Alligatorsneeze

This week I have two websites that I've been having some fun with. The first is Taaz.com. At Taaz you can upload a photo of yourself and give yourself a makeover, with new hair, makeup, even contacts. It works quite well, the UI is nice, and it has all the social networking goodies like friends and commenting and you can even give other people makeovers! There's been other sites that tried to do this but didn't do a good job at all, were full of advertising (Taaz has advertising, but it's not intrusive), or gave you limited options unless you paid for it.

This is the haircut I come up with. They do need more hairstyles, I think, and a 360 view would be awesome.

Still digging? Check out Mixx. They just released their API.

This last week I've taken it upon myself to see what's going on in the web tech world. I used to keep pretty on top of this stuff, web 2.0 and all that, but I've admittedly fallen behind on the latest and greatest the past year, instead concentrating on Drupal and, of course, my three amazing daughters.

There's so many new websites and things to do and keep up with. Web 3.0, even - gack! Come on! I just barely started twittering (tweeting?) and reorganized my iGoogle and added a bunch of feeds I used to read, feeds from some Drupalchix, etc. But I still just don't know if it's even worth it.

When I first began writing this blog, I limited it to blogging related topics. Since then, it's evolved into writing about anything that happens to involve Web 2.0. I realize many people might not know what Web 2.0 is, though, and so here is my attempt at explaining it.

The term Web 2.0 began at a conference in 2004 or some such. I honestly don't know the details, nor care. There's confusion about what Web 2.0 means, whether it means anything, and even whether people should stop saying it. Here's my definition, nonetheless.

Microsoft's new search engine, www.Live.com is in beta.

When you do a search, you can click on the various tabs at the top, in these categories: Web, News, Images, Local, Feeds, and you can create your own tab. It's very Web 2.0, in that you can even use it as your start page with a list of your feeds, your Hotmail email, weather, sports, and more.

I'm a little late in reporting this, since Riya opened to the public on the 25th, but I still thought I'd let you all know.

Riya is greatest thing since Flickr. It's a photo sharing site and search engine that uses face recognition technology, meaning it "auto tags" your pictures for you once you "train" it to do so.

Pretty awesome. It's new and still missing some features, but I'm sure they'll be coming.