Now there’s WhatUCollect.com instead.

This is basically a website where you can catalog your collections online for display.  Your photos, comments, and other information can be put up for the world to see in an organized and fun way.  The main focus of the site is to display collectibles in a nice and coherent way as well as to organize photographs so that multiple photos of the same item are shown logically rather than in the haphazard way.

The site is slick, well-made, and easy to navigate.  There are users with collections ranging from comic books to beer cans to Mr. Potato Head dolls.  These are displayed in catalogs and if your collection is missing a star piece or two, you can leave a “blank” for it until you find one.

There are discussion boards, feedback posts, and other things to give interactivity and information sharing as well.  In fact, if your collection is missing a piece, you may connect with someone who has it.  You never know.

WhatUCollect wants to be a social network for collectors, though it appears from the site’s user activity and functionality that this is more of a marketing wish than a reality.  The website started in 2008 as UCollect, built by students of Sonoma State University in California.  It relaunched this year with its new name.

BarcodesGenerator.com is a simple little site app that makes a generic barcode for whatever you’d like.  You can put in your name, short tagline, website URL, or whatever and change a few settings to have a barcode made just for you.  You’re given a link to embed or share it as well as the image for download and use.

The site is straight forward and has nothing but the barcode generation fields.  Using our above example, I used “VOIS.com” for the text, set the width and height to 200×40, set the font size for 35, and left the colors at their default 44-146-27 and 255-255-255 and had it rendered.

Once your barcode is made, it appears below the creation fields and you can download and save it as you would any image.  You’re also given link info for forum [img] embeds and the URL for standard location linking as <img> and so forth.

It’s pretty cool and a lot of fun.  It’s also free.  So long as visitors keep being nice and click on their AdSense links to help them keep it that way, anyway.  Check it out!

Think of this as Meetup for Twitter, but with better functions for that platform.   It allows businesses or people to schedule promotional events like product launches, seminars, broadcasts (online or off) and more.  It creates a sort of calendar of events leading up to the big premier, including auto-tweeted promotional tweets (even via multiple accounts).

That’s just the start though.  It also can created threaded timelines of discussions relating to the event.  So if your promoting the “BigTime Seminar” you can use a hash like #BTS or #BigTime and the discussions around those threads can be threaded as conversations.  Any Twitter search term can be used, of course.  Hash tags just make it simpler.

A public profile with all of the event information is where your action centers on Taweet.  Continuing our example with the BigTime Seminar, your BigTime Seminar account on Taweet would be linked to all of the Twitter accounts you attach to it and have access to.  So if you have a seminar-specific account, a personal account, and a business networking account, you can link all three to the BigTime Seminar profile on Taweet.

From there, visitors to the Taweet (which is promoted in every tweet it sends) will see the main linked account (say @BigTimeSeminar) and all “friended” accounts, including theirs if they’re a friend of the linked Twitter accounts.  Automatic tweets are sent as you schedule them by calendar.  The threaded discussion, latest information, website links, etc. are all prominent on your Taweet page.

Taweet is a cool idea and it’s easy to see how many uses it could have.  From promoting your kid’s baseball league to a real business seminar or convention, it has a lot of potential.  Of the few similar apps I’ve seen, this one is definitely the best so far.   Taweet is free to use and requires only a Twitter account to sign up.

Finding the lowest price for something is one of the cornerstones of online business, search engines, and has been the concept behind many a startup in the Web’s past.  So what makes this one different?

Well, to be honest, not much.  Booklookr.com is basically a low-price hunter site like any other.  It focuses on books, however, which is something that hasn’t been done (at least not very well) in the past.  It’s actually pretty good at that too, so it’s not “just another cheap price app.”

Originally aimed at college students looking for lower-cost books, which is nothing new online, really, it’s expanded to include most other booksellers too.  That is a good thing, since up until now, most of us just have to go to Amazon or eBay and hope we’re getting the best price.

Doing some searches through Booklookr, I found a lot of bargains (most of which were, admittedly, at Amazon).  A few online booksellers I’d never heard of came up occasionally and other venues that I knew about, but rarely visited like Barnes & Noble’s site also appeared once in a while.

So there’s definitely some use here.

It works pretty simply.  You can search by book title, ISBN, author, etc.  Matches will come up, usually with cover art, and you choose the one you’re after.  The five lowest-priced purchase options for the book appear with links to the vendor.  Some of these links are affiliates, so it’s obvious how Booklookr monetizes itself.

It’s a simple, useful, and free site.  Whether it comes up with the absolute lowest price I can’t say, but it does show some great bargains and does well enough for me to feel I’d have saved money trying it.  Definitely worth using and just in time for the Holidays!

Gifsoup.com does it and they do it for free, even.  You don’t even have to sign up for an account.  You can give them any YouTube video URL, select ten seconds from that video, and the site produces an animalted .GIF file out of it.  That’s basically it.

The animated GIF, of course, has been around since the beginnings of the graphical Web.  I remember when most websites in the mid-90s had the same slew of animated GIFs all over them.  From rotating stars to bouncing @ symbols, they were what made those early websites “interactive.”  It didn’t take long for them to become design and marketing taboo, of course, but at first, they were the hallmark of the “new” Internet.

Once Al Gore left the progression of his invention so he could pursue politics, the Internet and WWW quickly got beyond the animalted GIF and went on to other things.  Like hockey stick graphs and Flash.

Well, animated GIFs are making something of a comeback now, as more and more alternative sites (blogs mostly) are using them as eye-catchers.  Like anything else, if they’re done right, they look great.  Most of the time they’re not, of course, but welcome to design.  One man’s beautiful graphic is another’s trash heap.

As animated GIFs, of course, the short clips you can make with Gifsoup don’t have sound and are rather choppy.  So the idea works with some videos much better than with others.  Here’s how it works:

First, you give the site your video’s URL (for this, I used Weird Al Yankovic’s White and Nerdy, one of the greatest songs ever (re)written).  Then you give your GIF a title and category type (Gifsoup keeps the GIFs it makes on the site, rotating the latest makes through the front page).  Then you’re presented with a page that has the video embedded, your chosen category and title, and a table to put in the minute/second to start and stop with.  A preview of your choice is shown so you can adjust the timing as you need to get what you want.

For the above video, I chose to start at about about the 1:00 mark and run for ten seconds (max allowed).

Once you click “Finish,” you’re given a download for the GIF and you’re done!  Easy, fun, and free.  Whether it’s useful is up to you to decide.

I should point out that using Gifsoup on anything that isn’t your own is a violation of YouTube’s terms of service (technically), so that’s worth considering before you use it.  Since it doesn’t really link to your YouTube profile, however, it’s not likely anyone will be enforcing this rule except on Gifsoup themselves, if ever.  Caveat emptor and all that.

The matches are shown with their Twitter bio and other information and you can follow them from there.  You can also ad your own business to the listings for future searches.

If you’ve followed my Twitter account (@Lapp), you know that our local Police Department’s Chief has his own Twitter that I follow and have made comments on regularly.  This kind of outreach is becoming the modern way to get in touch.  Social networking isn’t just for the big marketing gurus anymore.  Even the local business can benefit.

The idea is pretty good and keeping with the simplicity of Twitter, TweetsLounge has kept their site simple and easy to use.  Normal users don’t have to sign in or even give their Twitter info to use the site, but businesses who’d like to register to be seen will need to go through the process.

Very cool and very much needed, so if this new site catches on, you can expect it to become a hub for this sort of thing.

Currently, while in beta, Tweets Lounge is focused on the Seattle area of Washington.  Users can sign in using their Twitter account if they’d like to make searches more automated and compare whether the business you’re looking for is already on your friends list.

Tweets Lounge was started by Peter Boctor, a Seattle-based software developer specializing in Ruby on Rails and iPhone apps.  His Twitter account is, of course, on Tweets Lounge too.

RecipeRX.com is a website where you can look at recipes, restaurants, and even products to find those that are (or aren’t) amenable to your dietary needs.  It’s free to use and gives you a lot of freedom and information for your diet and health.

The site was founded by chef Camille Macres who describes herself as a “certified health nut.”  It launched during the TechCrunch50 convention in September and is headquartered in Santa Barbara, California.  Seeing a need for health-related food information that went beyond the Nutrition Information on the back of the package, and tired of wait staff needing to memorize ingredients list or continually ask the chefs “what’s in that?” she decided to put it on the Web.

RecipeRX is free to use and definitely interesting.  You sign up for a free account, create a profile for yourself based on your medical or health needs, your food preferences, etc. and then you’re linked with restaurants, farmer’s markets, grocery stores, etc. that match those criteria.  You can then view the profiles of those and try them out.  From there, you can leave a review of the outlet for others to use in making their decisions.

The way the site works isn’t new, but the idea behind it definitely is.  Everyone benefits by eating healthier and those who have a specific reason to eat one way versus another will definitely have a leg up on the game by using RecipeRX.  It’s free, so why not give it a shot?

Often times, startups might get together and barter goods and services to accomplish this.  Usually the process if pretty informal, but it only happens between those who know one another directly.  A startup in New York might have never even heard of one that has the services they need, but is located in San Diego.

That’s where TheSwop.com comes in.  It formalizes those barter agreements by not only putting the two startups together, but creating a way for them to favor-trade in a more professional atmosphere.

The site runs on “favor points,” which are traded and earned when services are provided or purchased.  The setup and idea is pretty simple.  If your marketing guy is available, he could offer his services (in your startup’s name) on TheSwop for a number of favor points.  When a taker grabs the opportunity, the work is done and the points awarded.  Later, when your startup needs some copywriting done, you can save the cash hiring a copywriter and instead find one using your points on TheSwop.

TheSwop is free to use, though some premium items require payment (such as access to a total list of participants).  Obviously, money was invented for a reason, so at some point, actually paying for services will be the next step for your startup.  However, when money is tight during the beginning stages, this might be a great option.

So far, participants are mostly in the United States and Europe, but the site is world-wide.  Everything from design/development to office space and PR are offered on the site by other startups.  TheSwop was also one of the Tech50 at TechCrunch this year.

The three search boxes to build your search are simple and require no login: what you want to do, where you want to do it, and when you want it to be.  Each of these can receive extraneous data, though the better your “computer” the better your result will be.  So to find those Italian restaurants in Moscow, you’d search for “Italian food” or “Italian restaurant” in “Moscow, ID” or “Moscow, Idaho” and you’d say “tonight” or “today” or “tomorrow” and click for results.

The site is a little quirky and doesn’t always deliver, however.  The above search, for instance, took two tries (the first returning an error) and came up empty.  Not surprising, since Moscow, ID isn’t exactly a booming metropolis.  Still, other searches I tried that should have worked also didn’t.

Looking for italian restaurants in Washington, DC comes up with matches in Washington State and New York City searches often include New York State returns.  Other areas that seem like they should have information, like Los Angeles or Miami, don’t.  So the app does need some work.

On the other hand, it just launched in September and other aspects of the engine, such as auto-filling the date and extruding real English into search-able data it does beautifully.  Finished results include Google Maps to the location(s), Yellow Pages-style information on the business (if available), and so forth.

Overall, while Goby is in its growing stages and experiencing some pains, it’s definitely worth trying.  Just don’t base your entire vacation plan on it yet.  It’s free and has great potential.

PizzaTweetup.com is Meetup for pizza lovers.  Started by the Pizza Expert (editor of this site) (WorstPizza.com) in Boca Raton, Florida, the site can be used by anyone, anywhere to organize their own events.  It’s creator, set the site up for his own Pizza Tweetups (held regularly in South Florida), and decided to open it up for everyone.

“These events are getting huge down here,” Craig says.  “So I figured, ‘why not let everyone else, whether you’re in New York or California, set up their own thing?’ So PizzaTweetup.com was made public.”

Pretty cool idea.  So far, the site is brand new and just has Lapp’s own tweetup events, but it will grow with time.  A Twitter feed of the #pizzatweetup hash is centered on the site’s main page and upcoming events are listed to the left.  A virtual map from Google Maps appears to the right with the latest (or selected) event’s location highlighted.

The site is free to use and easy to utilize.  It works in basically the same way that Meetup.com does, though users don’t have to register with a profile.  A Twitter name (such as @Lapp’s, the editor of this site) and email address are required, of course.  The Twitter name is the “name” on the profile and who to contact while the email address is used to send you a secret URL so you can easily edit your PizzaTweetup event.

While this is obviously a very niche-oriented site, it’s very cool to see.  These sorts of events are getting very popular and pizza is beginning to emerge from the college dormitory and the cardboard box (and crust) to the main stream and upper crust.  Pun intended.  Sorry, couldn’t resist.