (say your favorite band, a book you’ve read, your favorite politician, etc) in order to keep abreast of the latest buzz (news/videos/relationships) that is developing around your topic of interest. For example, I have found Evri Search to be a great way to keep informed about developments relating to a couple of companies that I’ve invested in, whereby Evri search brings most of what is published about these to a single page.

Evri Term Highlighting: Imagine reading a news article with a section or paragraph about something that you’re interested in. Now imagine hovering over the keyword for that subject in the text that you’re reading to instantly bring up related news articles, images and videos, (and a definition from Wikipedia). This is exactly what the Evri toolbar sets out to do, and it does it for a wide range of general interest topics/entities that you may encounter

If you’re a developer and you think you could utilize this type of information in your own application, you should take a look at Evri’s new developer API. Everything needed to make this toolbar application, as well as the Evri topic pages, and many of their widgets is all in this simple REST based API. Its free to use for 10,000 requests per day, and it sounds like with some nice link back love, they’ll probably let you go a lot higher in volume.

What I like about Evri term highlighting:

• The ability to browse related news items or media related to the topic I am interested in on the spot, simply by hovering over a term.
• The results: there are a number of services that attempt to deliver contextual related content, but Evri’s related results seem to be generally of higher quality than others that attempt to do the same thing. (Which is not to say there isn’t room for improvement still).
• The related news and video tabs are my two favorites. Note that videos play without leaving the page, straight in the popup window.
• Can be quickly enabled/disabled by simply clicking a button on the toolbar. In case you did not feel like seeing any highlighted terms.
• Does not display highlighted results on secure sites. Which means your webmail and online transactions will be free of keyword highlighting.
• Only loads content once you click on the highlighted term. And then after that loads the content for each tab you click when you actually click it, preserving bandwidth.
• Works on IE and Firefox both (which is refreshing, since this sort of service is frequently limited to Firefox users).

What I do not like so much:

• Highlighted terms can glut your page with information. This, of course, is why they made it so easy to switch them off. But the question remains whether the value added outweighs the cost in sheer informational overload.
• Provides a good number of highlighted words for most news, entertainment, and general interest topics, and most keywords that have a Wikipedia entry. When surfing other sites or topics, however (such as Freewaregenius), the highlights will be few and far between and limited to entities that are fairly well known.
• Too many tabs? Currently, there are five (Overview, News/web, Connections, Images, Videos), with Overview always pre-selected. I’ve found that I mostly care for two, News and Videos.
• Performance: on slow connections it can take a bit of time for the highlighted terms to populate.

Wish list: or how this software can be made even better

• The ability to select a default tab rather than the current "overview". I’d prefer the "News/Web" link to open as default personally.
• The ability for the user to set some sort of intelligent filtering. For example, if a user is on a page that contains 20 links, the software might present, say, only the ten that it rates as being the most value added. The rating can be as simple as opting for the specific or niche rather than the general and/or well known.
• The ability to choose from different styles of text highlighting; such as a little star next to the words rather than the aggressive yellow-marker style of highlighting, or even highlighting that only shows up when the mouse cursor is within a certain distance from it.
• Sticking to the main article: currently the text highlighting includes the text of the article itself as well as the navigation, sidebar(s), header, footer, and even some of the ads. It would look and feel better if it focused on the article in my opinion, as it is safe to assume that that’s where the user’s interest lies.
• Limiting duplicates: if an article mentions Barack Obama 10 times, highlighting each and every one of them will likely send users reaching for the "stop highlighting" button. Might be better to highlight just one or to limit the frequency to the two or three that are furthest apart.

The verdict: an interesting software that delivers fairly good results. If you haven’t tried Evri search then I suggest you check it out. What’s cool about Evri Toolbar’s keyword highlighting is that the related links and results are generally of very high quality, especially when compared to other similar services (e.g. Headup for Firefox).

My impression is that while this can contribute towards a richer browsing experience on some sites (e.g. news, entertainment, financial, and general news sites), for most other sites you might surf the keywords that light up on the screen will be general entities that are not very value added and may seem like added clutter alongside the in-text ads and links and whatever else may be inserted in the body of the text of an average article.

The Evri Toolbar is still in its beginning stages and has the potential to get a lot better. In the meanwhile check it out for yourself right now; you will find it quite interesting.

Version Tested: 1.2.0.2

Compatibility: Windows (XP/2000/Vista), Mac, Linux. Runs on Internet Explorer 6+ or Firefox 2/3.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 1 meg).

LinkExtend is a free Firefox plugin that brings together a wide range of website-related informational services and puts them at your fingertips, as a toolbar on your browser, in the browser’s context menu, and in your Google or Yahoo search results. Available resources include website safety information, site traffic, ratings, and demographics; general site information and reviews, site "kidsafe" status, and even a category for "site ethics".

There is a lot of information being collected by many different services about most sites and web pages that are out there. Examples of this are: their safety rating (e.g. McCafee SiteAdvisor), their popularity (Alexa ranking), how many visitors they get (Alexa, Compete), where the traffic comes from, and the demographics, how long the site’s been around, user site reviews (Stumbleupon), and on and on. LinkExtend is s kind of informational Swiss army knife that brings a wide range of information into a single place in the form of a toolbar or in the context menu, making it really quick and easy to check any page you surf or link you encounter against numerous resources (many of which you probably didn’t know existed).

More notes on this tool below:

• Customize your information: you can display only the services that you want and remove others that you are not interested in. This applies for the toolbar, the context menus, and the search results.
• The context menu: is invoked by default using shift or alt + right click. Your regular Firefox context menu is unchanged.
• Look inside a website before you visit: an interesting use for this tool is that it enables you to shift+right click on a link and access information on its safety rating, its kidsafe status, and a lot more without actually visiting. This of course assuming that you are suspicious of the link to begin with
• Site tools: the "site tools" category is my favorite. It can deliver a listing of all the links on a page, all files, and all titles. Also contains reviews (e.g. Stumbleupon), similar sites, contact details, free account passwords from BugMeNot, and various other site-related info. Very cool.
• Custom search: I confess that I do not like custom search results, even when bundled in with otherwise useful, legitimate toolbars. The LinkExtend custom search, powered by IxQuick (?) or Ask.com is a dud, and unfortunately they do not allow you to remove it from the toolbar altogether. There is also something which they refer to as Supersearch, a kind of directory of links where you could search for information on all sorts of topics. This is somewhat interesting, yet dispensable in my opinion.
• Ethics ratings: need to confirm a prejudice or two? You’re in luck, as someone out there has taken it upon themselves to pass judgement (Scryve, KnowMore, CorporateCritic). To test this I looked up the sites for the following companies: Wallmart, Halliburton, and Blackwater, just to see what will transpire. The first two did indeed come up as ethically compromised, which was somewhat gratifying, but not alot. I proceeded to remove the "ethics" part of LinkExtend to reduce clutter.

The verdict: there are so many resources and so much information that this tool brings together that it is simultaneously it’s strength and it’s weakness. The strength is fairly obvious: if you’re interested in certain information about the links and pages you visit, it will be on offer. The weakness is that because so much information is there, some users may be overwhelmed or put off at first.

This tool has something to offer everyone, but it will be particularly appealing to security-conscious users, webmasters and/or people who work with websites or on the internet, those interested in SEO (search engine optimization), and advanced techie types. You will either find this tool to be extremely invaluable or you might think that is a lot of informational clutter. I belong to the former category and overall think that it is quite terrific!

Version Tested: 1.0

Compatibility: Firefox: 1.5 – 3.2a1pre.

Go to LinkExtend page to download the latest version (approx 433K).

Email This from Clickability is a free bookmarklet that resides on your browser toolbar and can quickly email any web page that you are browsing to yourself or friends. It supports most browsers, including IE, Firefox, Opera, and AOL.

Have you ever read a really good posting or news story that you wanted to share with a friend or friends? I remember many a time that I would copy a URL, open my Gmail account, and paste into a new email message in order to do this. More recently we have had the proliferation of "Email This Article" links on blogs and websites that make it easy to email a story in a single click straight from the website, although many of these still rely on opening your default local email client to do this, which can be a hassle (especially if you use webmail and do not use a local client).

"Email This" lets you email the URL of any site that you are surfing (to yourself or to others) in a single click. Here are more notes on this service:

• Uses it’s own browser-based form: clicking on the "Email This" bookmarklet will instantly display an email form. It is self contained and does not need a local client or webmail client to send.
• Keeping an address book: registering for the "Email This" service will allow you to maintain an address book that collects and maintains all the email addresses you send to for future re-use. Note that you do not need to register to use the service.
• Installing: involves right clicking on the bookmarklet and adding it to your "Links" folder in IE or "Bookmarks Toolbar" in Firefox. For more info on installing click here.
• Other bookmarklets: in addition to "Email This", the site offers a "Save This" and "Organize & Share" bookmarklets which provide a fairly advanced online bookmarking service. You can use your "Email This" account for these as well.

The verdict: so simply and yet (potentially) so useful. You will never need to search high on low on a website again looking for that elusive "Email this article" link which many or may not be there. You can now spam email interesting articles to yourself and to friends with ease.

Compatibility: IE, Firefox, Opera, AOL, MSN; most likely other browsers as well.

Go to the Email This page.

Usernamecheck

[Editor’s note: this review was written by reader Gaurav Paul with subsequent editing by the webmaster].

Although most of us have a username that we particularly like that ideally we would want to use across the board for all web services and websites that we use, we have all had the experience where our preferred name was already taken. The Usernamecheck service can check your username across a great many sites at once so you can either take quick action to register your name or otherwise help you find that distinct username that still works on all the services that you are interested in.

How to use: enter your desired username and the site will check for availability in (currently) 68 different and popular sites, including Gmail, Twitter, Wordpress, Ebay, Yahoo, YouTube, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Delicious and many others. It will show you the username status as “available or taken”. (Facebook is notably absent).

Note that Usernamecheck doesn’t actually register available names for you; for that you will need to go to each site separately.

The verdict: a brilliant concept and overall a very good, well-designed site.

Go to the Usernamecheck site.

Vertor

The concept for this website is so simple I am surprised it hasn’t been done before: check torrents listings for malware, and check that torrents are not fakes. This is the kind of torrent site that you can confidently recommend to friends and family without worrying about them downloading harmful things, being exposed to scams that mis-represent the content being offered, and indeed without them being assaulted with popups and porn ads.

Some observations.

• Previews: displays thumbnails from video torrents and 20-second sound snippets from audio files (that can serve the dual purpose of demonstrating that the torrent is real, on the one hand, and providing a preview of the music before you download on the other).
• No 100% guarantee: Vertor checks for malware using some sort of virus scanning engine, and although they do not suggest 100% verified and virus free torrents, they are working on it and ask for user feedback. I’ve downloaded a number of things off the site (just to test, you see) and all were good.
• New listings: seem to be somewhat delayed compared to other sites. I am assuming that this is because of the need to check them out and verify them? I know this because on Saturday mornings I am usually able to find and download the torrent for a show that airs the previous night at 8 EST. However, my torrent did NOT get listed on Vertor for a good 24 hours after it showed up elsewhere.

The verdict: I love it. Keeping my fingers crossed that these guys succeed (and stick around).

Visit Vertor.

Not freeware, but a free web service that helps users browse some of the most popular subjects on the net (popular people, popular places, and popular things) and discover connections between them. Evri is a bit of a combination between a recommendation engine of related links and a sort of dynamic, self-creating Wikipedia.

While Evri might look like a news and/or media portal with some nice, flash based links, this startup is based on a robust technology that should raise some eyebrows. Evri is in fact powered by a search technology that scours parts the net (focusing mainly on news, politics, and general media related web pages) and actually understands references within the text to people, places, and things. So, for example, when indexing a news article that talks about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigning together in Unity, NH, it will “understand” that Barack and Hillary are people and that Unity is a place (and it will do so on its own, without any human intervention). If it sees a lot of texts connecting Obama, Clinton, and Unity on the web, it will be able to gauge the “strength” of these connections, as it were.

What this enables Evri to do is construct a web of links and interrelations that mirrors the flurry of activity (expressed in texts, articles, etc.) that takes place on the internet. It is designed to reveal interconnectedness of the web as expressed linguistically in what is being said/discussed rather than in terms of linked hyperlinks (as, for example, Google does).

What it means to you now: the Evri beta has been launched (at this point you will have to sign up for an invite). Here are some of the things you can do on it right now:

• Browse dynamically generated pages on your favorite topic: whether its a band such as Radiohead, a politician like Barack Obama, or, say, the Seattle International Film Festival. The beauty of looking at these pages rather than, say, the corresponding page on Wikipedia is that they are always up-to-date and dynamically generated to reflect all the latest connections that relate to your topic. You might imagine how valuable this could be if you need to keep abreast of the latest that is going on with a topic that you are following from a holistic perspective rather than the headlines in a news portal (the latest on a company you are following such as Apple, or the latest on the iPhone, etc.)
• Discover connections you didn’t necessarily know about: for example, the connection between Radiohead and Bono of U2 as reflected in latest news stories, but also the connection between your subject and verbs or actions that relate to them (e.g. in the Barack Obama page, click on “meeting with” in the dropdown and you will get a list of the top articles siting Obama meeting or having met with other figures.

What it might mean to you in the future:

• Recommendation engine/widget: the model of interconnectivity that Evri builds can be applied in many places; in news portals or other websites where Evri can be embedded as a widget to act as a recommendation engine (a related links widget on steroids, if you will). I can’t wait to get a widget running on Freewaregenius, although from what I understand they will first start with indexing general news and media content (i.e. household name things), and then work their way down into other more specialized areas.
• Dynamic pages indexed by Google: such that a search for, say, “Seattle Film Festival” will include a dynamic Evri page on the subject.

Wish list or how this service can be even better)

• A search box would be nice. The current lack of one is perplexing but might have something to do with Evri’s stated slogan of “searching less and understanding more”; in my experience, however, not finding what I’m looking for to begin with did not lead to understanding more at all. As I understand it, a search may be coming in the form of Google.

The verdict: while it may look like a news portal with a curious way of browsing content, Evri has some seriously scary technology under the hood that can not only finds linguistic links but evaluate and rate a site’s content in a way that a number of other services employ an editorial staff to perform.

Having said that, I am also hoping that the people over at Evri can figure out a way to do more with this technology than the news portal that is the current beta release. I couldn’t help but wonder about why I, as a user, would care whether the technology knew that a relationship was to a person, a place, or a thing, and why (and how) that might add value to me. It seems to me that Evri can set their sites on a much more wow-inducing first impression that the current beta delivers.

Version Tested: beta release as of 7/2/2008.

Go to the Evri home page.