Slashdot Mirror
Web Singletons?
tcmb writes "There are an uncounted number of web mail and picture sharing services, there are more than enough web sites for online bookmark management and friend-finding, but as far as I know there is only one Internet Archive. Which are the true web singletons, services that exist only once in this form?" And does anything approach the singular time-wasting abilities of IMDB or Wikipedia?
Seriously what?
Everyone knows about Zombo of course. You could waste hours there without even thinking about it.
Timecube.
Unique and a waste of time.
And does anything approach the singular time-wasting abilities of IMDB or Wikipedia?
looks up at teh awesome bar (cough).
looks at uid.
sighs.
I'd say /. is relatively unique.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
There's one site that I certainly hope is unique: goatse.cx.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
You can't beat /.
you had me at #!
A lot of stuff that doesn't quite make it onto the regular Wiki is found here.
It also hosts some very concise, fictional world Wikis, like Wookiepedia [Star Wars]. and Memory Alpha [Star Trek].
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
www.qik.com allows you to stream live video and audio from your cell phone. As far as I know, it's the only service on the internet like this.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
I'm surprised no one else has tried to create a search engine for the internets...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I hear that eharmony is a good place to find singletons.
You must be new here.
TinEye.com is an image search engine that works like this:
It analyzes images it finds online, by looking at their pixels and dimensions.
To search, a user uploads an image, and TinEye returns a list of links to similar images, said images' dimensions, and links to the pages on which said images are posted.
It's useful for finding originals from photoshopped images and for finding images in a series if you have only one image and know it's part of a series.
And no, I don't work for them(but I do use the site almost daily).
Usually, I'd rather be right than happy.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I lost interest when it seemed like very few of the bills I entered were later tracked.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
...is still alive!
And does anything approach the singular time-wasting abilities of IMDB or Wikipedia?
Google for "TV Tropes". No, I'm not giving you a URL. If I had to go find the URL, I might accidentally look at the URL. And then I'd end up clicking some of the links there. But there's no way to read through a Trope page without being curious enough to click on at least two of the links there, and then two of the links on each of those, and then... well, I just put dinner in the oven and I do not want to suddenly snap out of a fascinated reverie an hour from now when the smoke from my kitchen burning down reminds me that I'm starving.
Especially since as soon as anyone creates something new and vaguely useful, a dozen clones pop up within a week and do it better (though tend to fail anyways, since they never get the initial market share or publicity of the original - see: twitter).
Are you talking about the microblogging service with a dozen clones or the Slashdot poster with a dozen clones?
"And does anything approach the singular time-wasting abilities of IMDB or Wikipedia?"
This does -idle.slashdot.org.
Sig this!
There is only one space-time continuum monitoring service, http://space-time.net/
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
There is no shortage of idiots.
Fixed that for you.
Singletons are the loneliest objects that I've ever seen...
Factories can be as bad as a Singletons
They're the loneliest objects since the Singleton
False is the saddest value that you'll ever know,
True, it's the saddest value that you'll ever know...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
AFAIK, this is the only site which will tell you if the LHC has destroyed the world yet. You can waste hours of time by checking it frequently, making sure that you're not dead yet! http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ and the source is fairly humourous as well.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
They do if you have any sense.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's "fool me once, shame on... shame on you; fool me you can't get fooled again".
You are doing it wrong, think TV Tropes.
But... the future refused to change.
Actually, it was first recorded by Three Dog Night in 1969 and written by Harry Nilsson. allmusic
There are quite a few situations where life would be simpler if there were just one definitive instance of something - mostly indexes / official repositories of some kind, but sadly at the moment we have a multitude of these things with no single instance providing 100% coverage :
- Airline flight schedules : presumably every airline has planned its timetable months in advance, but there is no obvious place to search across all of them (cf. www.nationalrail.co.uk which I think does have the authoritative timetable across all mainline railways)
- List of all properties for sale in the country; in the UK the seller has to choose which estate agents to list with, and the buyer then has to go around a load of different agents to find out what's available. It'd seem obvious for this to instead be a nationalized thing - what added value do estate agents / letting introduction agencies provide anyway? (as distinct from letting agencies that also do some property management)
- Web Search : there is scope for different search-engines to provide fundamentally different types of search (ie. text, image, audio etc) : but why do we need more than one of each type?
- Scientific Journals : pre-print servers (arXiv.org) are starting to solve this problem, but lots of papers still get published in obscure / less-popular journals and if your university library doesn't subscribe to that one then you can't easily read it - and once you leave university they become pretty much unavailable to the average member of the public.
Pretty much all the things I can think of that would be better as a single instance have the problem that they are run commercially - so there are problems with monopolies if we ever get just one of them, and the tin-foil-hat brigade might have something to say if they were nationalized (and in many cases could just be right too : imagine if our primary news outlet were government controlled)
Free stuff seems to find its own level of singleton-like-ness, some keeping just one instance : ....
- IMDB, CPAN, w3c.org,
others forking to meet differing preferences like linux distributions, tech news website etc.