• Careers
• Chat/Community
• Computing
• Experts/Opinions
• Family/Education
• Lifestyle
• Portals/Start Pages
• Reference
• Search
• Shopping Assistants
• Shopping: Computing
• Shopping: Dept. Store/Mall
• Shopping: Specialty
• Small-Business Services
• Surfing Assistants
• Travel


Backflip
Everyone has bookmarks and favorites, but you probably don’t bookmark every useful page you find in your explorations. But what if you did? And what if you could categorize those pages into your own private Yahoo!-like directory and go back and search through them later? That’s the service Backflip provides: It helps you create a permanent, searchable record of the pages that matter to you and lets you share parts of your personal directory with other Backflip users.

http://www.backflip.com/

Clip2
Clip2 started out as yet another way for you to store your bookmarks online, but the service has morphed into more of a Web guide, where people with a particular interest can build up a set of favorite links and then share them with others. Unlike services such as About.com, Clip2 lets anyone build a guide and then depends on user ratings to drive the best guides to the surface.

http://www.clip2.com/

Netsanity
Of all the utilities, toolbars, and gadgets you can add to your browser to make surfing easier, the one we like best is Netsanity, which combines shopping searches and a search box (you pick the search engine you’d like to use) with a main window displaying continuously updated information that matters to you scrolls. This can consist of news, stock prices, sports scores, and much more. And Netsanity does all this without putting unwanted advertising on your screen.

http://www.netsanity.com/

Octopus.com
Though in its prerelease version it’s slow, a little hard to use, and compatible only with IE, Octopus.com is an intriguing site that’s well worth checking out. It lets you build forms into which Web-based data of all types can flow. You can create your own, ideal stock tables, for example, featuring tickers, charts, logos, phone numbers, maps to corporate headquarters, weather at those locations, or whatever information you wish. Then you simply type in a list of ticker symbols and a big, useful chart fills itself in and updates itself automatically. The same system will give you sports information, comparative shopping grids, or any other manner of things you can think of. Not imaginative? Then you can import views that others have created and want to share.

http://www.octopus.com/

SideTalk
The premise behind SideTalk (a downloadable IE add-on) is that Web surfing need not be a solitary experience. The multipane interface delivers links related to the site you’re currently visiting (à la Alexa), lets you leave annotations on a Web page for other SideTalk users to see (à la Third Voice), and perhaps most important, lets you browse along with several other people so you can shop or make plans together.

http://www.sidetalk.com/

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