I was reading an interesting bit in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail about how top 10 lists of things that are spread thinly across multiple categories tend to be banal. His primary example is that of top 10 lists of artists from all genres. Any casual reader of such a list would immediately recognize the loss of focus inherent in such a list–it’s simply a jumble of popular artists with barely any depth.

While reading the example, I was reminded of a top 10 contest two of my friends and I played during my years in college. We had decided to create a list of the best songs of all time. We would each come up with 10 songs that we felt would make the list, and we would go down the line and eliminate songs from each others’ lists until we only had 10 left–presumebly, the 10 best.

We were really excited, as if the final list would be a miracle list straight from the heavens.

We quickly went to the task of whittling down the 3 lists. One person would exclaim, “No way that song would ever be on my list. That’s out!” And thus, this went on for another 30 minutes. We all had similar tastes in music, but just different enough to cause arguments of religious proportions. At one point, the two of them threatened to skin my alive if I blackballed Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train.

But, as the number of songs dwindled, we began to notice something. The list was becoming quite familiar. Yes, we had all seen it before. It started to look like a Billboard music chart.

We were horrified. This wasn’t what we had intended. Our tastes are eclectic and niche. The last thing we wanted was a final list that mirrored the pop charts.

The real problem underlying it all was that our tastes were different enough to cause a “graying” of the final list. Combining our tastes into one list resulted in a bland popular songs list, without any artists that delved deeply into a genre.

Just like with our music charts, it’s important to remember that social media and the filters that sift through them need to flexible enough to compare things in a focused genre. It’s much more interesting to see the top 10 horror films that included a clown than it is to see the top 10 hits of the century. By leveraging modern filters and searches, we are at a point where producing such niche lists is just as easy as finding the top hits.

In 2004, there was a total of 4.3 million injuries and illnesses on the job in the US. That’s at a rate of about 5 out of 100 people on the job. For those that do get injured, it can be frustrating and even confusing to figure out basic information like compensation, healing time, and the cause of the injury. The Injuries is a site that provides resources for people who are injured (or, who may be injured).

As part of their goals, The Injuries hopes to become a resource for the injured through information and advice about injuries, and through interactions with other people with similar injuries. Although there are other sites that allow users to talk about injuries, The Injuries looks to be a nicely design and focused site that could be very valuable as more users use it as a common resource.

It’s great to see Web 2.0 starting to diversify into verticals such as health. The Injuries can potentially do a good job of providing user interaction and a sense of community for those that are injured. Their database is small right now, but, watch out for them to grow as more users join and comment with their own injury experiences.

WubHub is another social commands service for the web, alongside YubNub. It’s interesting that their names are so similar. The aim is to satisfy those linux and DOS junkies out there by extending the notion of a command prompt to the web.

You may be asking why a command prompt would be of value to anyone for the web. Aren’t command prompts a legacy that the typical user rarely ever needs? The fact is, that, for many, the command line interface is one of the fastest and most efficient way to access information. This is no different for web interfaces.

For example, suppose that I’m a physics researcher who relies heavily on Wikipedia. It’s become a real time killer to go to the Wikipedia homepage, wait for it to load, and then type in my search term, then wait again for the results. Instead, I could just go to WubHub and type in “wp(atomic physics)”, and I’ll immediately get sent to the results page. The key is that I’ll get used to typing wp(something) so often that it will become second nature, and will eventually help save me time.

They also have other commands that are useful, like “imdb()” to search imdb and “deliciousPopular()” to search on del.icio.us. Since this is a social application, users can also submit their own useful commands for querying other services. As more users add commands, value is added to WubHub.

WubHub, however, does have its shortcomings. It really needs to have browser integration like YubNub does, so that I can type in my commands straight into a search box on my browser. Having to go to the WubHub website each time I want to query is a deal-killer. Another problem is that the command structure is quite rigid at the moment, only allowing queries that conform to “wp(test)”. Otherwise, WubHub will hit you with an error. What they really need is to implement a flexible parser that can take a variety of syntaxes, like “wp test”, “wp test”, “wp[test]”, or “wp{test}”.

If you’re one to cringe at command line interfaces, I would still suggest giving YubNub and WubHub a try. You might be suprised at how much time they could save you. And, if you find that there’s a service you use that’s not covered, try adding a command for it.

When you look at the social networking space for 20-somethings in the US, you’ll see a crowded space that would make any entrepreneur shy away. But, as soon as you widen the field outside this age range or outside the US, the space is considerably more open. Miaplaza, which has been through a year long private beta, aims to grab marketshare in the untapped demographics of social networks.

Miaplaza centers around the idea of plazas, which are basically groups of people who share an interest–think Yahoo Groups, but with a tighter integration around social networking. All the usual features of social networks are there: the ability to add friends, look at the links between friends, messaging each other, and perusing member profiles. The plazas are grown organically, which is to say that members make their own plazas, and passionate members keep them alive with activity. This is similar to the portals at Zimbio, but with a stronger emphasis on social networking.

The key behind the plaza paradigm is that users are able to post various types of media, including photos, news, discussions, and recommendations. You can also surf these media types across all the plazas via the top navigation menu.

I met the founder of miaplaza, Johannes Ziegler, at Stirr, and he is a strong proponent of organic community growth, and looking for social networking oppurtunities outside the demographics of the usual players. For example, they have seen a huge growth in World Cup Soccer plazas, which have sprung up with users all around the world. Indeed, some of the other plazas that I see are “Parents of the Silicon Valley Area”, “Peninsula Bible Church”, and “Fly Fishing and Bird Hunting”–not the usual social networks you’ll see on the other popular sites. And a lot of them are garnering a decent amount of activity.

Right now, Miaplaza offers localizations for US, Canada, and Germany. They’ll be rolling out other countries soon.

Miaplaza is a social network to look out for. If they tap just a slice of the untouched social net, that may bring enough people and value to the system. However, I’m not crazy about their faded khaki color scheme, which I think should be made more colorful and friendly.

Remember Hot or Not? Not very useful, unless you really want to know what anonymous visitors think about your new hairdo, or, if you want to play a prank on your roommate by submitting his picture. But, what if we could use collective intelligence to decide if two people would be hot together? This is the premise behind the new dating site, MatchMake.Us.

Usually, dating sites involve submitting your profile, then browsing endless listings in hopes of finding that one fish in the sea that is compatible with you. But how likely is it that you’ll find that one profile that matches well? Even with the state of the art matching algorithms, there are still a lot of profiles to weed out. MatchMake.Us aims to turn the whole social dating site paradigm on its head by allowing users to essentially take part in match making other users.

Visitors are presented with two profiles and three buttons: “yes”, “maybe”, or “no”. After contemplating the viability of the two people’s relationship, they cast their vote. After a particular pair gets enough “yes” votes, they will both be contacted about the potential match, in which case they can contact each other. They just launched, so there aren’t that many profiles or voters yet, but I could see this being highly effective with a large user base. Why search through profiles when you can let other people suggest matches for you?

I had the chance to speak to Dale Thoms, founder of MatchMake.Us, at the Stirr Mixer 1.3, and he said that he has been getting great responses from women who love to play matchmaker in real life. Some of the upcoming features include support for matchmaker accounts, which will let matchmakers track how successful they are in making matches, and how they compare to other matchmakers. In a way, this is kind of like digg, instead of being first to find interesting links, you can be the first to suggest a successful couple.

Other new features to look out for are the ability to make lists of friends you may want to try to matchmake, and better searching capabilities. They’re really trying to be user-driven, and keep things simple and fun, which is a great philosophy.

When they get more votes in, it would be interesting to see on the front page lists of the most compatible couples, and most uncompatible couples, as voted by visitors. Another idea is for match seekers to message successful matchmakers to request to find a match for them. Matchmakers could either do this pro bono, or even charge a fee for doing it (if they’re good enough). There are numerous variants on matchmaking that could be done.

Overall, MatchMake.Us is a simple idea that could go a long way. I haven’t seen any service like this in the dating space as of yet, so it looks like they have a really original idea here.

Netscape recently launched their new beta portal, which will later replace the front page at Netscape.com. And suprise suprise, the new beta is a digg-clone, allowing users to democratically vote for stories, which are placed on the front page after they attain enough votes. The fact that they are placing this right on the front page is a sign that they’re taking the social news space seriously.

The interface is all-too familiar for us digg-ites out there. Users submit stories which are voted upon by other users. The stories then proceed up (or down) the ranks as users vote for them. The question is, will Netscape be able to overcome digg and the other social news sites out there?

Netscape has the advantage of volume–they have many more pageviews than digg, which could potentially bring in more quality stories and votes. However, Netscape is still hesitating about allowing users to control the content in its entirety. The stories on the absolute top of the stack are chosen by editors, instead of placing trust in the voted content. Netscape probably still has qualms about letting the mobs create the content on their most heavily prized web real estate, so I’m sure we won’t see those editorials go away anytime soon.

There are a few differences in the interface, most notable of which are:

• Photos are pulled in for some of the stories.
• Users are able to tag their submissions.
• Visiting an external link brings up a sidebar navigator frame along with the content.

The tagging function is sorely missed at digg, which I hope will make it into the next version when it comes out later this month. The sidebar navigator is simply annoying. I hate external sidebars, which should never used in my opinion. If I want to visit an external site, let me do it without dragging a klunky framed interface with me! (that goes for you too, Google)

But, other than these two elements, Netscape is pretty much identical to digg. I personally like digg’s design better than Netscape’s, which seems to have been crafted more haphazardly. Perhaps we’ll see another iteration on the design when it comes out of beta.

Amusingly enough, it looks like digg users are gaming Netscape’s system. The top story right now is about how Netscape is copying digg (along with a photo of Kevin Rose):

Looks like the Netscape people will have a lot of these kinds of issues on their plate in the next few days.

In the end, I think Netscape has a chance against the other established sites, simply based on their traffic ranking. And who knows, perhaps Netscape will help foster the idea of user generated democractic stories to the average internet joe, since a good chunk of them have Netscape.com as their homepage.

Now here’s an idea: a social networking site that doesn’t thrust you into popularity games with all the excluding of “unpopular” people, and the idolization of a few lucky profiles. This is exactly what the recently launched social site, The Impersonals, is trying to do. They plainly state on their front page that the inspiration behind The Impersonals is that

We couldn’t find a personals site we weren’t embarrassed to join, so we made our own.

The site takes the social web to a new level of minimalism. Users can create a profile, which consists answering a few questions (we’re talking about 5 or 6), and send up to three messages a day to other users. You can also bookmark users you find interesting, and, you’ll be notified if they bookmark you. In terms of functionality, that’s about it for The Impersonals. But in this case, their strength is derived from the ease of entry–there are no long questionaires that make you rack your brain for the best answers, there are no complicated popularity ranking schemes that would make anyone’s head spin, and there is no exclusive referral system that restricts joining the network. The Impersonals is a site that simply allows you to post your profile with a few witty comments, and see what responses you get.

I’m a sucker for simplicity, and, The Impersonals is doing the right thing at the right time. Hopefully, we’ll see their network grow.

Right now, it looks as though they’ve been dugg, and, as it turns out, their male to female ratio is severely skewed to males (goes to show who the typical digger is). They’re trying to get as many women to join as possible now, so invite your girlfriends, or they’re going to have a social network imbalanced meltdown.

Consumating, which is part of CNet, has recently relaunched with a fresh new design and attitude. Consumating’s users are mostly young workers in their 20’s and 30’s who probably scoff at networks like MySpace. Right now, the emphasis is on social networking, with some shades of dating.

There a few features that sets Consumating apart from the crowd. First, users are able to tag other users. From what I’ve seen, tagging is used pretty creatively, from tags like “brings_the_devil_out” to “physicists_can_be_quarky”. Of course, you can also tag yourself with your own set of tags. Consumating is successfully bringing tags into the social networking world, just like Flickr did in the online photo world.

But, what would a social network be without the aspect of popularity? Consumating allows you to rate users with a thumbs up or down, which goes into a point-based calculation for that particular user. You can see who the most popular users are on the Popularity Leaderboard. What’s interesting is that you can also sort popularity by tags, which allows you to focus in on a particular set of users that might have similar interests as you (as deemed by the user, and the other users who have tagged him or her).

Consumating also does a good job of prodding their users to be creative. They run interesting weekly questions that are posed to all the users. If a user answers the question, it shows up in their discussion (which is kind of like a blog for a user’s stream of messages). This continually generates interesting content that can be funny, witty, or just weird. It’s really a great way to create a sense of community. Some other features include polls and contests, all of which make for interesting user generated content.

Even though the site design is a little cluttered, I think Consumating has a great chance to break into the social networking space, especially for the age group they’re targeting. They’re doing a lot of great content related things that would bring back users for more, and, at the same time, allowing users to discover other user’s who have something in common with them.

After seeing Richard’s chmod 777 post, and reviewing a new mega-reviews site, it got me thinking that it’s a great time to have an opinion on the web. There are a vast number of reviews and rankings sites out there that will let you throw in your 2 cents (and many more launching each day). So, here I present my list of reviews sites.

Notice that I’m leaving out social news and simple voting sites like Digg. The focus of this list will be on individuals making their voice heard through reviews on specific items.

Products
Amazon
The Mint Pages
iNods - A product reviews aggregator
ResellerRatings
MyPickList
Epinions

Media (Books, Music, Films, etc.)
All Consuming
Books Well Read
Reader2
MyFilmz
Criticker

Housing
Apartment Ratings

Brick and Mortar
Yelp
Judy’s Book
Burritophile
Zipingo
Add Your Own - Manhattan restaurants and reviews
Insider Pages

Anything and Everything
The Best Stuff in the World
RateItAll

Web 2.0 and Websites
BuzzShout
Web 2.0 List
Neobinaries
StumbleUpon
BringALink

Wine
Cork’d
TastyDrop
Nosewine
Wind Diary

Computer, Electronics, Gaming
gibbity

Travel
TripConnect
Epic Trip
43 Places
Trip Advisor
TravBuddy
IgoUgo

Education
RateMyProfessor

This list is by no means complete, so please comment below with your favorite sites that let you rant and rave about your favorite things.