Hasta La Gadget!

I think people who live in New York City are extremely lucky, because there are so many developers out there who are setting up all sorts of apps and services targeted especially for them. One of the latest of these is TipTop.

It’s described as “a simple way to find the best of NYC.” It’s essentially a search service for those living in the area, but with a twist: it only displays results of the purported “best” of whatever it is you’re looking for.

Be it the best burger, the best pizza, or the best haircut even, just fill out the fields on the TipTop NYC site and click on the magnifying glass icon to start your search. And the bests aren’t just picked by critics – they’re ranked by the community’s votes.

The service was built and recently launched by Betaworks. Let’s hope they add the rest of the major cities in the great US of A to their database soon.

[via Laughing Squid]

When I first heard of Facebook, Friendster was still all the rage. I didn’t care much for it and only went online on Facebook because somebody gave me these virtual pets that you were supposed to take care of. I eventually deleted my account and moved on… until I went back and signed up again to become the site’s 47,728,103th user.

So when did you get on the Facebook trend relative to other users and relative to your friends? You can find out by checking out The Faces of Facebook. The site features an interactive gallery of all the profile pictures of Facebook’s 1 billion plus users on its front page. You can click any tiny square to zoom in and see whose profile occupies a certain position.

You can also authorize the site’s corresponding Facebook app to access your account and determine if you are among the first or the last in the social network’s massive pool of worldwide users.

[via Geekologie]

The longer you’ve been wrapped up in the internet, but more crazy stuff you’ve seen. Everybody’s got one or two really strange, totally bizarre website they like to trot out; they’re like trading cards for web nerds. Now’s the time, what’s the single strangest site you’ve got in your arsenal?

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If you love playing RPGs, perhaps you’ve imagined what skills and prerequisites you’d need to have in the real world to reach your desired job or level of success. The folks at web development agency 352 Media thought of doing the same thing to their profession and created Dungeons & Developers, an RPG-style skill tree that outlines what you need to learn to become a master web developer.

As with a typical RPG, each icon in the tree represents a skill. The skills involve learning about things like CSS, AJAX & APIs and Advanced DB Management. When you learn a skill, your character gains stats and unlocks more advanced skills. But 352 Media took their geeky project a step further and made it possible so you could actually use the skill tree to help you learn about web development and keep track of your progress while you’re learning. Each skill contains a link to an educational resource such as a tutorial. Your skill tree is tied to a unique URL, so you can bookmark it to save your progress, then check back to see if you’re bound to level up.

Once you’ve learned a skill, simply left click its icon to add a point into it. Right-click on a learned skill to subtract a point. You cheater. Speaking of cheating, Dungeons & Developers also has a god mode. 352 Media says you can unlock 100% completion if you “go old school.”

Head to Dungeons & Developers to check out the skill tree. As a fan of RPGs I can’t help but point out that the tree is misleading. It’s missing a few arrows for the other prerequisites needed to unlock the ultimate skill. It’s no biggie though, just know that all of the skills at the second to the last row need to be learned before you can unlock Web Development Mastery. The earliest you can do that is at level 26, so get grinding!

[via Boing Boing]

Anyone who has ever scrolled a page on a website or clicked a link on the Internet or watched a video on YouTube or enjoys the practicality of living with electricity should know what Reddit is. But could you explain it to someone who’s never heard of it? Is it the front page of the Internet as it claims? A chaotic community of circle jerkers that it can devolve into? Everything a newspaper should be? A wonderful time waster? Or somewhere in between all four? CGPGrey explains what Reddit exactly is. [CGPGrey]

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