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Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
I have used a TON of different Web apps in the last ten months. Whether I hear about an app, read about it, or am pitched by a PR company, I have a lot of different applications coming across my various inboxes on a daily basis.
For the most part, I love trying these applications – they’re usually fun and useful, and I just enjoy getting to play around and test out a given site. But as I test drive more and more applications, I’ve noticed that there are a few features and issues that make the difference between me trying it, ceasing to care and moving on, and actually integrating a given app into my daily life.
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Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
The Web is full of odd trends, and bizarre things that get incredibly popular for no particular reason. Some things are funny, some are just weird, and some feature small children coming home from the dentist and wondering, “is this real life?”
These trends and fads on the Web are called memes, for some reason completely beyond me. Whatever the reason, they explode, and are the thing everyone’s talking about – at least for a little while.
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The beta tag is gone, the use of extensions seems to be imminent, and Google Chrome looks poised to become the next big thing on the Web-browser market. I’ve been using it for a while, and grow to like it more and more every time I discover something new and excellent that Chrome can do to make my browsing even better.
And there sure are a lot of things that fall into that category. Chrome does neat things with your history, your searching, your most visited pages, and a number of other parts of the browsing experience.
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Over the last several months, the American and World economies have entered periods of significant downturn. The scale of these problems, as well as their duration, is still largely unknown. One thing is obvious, though- at least in the near future, money is going to be tight for just about everyone, offline and on.
The Web is feeling this crunch, especially those businesses either based or extended onto the Web. Venture capital is hard to come by, because there simply isn’t the amount of expendable cash there once was. Advertising is down, because it’s both unproven and expendable for most corporations. Companies are dying, there are fewer start-ups than before, and in many ways the industry is suffering.
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This is one of those sites you never really think about until you use it. Then, suddenly, you can’t live without it.
Joongel calls itself "Internet, the Easy Way." In reality, it’s a way to search a number of the most popular sites in any given category, and to do a lot of web-scouring all in one place.
When you search Joongel, you specify two things: the query (whatever you’re searching for) and the category (you choose from a drop-down menu). Once you click "search" you get results from 10 of the most highly regarded sites within the category you chose.
For instance: let’s say you’re searching videos for monkeys. Maybe you just love videos of monkeys. Type "Monkeys" into the bar, select "Videos" from the Category list, and hit search. You get to choose between videos about monkeys, and how-to monkey videos. (I’m not sure what those are…)
Joongel then loads searches for YouTube, AOL Video, MySpace, Yahoo Video, Google Video, MSN Video, Dailymotion, Veoh, Metacafe, and Blinkx. With one click, you can switch between all the different sites and find all the videos about monkeys that you could ever want or need.
The categories are plentiful (everything from Shopping to Health to Q&A), the sites are smartly chosen, and the site generally works really well. I’m starting to use it as a research tool, because it allows me to search a bunch of different places all at once, and not have to deal with opening and closing tabs, navigating between engines, and all the other insanity.
One other nice touch- if you choose "general search" as the category for the search, you get a basic Google search returned to you. It’s a small thing, and definitely not what Joongel is for, but it’s a nice feature.
For Firefox and Internet Explorer users, Joongel provides plugins for the search bar. What this means is that you can add a shortcut to a Joongel search in a given category, and search there in one click.
Joongel is very Web 2.0, giving heavy emphasis to user-based sites. They’re crowdsourcing your search results, and it makes your searches both more focused and more fruitful.
