Bottletalk

I talked about the progressive specialization of social networks and things are going fast forward in this trend. Now the users of Bottletalk can share impressions about the wines that they have tasted and about the best harvests.

Bottletalk is a directed social net about the world of wine, where users can add the wines that they have tasted or would like to taste, and post their own experiences about the wines through comments and tags.

Tags are useful for searching a type of wine of among the tag-cloud and know the opinion and the appraisal of other users.

Just make sure you don't post to many labels this holiday season. There should be a parallel site named hangovertalk.com.

tag: bottletalk, social networks

Koolanoo

Guess what service is this cool James Bond Video promoting:



Koolanoo is a new specialized social networking site that caters to Jewish users. It offers the required features in this sort of product; messages, events, forums, photo albums and even a dating section all for a free sign up. Progressive specialization of networking sites was bound to happen, as generalist sites such as Friendster are to clobbered by users to be of any practical use. We will see more and more sites articulated around some particular axis (be it religion, beliefs, profession), and this will form tightly united and productive communities.

Data for the masses

If you like data you we will find Swivel, a quite curious service. It allows registered users to upload their own data sets in CSV format, obtained from a web page, from excel sheets or even from pdf files, and the site will generate all sorts of graphs for this data.

You can make the data public that the rest of users are now who can embed the graphs in their web pages thanks to the facilitated code, to leave comments, to value them, to edit some options, and the most interesting feature, to make comparisons with other graphs and run correlation analysis between different variables.

Some really weird correlations are being established in the site (global warming fits almost everything that goes up).

Online Discounts

Online savy people can save a ton of money this holiday season by buying their presents in the Internet and getting discounts and coupons for major retailers. ncnatural.com is one of the places that host a directory of this sort of Online Coupons. The page is updated frequently with dozens of online merchants. The site is easy to navigate and some coupons do not need to fuzz with offer codes, just follow the link to the Merchant and voilá, save some dollars on this year compulsive Christmas goodwill. You can get some books from Amazon or some Refurbished iPods at incredible prices. Just remember no to buy Ipods as presents, because everybody has already one. Other merchants include Overstocks, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Expedia, Disney and Dell. Happy buying and just forget that January is around the corner.

4 things that make me feel in the 21st century

With all the hype built by legions of science-fiction writers, let's admit that the 21st century has been a complete letdown. Where are the personal flying devices and virtual reality gadgets?

Personally, I have to rely in some few and scattered things that make me feel in the 21st century with their instantaneous futuristic aura, it's the 21stesque touch:

- Calatrava's architecture: His buildings and bridges blow my mind.


- The Sony Reader: e-ink has fulfilled Borges' sand book vision.


- The Nintendo Wii: one step closer to Star Trek virtual playground.


- Second Life: ultracapitalistic society with commandments encoded in the genes (thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal). Perfect society? Hell no, but you can cruise some chicks there.




tags: second life, calatrava, wii, sony reader