webware

Make your keyboard an instrument

In a time when most people spend 8 hours a day (or more) with their fingers on a keyboard, a service called JamLegend wants you to spend a few more. It turns your average, everyday keyboard into a virtual electric guitar. Think of it as Guitar Hero, without the need for special hardware or software.

To play songs, you just hit the right note at the right time, which, just like Guitar Hero, requires holding the corresponding notes and strumming with the Enter key. The site suggests two ways to play: either a "chill" mode that looks like … Read more

Music mixes and recommendations

Pandora is a music discovery and recommendation service that creates custom stations based on artists or individual songs. The service is powered by the Music Genome Project, a taxonomy of musical information by a team of musicians an audio analysts who have gone through a massive database of songs and categorized them based on more than 400 characteristics (among them harmony, instrumentation, and rhythm). Once you input a song, Pandora spits back a continuously-running playlist of music with similar characteristics.

Pandora is an extremely simple and easy-to-use site that requires very little information from you to sign up. The service … Read more

Free music mix widget

Project Playlist was built to do one thing--stream audio playlists using music found freely online--and it does that fairly well. At its core, Project Playlist is a service driven by its members, who are the main contributors in terms of content. Although the music is (obviously) provided by the artists, the members are the ones who create the mixes upon which the site is based.

The Project Playlist site, which is supported by a smattering of fairly unobtrusive ads, is simple and easy to navigate, with a giant search bar prevalent on every page. All of the songs have two … Read more

Music for the masses

In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other's fins for dominance, there's at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark. Grooveshark is a free online jukebox service where users can search for tracks and listen to them through a Web-based player that can be controlled just like a software jukebox application. The best part, however, is that Grooveshark manages to keep itself lawsuit-free by making sure that everyone gets paid.

As content distribution has mutated from analog to digital, the companies that … Read more

Legal music sharing

Jamendo, a Luxembourg-based music service that launched back in 2005, takes a different tack than most mainstream music sharing Web sites. Namely, the legality is not questionable because the service is positioned rather strictly as a tool for indie artists to make their songs readily available in the name of expanding exposure and attracting more listeners. It hosts music of varying licenses, and gives users and professionals a place to discover and download tracks either for free or by purchase.

Jamendo is great for indie stuff since you can stream tracks an unlimited number of times without being registered. It … Read more

Good for others, good for you

GoodGuide is the reason we have awards for tech services and products: it's a small and relatively unknown service that demonstrates real leadership on the Web. Anyone who is concerned with the impact their purchasing has on their bodies, the environment, and other people can benefit from the information provided by GoodGuide. And let's face it: such awareness is quite the trend nowadays, and that means demand for such a site is sure to grow going forward.

At it's core, GoodGuide is a product recommendation system focused on safe, healthy, and green products. Along with telling you … Read more

Still needs work

At times, open source seems like an unstoppable force. Then, apps like OpenGoo come along and sully that perception. OpenGoo aims to provide you with a top-notch Web-based office suite, but instead it manages to undermine every benefit that an online productivity application like Google Docs provides to its users. The main problem is that the developers appear to have misunderstood the meaning of the term "Web-based app."

The first thing that struck us with OpenGoo was the download page, which doesn't exactly jibe with a Web office productivity suite. Nor was there an obvious application launcher, … Read more

Weekend Webware: DIY keyboard cat videos

Keyboard cat is a full-fledged phenomenon. Even my mom knows about it, and I wasn't the one to tell her (Stephen Colbert was).

The meme stems from a lovable costumed feline whose owner gets it to play a keyboard. By cutting it into any video, it provides a humorous effect, a cross between the "wrap up your acceptance speech" music at the Academy Awards, and the large hooks they used to use to drag off actors in vaudeville shows.

If you've been itching to create your own Keyboard Cat video, but don't have the software … Read more

Complete list of 2009 Webware 100 winners

Congratulations, Webware 100 winners!

Audio & Music Amazon MP3 Grooveshark iTunes Jamendo JamLegend Lala Last.fm Nexus Radio Pandora Project Playlist

Browsing Diigo Firefox Flock Google Chrome iGoogle Internet Explorer 8 Maxthon Opera Safari XMarks

Commerce Amazon Craigslist Elance Etsy Eventbrite PayPal Woot Zillow ZipRealty ZocDoc

Communication Digsby Dimdim Gmail Pidgin Postbox RingCentral Skype Windows Live Hotmail Windows Live Messenger Yahoo Messenger

Infrastructure & Storage Adobe Air BitTorrent Carbonite DropBox Dropio Facebook Connect Mozy OpenID Windows Live SkyDrive YouSendIt

Location-based services FlightStats Goog411 Google Earth Google Maps Live Search Maps OpenTable PolicyMap Topix TripIt Yelp

Photo & Video Amazon Video on Demand … Read more

Webware 100 winners announced!

We just announced the winners of the 2009 Webware 100. Nearly 630,000 votes were cast during the voting this year to pick the best Web 2.0 sites and services. As with the previous years' awards, there were some surprises among the expected winners.

As in previous years, Google got the most awards--this year 11 in all. And also as in previous years, the social network Gaia Online got a disproportionately large number of votes, as did the big-in-China browser, Maxthon. Justin.TV joined Maxthon and Gaia Online in the list of Webware 100 winners whose huge number of … Read more