Zeus of the ‘NetReviews of the Coolest Sites on the Net

If you’ve ever wanted to create your own cool slideshow of say vacation, birthday, or Christmas party pictures, then Animoto.com is the site for you.  In fact, it’s the site for just about everyone with a digital camera and an Internet connection.  There’s a lot of hype surrounding Animoto these days, which can be daunting for any company but especially so for a web start up.  However this site lives up to it and then some.

For absolutely free, yes that’s right free (once you try it out you’ll be as amazed as I was that it’s free) users can create their own 30-second video, complete with music and everything.  After creating an account, users can then upload pictures (approximately 12-20 for a 30-second video), and can then re-arrange them in the order that they want.  After the order is selected, music for the video can either be upload or chosen from the library of songs on the site.  Next a title and description can be written for the video, and then finally Animoto takes over and does the rest.  A 30-second video takes about 2-3 minutes to be created, and once it’s finished just sit back and enjoy.

Videos can be emailed, downloaded, embedded, or uploaded to YouTube.  Because what would be the point of creating something as cool as your own video slideshow, if you couldn’t share it/show it off to your friends and family?  Well with Animoto you won’t have to worry, because now you can share your pictures in a very cool and unique way.  Bye Bye Boring Slideshow.  Hello Animoto.

Have you ever tried mixing random liquors, only to come up with something that tastes like it came straight from the Nyquil reject batch?  Yea, yea me neither.  But seriously, this is where ExtraTasty and their recipes step in and help make that mixing/experimenting process easier.  With thousands of drink recipes to choose from, and a new drink of the day every day, this site offers liquor lovers many cool drink options.

Doing a random search on ‘tequila’, 271 results are returned, ranging from guava margarita to citrus express to death wish.  Each gives the booze, the mixer, the garnish, and the directions.  Ratings and comments are included with each recipe to give users a better idea of what the drink will be like.  So before you decide to host that next party, be sure to hit up ExtraTasty to get some unique drink ideas.

While this still remains to be seen, the founders of the enormously popularly and widely referenced Wikipedia website, have decided to give it a go.  Their search engine site Wikia Search is similar to the big three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) in that the results are displayed in the standard fashion, with ads along the top and right hand side.

To test out the relevancy of this newest Google challenger, I did a search on ‘basketball’.  The results are displayed in a manner that is very similar to Google with a few exceptions.  The first result (as I also tested with several other searches) is always a wikipedia article relating to the search query, which makes sense I guess.  Also along the top of the results page, various topics related to the search query are given.  In the case of my ‘basketball’ search, the topics included: shoes, games, drills, court, plays, rules, etc.

Another unique feature of the site is that users never have to go page by page through the results.  As you scroll down the page new results are continually added, so you can continue to just scroll down until you find the result that best matches your search.

Cool features aside, the determining factor of whether or not this search site will be successful lies solely in the relevancy of the search results given.  So far they are doing a pretty good job.  As for being a serious competitor to Google…only time will tell!