It’s a new year and it’s time for you to try some fabulous new web apps. We look at new apps all day around here and would like to share 3 of the very best we’ve found already this new year.
Music discovery, social Q&A and sharing your plans – that’s what these apps are all about. Read on, I’m pretty sure that at least one of these will get you jumping up and down, clapping your hands. It’s stuff like this that makes me love the internet.
thesixtyone
thesixtyone isn’t brand-new but it just relaunched with a gorgeous new design and we learned this morning that the YCombinator-backed music exploration site has also taken funding from Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito and his investing buddy Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.
It’s hard to describe thesixtyone. It’s a very feature-rich music discovery site and marketplace, with user voting, a game made up of listening quests and big, full-screen photos all over the site. It’s a joy to explore. There’s all kinds of little quirks, like you can limit the music you’re shown by genre. Did I mention there’s really big pictures?
Music, game play, big pictures, hot financial backing – this one’s an app to watch, and listen-to as the case may be. Jumping up and down, clapping my hands? Well yes, I am now that I’ve found TheSixtyOne.
Quora
Take a team of early Facebook engineering rock-stars, have them tackle the age-old field of Question & Answer and what do you get? Quora, a social Q&A site that is a whole lot of fun to use and a great place to learn things trivial or useful. The company’s goal is to create a timeless, best-consensus knowledge collection on a wide variety of topics and with more participation than you find on Wikipedia. So far the site is mostly a hang-out for Silicon Valley insiders (it’s in closed beta) but as more and more of the rest of us filter in – hopefully the excellent user-experience can scale.
It’s more general-interest (if less populated) than StackOverflow and its clones, it’s more social (if slower) than Aardvark and it’s more usable (if less immediately stimulating of the intellect) than Hunch.
I’m “following” (subscribed to) topics on Quora like startups, journalism, food and the New York Times. I’ve been going back to Quora multiple times a day every day for weeks, because it’s so much fun to see what new questions have been asked, what new answers offered, what answers have been voted up and what new topics you can follow.
Plancast
“What are you doing?” It was only a matter of time until someone decided that question was too slow. Plancast asks what you are planning on doing. Started by former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson and launched in December, Plancast is on fire right now. Robert Scoble asked this week whether it was going to pull a Twitter/SXSW and with the flurry of sign-ups I’m seeing, that seems possible.
It’s fun to see the plans that friends have in the long and short term. My friend Mark Krynsky is going to DrupalCon in April. I’m going to the Post Office on Sandy Blvd. in an hour, then I’ll grab lunch in the area. Interested in joining either of us in those plans? Now you can, thanks to Plancast. It’s fun.
Those are the three apps I’ve been most excited about in 2010 so far. What new apps have you been trying out so far this year? Let us know in comments.
Heart photo at top by Flickr user bymanu.
