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

You might have already heard about this site but I thought I’d share it with those who might not have (or for those who have and weren’t sure what it was all about).  Foursquare is for use on mobile devices (specifically smart phones like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm, etc.) but can also be used via text message for those users on non-smart phones within the U.S.  After downloading the Foursquare app onto your phone (completely free) you can begin to ‘check-in’ at different locations.  The check-in process is based on your location (using GPS) and is pretty simple; all you need to do is select your correct location from the list.  If for some reason the business/location is not listed you can add it and then check-in.  You can also leave a short message, 140 characters or less, describing your experience.  Sounds interesting.

The question is why would anyone use this?  To address this issue, Foursquare has created a game style format with points and badges where you can login in at the end of each month and see your stats.  The ultimate goal behind this is to become “mayor” of a certain business location (your local Starbucks for example) which is achieved by checking in at a particular location more times than any other fellow Foursquarer.  Once you are mayor of that location you unlock the mayor’s badge and in some instances can receive a discount off of purchases ($1 off purchases at Starbucks) simply for being mayor of that location.

I think there’s a lot of potential in this new geo check-in arena but Foursquare is dealing with quite a few competitors at the moment and some pretty formidable ones at that (Yelp).  It will be interesting to see how it all unfolds over the next 6-12 months.  What do you think, would you use a service like this?

Me too!  But since we all know that’s not possible (at least not without a flux capacitor) let’s talk about a site that will get you as close as possible to time travel.  In existence since the very early days of the internet (1995) Archive.org has archived nearly every website, audio, live music, text, and moving image that has been posted online in the last fifteen years.  Most users of this site however take advantage of the coolest feature called the “Wayback Machine” (with a top speed of 88 mph… OK I’ll stop).  With over 150 billion pages currently in its archive the Wayback Machine has the most extensive collection of webpages on the internet today.

It works like this: users go to the site and type in the URL of a website (let’s use Yahoo as our example) and then click ‘Take Me Back’.  It then takes you to a search results page that has the years, number of pages, as well as links with exact dates of went a snapshot was taken.  For example the earliest snapshot of Yahoo.com was on October 17, 1996 and links to this snapshot. This can be done for most websites in existence (with a few exceptions).

So just thought I’d share this neat tool that can be used for research or for those of us with a curious streak.  Whichever reason you decide to use it, I’m sure you’ll find it to be a valuable resource! (I’m sure Doc Brown would have agreed…alright I lied!).