Tupalo, a new webservice by Vienna based 9tomorrows, is a service that lets users review everything in their neighborhood. From restaurants to record stores or independent shopping opportunities.
Right now their service covers eleven international cities, including Berlin, San Francisco, Toronto and of course Vienna.

The interface is quite intuitive, linking every location to a Google map, which is not only visually pleasing but also quite handy.

In the tradition of every web 2.0 service, they provide all the functionality of a social network as well, including friend requests and a messaging system (what would our lives be like without friend requests?).

Reviews can of course be tagged and the respective city’s homepage displays latest entries and latest active users.

It’s a service I for myself could see using more in the future, but I think they should consider creating a German version for the German speaking cities. Not because I don’t like their English, but because it’s probably a deal-breaker for the not-so-web2.0-crowd when they have to write reviews about their own home-towns in a foreign language.

All in all the app is a whole lot of fun really, as it not only invites you to review, but also to search and explore, and maybe find that one favourite cafe you didn’t think existed.

Screenshots (click for full-size, because yes, they look like crap when they’re that small):

The city default page

The review creation interface

Finally, the profile page, essential to any respectable social network. Fortunately, not all profile pages have to look like MySpace.

It’s time for some more reviews. Focus: music related services (the more acute among you may have gathered that from my rather ingenious headline).

Media Master

Let’s jump right in and look at the first one: MediaMaster. While the name may be on the boring side, the service itself is rather interesting. What is it? It’s an online music player! So last year? Well, here’s the twist: you can upload your own music collection, and as far as I have seen, you can upload as much as you want! And then, whenever you are using a computer with a nice enough broadband connection, you can let them stream the music back to you. They also offer a widget, so you can proudly display your music on your blog.

Uploading is easy, especially since they use Java to do so, making the whole venture cross-platform, which is of course music in the ears of a Linux advocate like me (yes, pun intended).

The player looks and is basic, but that’s alright when all you want to do is have some player play your music, don’t you think?

For the more visually inclined among you, a screenshot (click for the full-sized one):

MyStrands

Service number two is MyStrands, which is similar to Last.FM, as it uploads information about the music you listen to, and then weaves connections between your collection and other users’ collections. Desired outcome: good recommendations of new music and a bunch of like-minded friends.

Yesterday they issued a plugin for Amarok, my favourite music player in KDE, which does exactly what needs to be done to use the service: send information about my listening habits to my profile. That’s a great move, because hey, they now have me as a user.

Right now I can’t say too much about their ability to actually provide good recommendations or that wonderful new friend who listens to the exact same things I do. They do have a nice design, even though it seems a bit more cluttered and ad-filled than Last.FM’s. Maybe they should consider expanding the design to make use of the screen real estate most people have nowadays. Having a service provide that many features on a fixed-size design is really not too practical.

Finally, a screenshot:

Flickr updated their offerings with a new feature called Collections. It lets you add sets and pictures into one big collection, creating a set of sets of sorts (I’m proud of that sentence). Read more about it on the Flickr blog.

Take a look at my collection of photos shot in the fair city of Vienna.

And here’s a screenshot of the mosaic Flickr creates from the collection of sets: