Coming Up At The Web All Around You!

After Facebook and Twitter, what next? What is the next Internet craze that will suck time, money and bandwidth the world over, and inspire dozens of wannabes and clones, vying for attention from the ever-multiplying millions of web-enabled and mobile-enabled users?

Here are some of the cool sites I have come across recently...

Foursquare (http://foursquare.com/): Explore places on the go, give reviews, suggest restaurants and shops to your friends, check in at those places, earn badges, and finally, be the "mayor". Interesting locale-based services, and could be great for Internet based marketing and attracting footfalls through social buzz. Facebook recently tried to buy them, before giving up and starting their own Places. Other similar sites are Whrrl (http://whrrl.com/) and Foodspotting (http://www.foodspotting.com/) which as you can imaging is focussed on bringing foodie lovers together.

Another very interesting application is Glympse (http://www.glympse.com/) where you can publish your whereabouts, for a given time interval, to a given set of people, who can then trace you during that time interval live in action :)

Qwiki (http://www.qwiki.com/), showcased at TechCrunch in SFO in Sept, promises to bring you "information experiences" not "search results" - type in a word, and you will be presented with a pretty cool multi-media presentation on the topic! Would be an excellent source of learning, besides being a mcuh more fun way of finding out things.

An esoteric but equally exciting application I came across was Wolfram (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), which is all about number crunching and statistics, a wonderland for those obsessed with figures, comparisons and graphs. If you need numbers to impress your MBA colleagues, this is for you!

Have an idea and need funding and backers? Register on Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/) and you will be well on your way to be a multi-millionaire enterpreneur!

And finally, Waze (http://world.waze.com/) which promises to get you the latest information on traffic jams and street conditions, straight from the horses mouth - the commuters.