Orangeinks

More Uses: Find and Suggest Alternative Uses for Anything

MoreUses is a website where you can find and share more uses for things other than the general purpose that they serve. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that most of the things that we own have other uses other than what the label says. If you are meaning to find out and learn new uses for the usual and not so usual things that you can find in your house, better head over to this site.

If you think that a particular item that you have has only one purpose and is made only to function as you were told, then you better think again. In MoreUses, you’ll be able to learn and discover a lot of new things that you can do with your stuff. You can find out how to use salt other than make your food taste salty, use clear nail polish for gluing small stuff, and a lot more.

If you have your own experiences on using ordinary things and turning them into something other than what they are made for, you can also share your knowledge with others through the website. Simply look/search for the appropriate category or create one if it doesn’t exist and make your submission.

More Uses will help you save money by learning alternative uses for common things around you that you commonly neglect. Instead of buying a brand new something, you can explore the site and see if others have submitted an entry about an alternative use that will match your needs. Sometimes, all you need is a little imagination and a bit of research.

Tags: MoreUses, recommendation, suggestion

WhichBook: Book Recommendation Based on Your Mood

WhichBook is a book recommendation engine that allows you to adjust the level of mood or story elements you want to be in a book. This interesting tool will display a list of books that matches the strength level of elements that you have selected. All you have to do is drag the slider bar on each element and select go. Just remember that you can only open four sliders per recommendation.

Elements to choose from:

Happy – Sad

Funny – Serious

Safe – Disturbing

Expected – Unpredictable

Larger than Life – Down to Earth

Beautiful – Disgusting

Gentle- Violent

Easy – Demanding

No Sex – Sex

Conventional – Unusual

Optimistic – Bleak

Short – Long

Aside from mood elements, you can also get recommendation by selecting plots, character properties and setting. You can use their cool animated globe to choose the setting of the book that you want to read.

Whichbook is a different way of choosing your next book. It all depends on the story elements that you’ve selected and how strong you want them to be in your book.

Tags: books, recommendation, WhichBook

GoodRec: A Twitter-Like Recommendation Voting Site

GoodRec is a place where you can get and make short online recommendations on restaurants, bars, wine, movies, books and products. The recommendations posted in GoodRec are short and often given only in three sentences or below. The community is allowed to vote on the recommendations submitted in GoodRec.

Since the service covers recommendations to bars and restaurants, features like Google Maps and photo uploads are added to give the members added information about the place that someone recommended. A link to the website is also included if available. As for other categories, you can view images which are related to the topic/review. It would have been great though if they allowed short trailer uploads under the movies category.

The rating method is not done in a straightforward like it or not voting. Users are allowed to cast an undecided vote. The search filtering system is very useful. When you decide to filter by restaurant or bar, you have an option to display recommended places which are near your location. That is assuming that you entered your true location when you registered which you can always change in your account settings.

GoodRec allows you to publish your recs to different social networking sites such as Twitter, FriendFeed and FaceBook. They also have an iPhone app which allows you to read and make recommendations on iPhones. Non iPhone users who wish to view GoodRec in their mobile phones must go to m.goodrec.com to access the site.

Tags: goodrec, recommendation, social netoworking, twitter, voting

StumbleAudio: Stumbleupon for Music

StumbleAudio is the Stumbleupon for music lovers with over 2 million available tracks for you to stumble. Judging from the name of the site, the idea was generally taken from Stumbleupon. StumbleAudio is like the “I’m feeling lucky” of music search sites.

StumbleAudio does not function like Stumbleupon in every way. You do not need to install a browser plugin in order to use the service. You can do your music stumbling in the StumbleAudio page. This is managed by flash, since stumbling music is so much different from stumbling webpages and websites. It only takes up a small space and a little flash. You have to register for an account though in order to rate tracks and save them in your profile.

You can choose a genre that you wish to stumble. Once you start stumbling, a random music will automatically play along with some information like album cover, artist and of course the title of the song. You can also browse and play the songs in the stumbled album and rate the track according to your liking. A thumbs up and thumbs down button (Like in StumbleUpon) is used for rating tracks. There is also a quick share button which will automatically copy the track URL to your clipboard.

This is another great site for discovering music semi-randomly. A search bar is provided if you like to filter your stumbles by the keyword(s) you enter. The service also allows you to make quick purchase of the playing track from iTunes, Amazon, PayPlay and CD Baby. Check it out and start audio-stumbling.

P.S. And, yes, artists do get paid when their songs are played on StumbleAudio.

Tags: Music, music discovery, recommendation, songs, stumbleaudio, stumbleupon, tracks

Emmy the TasteKid: The Recommendation Robot

Meet Emmy, the taste kid robot. Tastekid provides recommendations based on stuff that interests you. It’s a great site for discovering other interesting things that you might like. There are lots of recommendation sites out there but I find this one very unique. Maybe it’s because of Emmy, the character (mascot) of the site. It kind of feels like getting recommendations from someone other than an algorithm, even if it is actually a robot.

Who is Emmy?

I’m glad you’ve asked ^^ I am Emmy the Taste Kid and I currently live in Romania.
Although I’m young, I’m very much interested in music, movies and books. I’ve currently heard about 22,370 bands, some 13,100 movies and around 9,440 books.

To use the service, just tell Emmy a book, movie, band and she will give you recommendations of other related stuff that you might be interested in. It’s actually a fun site to visit if you’re looking for something new that will interest you. Emmy is constantly improving and learning from mistakes and bad recommendations, so bear with the service for it is still young.

You can also help Emmy improve by giving her your own recommendations through the contact page. This will help the creator to improve Emmy’s suggestions. Give it a try and you might enjoy it.

Tags: emmy the tastekid, recommendation, web service