Searchme is a visual search engine and currently in the public beta phase. Searchme reminds me a lot of another visual search engine called oSkope, however these two are totally different in terms of user experience. I like Searchme very much. It allowed me to search the stuff that I want and save it on my desktop, within a finger click, i.e. drag and drop the search results (in the format of page by page) to the stack I created. As told by Searchme, all the pages saved in the stacks are stored in your desktop computer, and if you deleted your Flash Player cache, the pages you saved will be gone.

There are other features in Searchme, you can delete the stack you created, or add a public URL to it. Don’t be afraid the pages you saved will be exposed to the public, good pages should be shared to others as this is an act of demonstrate trust and cultivate the knowledge management culture.

To know more, I embedded two videos of Searchme, watch and enjoy.

1) Introduction to Searchme

2) How To Create a Stack

Wigadoo is a travel site that launched in the UK. It is a site suitably for those who are organizing a trip or a travel leisure plan. What Wigadoo provided is a platform which allowed users to propose a trip, send the emails out to their friends, and then confirm the number till get everyone involved on board by giving out their credit or debit card details and pledge a certain amount of money.

The money collected for a particular event will be saved into a so-called online event account. This handy account comes with a Wigadoo Virtual Prepaid MasterCard that help users to pay for the event in advance.

Wigadoo was initially formed in January 2007, but only being introduced on the Web on 23 June 2008, approx. 18 months of preparation for the site. Currently, they have a team consists of five people based in the UK, and additionally four developers are from Bulgaria. As Founder Uma Rajah mentioned, “We looked in lots of different places – China, India, various places in Eastern Europe, the UK. The guys in Bulgaria referenced very well and we’ve had a really good experience working with them.” According to this RealBusiness article.

Update: September 8, 2008

Evernote: This Web 2.0 is officially launched in public beta today. Their motto is “Capture what you like; Find it when you want,” it help users to capture what they want such as notes, pictures, by simply click those stuff to a button called “New Pasteboard Clip” on their Web browser. It’s easy, the notes, pictures have been captured. Users can put a tag on each one of the items captured, so that they can find them later through the tag/category given.

Evernote can be operated on Windows, Mac, or Mobile phone. Currently, Evernote is operating it based on versioning, whereby Premium account goes for a larger capacity, i.e. 500MB per month compared to 40MB entitled to Free account. And Premium version does recognize text in images/pictures, thus users might find it very interesting.

Watch the video embedded below for more information below.

EveryBlock is a grant project created by a co-founder of Django namely Adrian Holovaty. It is a site that allowed users to keep track of the data on every block of Chicago, New York and San Francisco, three cities initially upon launched in January 23 this year. Now if you go to the site, more cities are covered at this moment since they’ve included Charlotte and Philadelphia (June 30, 2008), Boston, Seattle, Washington, DC (August 18) and the latest addition is Los Angeles (August 27).

EveryBlock is one of the early leaders in local news aggregation. In a motto, “A news feed for your block,” this site offers the latest news feed of what is happening in the neighborhood in the cities aforesaid. So far, EveryBlock is particularly useful when users want to know the latest photos taken, real-estate listings, geographic cataloging of local media or blogs in the cities concerned. Though all these data are pull from some third-party applications such as Flickr, Panaramio (photo), Trulia (real-estate listings), Yelp (business reviews), Craigslist (lost-and-found), media, mainly local relevant newspapers or blogs, EveryBlock seemed to offer a broader assortment of local news, with much greater functionality than those offered by the local newspapers. This make sense with the almost-instant updates of crime, fire alerts, restaurant food closures and inspections that are freely available on the site. Those data are obviously important for users who live in dense areas such as New York with lots of stuff going on in every second.

Undoubtedly, the present success of EveryBlock should be attributed by its smart partnerships with Government bodies such as New York State Liquor Authority, Chicago Tribune, the Mecklenburg County Health Department, just to name a few. With the help of these bodies, all the public records and information can be passed to the public instantly with a ZIP code search in the search bar. If you can’t think of anything to search on this EveryBlock, you can test it out by simply browse to the latest news feed by type, such as graffiti cleaned in New York, liquor licenses, and etc.

Meanwhile, EveryBlock is up against a bigger competition, in viewed of its recent move to the private transport sector by launching a EveryBlock DashApp that enable drivers to view the latest EveryBlock data in their cars.

Finally, to know the latest development of EveryBlock, you can subscribe to its official blog here.

Update: September 8, 2008

I’ve always had an inclination to use a desktop client to access to my Web accounts. For tweet purpose, I’ve tried Birdy, but this Twhirl did gave me a different user experience in some ways.

Twhirl is a social software client, currently supports both Windows and Mac Operating System, and users could install and use it to access their Twitter, Friendfeed, identi.ca, as well as Seesmic accounts. In order to use Twhirl, you’ll need to download Adobe AIR runtime. One of the advantages in building a software on top of Adobe AIR runtime is that it is a cross-platform kinda of technologies, so that when next time you want to release your app (application) in the Linux system, it’ll support your app.

In matter of fact, Twhirl was developed by a highly caliber German developer Marco Kaiser and eventually being bought by Seesmic. Read the 20 reasons why Seesmic acquired Twhirl I came to realize that the acquisition of Twhirl is a good buy, and the key person behind Seesmic Loic even stated that he want to grow this Twhirl as a new Skype for micro blogging. Note that the price of acquisition is not disclosed to the public by Seesmic until now.

Twhirl provide lots of additional features that Twitter users normally wouldn’t find that in their Web-based Twitter accounts. It’s a cliche to say that when you improve something from an existing app, it will makes your app more favorable in the market, and most people can accept that it’s generally true. On Twhirl, besides the aforesaid few Web services support, users can post their status updates to Pownce or Jaiku. Part of the reasons what makes a user enjoying this Twhirl is the options of the configuration feature. After you adding your Twitter account on this Twhirl, you can set your opacity level of this client, text font size, play a “Ding” sound when there’s a new pop-up tweet arise, or even show a notification window when you’re replying someone’s tweet.

Twhirl has significant simple interface, as all of the familiar functions such as arrays of tweets, replies, directs, etc. are available as tabs for you to choose for. Though users at first play might not familiar with all of the icons, but I think in overall it will not discourage users from using it. Personally, in my first trial, I think the best part of this Twhirl is the built-in of search capabilities through the Twitter Search and TweetScan. Some other notable features are the color changes of the client, post image to TwitPic, mark tweets as seen, shorten URL through snurl, is.gd, or twurl, just to name a few. In short, I can say that the interface use the available space in an extremely well and effectively.

Twhirl can be considered as a leading desktop client in the race of the best Twitter applications, but it has competitor as well, the closest is Alert Thingy.

Update: September 9, 2008