Wednesday, September 2, 2009

All the Top News on One Simple Page: Most Emailed News


Surfing around, sometimes when I see an intriguing ad, I'll click on it, and sometimes, it'll lead to something good. This time, I hit the jackpot. Most Emailed News (or the cheesily awesome way of doing it, Most Em@iled News) is a very simple website. In fact, there's really only one page on the entire site. It just compiles all of the most emailed news from the major sources, and puts them all into a less than beautiful but very effective list.
It's got the top 5 most emailed articles or videos from 17 different sources, including the likes of the New York Times, Time Magazine, Digg, BBC, Wired, USA Today and Youtube.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "Well, that's pretty useless." That's exactly what I thought when I first came across this. But soon enough, you'll realize that not only does this give you the most interesting and relevant news, but it saves you tons of time in contrast to you doing all this manually.
Well, there's not much else to say about Most Emailed News, it's simple, cool and very effective.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Get Invites to the Hottest New Sites with the Original Invite Exchange: Invite Share

When a new and unique website or web service comes out, often, companies will not grant the general public access. Instead, they will employ the invite system, where new users are only allowed in when an existing user sends an invite to them. Unfortunately though, the original invites are generally sent to a list of famous people to raise hype, and so unless you have a circle of famous friends, you aren't going to get many invites very easily. You may be thinking, "Well, why in the world would any company want to do that?" Really, it's quite an effective strategy that is often used by Google to raise hype and test the service.
Still, it's an inconvenience to us humble users, but the good people at TechCrunch have found a way to jump this hurdle, with their new service Invite Share.
As suggested by the name, the concept of this site is simple; different people exchange invites to different sites for everyone's benefit. So when one user happens to get an invite to say, Google's GrandCentral, they can join and then send out invites to other members of Invite Share. And the more invites to GrandCentral he sends out, the higher priority he gets to have when he signs up for an invite to another site. What this means is that when he wants to get invited to a site through Invite Share, he'll "Add his name to the list". This puts his name somewhere on a list of users waiting on an invite, depending on your priority rating.
It seems useful and foolproof, doesn't it? The only problem with this site, as with many others, is the popularity. By this, I mean, there's too much popularity on the receiving end but not enough popularity on the sending end. The waiting lists for some sites get to 1000 users and by the time you get an invite, the service you're waiting for might even be released to the public. However, it's not hard to gain priority; if you've just gotten invited to a private service, throw a party, then, join Invite Share and your priority will skyrocket with every invite you send.
And bear in mind that over 100,000 invitations have already been sent and there are 54 sites you can sign up for, so you pretty much can't go wrong giving Invite Share a try.