Whois for Twitter! Who knew?

Written on 7th January 2009 21 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

Although many of you probably use mobile or desktop clients such as Twibble or Tweetdeck to access Twitter, if you are using Twitter in your browser, and want to find out a little more about a Twitter user, there’s a faster way than visiting their profile.

Just type ‘whois username‘ into the twitter status field when logged in, and hit the [Update] button. (You don’t need the @ character preceeding username.)

Voila! You’ll be presented with the Name, Date of joining, Biography and URL for that user.

All that’s missing perhaps is the ability to immediately follow that user, or go to their profile page with a simple link – but it’s a quick way to check who’s who. Try it for yourself – [Open Twitter WHOIS in new Window] Simple. Nice. Who knew?

(Thanks to @andrewburnett for the tip, retweeted via @tomcritchlow from an original by @robousbey)

tools, twitter, whois

21 Comments »

Let’s face it, you just want to know if it’s GoingtoRain

Written on 28th November 2008 9 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

A nice little discovery today in the form of a simple little webapp called GoingtoRain.com. You can probably guess what the site does. Visit and voila, there beholds the answer most of us want to know when we ask “what’s the weather like?”

The site detects where you’re located and I believe either says, “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe”.

tools, weather

9 Comments »

13 tools to spice up your Flickr photos (or the way you view them)

Written on 12th June 2008 26 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Take your Flickr photos – or the way you view them – to the next level by using any of these thirteen tools. Are you missing a specific service? Post it in the comments and I’ll update this post.

Fotoviewr – four cool galleries

Fotoviewr started out as someone’s pet project to learn how to program using Adobe Flash and Papervision – and you can tell. Although the service looks very promising, it’s not nearly as cool as it will eventually be. It aims to provide a better experience for viewing photos, thus you it allows you to create four cool galleries. Yet it misses vital functions like an embed option, high-res support, and there’s a max of 30 pics. The usability is great though, so keep an eye on it.

www.fotoviewr.com

Tinou Flickr Cover Flow – iTunes revisited

flickr cover flow San Francisco-based Vietnamese guy Tinou Bao has built a tool which allows you to create a cover flow slideshow ala iTunes for your Flickr photos. Viewers can browse through the slideshow using the keyboard arrows. Tinou has made quite an effort, as you can specify almost everything that you can imagine, so make sure you have some time available before you click the link below.

www.tinou.com/coverflow

Splashr – dead-simple slideshows

Welcome to splashr.com This is perfect for someone who quickly wants to create an embeddable slidehow. It’s not as fancy as the creation of Tinou Bao but it sure does the job right. Splashr outputs your photos by username or tag into any number of different slideshow formats, and then creates a link to the slideshow itself that you can share with all your friends and admirers.

www.splashr.com

Dumpr – get your face on the walls of a famous museum

Dumpr is a site where you can add fun effects to your Flickr photos. You can choose from the following options: Museumr, Amazing Circles, Lomography, Rubik’s Cube, Jigsaw Puzzles, Pencil Sketches, Reflection, Easter Egg, Celebrity Paparazzi, Weave, Lego-ize and Stone Mosaic. The last two are premium options though, so you’ll have to pay a few bucks for them. The picture on the right is an example of the Museumr, featuring Digg founder Kevin Rose and blogger Edial Dekker.