The age of web usefulness
Call it web 2.0 or whatever, but we are in a very exciting time for Internet usefulness. In just the last month, a slew of new applications have popped up that show the promise of the internet to make life more entertaining.
Muxtape, while operating with dubious legality, is a very simple way to share music with friends. WilliamsburgEats is pure genius: completely local restaurant links with a huge Google map providing the base functionality (the model can be ported anywhere). Now we have BeerMenus, which could have a profound affect on the pricing of NY beers, since it allows for drinkers to seek out specific beers based on price (not its core function, but a very useful benefit of correlating all NYC bars with the beers they serve).
What’s next:
HottestWaitress.com? WineMenus.com? CheapestGas.com?
The real revolution won’t happen until we get MostSuedDoctors.com, or PharmaPrices.com, ConvictionRateByJudge.com. Or what if someone were to challenge U.S News simply by reprocessing their data into an actual accounting of the best colleges? (In other words, kill that absurd category they have that judges colleges by how they are perceived and just judge their grad rates, student teacher ratio, and other meaningful stats).
Google is providing a lot of the pipes for all this, but also allows for inefficiencies that it may someday remove: if Google’s restaurant listings didn’t suck, we’d have no need for WilliamsburgEats, but Google, for some unfathomable reason, is terrible at listing all nearby restaurants.
But we can thank Google for the speed with which we can aggregate data. We then have PHP to thank for easy database access. And web design has gone functional, thank God. Flash is dead! Long live the useful!
April 30th, 2008 at
There is already a website that reports Long Island gas prices based on sightings made by the website users.
Not that this has anything to do with the post in general, but don’t you think the public perception of a University or College is important when it affects financial donations to the institution and the caliber of student who chooses to attend, both of which will have a positive effect on the standards at the school in the long run?
April 30th, 2008 at
Public perception is important, but USNews claims to attempt an objective look at the quality of the education and experience provided by colleges and universities. By making current perception part of the analysis, they perpetuate the status quo.