The Big Websites List 2012: 72 Sites You Don't Want To Miss

10 Minute Mail A lot of sites these days offer perks for users who sign up for an account, and that frequently requires a verified email address. If you don’t feel like sharing your email address with everyone on the Internet who asks for it, you’ll need to use a site like 10 Minute Email, which makes it incredibly easy to create a temporary email address you can use to bypass verification.

Academic Earth You don’t need to quit your job and move across the country to attend an elite university. You can sit in on video lectures and complete courses, some of which are for college credit, given at our nation’s top schools—all from the comfort of your desktop. Search by subject, university, or instructor, or get started with Editor’s Picks.

Accident Sketch Let’s face it, the aftermath of even the most minor fender bender is a major headache. Accident Sketch provides a simple, one-stop resource to file claim paperwork and photos, but its coolest feature is the eponymous Accident Sketch feature. The surprisingly robust Flash app has a ton of options, meaning your days of rough sketches on the back of a folded up napkin are a thing of the past.

Browser Check What’s the leading attack vector these days on your machine? The hole-ridden plugins installed on your browser. Luckily, Browser Check has your back. This web-based scanner will check your browser’s plugins for known security holes and give you links to patches (if any exist). Don’t think you need it? We dare you to check—no, we double-dare you.

Fax Zero We can’t tell you why some people require that you send documents to their ancient fax machines, but it does happen, and it’s a pain. When you have to play ball with the technologically backward, use Fax Zero, which lets you send faxes from your computer for free.

Codeacademy Want to learn code, but are too intimidated to delve solo into the dusty mire of instructional programming books? Thankfully, there’s Codeacademy, a step-by-step interactive way to learn code. Codeacademy further incentivizes the learning process by giving out video game–esque “Achievements” for completing its easily manageable bite-size mini-lessons. Looks like the dog trainer was right—positive reinforcement works.

Wordle Remember word clouds? Wordle takes text input—either a plaintext paste job or an RSS feed—and generates a cloud from the most frequently used words. The more often a word is used, the bigger it is. It’s not a new concept, but Wordle’s automatic cloud creation and its font, color, and layout flexibility, make it stand out.

Stolen Camera Finder Many modern digital cameras include the camera’s serial number in the Exif data stored inside each photo. Stolen Camera Finder crawls the Internet searching for digital photos and collecting the serial numbers of the cameras that took them. If your camera is stolen, you can use the site to extract the camera’s serial number from a photo (or enter the serial number manually) and search its database for a match.

PopURLS You’re probably familiar with sites like Reddit and Digg, which aggregate popular, user-submitted content from all over the web. If visiting even that many pages is too much work for you, check out PopURLS, which collects the top posts from all the most popular sites on the web on a single page.

Big Ass Message If you’ve got a message you want to convey with conviction, this is the place to do it. Simply type your message into the box, choose the Style (including basic, magic, heart, and hypno), copy the url, and send that big-ass message to anyone you please.

Camel Camel Camel Are you sure that you’re getting the best deal on the gizmo you’ve been salivating over? Point your browser at this site to see historical data on the price. The site tracks prices of products at Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, and Backcountry.com so you can see if now is truly the time to buy, say, that Canon EOS 7D. We say yes, as the Camel tells us that camera is currently sitting at its lowest price since its introduction.

Can You Run It? We usually go by the rule that if you have to ask if your PC can run a certain game, you probably shouldn’t bother. But that’s the snob in us. Fortunately for everyone else, there’s this site. Just pick any game, and a Java or ActiveX applet will analyze your PC to see if you meet the minimum specs or not. To feel even more insulted, hit the Recommended button.

Coffee and Power If the weak economy has you feeling pinched, consider selling your services in small increments on Coffee and Power, an online marketplace of odd jobs. And some jobs are odd indeed—a crocheted octopus, anyone?—but many are very practical. Posts consist of both services for sale as well as small jobs in need of a provider. Presumably, somewhere in the mix, money is being made.

Dead Pixel Test Here’s a test you should run as soon as you take that shiny new LCD monitor out of its box—and repeat at least weekly while it’s under warranty. If your display has or develops a pixel defect, pointing your browser to this website will immediately expose it. Pick the color you wish to test, tap F11 to put your browser into full-screen mode, and study the screen for defects.

Deal Extreme Like all nerds, sometimes we’ll take crazy-good deals over quality and customer service. That’s Dealextreme.com in a nutshell. This site is a virtual flea market and Chinatown store rolled into one. Where else could you find everything from flashlight parts to USB cables for dirt cheap? Sure, some of the parts may be knockoffs, and good luck with the documentation, but we guarantee that you can’t spend fewer than 10 minutes browsing deals.

Debatepedia Can’t decide which side of an issue you should take? Debatepedia, produced by the International Debate Education Association, presents the pros and cons of thousands of topics in a wiki format. You’ll find summaries of cogent arguments with links to the full online essays, op/eds, and articles.

EasyBib After laboring over a research paper, the last thing you want do is carefully format a bibliography of the works cited. EasyBib handles this tedium for you. A vast searchable database gives you access to bibliographical info for books, newspapers, journals, and websites, and then formats your selections in one complete list, following MLA guidelines.

Eset Online Scanner There’s no such thing as anti-malware scanners that are capable of finding every evil on your machine, so we recommend doing an occasional secondary scan using another AV engine, such as ESET’s Online Scanner. Just download the plugin, then once a week or month, after you’ve done your normal scans, task ESET with double-checking.

File Destructor 2.0 We’re not ones to subvert the higher education system, but we recognize that every once in a while you get behind on an assignment and need an extra day. That’s what the File Destructor is for—use it to generate a broken file, turn it in, then finish your assignment in the time it takes your professor to email you that something went wrong.

Hacker News A link-sharing site aimed squarely at the Silicon Valley in-crowd, Hacker News is a great place to find out what's hot in the world of hackers, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Adblock Plus OK, it’s not a website, per se, but the free browser extension Adblock Plus can improve the atmosphere of any website you visit by removing the ads. By default, ads are blocked on every site, but a button in your URL bar allows you to disable ad blocking at will. You can also create filters for any other offensive elements on the sites you visit.

FlipText Not a whole lot needs to be said about this website. You type in your text, it turns it upside down. It’s a little too much fun using it to mess with your friends. All you have to do is copy the new text and paste it where you want it.

Gazelle Gazelle is the online equivalent of American Pickers. But instead of waiting for two guys in a van to roll up in front of your house, you describe the item you wish to sell and Gazelle will offer a price based on its condition. If you think the price is fair, they’ll send you prepaid shipping materials and cut you a check after they receive the item. If they can’t pay you for the product, they’ll offer to recycle it (but you’ll pay for shipping).

Ge.tt Calling Ge.tt a file-sharing service is selling it a bit short. This real-time media publishing site lets you upload and publish documents, images, music, and videos, and share them with your friends instantly via email, direct link, or your social network of choice. A 100 percent pure web app, Ge.tt is as tiny as it ge.tts—the URL is a mere five characters long, and works without the need of Flash or Java.

Ghostery It’s true that our every move on the Internet is being monitored—usually with the intent of selling us something or selling information about us to someone else. Ghostery lets you “track the trackers.” At every site you visit, a list appears telling you which entities are keeping tabs on you at that moment—learn more and selectively block unwelcome guests.

Gifsound If you’ve ever seen an animated .gif and thought, “That’d be so much better with sound,” congratulations: You’ve just independently replicated the concept of video. It’s not always the right time for a video clip, though; sometimes a .gif with sound is really what you need. Pair any .gif with the audio from a YouTube clip; share and enjoy. Sample: bit.ly/sTZgL7.

Google Gravity For a bit of senseless fun, Google Gravity is equally fun to use and show to people. It’s Google, but with no gravity, and each of the buttons, including the search bar, can be dragged around the screen. You can even use the search bar as a baseball bat and knock the other buttons all around the webpage. Fun stuff.

Howjsay.com The brainchild of English language instructor Tim Bowyer, Howjsay is as simple as it is useful. Type in a word and Bowyer will pronounce it with impeccable diction. Howjsay also includes pronunciations for a handful of highbrow brands, so you can impress your date by ordering a glass of Courvoisier, Moët & Chandon, or Glenmorangie without sounding like a poseur.

Indaba Music Whether you want to create music online in its Java Applet Mantis recording software, or get in on the site’s many song and remix contests, the Indaba Music social community has become a ripe gathering place for aspiring musicians to gain exposure and valuable feedback. Free or paid members can upload and sell songs or submit music for contests bearing cash, royalties and other prizes.

Is It Old? Nothing’s more embarrassing than being called out on Twitter for your played-out YouTube link. This site’s simple search checks Twitter for the frequency and age of a link and lets you know if it’s the new hotness, or as played out as an arrow-in-the-knee joke.

Best of YouTube This is an aggregator site for viral videos, compiling all the most popular videos from YouTube throughout the day. The videos can then be voted on, and the overall consensus is displayed right there in the player, before you even hit Play.

Jet Punk Movie quizzes, geography quizzes, ’80s catchphrase quizzes, NFL quizzes, Fresh Prince lyrics quizzes… with new quizzes released every day. We like Countries of the World, which gives you 12 minutes to name all the countries you can. Quizzes range from fun and easy to fairly challenging.

Khan Academy Say you want to learn quadratic equations, or how to multiply polynomials, or even what a polynomial is—get to Khan Academy, where countless mathematical equations are explained and illustrated in clear detail on a virtual blackboard. In addition to the video lessons on math, science, and a number of other subjects, there are also practice exercises to help you put your new knowledge to use.

LastPass An easy-to-remember password is an insecure password, especially if you use the same passwords for everything. Use LastPass to generate and store ultra-secure, unique passwords for all your sites. With browser extensions and desktop and mobile versions available, you’ll always be able to access your passwords, but thanks to LastPass’s robust security auditing, strong master passwords, and optional two-factor authentication, bad guys won’t.

Dynamite Deals You can’t track the inventory of hundreds of ecommerce sites at once, but Dynamitedeals.com can. This web plugin for Firefox and Chrome lets you instantly see the price of an item on other sites. For example, while browsing a camera at one store, Dynamite Deals let us know that the same camera was available elsewhere for $50 less.

Louis vs. Rick Louis is a cat. Rick is his human. Rick teaches Louis how to use instant messenger, and thus is born a site dedicated to the IM conversations of a man and his cat. Written by Shane Cyr of the Selected Works, Selected Jerks podcast, LvR takes a hilarious look at Hannukah, cat territories, Caps Lock, litterboxes, house guests, and laser pointers from Louis’s perspective. Funnier than most conversations (human or feline).

Mafia Scum If you’ve been to a nerd gathering in the last few years, you’ve probably played Mafia—a social-engineering game of deception and deduction. It’s a lot of fun for a group of eight or more people, and you can find tons of rules and variations, and even play online at Mafiascum.net.

Minesweeper Online If you work in the kind of criminally un-fun office that removes even the built-in Windows games from your work computer, there’s hope for you yet. The classic timewaster Minesweeper is available in all its grid-based glory online, as a simple web app.

My Face When There’s a wide range of faces for a wide range of emotions, so sometimes emoticons just can’t get the point across. This site has hundreds of gathered photos of celebrities, cartoon characters, and yes, even normal people making ridiculous faces, ready to hotlink. You’ll never need an emoticon ever again.

My Parents Were Awesome Hard to believe, but at one point Pops was rolling around town on a motorcycle, and Mom was super fond of hot pants. A sepia-toned homage to the days before you got here, this site is a tribute to spandex, ’80s hair, horn-rimmed glasses, fringed vests—and more than a little about giving a shout out to family.

OER Commons Short for Open Educational Resources, OER Commons is a clearinghouse of teaching and learning materials that are free for anyone to use, share, and contribute to. Composed of works from various universities, libraries, scholarly collections, and individuals, OER covers a wide range of subjects geared to a wide range of grade levels in an easily searchable database. It’s a great tool for educators and self-learners alike.

Otomata Otomata is a generative sequencer that uses cellular automaton‑type logic in the form of sequenced cells functioning independently of one another in their respective internal states. Oh, you want it in English? It’s a music generator, which allows you to use a very interesting interface to change the pitch, tempo, and keys to create and record your own music. We warn you: Hours can be lost.

Pinterest Pinterest is half Google image search, half Tumblr, all gold. Users get a board where they can post images, videos, and links of everything from architecture to DIY, photography to science, gardening to fitness, etc. It’s a wide net, and a great way to get inspiration or instructions on a project or just to explore a subject you already enjoy.

Pixlr Looking to quickly edit an image on the go but don’t have the time, money, or bandwidth to snag a fully featured photo editing suite? Not to worry. Pixlr is like an ant—it’s tiny and lightweight, but also capable of some seriously impressive heavy lifting.

PrintFriendly Not every website has a print-friendly style sheet available for those of us who want to read articles on deadtreeware. PrintFriendly lets you turn any URL into a, well, print-friendly version of itself that you can then either print or convert to PDF. It’s smart, too—if the autoformatting doesn’t get rid of an element you don’t need, you can just click it in the preview window to delete it.

Procatinator They say that cats rule the Internet. So what better way to take over the universe than to take .gifs of cats, set them to popular but somehow thematically related music, and start a website with a punny name? Procatinator will in fact ruin all attempts you make at doing anything useful, but will also endlessly entertain you with mashups of a tabby cat punching the screen to Eye of the Tiger.

Put This On Put This On bills itself as “a web series about dressing like a grownup.” Through a series of instructional/inspirational videos, how-to guides, Q&A sessions, and even sales notifications, host Jesse Thorn and his nattily dressed contributors will help you up your style quotient without turning into a total office-drab dweeb. Bow tie optional.

Raptr Raptr.com is a free web service that synchs to your day-to-day gaming life—whether that means tracking your gameplay hours, achievements, or just keeping up with your online pals. The front page serves as a sort of topic hub that features news and events planned within the Raptr community. A must-have for serious gamers.

Rhymer This free online site displays rhymes for any proper English word you can think of. You’ll also find links to dictionary definitions and a thesaurus. Need some rhymes for your end-times rap about the coming apocalypse? How about “hardships,” “horsewhips,” and “conscripts”?

RunPee Runpee.com is equal parts hilarious and convenient. In addition to reviewing movies, the site editors make it their job to tell you at what point in any given movie you can run to the bathroom. According to Runpee.com, for example, 42 minutes into the film Red Tails is the best time to urinate, the cue being when a German fighter pilot says, “My god.” They’ll even tell you what you missed while you were gone!

Shady URL On a purely humorous level, Shady URL lets you have fun turning innocent URLs into highly suspicious ones. But it’s got a practical application, too. Send a Shady URL to someone you suspect of being careless about links—we’re looking at you, Mom and Dad—and see if they open it. Then give them a stern talking-to.

Snaggy If photo editing software just isn’t your thing, but you want to quickly share some screenshots, Snaggy’s got you covered. Snaggy cuts out the middleman entirely, letting you paste images directly from your clipboard to the website—you know, to save yourself those vital 20 seconds of pasting to Paint and saving locally.

Sodaplay If you thought playing with Lego bricks was an exercise in engineering, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Sodaplay features a variety of applets that are as much physics simulators as games. If you think you’ve got what it takes, go to Sodaplay.com and get building.

Spreaker Stop wasting your know-it-all loud-mouthery on people within earshot. Spreaker blasts your voice live to the Interwebs using nothing more than your computer's built-in mic. A virtual mixing console can add music and sound FX. A free membership gives you 20 hours of audio storage, 30 minutes per show, easy iTunes and Zune syndication, etc. Monthly subscription plans step up your gab game.

Stack Overflow Once you’ve gotten past the most basic steps on your journey to programming mastery, you’ll start to run into bugs, challenges, and questions that you just can’t figure out. No programmer is alone, thanks to great sites like Stack Overflow, which lets you ask a programming question and get quick answers from a community of experts.

Super Cook Pop quiz, hot shot: What can you make with a pork chop, sweet potato, and mayonnaise? Well, if you had just a little rosemary, you could make a nice balsamic-glazed pork chop. If you had a little onion, you could make Ed Zieba’s Famous Family Pork Chops. Just take a quick inventory of what’s in your pantry and fridge and enter them into Supercook.com for a quick recipe recommendation.

Swappa You got a fever. And the only cure is a new Android! Sell your old handset and find your new addiction all at one site. There's no listing fee; Swappa takes a flat $10 cut when the phone sells, and you'll be dinged with Paypal fees, as well. But it's still faster, cheaper, and probably less shady than Ebay. Paypal's buyer and seller protection plans have your back.

Synchtube One of the coolest features of Google+ is the ability to share with friends. Synchtube gets you that functionality without a Google account. You can organize into public or private rooms and share music and videos with your friends. Stream and share media from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, Ustream, SoundCloud, Imgur, SlideShare, Livestream, and more.

Tatoeba Project Tatoeba is Japanese for “for example,” and that sums up what the Tatoeba Project is all about. Tatoeba eschews a simple word-by-word library and instead has a searchable database of tons of example sentences from a wide variety of languages—many with voice clips. Now instead of just knowing random curse words, you can string together an entire grammatically correct epithet!

This Is My Jam Don’t bombard your friends with every song you play. There are already services for that. Instead, if there’s one song you’re really rocking out to, you can share it here. This Is My Jam will find a YouTube video or an .mp3 and embed it, so when you announce to the world, “This is my jam!” they’ll be able to jam along. If any of your Twitter or Facebook friends are on it, you’re already invited.

TinEye If you’re not sure of the source of a picture you see on the Internet, maybe TinEye can help. TinEye uses an image-interpreting algorithm and compares the picture to a database of more than 2 billion images on the web, so you can find out if the image you’re about to upvote is sweet, sweet original content or just another repost.

Topatoco Web artists make our lives better by publishing their work on the web for free. You can make sure your favorite artist has food, shelter, online access, ink, paper, and other necessities of life by shopping at Topatoco; buy T-shirts, books, coffee cups, and lots of other art-emblazoned goodies.

TripIt Whether you trot the globe or just know people who do, TripIt works as a master hub for seeing who's going where and when. It rounds up all your travel reservations from multiple sites into one schedule, adding maps, directions, and weather for the voyage. Connect with friends to share plans or book restaurants and tickets within TripIt. Apps for Android, iOS, WP7, and Blackberry keep it convenient.

Turntable.fm A mashup of social networking, streaming music/radio stations, and TokiDoki-esque avatars, this site is designed primarily to get people listening to music together, in real time. Enter rooms where DJs spin tunes, vote on what’s playing, and chat with other members. A good chunk of the rooms lean toward electronica, but there’s enough variety to please most.

Twitch TV For those who enjoy the voyeuristic, vicarious thrills of backseat gaming, we have TwitchTV. A spin-off of JustinTV, Twitch is all games all the time, from giant E-Sports event streams, to smaller enthusiast retro casts and everything in between. Yak it up with your buddies in the chat room as you check out a huge selection of channels, browsable by game and by caster.

Vector Magic What with photo-editing being nearly ubiquitous these days, having easily resizable images is a must. Vector Magic takes your humble legacy image files and converts them into infinitely scalable vector graphics. Great for logos, line art, and cartoons, the Vector Magic tracing tool even gives photos a cool, watercolor filter–like makeover.

Virus Total Why get one second opinion on the safety of a file when you can get 42? That’s what Virustotal.com does for you. Just upload a questionable file to the site, where a phalanx of antivirus engines will judge whether it’s malware or not.

WeVideo Looking like a dead ringer for Final Cut, this free online video editor is a much more limited, but also more accessible, option—no downloads required. Upload your own media and use the provided audio, transitions, and effects. Monthly plans of various prices set different limits for your storage, video resolution, and video export time to YouTube and other social sites.

Wirefly Most cell phone love affairs end long before the contracts expire, so why pay through the nose for a fling you know won’t last? Wirefly, one of the largest online cell phone retailers in the country, offers great prices on phones and service plans with every major carrier—except AT&T.

Wobzip We love software as a service, rather than a product. And a free service? Even better. Thank you, Wobzip, the one-stop site for uncompressing files (up to 100MB) online. Simply upload a packaged file, and when Wobzip is finished, you get links and a URL to the freed files that are good for three days. The site works with 30 file types, including ZIP, TAR, GZ, RAR, and ISO.

If This Then That What if you could automagically make things do other things? What, you need specifics? How about an app that emails you if it’s going to rain tomorrow, or changes your Twitter avatar when you change your Facebook profile picture, or downloads photos you’re tagged in to your Dropbox? If This Then That lets you choose from hundreds of recipes and lets you roll your own, as well. Make the web work smarter for you.

Zamzar Prepare to uninstall your incomplete file-converter software. Zamzar lets you upload and convert files to dozens of image, doc, music, video, and e‑book formats. Files up to 100MB are free. For larger file sizes (up to 1GB), simultaneous conversions, online storage, and other perks, you'll have to throw down a little dough.