Tag Archives: tools

Have you ever been stuck naming a new project?

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
2

Enter Mixnomer! Mixnomer is this cool new web tool that helps you find a domain name for that new idea, blog, company, or side project that you’ve been wanting to get off the ground. It’s what I used to find the name for Simply Curated and it helped me find a great domain that I never would have thought to try.

The tool is super easy to use, enter keywords or possible words you’d like in the name. Let’s say you want to open a vegan bakery (not the most original startup idea, but just go with it). I enter the keywords vegan, bakery, baking, treats, cakes, simple, healthy, chocolate, tasty, delish. Then I enter the prefixes little, and the. Then pick some suffixes like, ous, ly, and shop. Mix it up and here’s what I got.

More options than I could show you! Mixnomer not only shows you the available domain, but if the twitter username is available as well. Right now the list is ordered by the number of characters in the URL. But I can rearrange to show my favorites on top.

Some of my favorites from this search were DELISHVEGAN.COM, LITTLETASTY.COM, THEDELISH.COM, lots of options I would have never thought would be available domains.

So play around with it, I’d love to see what cool domains you guys come up with! (full disclosure, mixnomer is a company I have been consulting for, but I honestly think it’s an awesome product!)

Cataloging Inspiration

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
2

For over 6 months now I’ve been meaning to write a post about my love for Svpply. Svpply is a site that allows you to save what you may want to buy later from any retail website. I’ve been using it more like  virtual storage for all the things I like. In the beginning that was mostly clothes and accessories, but more and more it’s becoming more of a place for me to keep a catalog of products that inspire me.

Svpply is frequently compared to Pinterest. Pinterest lets you catalog the things you love. It has similar features to Svpply in that it allows you to grab images from the web and “pin” them. But it also acts like a social bookmarking tool, letting you place things into categories, called pinboards.

This is a style pin board by my friend Patrice. Unlike Svpply, Pinterest allows you to add text to the photos you are saving. It also has features similar to Tumblr. Users can “re-pin” a post, like it, or leave a comment.

I find both these tools more visual and more appealing than traditional bookmarking sites like Delicious. I love just scrolling through the main page on Svpply, and discovering new things from the people and stores I follow.

What are you using to save inspiration on the web?

Topsy-search based on Twitter

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
4

The other day I came across someone tweeting about a site called Topsy.com which is calling itself “a search engine powered by tweets” and it’s pretty cool. Unlike twitter search, when you search for something on topsy it is going to show you results as webpages, not tweets.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about. The first index is based exclusively on Twitter statuses and the wonderful people who write them.

This is what a typical search page on Topsy looks like. You see the website and underneath in the speech bubble are the number of times that link has been tweeted. On the right hand side you can see the twitter users who tweet about this topic the most, and on the left side you can narrow down your search down to the last hour!

Topsy Search Results

Another really useful way to use Topsy is to find out more information about people on twitter. Topsy has a page for every person it listens to. Tracking all the links that person tweets.

I was surprised when I looked up my twitter name. Topsy had determined that I was “highly influential” and had already added tags to my tweets.

And if that wasn’t enough to blow your socks off, take a look at this. Topsy has “trackback” pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing.

I am not sure if Topsy can see who tweets what links if they are bit.ly or tinyurl links, because if it can, then this is a much better way to track the reach of a tweet or a link on twitter, regardless of what url shortening service people are using.

So that’s Topsy. Let me know what you think about it.