Web Singletons? 254
tcmb writes "There are an uncounted number of web mail and picture sharing services, there are more than enough web sites for online bookmark management and friend-finding, but as far as I know there is only one Internet Archive. Which are the true web singletons, services that exist only once in this form?" And does anything approach the singular time-wasting abilities of IMDB or Wikipedia?
Qik (Score:4, Interesting)
www.qik.com allows you to stream live video and audio from your cell phone. As far as I know, it's the only service on the internet like this.
TinEye.com (Score:5, Interesting)
TinEye.com [tineye.com] is an image search engine that works like this:
It analyzes images it finds online, by looking at their pixels and dimensions.
To search, a user uploads an image, and TinEye returns a list of links to similar images, said images' dimensions, and links to the pages on which said images are posted.
It's useful for finding originals from photoshopped images and for finding images in a series if you have only one image and know it's part of a series.
And no, I don't work for them(but I do use the site almost daily).
Nope, not google... (Score:3, Interesting)
OurCampaigns (Score:3, Interesting)
There are lots of political sites, but my site OurCampaigns [ourcampaigns.com] is a bit different than anything out there.
It is custom programmed and is a structured international view of politics at allows user contribution. Lot of current and historical race result data, going back hundreds of years. High level to local level. Right now a half million political races. News items, endorsements, candidate information, party information.
One, One, One (Score:3, Interesting)
Singleton:
- a single object (as distinguished from a pair)
- a set containing a single member
- In mathematics, a singleton is a set with exactly one element. For example, the set {0} is a singleton.
One good reason for finding "singletons" on the web (unique web properties) might be to find an entry point for competition where the market is not yet saturated. At the same time it's often hard to compete against something that's firmly established (e.g. David and Goliath). Maybe submitter has a obsessive compulsive disorder and feels a strong need to find one of everything on the web. Speculation. Maybe I'm a jackass.
space-time continuum monitoring (Score:4, Interesting)
There is only one space-time continuum monitoring service, http://space-time.net/ [space-time.net]
Stephan
Everything? (Score:3, Interesting)
Time wasters?
How about slashdot's sister site, everything2 [everything2.org]?
Re:Zombo (Score:2, Interesting)
Not singleton.
Here's a clone: http://crotchzombie.com/ [crotchzombie.com]
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/singleton
singleton
One entry found.
Main Entry:
sin*gle*ton
Function:
noun
Etymology:
French, from English single
Date:
1876
1: a card that is the only one of its suit originally dealt to a player
2 a: an individual member or thing distinct from others grouped with it b: an offspring born singly <singletons are more common than twins>
I like the way MW has a joke for Singleton. If you look up other words [merriam-webster.com] with a single definition it doesn't say "one entry found".
It reminds of the definition of recursive in the hacker's dictionary.
http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_33.html#TAG1486 [ccil.org] /n./
recursion
See recursion.
Clearly both are an attempt at meta humour.
Things that should be a single authoritative site (Score:4, Interesting)
There are quite a few situations where life would be simpler if there were just one definitive instance of something - mostly indexes / official repositories of some kind, but sadly at the moment we have a multitude of these things with no single instance providing 100% coverage :
- Airline flight schedules : presumably every airline has planned its timetable months in advance, but there is no obvious place to search across all of them (cf. www.nationalrail.co.uk which I think does have the authoritative timetable across all mainline railways)
- List of all properties for sale in the country; in the UK the seller has to choose which estate agents to list with, and the buyer then has to go around a load of different agents to find out what's available. It'd seem obvious for this to instead be a nationalized thing - what added value do estate agents / letting introduction agencies provide anyway? (as distinct from letting agencies that also do some property management)
- Web Search : there is scope for different search-engines to provide fundamentally different types of search (ie. text, image, audio etc) : but why do we need more than one of each type?
- Scientific Journals : pre-print servers (arXiv.org) are starting to solve this problem, but lots of papers still get published in obscure / less-popular journals and if your university library doesn't subscribe to that one then you can't easily read it - and once you leave university they become pretty much unavailable to the average member of the public.
Pretty much all the things I can think of that would be better as a single instance have the problem that they are run commercially - so there are problems with monopolies if we ever get just one of them, and the tin-foil-hat brigade might have something to say if they were nationalized (and in many cases could just be right too : imagine if our primary news outlet were government controlled)
Free stuff seems to find its own level of singleton-like-ness, some keeping just one instance : ....
- IMDB, CPAN, w3c.org,
others forking to meet differing preferences like linux distributions, tech news website etc.