The following is a continuance of my previous article, Nine Websites You Should Know About, But Probably Don't. We decided that there were still some extremely useful websites that were left out, so I'm writing a continuation article to cover these sites.
Why It's The Best: A one stop shop for all your instant messaging clients - Meebo allows you to sign into all of your instant-messaging services into the browser window, without having to download any of the individual clients (MSN, AOL/ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber/Gtalk).
Genre: Product Reviews.
With all the product reviews floating around the internet, it's hard to know who's behind these reviews. Review sites like Epinions pay their users to write reviews, so most of these reviews are written by people who never even bought or used the product.On Buzzillions.com the majority of reviews are written by people who have been verified to have actually purchased the product, so the reviews are quality oriented, unbiased, and trustworthy. (See how the Verified Buyer system works) Also, they used a "tag based review system" where you can find products and reviews that match your user profile, needs, and interests.
Genre: Music.
Why It's The Best: An easy to use and extremely accurate music recommendations system, all you have to do is type in the name of your favorite band or artist, and immediately the site will start playing songs which you can thumbs up, thumbs down, or skip over. The more you tell the system what you like and don't like, the more accurate the recommendations will be. There's no registration and no downloads required.
Genre: Community based lending.
Why It's The Best: Prosper is a site where you can lend people money for an interest rate you set the minimum to and bid in increments of $50 to $25,000 on loan listings you select. If you're on the borrowing side, you can list how much you want to borrow and set your maximum interest rate, and lenders can compete for the loan by lowering their offered interest rate. Lenders can easily check the borrowers credit grade to assess their risk. Read more under How it Works.
Genre: Local reviews.
Why It's The Best: Yelp is the best local guide in the San Francisco Bay, Chicago, New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle, and pretty much every city that matters in the U.S. You can read reviews on everything from restaurants to home services within your area, and find which places to try out and which to avoid.
Genre:Auction site.
Why It's The Best: Etsy is essentially an eBay for all things handmade. Users can buy and sell homemade goods, promoting a vision for a better economy.
Genre: Textbook renting.
Why It's The Best: Chegg.com is a site I randomly stumbled upon through one of the founders I met through Facebook. Chegg provides a new way of getting your college textbooks for cheap by renting them for a fraction of their cost price. Additionally, Chegg promotes an "eco-friendly" business model by planting a tree for each textbook rented. They have an inventory of over 2 million book Titles.
Genre: GrandCentral gives you “One number for life” which lets you forward all your calls from any number, and answer calls at any phone you want.
Why It's The Best: You can easily switch phones in the middle of a phone call, screen your calls, check your voicemail by phone/email/or online, organize/store/and record calls, customized voicemails, and a lot more. For the full description and features, click here.
Genre: Sells cool stuff for cheap.
Why It's The Best: Woot sells one consumer electronics product a day until it is sold out (which is typically very fast since they offer it at a major discount). Users can discuss the product up for sale on the forum, and they show you all kinds of stats like percentage sales per hour, quantity breakdown, revenue they incurred for that product, and so on. A very fun way to get really cheap electronics!
[via webupon]
