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.

Imagine combining all of your photo albums, scrapbooks, home videos, and correspondence all in one easy to access spot.  Well imagine no longer.  Lifesnapz.com is a free to use site that lets its users chronicle the events of their lives, and share those events with the people closest to them.  Users of the site fall into one of three categories: Group Founder, Full Member, or Read-Only Member.  The difference between them being Group Founder’s and Full Member’s have full editing and invitation privileges, while Read-Only Members can only view events and add comments.

Members, who have the privileges to, can add photos which can be uploaded from photo sharing websites flickr.com or picasa.com, and videos which can be uploaded either from youtube.com or vimeo.com.  This site has many cool features, but the coolest is probably the timeline (see example below).  This feature is an excellent way of visually looking at events in chronological order, which makes finding specific events much easier.  There is also a zoom filter option which let’s group members search for events by a certain increment of time (i.e. 1 month, 6 months, 10 years, etc.), to be able to narrow down their searches even further.

With the ability to have a virtual history of your life’s events available to view and share with family, and friends, LifeSnapz.com has hit upon something unique that could someday propel them to become a very popular social website.

After creating a free account with Mygazines.com, users are allowed to view all of the thousands of magazines that have been uploaded by other users.  It works like this: a user who has an account with Mygazines uploads a PDF scanned version of a particular magazine, let’s say Entrepreneur magazine.  Once it is uploaded, other users can then view that issue of Entrepreneur.  Very basic concept, similar to many music or file sharing sites.

One of the really cool features of this site is the ability to ‘flip through’ a magazine almost as if you were holding a real copy of it.  Once a user selects a magazines and issue they want to look at, a new window will open up displaying the cover of the scanned magazine.  In that new window the user has the ability to flip through the pages by either using the mouse or the arrow keys as well as zoom in and out on a particular page.

While still in the beta phase, Mygazines.com definitely has room to grow and expand.  There are a limited number of magazines on the site right now, but once this site catches on, most likely many more will be uploaded and available to view.  The major road block to success will be the issue of displaying copyrighted materials.  Hopefully Mygazines.com can get together with the various publishers and make it work.