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Cut your tunes some slack, man
Forget Last.fm. Never mind Pandora. Don’t even think about iTunes. If you want the ultimate in fully customizable Internet radio, get your slackin’ ass over to Slacker.com. Like Last.fm and Pandora, Slacker.com makes it mindlessly easy to create custom radio stations by typing in an artist you like and letting the site automatically compile a playlist of similar or related artists. The interface is way slicker than its competitors’, but that’s just the start of its draw. Soon Slacker will offer a portable player that’ll let you take your stations on the road and a satellite player for your car.
Free (player hardware to be sold
separately), www.slacker.com
Hundreds of widgets for your online life
Most blogs are about as interesting as the cracks in a sidewalk. Some even less so. Widgetbox gives you the tools to add cool, dynamic content to your blog in the form of hundreds of widgets for just about any purpose. Need to add instant lolcats to your front page? Select the I Can Has Cheezburger widget, copy the code, and paste it into your blog. But there’s more to the site than mere diversions. Widgetbox also gives you the tools to create your own widgets—either by turning your blog into a “blidget” that others can subscribe to or by coding something unique and adding it to the Widgetbox collection.
Free, www.widgetbox.com
A free MS Office alternative that lets you rock while you work.
Work sucks. If they didn’t pay you so well to do it, you probably wouldn’t bother. So why would you want to drop a few hundred bucks on a suite of business apps when you can get the same features online? Ajax13 is one of many free office suite web apps, offering a word processor, an Excel-compatible spreadsheet program, a drawing app, and a PowerPoint-compatible presentation program. These aren’t sloppy editors, either—each includes a standard button bar that’s loaded with familiar tools. Plus, Ajax13 comes with ajaxTunes, a mini music player loaded with Internet radio stations, so you can chill with some tunes while you labor for the Man.
Free, www.ajax13.com
One-stop IM shop for your web browser
Why anyone even bothers running a single-service IM app anymore, we just can’t figure out. And now Meebo is giving us cause to wonder whether installed clients are even worth the trouble these days. With its clean Ajax-powered interface, Meebo gives you slick, intuitive access to all the major IM services, including AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. The Meebo client runs within your browser, and like Google Talk, pops up with a single click. Just create a Meebo account and then link it to all your IM accounts for one-login access without having to bloat your PC with some overblown, adware-ridden chitchat client.
Free, www.meebo.com
Share big files without making enemies
Remember when 1MB was considered a large file attachment? Well, even if it doesn’t seem all that big anymore, many mail servers still won’t accept more than a megabyte of attachments on a single message. And even if they did, it would be just plain rude to jam your friends’ inboxes with massive files. Yousendit lets you send single attachments of up to 100MB for free and gives you 1GB of bandwidth. If you need more than that, premium accounts let you send 2GB files with up to 200GB of bandwidth per month.
Free for basic account/$5–$30 per month for premium account,
www.yousendit.com
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