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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Identify for Firefox: stalking made easy, no Google required



Googling someone to get more information about them is a pretty common practice these days, whether you're an employer, a journalist, or just curious. A new Firefox plugin called Identify makes the task of information-gathering easier, by displaying information and links to someone's blogs and social profiles with just one keypress. From any page with a "rel=me" line -- that's most blogs, Twitter pages and other profiles -- hitting control-i on a Mac or alt-i on a PC will show you the info.

Identify is good for finding info on others -- including contact info like phone numbers and addresses, sometimes -- but you can also use it to see much information you're revealing. If you want to make sure you're easy to find and all of your profiles are linked, give it a spin and correct as needed. Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Flickr and LinkedIn are just some of the sites Identify searches for info.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Filed under: Fun, Games, Kids, Freeware, Time-Wasters, Web

Z-Rox - skill testing Time Waster

Z-RoxHow good are you at identifying well-known alphabetical characters and shapes? Well, I'm pretty good at it. I can even read, and stuff. So at first I wasn't sure how a game that had to do with identifying shapes and letters would be all that interesting.

But what if you can only see a one-pixel slice of a letter at a time, and you have to imagine that that slice is scanning from top to bottom? Basically, you're looking at a little line that changes size and moves back and forth, but is representing a shape or letter. Well, it certainly gets more challenging.

Z-Rox is a quick little online game that presents letters and shapes in exactly this way, and challenges you to identify them. For letters, you just enter the letter as the answer, but for shapes you must type the name of them.

Filed under: Fun, Web services

Identify songs by tapping

Song TapperThe Song Tapper is a web service that will identify songs based on the rhythm you tap out with your spacebar. I put it through its paces a couple times and found that it has about a 50% success rate, but then, maybe I just have lousy rhythm. Still, it's more fun than calling up your friends and singing at them until one of them recognizes the tune.

Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Freeware

Tunatic names that tune

TunaticThere are several tools out there that will identify your music, such as MusicBrainz Tagger, but Tunatic is a bit different. Its sole purpose is to identify music you play it through your computer's microphone. So, if you're listening to the radio and hear a song and want to know what it is, you can hold your microphone up to the speaker and in a few seconds Tunatic will, or so its makers claim, identify the song. It's supposed to work for music of any genre except classical and be able to identify different versions and mixes of the same song. I don't know when the last time I listened to the radio while at the computer was, but I suppose this could be useful for some people. Tunatic is available for both Mac and Windows.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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