LIKE A CHILD PROGRESSING INTO ADOLESCENCE, the Web has entered a new era of sophistication. We used to spend most of our time just surfing the Internet--reading and downloading whatever we could find. Nowadays we're more likely to create waves ourselves by sharing our opinions, photos, and home videos; collaborating by text, voice, and video; or adding our own data to maps that span the globe.
Applications that run in a browser are now almost as speedy as those installed on PCs, thanks to new programming tools that combine recent Web technologies, like Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Ruby on Rails, with Java and other standbys. These technologies allow more processing to occur on users' local PCs, meaning fewer trips back and forth to Web servers. And browser-based programs can now interact more closely with Web sites. Google, Amazon, and other big sites let anyone create services that incorporate their data. These public application programming interfaces permit the data of Google Maps and similar mapping services, for example, to become content for "mashups"--sites like Trulia.com, which joins data on houses in an area.
The shift from consumption to participation is a critical change in the Web's evolution. It's now easier than ever to post photos, documents, and other files to a blog, or to publish content as a news feed. Many sites permit us to add keywords, or "tags," to our photos, videos, links, and other shared resources. For example, you might add the tags "Barcelona" and "water balloons" to a photo of a soggy day in Spain. Tagged files can meld with similar content from other contributors. Tags also allow audiences--either public or private--to search, group, and otherwise slice and dice our contributions. Naturally, we can use the same tags to discover interesting, funny, or beautiful content we might not have unearthed using a standard search engine.
Here's a sampling of the most useful and interesting sites and services of what some call Web 2.0. All promise to deliver the best Internet experience yet. (Many of these are run by fledgling companies or by individuals, so surfer beware.)
Apps in a Browser
IF YOU'RE USED TO the click-wait-click-wait browser routine, you'll be surprised by the speed of today's Web-based applications. Ajax and other technologies give browser apps the features and responsiveness of their desktop counterparts.
NEXT-GENERATION WEB MAIL
Outlook goes Live, almost: Wherever you go, there's your Outlook data. Microsoft's flagship program for e-mail, contacts, and calendars has never traveled well ... until now. For $45 a year, you can bring all of Outlook's features with you anywhere, via your MSN or Hotmail account. Like the deskbound version, Outlook Live lets you view and manage multiple e-mail accounts, calendars, contacts, and tasks. Unlike its desktop counterpart, it limits you to 2GB of mail storage, and outgoing messages can be no larger than 20MB each. outlooklive.msn.com
Windows visits the Web: Microsoft has hopped on the New Web train in the nick of time with the beta of its free Windows Live service. You can connect to your Hotmail account, get news feeds, and store IE and Firefox bookmarks online. Features that weren't available when we looked at the beta include a Gmail-style mail service, a Web-hosted Messenger IM client, and various Windows security and performance utilities. www.live.com
Gmail sets the pace: Web e-mail had been around for years when Google debuted its free Gmail service in 2004. What made Gmail different, and also ushered in a new Web age, was its slick, quick interface, as well as its spam filter and abundant storage, currently creeping toward 3GB per account. Need to back up some key files? Just send them to your Gmail account, where you can organize and search messages using tag-like labels. Both Hotmail and Yahoo are working on Gmail-like versions of their offerings. (See last month's story at find. pc.world.com/50478 for more on these new Web mail services.) www.gmail.com
WEB WORE SITES
Brainstorm on JotSpot: Wilds make it easy for groups to add text, images, and even files to a single Web page. JotSpot is a wiki that lets workers in far-flung locations get on the same page, as it were. People can create, edit, and read a wild page, all without having to know HTML. The page can be a blog, company intranet, database, group task manager, or anything else team members would need to organize online. The service is free for up to five users and 20 Web pages (registration required), and from $9 to $49 per month for more users and pages. A related service, JotSpot Live, permits groups to enter meeting notes in real time on the same Web page. www.jot.com
ThinkFree puts office apps online: With this Java-based, ad-supported service's browser knockoffs of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you can do almost anything you would want to do in the originals. The browser equivalents read and write .doc, .xls, .ppt, and other native Office file formats. The free service (registration required) lets you save up to 30MB of documents, either online or to your local PC. You can post files to a blog with a single click. Best of all, ThinkFree Office Online can save files in Adobe's Portable Document Format--something Office applications can't do yet. (Note: The initial applet download can take several minutes on a broadband link, so on a dial-up line it might seem interminable. The applets open faster subsequently.) online.thinkfree.com
Share your musings with Writeboard: Behold the power of text. This free service from 37signals lets you create and store any number of text documents online. You can even invite collaborators to view and edit the files. Just give the document a name, enter your e-mail address, add a password, and you're ready to create your first shared file. The clean interface highlights your edits, and e-mailing invitations to collaborators is quick and simple. The service also retains previous versions, so you can roll back unwanted changes. (Read about 37signals' Backpack personal organizer in the following section.) writeboard.com
Blog in an instant with Writely: Like Writeboard, Writely is a free Web-based word processor that supports collaboration, tracks revisions, and stores and displays your documents online. Files are limited to 500KB in size, but Writely distinguishes itself from other such services by allowing you to publish to a blog, and to upload existing documents by e-mail. www.writely.com
ONLINE ORGANIZERS
Stuff your data in your Backpack: Before, whenever you wanted to travel with a lap top, you would have to load all the files you'd need onto the machine in advance. Now you can put your to-do lists, notes, and other essential files and photos onto one clean, clear Web page. 37signals' Backpack, a Web-based personal organizer, will even send e-mail and mobile phone reminders when tasks are due. Backpack isn't just a personal organizer--you can share pages, and group items by using tags. The service lets you save up to five pages and send as many as ten reminders for free, but adding files and images to the pages costs from $5 to $19 a month. Paying customers receive from 25 to 1000 pages, 80MB to 500MB of storage, and 100 to 300 reminders. If Backpack is more organization than you need, its lightweight cousin, Ta-Da Lists (tadalist. com) is an alternative, backpackit.com
Gather your team at Basecamp: Basecamp, also by 37signals, is Backpack's heavy-hitting big sibling--a full-blown Web-based project manager that permits you to track team members' responsibilities, the time they spend on various tasks, and the group's messages related to the project. The service is free for one project, with some limitations. Fee-based plans are priced from $12 per month for up to three projects to $99 a month for an unlimited number of projects. www.basecamphq.com
HipCal puts your days in order: If you think online calendars are too slow and have too few of the features you need, this free calendar service may change your mind. HipCal will hook you with its snappy interface, address book, group calendaring, and content tagging. The service can even send a text message to your cell phone when an appointment draws near. Now even squares can get hip. hipcal.com
Planzo keeps you up-to-date: Rising Concepts' Planzo: The Online Planning Community has a cutesy name, but it also has some nifty features that HipCal and other online calendars lack, such as the ability to e-mail alerts for an impending appointment. The service's interface is easy to customize, and you can sync your calendars with those of friends who have also signed up for the free service. Two other nice features let you attach files and photos to your notes, as well as create sharable to-do lists. www.planzo.com
Note to self-Remember the Milk: More than just a to-do list manager, Remember the Milk acts like a full-blown calendar, but without the row-and-column display. Separating your life into Personal, Study, and Work tasks (categories you can change), you enter task reminders as you would in any other calendar; you can even create shared calendars for your group projects. Remember the Milk stands apart from other free online calendar/ scheduling services in its support for the iCalendar format for importing and exporting calendars, as well as in its ability to publish your various tasks as a news feed. Www.remeberthemilk.com
Collaboration & Community
WHETHER IT'S TO FUEL your passion for Hungarian cinema or to find new pomegranate recipes, the Web is a great place to meet kindred spirits. (Note that all of these sites require registration.)
THINKING IN GROUPS
Yahoo 360 offers the Web from A to Z: Yahoo's free personal Web site gives you unlimited online space to publish a blog and share photos, and lets you subscribe to and share RSS feeds. You can access your Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Groups, and other services as well. After uploading your content, just invite friends to view your handiwork, even if they don't have a Yahoo account. 360.yahoo.com
Form a chorus in the Opera Community: Much like Yahoo 360, this free community offers up to 300MB of online storage for photos, blog posts, and feed subscriptions, or for creating your own topic-based community. You don't even have to use the Opera browser, my.opera.com
Put your best Faeebook forward: According to TechCrunch.com, 85 percent of college students in the United States have accounts with this online student directory, and 70 percent of them log in to the site daily. Facebook lets you post photos and send messages to other members, but most of its popularity is due to a single feature: You can browse mug shots of the people in, say, your 2 p.m. Social Psychology lecture, find out all about them, and maybe even ask one out on a date (or at least ask for last week's lecture notes). College alumni can join to reminisce about the good old days (you need a university e-mail address). Students at some high schools are also eligible for Facebook accounts. www.facebook.com
Get all chummy at Friendster: Like Facebook (see above) but without the student-only limitation, this free online social directory allows you to put your personal profile, blog, and photo album on the Web, and then see if anyone out there wants to be your buddy. Friendster lets you chat with one person or a whole group. The service recently added peer-to-peer file sharing. www.friendster.com
PICTURE PLACES
Flickr makes sharing fun: Use this free Yahoo-owned service to share your digital photos with everyone else in the world, or just the people to whom you grant access. After you upload your shots to the site, you can tag shows, and post pictures to external blogs. Moving your images to the site is easier if you download and use Flickr's handy batch-upload utility, which also adds a 'Send to Flickr' command to IE's context menu. Uploading as much as 20MB of photos per month is free; a Pro Account ($25 per year) increases the limit to 2GB per month, flickr.com
Picaboo polishes your photos: This is a photo-sharing site with a twist. Instead of uploading individual pictures to Picaboo's server, you download the free Picaboo photo-album software, make slick-looking digital albums on your PC, and then upload a copy of each album to Picaboo's server for sharing with the people you specify. You can use one of the free service's many album wizards, or use a layout of your own devising. Picaboo makes money by selling prints of the albums (though the software allows you to print your own using standard photo sleeves and album covers), as well as individual prints and slide-show DVDs. Photo-album prints cost $25 for up to 20 pages, and photo DVDs cost $10. picaboo.com
BOOKMARKS TO SHARE
Del.icio.us takes the Web's pulse: Want to find out what people are interested in these days? Just look at their bookmarks. While you're at it, let them look at yours. The name of this free site just bought by Yahoo may be awkward, but using it is simple: Register, log in, add two buttons to your browser's Links (IE) or Bookmarks (Firefox) toolbar (the site shows you how), and click a button to bookmark the current page (you can't upload all your browser's current bookmarks in a batch). For the full New Web effect, tag your bookmarks and share them with the universe, or with a small group of friends. family, or coworkers. One of the site's new main features: You can now access your Del.icio.us bookmarks from any Web-connected computer, del.icio.us
Digg deeper for tech news: The free Digg technology news site is similar to the popular Slashdot, with one giant difference: Rather than having editors decide which stories are most important, subscribers rate articles by "digging" them, a process much like tagging. As a result, breaking news tends to appear on Digg a tad sooner than it does on Slashdot. Simply read the postings on Digg as you would on any news site (or subscribe to the service's news feed), or delve deeper into the community by registering and creating your own news Diggs. Alternatively, you could simply bask in Digg's reflected brilliance by posting its stories to your own blog with a single click, www.digg.com
Flock makes browsing a group experience: This new free browser (based on the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox) has a decidedly social twist. It uses Del.icio.us's shared bookmarks by default, and it allows you to tag Web pages, grab news feeds, and link to major blogging services. The browser even displays photo thumbnails in its Flickr toolbar (just in case you find yourself getting too much work done). Though not yet in beta testing when we looked at it, Flock may be ready for regular duty by the time you read this. www.flock.com
For book lovers, it's a LibraryThing: This site is similar to Del.icio.us, but for the tweed set. If you love books, and love people who love books, LibraryThing is for you. Start by using the service to catalog your book collection: Tag your books by topic, share your catalog with others, and then endlessly browse the titles that they have on their shelves. The utterly book obsessed can add the LibraryThing widget to a blog to show visitors what they have been reading lately. Listing up to 200 books is free; listing any number of books beyond that costs either $10 per year or a one-time $25 fee. www.librarything.com
Sharing is a snap with My Web 2.0: This free personal bookmarking and tagging site from Yahoo (in beta when we looked at it) bears the familiar plain-jane look, but don't let that fool you. Unlike Del.icio.us, My Web 2.0 uploads all your browser bookmarks smoothly, and it lets you share your bookmarks via a news feed. The service also allows you to share your tags with a group of friends or associates. myweb2.search.yahoo.com
VIDEO SHARING
Check your radar for Blip.tv: The Swiss army knife of online video, Blip.tv offers free video blogging, podcasting, searching, and sharing. Create your video blog on the site, or simply post links to clips from your own blog. Most of the site's videos are tagged, and Blip.tv generates a news feed of the latest video uploads for your convenience. Better yet, Blip.tv automatically posts videos to the Internet Archive or to your blog. It also sends tagged video links to the Del.icio.us bookmark directory (see the previous section), and thumbnail images to Flickr. blip.tv
ClipShack converts videos in a Flash: It may not offer all the bells and whistles of other video sites, but this free service makes posting your videos quick and easy. Unlike other sites, ClipShack converts your uploads to Flash animations, ensuring that most people will be able to see them without having to download a plug-in. Linking to a clip requires copying and pasting some HTML code into your blog. Inveterate voyeurs can subscribe to an RSS feed of new clips. Uploads are limited to 50MB (the site plans to offer paid services with higher storage limits in the future). www.clipshack.com
Google gets the video bug: Most video-sharing sites want to be the "Flickr of video," making it easy for you to see other people's creations and for them to see yours. Not Google Video. While you can upload your own video clips to the site, don't expect them to appear online just like that--the company must decide if they meet Google Video standards first. Nevertheless, this free service knows a few neat tricks. For example, you can use keywords to search for videos, as well as sample random clips that Google deigns to serve up (usually interesting, sometimes long), video.google.com
Ourmedia.org is your media repository: Billing itself as a global home for grassroots media, Ourmedia.org is a free video, audio, photo, and text upload site that acts as an interface to the Internet Archive (archive.org)--you have to register on both sites before you can upload. You can receive the media contributions of others via RSS, or just browse around patiently (the site is a little slow), ourmedia.org
Vimeo makes Web video easy: Vimeo looks lightweight at first, but the more you use it, the more features crop up. You can upload as much as 20MB of video per week for free in any format you like. You can also tag clips for easier searching, and post tagged links to Del.icio.us to attract viewers. Vimeo lets you post thumbnails of your clips to your Flickr account, and transmit the clips via an RSS feed. (Note that some of the site's content isn't suitable for children.) www.vimeo.com
Everybody's a star at YouTube: YouTube doesn't have the video sharing and sorting tools that Blip.tv and Vimeo do, but posting your clips to the free service is a breeze. Videos are limited to 100MB each, and you have to give each clip at least three tags before YouTube will accept it. Linking to clips from your blog requires copying and pasting HTML code. YouTube offers only one news feed of the site's most recently uploaded videos; and like Vimeo, some of the videos on the site are R-rated. www.youtube.com
Search & Maps
WHETHER YOU swear by Google or use an army of Web search tools and services, there's always more to discover online, and more ways to discover it. Some of the most innovative new Web services combine search results with maps to provide a fresh perspective on places a continent away, or just around the corner.
NEW-LOON SEARCH
Odeo hooks you up with podcasts: This free service could do for podcasts what Blip.tv and other sites are doing for video. Though the site's podcast-upload capabilities were still under construction as we went to press, it nevertheless provides a great way to search for audio files on the Web without having to install itunes on your system. Casual visitors can browse podcasts by the tags assigned to them. Registering lets you do some tagging of your own (a feature itunes doesn't support); it also allows you to subscribe to topic-oriented channels and to download audio to your iPod. www.odco.com
You make the rules at Rollyo: The name is short for "roll your own search engine," which means you can create a custom collection of search engines and topics and then share the resulting "roll" with others. The free site provides logged-in users some starter search rolls of its own, as well as lists of topic-targeted rolls created by celebrities and other "high rollers." You can add your Rollyo search rolls to Firefox's search engine toolbar with a click, and post your roll to your own blog or Web site just by copying and pasting some HTML code. www.rollyo.com
Technorati keeps its ear to the Web: Google Blog Search (blogsearch.googh. com) does a good job of exploring blogs, but Technorati's free blog portal takes tracking blog buzz to the next level. You don't have to register to search blogs, browse its cloud of tags or Top 100 list, or use the site's Blog Finder to locate blogs on a particular subject. But signing in lets you promote your own blog and set up watch lists of topics you want Technorati to track for you. www.technorati.com
Search the smart way with Wink: Search engines are only as good as their underlying algorithm. Finding the nuggets of gold among the results typically requires a human (you) to read through and discard the many links that are only tangentially related to whatever you're looking for. The free Wink search engine incorporates the human element, crawling tagged sites such as De.licio.us, Digg, and Flickr (see previous sections) and drawing on Wink users' tagged searches to separate wheat from chaff. Set up Rollyo-like search sets based on tags, and sync with Del.icio.us and Yahoo's My Web 2.0. www.wink.com
MAPS AND MASHUPS
Freesound Project lets you hear the world: Close your eyes, and you're sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Oagadougou in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, or relaxing to the sound of waves lapping on Spanish Banks Beach in Vancouver, British Columbia. These and other audio field recordings (mostly of animal and environmental sounds) are linked to Google Maps on this very cool free site. fiun.pcworld.com/50554
Leave your mark on the planet with Google Earth: More than just a Web site, the free Google Earth is an application that runs on your PC, allowing you to "fly" over a virtual globe constructed of satellite imagery. Search for businesses and people, view 3 D images of cities, and
get driving directions and distances. More important, the app's public programming interface has spawned a new generation of mashup sites (several of which are described in this section) that piggyback search specifics, databases, or other "geocode" onto Google's virtual planet. Have a GPS unit? Get Google Earth Plus ($20) to import your own map coordinates. earth.google.com
Rise above it all with Windows Live Local: This free site (formerly MSN Virtual Earth) combines Microsoft's MapPoint mapping service with its TerraServer satellite images (see below). Where as Google Earth relies on a downloadable component, Windows Live Local lets you soar over terrain in your browser. Zooming beyond the U.S. border reveals one of the site's limitations, however: Outside of this country, most images are high-altitude satellite views that aren't much clearer than their counterparts in a standard atlas. As with Google Maps, the service's published APIs allow anyone to create their own apps, including maps of eBay seller locations and MSN Messenger chat partners. local.live.com
Google Maps Web Cam Locator looks ahead: Get a pretravel peek at the weather at your destination, or do virtual sightseeing at this site that plots Webcams on a Google Map. Click a pushpin on the map to see that camera's view in a pop-up window. Click again to see the view in a larger window, plus weather and other info. You can even add your own Webcam to the map. find.pcworld.com/50546
Put a place with that face via GeoBloggers: Ever wonder where the beautiful tropical-vacation shots you found on the Web were located? Want to show friends where you spent your summer? The free GeoBloggers site uses the geotagging of your images on Flickr (see page 85) to plot them on a Google Map. Visitors can fly to your photo's map point and conduct searches in the area using Google Earth. They can also jump to your Flickr page or--very cool--download a GPX waypoint file (which encodes the site's map coordinates) for upload to their own GPS device. geobloggers.com
Maplandia.com brings the world into view: This free service puts a regional interface on Google Maps, organizing the site's maps and satellite images by continent and by country. Want to see a map of Colombia? Just two clicks, and you're there. Maplandia creates HTML links you can paste into your blog so that your visitors can view the same map with just one click. www.maplandia.com
Trulia is a house hunter's best friend: Location, location, location. What could make a better mashup than maps and real-estate listings? This free site started small, mapping homes for sale in a few cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, but its goal is to show listings nationwide. Type a city or zip code into Trulia's search field to see listings pinpointed on a map. Using Google Maps' Hybrid setting, you can see at a glance which homes are close enough to the beach, and far enough from the freeway, www.trulia.com
Get a choice of views at TerraServer: Not only can you search this industrial-strength satellite-image database by city, state, and country, but you also get your choice of images from various providers, and you can purchase prints of the maps at prices ranging from $7 to $150. The service sells prints of satellite images from hundreds of famous locations, such as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and other hallowed shrines. APIs let you write applications that grab images from TerraServer (a la Google Maps). www.terraserver.com
Yahoo Maps joins the mashup: Brand new and still in beta as we went to press, Yahoo's free mapping service is a response to Google Maps and Windows Live Local, although it differs in one giant way--no satellite imagery. Nevertheless, Yahoo's public APIs let you create your own mashups (view a gallery at find. pcworld.com/50550), and its smart navigational widget makes jumping around a map easy. maps.yahoo.com/beta
TOP PICKS
THE NEW WEB STARTS HERE
IT'S EASY TO BECOME overwhelmed by the variety of features these fabulous sites offer. To cut to the chase, here are our favorites in each category.
* Web mail: How does Gmail do it? Volume-nearly 3GB worth. Labels let you quickly find your old messages, which you may never have to delete.
* Web work sites: ThinkFree Office Online puts a full-featured Microsoft Office double and 30MB of storage at your disposal wherever you roam.
* Photo sharing: Not only does Flickr make uploading, viewing, and sharing your digital snaps simple, but it also connects easily with blogging, mapping, and other services.
* Bookmark sharing: What's the buzz this morning? By sharing and tagging the highlights of your browsing at Del.icio.us, you contribute to the zeitgeist, and you make your list of favorite sites available both to yourself and to other Web denizens from any PC.
* Video sharing: Blip.tv does online video right, giving you tags, news-clip feeds, and storage of your clips for posterity (and for free) at the Internet Archive (archive.org).
WEB TOOLS
WIDGETS BREAK OUT OF THE BROWSER
THE TECHNOLOGIES that power the New Web are being applied outside your browser, too. Widgets are lightweight applications that sometimes run inside a browser and other times operate as separate programs. They can monitor the weather, measure battery life, reformat Web pages and search results, or do just about anything else that someone figures out how to accomplish in a scripting language. Here are three of our favorite widgets:
* Yahoo Widgets: Yahoo's free program, formerly Konfabulator, for Windows XP and Mac OS X runs JavaScript apps outside your browser. Its widgets float around your desktop (looking a lot like the widgets in OS X) and include a clock, weather display, to-do list, slide show of your Flickr photos, and battery and Wi-Fi signal strength monitors. The Web site offers over a thousand more, plus instructions on how to write your own. widgets.yahoo.com
* Greasemonkey: This free extension for Firefox runs JavaScript code (which it calls "user scripts") to change the way Web pages appear or behave. After you install the program, browse to Userscripts.org to view a collection of tags (called a "cloud") of user-script topics. One of my favorites is a Greasemonkey widget that adds Google Blog-search to the Google search page. greasemonkey.mozdev.org
* Klipfolio: Looking much like an instant messaging client, this free widget aggregates RSS feeds and other complex information (such as the local weather). Unlike standard RSS readers, however, Klipfolio lets you search feeds and sends you alerts when your search terms appear, www.serence.com
MESSAGING
IM VIA THE WEB
IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for instant messaging to become indispensable for many users. But how will you connect when you're away from the IM client software on your home or work PC? The four big-name IM services now offer Web-hosted versions of their software that let you send and receive text messages from any PC with an Internet connection (see the list below). However, remembering addresses, names, and passwords for multiple IM services is a problem that cries out for a Web solution, Meebo (in alpha) answers the call with its free universal IM service that supports AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ, pulls the Jabber service (which Google's Gtalk uses).
* AIM Express www.aim.com (page offers link)
* ICQ2GO: www.icq.com/icq2go/
* Meebo: www.meebo.com
* MSN Web Messenger: webmessenger.msn.com
* Yahoo Web Messenger: find.pcworld.com/50556
JOB SITES
THE NEW WEB AT WORK
WHILE BUSINESSPEOPLE are sure to find many practical uses for the new generation of Web sites and services, two of the best newcomers are designed specifically to get you into a business. Indeed ( www.indeed.com ) and Simply Hired ( www.simplyhired.com ) each collect listings from a variety of job sites (including Careermole, Craigslist, Dice, and Monster). They allow you to filter out unwanted job categories and save the resulting search as an RSS feed or e-mail alert that keeps new postings coming to you daily. Simply Hired lets you add prospective jobs to a Google Map so you can compare commute times among your various employment prospects, for example. Indeed's Jobroll feature lets you turn a job search into an ever-updating box you can copy and paste into your blog or Web page as a service to your readers.
HOW-TO
ROLL YOUR OWN SERVICE
YOU SAY YOU DON'T like the way that Craigslist, Flickr, or Google Maps functions? Just change how each presents its data, or combine the information on one site with that on another. ProgrammableWeb ( www.programmableweb . com) lists over 200 mashups, including a Google Map of Hindu temples, a Flickr screen saver, and a matchmaking tool for the HotOrNot.com dating service that turns you into a virtual yenta.
Creating a mashup requires a solid understanding of JavaScript (Wikipedia offers a good starting point at find. pcworld.com/50558). While it's no replacement for actual programming skills, Ning ( www.ning.com ; still in beta as we went to press) lets you set up your own classified listing, photo sharing, review, or social-networking site without writing a line of code.
You can modify one of the thousands of existing applications on the site and have a slick program of your own devising running in minutes. Ning even hosts the site, posting ads alongside your application in exchange, if you're feeling geeky, the service lets you alter the application's underlying PHP code.
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