Universal Avatar Concept

Gravatar

Today almost everyone has a number of accounts to handle, and all of them have a profile containing your profile picture/avatar. It sort of makes sense to have unanimous identity everywhere, and that includes having the same avatar everywhere.

This site above just helps you implement it easily. All you have to do is follow a few steps.

1. Create a profile on Gravatar.
2. Upload your picture(via Hard Disk, Some URL, Your Webcam)
3. Set your various E-mail addresses as the default id to use it.

So as the site says “globally recognized avatar”. It does this job the best.

It already has tie-ups with many websites and is in the process of acquiring set-ups with other popular websites too. some commenting scripts such as JS-Kit also has a tie up with Gravatar. Then all you have to do is give your Gravatar ID to the services you are using and your profile’s avatar is then always synchronized with Gravatar. So if you have done that job in 10 services first, all you have to do for changing your profile picture everywhere is change it in Gravatar.

Now for the sites with whom Gravatar doesn't have a Tie-up. With many websites it has a few tips and tricks/Hacks mentioned in its help menu. Some little bit of scripting that they tell you to do and its all done again.

Even if that is not possible, if you just copy the Gravatar URL and use it to upload your picture (this feature is available by almost every website) and again your avatar is synchronized.

To my opinion this site really appeals, as this service is useful in-fact very useful and is also offered by none other than Gravatar and hence no competition.

LINK : http://www.gravatar.com

A UNYK Address Book

www.unyk.com
 
UNYK is a smart address book which is really the need of the hour for today's generation. All of us have E-Mail accounts, in-fact many of them. You would have different people in different accounts, thus making it difficult for you to remember about each and everyone’s where-about . So here comes a UNYK(unique) address book.
All you need to do is a one time hard work of not adding your contact manually (you can always do that) but asking your friends to join it and create a profile there. Now once your profile is created UNYK will synchronise your contacts with your Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Orkut, Facebook & from your own Mobile contacts and will always keep them up-to-date according to their UNYK profiles. Now you will be wondering how does this help you?
Many-a-times it happens that people change their E-mail id’s, contact number, etc. But in your address book the old one remains while the new one is not even updated until and unless you remember, hence by mistake you tend to contact him/her via his old contact info. This is definitely not what you want. Hence UNYK will keep it updated as soon as your friend updates his profile, hence i said the downside that all your contacts will have to use UNYK too for it to be really effective, and hence a one time hard work.

Lets look into some other features.

1. All your contacts from various sources in one place.
2. A private address book.
3. Birthday Reminders.
4. Mobile Updates & Synchronization. 
5. A Digital Identity.
6. Segregate each of your contacts into groups and levels.
7. Available in SIX different languages.
8. Simple Interface.
9. Its free…:)

To describe the above features in brief. Its a private and very secure address book. Since its just one address book that you have to manage you can definitely give time to it and hence have it very well managed and ordered. You can keep Birthday Reminders here itself via E-Mail or even SMS, hence also avoiding the use of another service specially for birthdays. One more service fitted into this site is synchronizing your contacts with your mobile automatically(Now that’s an amazing thing), and once you have verified your mobile phone your mobile will remain synchronized always according to your UNYK profile. UNYK also provides you with a UNYK id. hence everyone registered to UNYK will have its own unique id which directs to your unique profile and hence can also be used as a digital identity of yours.
The downside though not many.

1. Your contacts will have to be a part of UNYK for your service to be effective.
2. Simple interface but still could have been better.
3. Mobile Synchronization is free just for 60 days.

Link – www.unyk.com

Online Task Manager

www.forcedo.com

ForceDo is an online task manager, pretty much similar to what Google Tasks has to offer but with a little more options, a better organized one too. In most of the task managers you will start by creating lists and then entering your tasks into it and later just giving it a tick once its done, thus maintaining a list of all the tasks you have completed with the tasks still to do.

Now, ForceDo does the same thing adding more essence to it. A little more fun too and also at the same time adding more productivity by adding a timer to all your tasks. You can select whatever time you want for each and every task to be completed. Thus time pressure will make you work more sincerely and in a better mannered way, making you complete your tasks in a more productive and also quicker way. Well now once you have started your timer, it doesn't mean that you have to go ahead with that plan, you can pause the timer and even edit your tasks.It has various interesting sound notifications, you can keep a notification to indicate the starting and ending of a task or even warn you just minutes before the completion of a task to hurry up. That is cool!


The key features it has to offer are :-
1) Online task manager to access it from anywhere.
2) A Task Manager with timer for each and every task.
3) Sound notifications.

4) Integration with Twitter.
5) Very simple and easy interface.

Now since its still in Beta, the features i would expect to be added soon are :-
1) SMS notifications.
2) E-Mail notifications.
3) A mobile version of the site.
4) An add-on for Firefox/Internet Explorer.


So the summary I would put forward would be that ForceDo has a lot to offer, much more than even Google Tasks, but still a long way to go for it to be the best.