shopping

Many green products and services sprout on Earth Day only to wither the rest of the year. Hoping to maintain the momentum year-round, many geeks are nurturing social-networking sites for the nature-loving set.

Online communities built to help you take baby steps to green your life include Riverwired--where you can keep a blog, upload videos, and mingle with other members--and Be Green Now, a project of Green Mountain Energy. And in addition to the many green car-sharing, rental, and limo services out there, the new GoLoco site might help you find carpooling pals.

Internet services that encourage users to … Read more

Phixr is a free, Web-based photo editing tool that celebrates its one-year anniversary tomorrow. If you're interested in tweaking a few of your photos (local or hosted), Phixr connects with nearly every popular Web service out there, and has some powerful tools to make your photos look better without your having to spend a dime on editing software.

Phixr gives users photo editing foundations like cropping, brightness, rotation controls, and red-eye removal. There are also some more advanced tools like pixel-noise removal and 14 Photoshop-like filters for adding artistic alterations to your shots. The pixel-noise remover takes a while to work its magic, but I got excellent results on some particularly grainy indoor photos.

Anytime you upload a photo either from your hard drive or popular Web services like Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa, Phixr will store your shot on its servers for three hours. You can log out, come back a few hours later, and continue editing. When you're done, you can re-upload your photo to a dozen different services like Costco Photos, ImageShack, and LiveJournal. There are also options to export it as JPEG, PNG, GIF, or PDF.

One big downside of Phixr is its speed. Every time you make an edit, the page needs to refresh. It's aggravating, actually. If you intend on working with more than one photo it's just not worth your time. While there are before and after previews for any edit, it's all done in small thumbnails, which doesn't show enough detail to do the job. By comparison, Picnik, a Web-based photo service we checked out recently, shows edits in real time, and has a much more user-friendly interface for beginners. More screens after the jump.

See also: Fauxto, Snipshot

Related: Adobe to offer Web-based Photoshop… Read more

When we last checked in with PowerReviews, the company that powers user review feedback for online retailers, the team had just launched a user-facing site to aggregate reviews from its clients. I liked it, although I had some criticisms. This week, PowerReviews launched a new site, Buzzillions, which addresses some of the early site's issues and adds a few more features. (It's too bad the name sucks, though.)

The new site does a much better job of clumping products together. You're less likely to find 15 different listings for the same camera now (one for each store … Read more

I just heard a presentation on MyShape, a relatively new clothing retail site for women. Its secret sauce: It collects all the measurements of the clothing it carries and puts them into a database, and then asks its consumers to enter in their measurements, from which it builds individual profiles. Each profile gets a shape code, for example, shape S is "curvy front and side profiles." Users can also bypass the measurements and just pick their shape codes from the descriptions on the site.

Once a shopper has her profile in the system, the store only shows clothing … Read more

Most people (in the United States anyway) are cowed by printed price tags. We see a number stuck on an item and just assume it is the price. But in more cases than people realize, a marked price can be taken as a negotiating position. Some people dislike dickering and choose to ignore this fact. Others (you know who you are) look at financial transactions as a form of sport.

Unfortunately, the Internet is a poor arena for one-on-one shopping combat. When you see a pair of pants you like on Macys.com, you can't ask the salesperson if … Read more

CrispyShop is a new tool for comparison shopping. Launched last week, CrispyShop lets you search and compare prices and specs for pretty much anything sold online, using visualization that's both useful and easy on the eyes. CrispyShop is built on ShoppingPath, a technology that visually sorts and separates search results. All results come from Yahoo Shopping, and provide users with direct links to purchase products from popular Web shopping sites like Newegg and Buy.com.

Search results show up in a scatter plot, with product thumbnails that magnify when you mouse over them, similar to the dock on Mac OS X. … Read more

I discovered Hotspotr at SF Beta this past week. It's a neat little service that mashes up Google maps with a local Wi-Fi hotspot finder. The real pull of the service is you can rate and comment on hotspots as you would with restaurant reviews on a review site like Yelp. It's the perfect service for the casual Wi-Fi traveler to benefit from road warriors who are willing to take the time to review a wireless access point.

The ratings aren't just things such as the overall quality of the wireless signal either; you also can rate … Read more

Ever wanted to score some hot Michael Kors boots, but didn't want to book the trip to Rodeo Drive? FashMatch.com is bringing that fancy shopping strip (and your local mall) to your computer.

Technically speaking, Fashmatch.com is a consumer social-networking site where visitors can put together outfits from various designers and swap fashion tips and advice. Last week, CNET News.com reporter Caroline McCarthy blogged about ShopStyle.com, another online shopping site. FashMatch and ShopStyle point to clothes shopping 2.0 as an up-and-coming trend.

With FashMatch, fashionistas are three steps away from having their dream outfit … Read more

Hey, style freaks: here's another reason to spend more time on the Internet. ShopStyle is a search engine that will paw through the inventories of all kinds of online clothing sites to find exactly what you're searching for. I'm not much of an online shopper since I like to try things on before buying them, but I can see ShopStyle being a very valuable search tool for people who dig the bargains that can be found on clothing sites.

We're not talking a simple Froogle-style interface here. ShopStyle is very Ajax-y. Search results scroll sideways, … Read more