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unfortunate posts

Filed under: Search, web 2.0

Spickr: another unfortunate name, this time it's a startpage


"Flickr" is a great name for a photo-sharing site. Displays flicker sometimes, right? Maybe you flick through your photo album? Recently, we've reviewed a couple of neat services with "add an r to the end"-style names that didn't quite work as smoothly: DeskLickr and Dumpr. Not exactly the kinds of names you want to tell a friend about.

Continuing our ongoing coverage of interesting, useful websites with extremely unfortunate names, let's try this one on for size. Your friend sees your fancy-looking startpage and asks, "What's that cool site?" "Oh," you casually respond, "that's Spickr!" SPICKR? Did someone really name a slick, search-based startpage after an old-fashioned, patently-offensive racial slur? It turns out that, no, no they did not. The official explanation is that the name means you can "PICK" the information you want, and the "S" is for "search."

If you can get past the name, Spickr is a decent startpage. It does 1-click searches on Google, YouTube or Wikipedia, has a nice list of popular sites in the sidebar, and the ability to navigate your del.icio.us from within its interface. The site is clearly targeting iGoogle users, with a bare-bones "no widgets, no RSS" message - if that appeals to you, give it a look. Maybe send them an email, while you're at it, and suggest they come up with a better name for their product.

UPDATE: The folks at Spickr noticed this post, and the service is now called FastEagle. We've updated the URLs for this post appropriately.

Filed under: Design, Fun, Photo

Dumpr: unfortunate name, neat photo effects

If you're no Photoshop guru, but you have fun applying different novelty filters to your pictures, you might like Dumpr. It's web-based, very simple to use, and has a pretty decent library of effects: sketch, Lomo, reflection and jigsaw puzzle, to name a few. You can upload photos from your own hard drive, or paste in URLs from some of the major photo hosting services, including Flickr and MySpace.

Dumpr isn't really meant for advanced users, although buying a Pro account will get you access to a few more effects. Despite the ... interesting ... choice of name, Dumpr is pretty fun to play with, and it's great for quickly doing things to photos that would take a while for a novice to learn in Photoshop. It also has a few Flickr-specific features, like searching for pictures similar to your favorites, and rating Flickr photos. We're still not sure about telling our friends we're going to Dumpr some photos of them, though.

Filed under: Design, Fun, Photo, Macintosh

Let Flickr spice up your wallpaper with DeskLickr

DeskLickr sounds like that kid we knew in first grade who would take any dare, but it's actually a neat little app with an unfortunately silly name. DeskLickr grabs desktop pictures from Flickr, making sure your wallpaper is never stale. It can change your desktop manually or automatically, and give you a little "about this photo" info, so you know whose picture it is and where to find it on Flickr.

There are plenty of options to make sure you get only the pictures you want. You can tell DeskLickr to grab from all of Flickr, from a group of your choice, just from Flickr's "interesting" selection, or from your own photos or favorites. If you don't like a picture, you can tell DeskLickr not to show it again.

Regular Download Squad readers will note that app is similar in function and effect to another one we recently reviewed, Desktoptopia. To compare: Desktoptopia uses its own image feeds, which are consistently full of great desktops, while DeskLickr offers a broader range with a little more hit-and-miss involved. Also: Desktoptopia is available for both Mac and PC, so if you're running Windows, you may want to scope out our earlier post.

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