Monthly Archive for August, 2006

BookMooch - Swapping books made easy

Update: LibraryThing mastermind Tim has finished integrating BookMooch (and a few other book-swapping sites) into LibraryThing. Yay! Finally I can try to put my Java book to good use! Read the announcement on the LibraryThing blog.

bookmoochBookMooch, another service focusing on books was recently released. While one of my most favourite Web2.0 ventures, LibraryThing, is focusing primarily on the theoretical aspect of a social web for book lovers, namely being able to compare ones collection to others, write reviews, etc., BookMooch is actually going one step further:

Their slogan “New Life for Old Books” very much summarises what the service is about. Swap your old books for other people’s old books. The idea is simple, and so is the implementation. When you sign up, BookMooch makes you enter 10 book you’d like to have, then you can enter books you would like to swap with others. To fill your list of the 10 desired books, you can also import your Amazon wishlist, which is a nice idea. The whole thing is managed by a points system, so people don’t start mooching books off of others without sending some out themselves.

The service is a very good idea for people with limited budgets, or people with limited space. The only thing that’s missing now is a reciprocal API to LibraryThing.

bookmooch frontpage

PS: I just saw that they are actually linking to the LibraryThing entries of the books! Nice! Now let me synchronize the two services, and I’m one happy book lover!

Flickr and Geotagging - together at last

After I wrote about loc.alize.us, the service that mashes together Google maps and Flickr to support the geotagging of photos, Flickr today revealed their own geotagging integration.

The tagging is done inside the Organize section of a person’s account, a new tab called Map appeared there today. They use Yahoo maps, which unfortunately don’t support all of Europe in as great a detail as Google maps does. The upside is that Flickr recognised the photos I had already tagged with loc.alize.us and imported them nicely into their own map.

Tagging is easy, as you can just drag and drop your photos in there. The fact that it’s done inside the organising area makes for much faster tagging than with loc.alize.us, but as mentioned above, Yahoo maps simply aren’t as good as Google maps. I hope they’ll catch up soon.

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when you drag a photo onto the map:
flickr maps admin

It’s also possible to just drag and drop a bunch of photos in there. That’ll be a time-saver, once I decide to actually tag all of my 900+ photos.

When you look at your photostream and click the map button, they show you the map with the tagged pictures indicated in pink:
flickr map view

Overall, the whole implementation is really quite smooth, and apart from the fact that they have to use their master’s map service, it’s a good addition to the service. By the way, before you can start tagging, they show a little disclaimer about privacy, and let you decide the default permissions for who can view your geo-tags. Nice that someone’s thinking about the fact that there are indeed a whole bunch of weird people out there, for whom geotagging of photos is probably a recurring wet dream.

Get rid of fat with Traineo

traineoIf you’re like me, you eat too much and don’t do a lot of exercise (If you’re really like me, you’ve actually picked up running but noticed your legs falling off and decided to forget the idea of looking like a modern-day Adonis in favour of, well, legs). Right, so to work against that development of no walk, much eat, a new service recently went online.

Traineo, a name that somehow doesn’t sound like a seasoned copy-writer’s idea, is a service that lets people sign up, add their stats, and then gives them the option of stating a desired weight. From then on, each day they sign in, they add their daily calories, workout and all sorts of other health/body/weight related things. They also offer the option of adding other people as motivators, so the whole thing really becomes one big, social weight-loss fest, on the way to everyone’s biggest goal: The desired weight!

The implementation of the service is very smooth, with an abundance of AJAX giving the whole thing a nice, rounded look (ha, pun intended!). Overall, the service is a nice addition to the lifehack-niche of Web2.0 services.

And hey, maybe it helps me in my quest to finally fit into my Rubyred Labs shirt.

Screenshots below:

The quick intro on the homepage
Their homepage gives people a quick intro to the service.

The private section
The members section lets users add all sorts of information, from their work-out routine to up to ten motivators.




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