Amazon has offered a music digital download service for a while now. After trying it out, I feel it’s competitive enough with iTunes that I may return in the future.

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Last night I checked out FriendFeed, a new social networking website that fellow blogger Louis Gray invited me to. FriendFeed pulls together your social news activity from other popular websites into one feed. Sounds simple enough, but there are a few additional features that pushed it into the “useful” column for me. It also has a Twitter-like simplicity that makes participation very easy.

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Despite all my personal biases as to why I should avoid Hulu like the plague, I have to say it works well enough, and I’ll use it in the future.

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It’s been a while since I checked out a new Web 2.0 website, but I had an invite for Spock lying around and finally decided to check it out. It’s a search engine for people and the relationships between them.

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I’m sure you’ve heard of it - I can’t stop looking. No, I’m not talking about Twitter, I mean the strange creation called “LOLcats“: photographs of cats with cute phrases written in text message or leet speak on them.

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I owe Smalltown a review because they put a coffee mug on my doorstep. This nice, vaguely Web 1.0 gesture fits in with their business model which is based around the local community. After checking out the site, they’ve built something fairly impressive, but unfortunately, I didn’t care for the user interface.

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Google recently added a new feature to the already outstanding Google Maps: My Maps. I spent some time playing around with it for purely self-serving reasons: to note exactly where the heck we went on our Japan trip, before I forget.

Here’s the map we’re putting together: Webomatica’s Japan Trip

Anyhow, if you’ve played around with Google Maps, adding your own markers is just another layer of interaction. Using the some simple drawing tools, you can add markers, lines, shapes, and descriptions including pictures and links using standard HTML.

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This guest post is by Dave Papandrew, one of the founders of Fanpop, a cool Web 2.0 sites for fans of anything under the sun. He checked out the Web 2.0 site Scribd, and here are his impressions.

Scribd is a site that completely evaded my web 2.0 “radar” until I ran across the glowing reviews from Techcrunch this weekend. Now, just because a site gets a great review from Techcrunch doesn’t always mean it’s something to write home about, so I was sufficiently skeptical. In this case, however, after actually spending some time using the site, I do think that the hype is very real and the kudos are well-deserved.

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Twitter is strangely compelling. While many wonder what the point is and whether it’s jumping the shark, I’m still intrigued enough to keep messing with it. I think I’ve found my use for it, in conjunction with this blog, for personal stuff too trivial to warrant a full post. In addition, I’ll go out on a limb and say Twitter has huge mainstream possibilities, because it’s way easier than blogging.

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Anybody with a fascination for Web 2.0 websites owes it to themselves to check out how USAToday, the daily national newspaper, has redesigned their website. They’ve basically taken a huge leap ahead into the social news future.

Who knows if that future is a happy one, but it will be fun to watch it evolve, and I’m bookmarking the site - even though I’m not a regular reader nor have I used the site in the past. It’s that compelling.

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