DemoGirl

I was waiting tables a few years back and a person at one of my tables made this comment to me, “Aww, you have a little lisp! How cute!”. I quickly shot him a look that my friends and family know all too well and walked away. For a long time after that I was so self conscious about my speech – and that feeling briefly came back today while doing the audio for this screencast. Say the word “Thoof” a few times over and you’ll know what I mean. OK, now for the real reason you’re here.

Thoof is a site that wants to find news articles, websites, and links to things on the web that cater to your liking. All you need to do is read a story. If you like it, great, keep on reading. If you don’t like it you can mark it as “not interesting” and Thoof will use that to make future recommendations. You don’t have to click on an article to let Thoof know you won’t like it. By not clicking on it you’re already letting Thoof know that you don’t want to be bothered. All of the articles you click on are automatically stored for you and you can remove them later as needed. Another great feature is that you can suggest changes to be made to the summary and tags linked to the article. All of the articles are submitted by the Thoof community and they vote on whether or not the changes should be made. Here’s my screencast tour of Thoof:

Flash Demo 3m15s

I know, I know, my title is corny but that’s what it is.  MyAOL is a personalized startpage suite.  There are three pages to start with.  MyPage – which comes stocked with your widgets, Mgnet – a visual recommendation service, and Favorites – a home for your feeds and bookmarks.  There are plenty of widgets to choose from and they even provide a nice list of feeds to get you started.  The visual discovery service, Mgnet, lets you browse through photos related to stories and allows you to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down so it can learn what you like.  Here’s my screencast tour of myAOL:

Flash Demo 4m20s

Zoho has an office suite of web based applications that seems to be growing every time I go back to the site.  For some reason I never noticed Zoho Polls way down at the bottom of their homepage.  It was released in April of last year but is so easy to use I thought I’d give you a quick look.  Here’s my screencast tour of Zoho Polls:

Flash Demo 2m30s

Pownce is a fun way to send notes, links, files, events, and all your other “stuff” to your friends. It’s been compared to twitter and Jaiku over and over so I’m not even going to get into that. After you receive your golden ticket (Pownce invite) create your profile and add your friends. You can then compose messages and choose to have all your friends or specific friends to be the recipient. It’s easy to add links, files (up to 10MB), and fill out a quick form to announce an event. If you don’t want to deal with going to your Pownce page every time you want to read messages or sent notes, you can install the desktop software that lets you use Pownce and it’s wonderfulness just like your IM client. Here’s my screencast tour of Pownce:

Flash Demo 4m17s

Open Source Food is a recipe sharing site that seems to take pride in the way food looks as well as tastes.  Once signed up, members can rate recipes, save them to favorites, leave suggestions and tips – you get what I mean.  But the beauty I found in Open Source Food are the photos members have paired with their recipes.  It makes my stomach growl just browsing through various categories.

One thing I would like to see added are tags so you can find recipes easier, but other then that it’s simple and tantalizing!  Here’s my screencast tour of Open Source Food:

Flash Demo 3m43s

GrandCentral is a service that gives you one number to control all of your phones. When adding contacts to your address book you can place them into a group. You can then decide which of your phones will ring when a member of a specific group calls your GC (GrandCentral) number. You can also use different voicemail recordings for each group and choose a different ring each group will hear when they call you. When someone calls you on your GC number you have the option to screen your calls on your computer and actually listen to them leaving a voicemail. If it’s someone you want to talk to you can answer the phone. If not, you can send their number to spam or choose to call them later.

I created a screencast for GC last year but decided to do a new one today as they’ve recently been acquired by Google (congrats guys!) and the site looks a lot different. They’ve also added more killer features. GrandCentral is currently not accepting new users but I have invites for the first five people that leave me their email address and first and last name in the comments. Here’s my screencast tour of GrandCentral:

Flash Demo 7m39s

Update:  Sorry, I don’t have any more invites but I’ll be sure to let you know if I get more!   

SeeqPod is a music search engine that gives you playable results. It doesn’t stop there though. After you submit your search, a list of all the available songs by the artist will appear and you can add them to the SeeqPod player. You can then create a playlist of all the songs and even watch YouTube videos, if available. You can share your playlists with friends, embed them on your website or blog, and discover new music related to the artist you originally searched for. I’ve been playing with it all day and I love it! Here’s my screencast tour of SeeqPod:

Flash Demo 3m2s

Symbaloo brings all of the things you search for on a daily basis to one place. It’s customizable, as a start page should be, and it comes preloaded with all the basics – Google Search, Wikipedia, YouTube, airline ticket prices, Google Maps, you name it. You can remove any of the modules you don’t like and add more from their current catalog. Symbaloo is still in beta and hopefully will be adding the ability to create an account, so you can access your settings from other computers, and the ability to create your own modules. Here’s my screencast tour of symbaloo:

Flash Demo 2m54s