Cool Websites I Like

So, I was watching TechTV the other day (or what Dinesh calls "MTV for geeks") and they had one of these "Wonderful Websites of the Moment" (Nobody write in and tell me what it's really called. I can't really remember. I don't really care). They were talking about the great imdb.com and then the commentator says something like "...visit this great new website...".

What the h-? IMDB is more than ten years old! It ws one of the first websites I saw that made me think, "Hey, this Internet thing is pretty cool!". I remember wandering around in 1993 when I was still trying to figure out email and Mosaic.

The Internet has thrown out a lot of good things in the last ten years. I'm not just talking about information sites, but websites that provide a service and provide benefit to the community by enabling possibilities. Just because I have time on my hands, here are a list of websites that I thought were pretty cool the first time I saw them, and time proved me right-ish when they made it big (I don't include ones that I like but were already on the radar screen by the time I appreciated them, so sites like Blogger, Yahoo and Google aren't mentioned):

• IMDB.com: The Internet Movie Database. All the films. All the actors. Posters. Images. Trivia. Goofs. Why would you need another website about movies? Thirteen years old and going strong.
  
• Hotmail: I know, I know, I have nothing but bad things to say about Hotmail these days, but when it first came out it was a revelation. It was web-based email. It was free. It was incredible. I didn't have to fight with telnet across continents anymore. I didn't have to battle tmnet's pop server inadequacies. It was cool. Then they sold it.
  
  
  
• Project Gutenburg: Bored? Get a book off Project Gutenburg. This is a depository of text that have gone out of copyright. Roughly speaking, this is any book published before 1925. It's great, you have all the Sherlock Holmes stories and Tarzan, as well as any book that the authors have released (e.g. The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling). The only downside is that thanks to the so-called Mickey Mouse copyright extension act nothing will move out of copyright until after 2019 at the soonest. But enjoy what there is while you can!
  
  
  
• Metacrawler: Just before Google came along, there was metacrawler. It searched search engines and aggregated results. Five search engines were better than one. And it was fast. It eschewed complicated, heavy interfaces in favour of a page with one search box and two links and nothing else. I don't know if they knew about Metacrawler (I can't believe they didn't) but Google picked a lot of this up (including at first using Yahoo as a meta-search engine) and went on to become the goliath it is today. Metacrawler somehow didn't get it and it thought more was better and got less as a result.
  
  
  
• Yahoo!Photos: Before, if you wanted to put pictures on the web, you had to do it all by hand. Edit the pictures. Upload the pictures. Make the thumbnails. Make the directory. And then, Yahoo did something clever: They allowed you to upload pictures directly and they handled all the processing for you. I'm not sure who the first were to do this, but Yahoo did it well. Yahoo was how I could get pictures from my camera to the Internet in extra quick time.
  
• ICQ: ICQ came before Yahoo!Messenger, so it gets the place of honour, although I have by now shifted over to Yahoo as my main message client. Although not strictly a website, this Internet chat client was the Thing I Had Been Waiting For on the net ever since the good old days in University when ytalk kept me in touch with my friends. Even if they were only in the lab next door. Just to show you what an early adopter I was, my number was 4441202, and now numbers reach nine digits. However, it's been so long since I used it that I've either forgotten the password or the account has been disabled.
  
• images.google Now how cool was that when it came out? I could finally search the web for desktop-sized images of Audrey Hepburn. It was incredibly clever at the time, and I still don't see anyone making a better image search engine for the Web. It doesn't always get it completely right, but it needs to only get it right once to be a success.
  
• Babelfish: Named after the fictional species of fish in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Alta Vista's Babelfish tool does pretty much what it's literary counterpart does: translate foreign languages. Now, you can read my homepage in French (or at least, part of it). Even if it's not perfect, it's free and it's usable.
  

These are all things that are now recognised as cool. There are other websites out there that I think are very cool, but have yet to hit the general consciousness:

• epinions: The website that I believe hinted at the power of blogging before blogger made it big. The consumer review website was so broad that you could write an opinion on just about anything and there would be a category for it to fall under. OK, so there isn't a category called Why-The-War-In-Iraq-Sucks, but you can write a review on War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know. The real power is that readers can rate the articles and those that are valued float to the top, so it is a self-organising hierachy. I know, SlashDot does pretty much the same thing, but this is one I feel I 'discovered' myself.
  
• CafePress: Way back when I was working for MDC, I said that if we really wanted to drive e-commerce in Malaysia, we had to make it easy for people to take it up. What we needed, more than promotion campaigns, was a cookie-cutter method for companies to sell stuff online. This was before CafePress was launched, and it gives the best example I know of making a difficult thing simple. I can now sell a t-shirt online, with my logo on it, in less than five minutes. Really incredible. I really wish the e-perolehan guys would look at this.
  
• Lulu: This site and CafePress should be talked about in the same breath, I guess. While CafePress makes it easy for you to sell physical things like t-shirts and mugs, Lulu focusses on intellectual property such as books, music and photographs. That's right, you can write and sell your book online without looking for a publisher or having to pay somebody up-front. The clever thing that they've done this as a community so that if you're looking for photographs for your book, you can search through other peoples' libraries and then incorporate their images into your work, for an appropriate agreed-upon royalty. You can also collaborate musically with people online. If you should be so interested, you can also buy some of my photos from there (but friends need to only ask and I shall email to them for free!).
  
• Jabber: This is the open-source version of all those chat protocols you see out there. Back when it first started, having a Jabber client meant you could use that one client to chat to people on Yahoo, ICQ and MSN, but then some companies started to make life difficult. I don't really use a jabber client now because most of my friends don't use it, but I have faith that it being open will mean that things will snowball. Unless, of course, somebody opens up their proprietary protocols.
  
• Wikipedia: Wiki is a tool that enables people who read your webpage to edit it, and Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. How on Earth is this a good idea? Wouldn't it result in chaos? Well, no, it doesn't, although this may have to do more with its obscurity than anything else. The roots of this project is in community sharing and in this case the commodity is knowledge - which pretty much is the whole point of the World Wide Web in the first place. My contribution? The history section on Kuala Lumpur.
  
  
  
• dmoz: aka The Open Directory Project. What's good about Yahoo? Human beings are doing the work of organising the data. What's bad about Yahoo? All of them work for Yahoo. Now you too can implement a web directory under an area that you intimately know and love. dmoz is a work of passion and isn't likely to pay the bills, but at least you get to organise the Internet the way you'd like it. Well, you and 50,000 other people. How successful is it? Well, if you've used Google, you've probably used dmoz, because the Google directory (which is also searched) is dmoz.
  

What do you think? Do I know what I'm talking about? I know I don't, because I didn't think Amazon was going to make it and I was skeptical about how popular Blogger was going to become. But two out of lots ain't bad.