Over the past couple of weeks I’ve started using two really neat websites. I like using them, but at the same time, using them makes me sad. Both of them constantly remind me that I don’t have any friends also using the site. This is my desparate plea for you to fill that role.
The first is blippr, the micro blogging inspired review site. It’s like Twitter for games, movies, music, and books. You have 160 characters to say what you think about anything that fits into those four categories, as well as rating it as love, like, whatever, dislike. Once you’ve made a few friends, it will start making recomendations for you based on how much you agree with other people and what your friends like. One thing that really impressed me about blippr is how many other sites it can integrate with. It can post your reviews to Twitter, identi.ca, Pownce, Plurk, FriendFeed, Facebook, and several others. On top of all that, it also has a cool little feature where it automatically finds profiles on other sites that it thinks also belong to you and suggests you add links to those as well. It found my profiles on most of those sites as well as this site and my Flickr. The site is still in beta, and I’m currently having trouble getting it linked up with my Facebook mini feed, but it’s a really fun site and it won’t give me any recomendations because I don’t have enough friends. So here’s a link to my profile.
My other new favorite site is Giant Bomb, the brand new video game website that is poised to de-throne IGN, GameSpot, and others. It’s unique for several reasons. For one, most of the content is user-created, and all game pages are editable. Your edits do have to wait in a moderation queue, but you are awarded points for your edits and once you accumulate 100 your edits can skip the moderation step. The other big point is that they don’t just have pages for games. They are attempting to catalogue everything that pertains to video games including characters, publishers, franchises, objects, and concepts. Yes, objects and concepts. Concepts like the game over screen, cheat codes, and hit points all have their own pages alongside the crate, rocket launcher, and exploding barrel. Again, all these pages are full of user contributed images and descriptions. There’s a lot more to the site than this, but just what I’ve mentioned here was enough to make me drop GameSpot for good in favor of Giant Bomb. Don’t get me wrong; there’s still a lot to be improved upon here, but it’s a small team of passionate people instead of the big media corp out for profit, and in my book that’s worth supporting. Also, it keeps reminding me that I have no friends. This is a link to my profile and here’s a video made by a couple of the people that created Giant Bomb.
