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WebWorther.com – Find the value of any website

Web Worther

WebWorther.com is a web-based service that tells you how much is a website worth.

The value specified by the site is based on several factors, including estimated traffic, existing links towards the site, estimated advertising revenue that could be gained from the site and performance metrics extracted from the most popular search engines such as PageRank.

The service is free of charge. The value displayed is approximative and has intrinsecly a high variance but it is good as a ball-park approximation metric.

WebWorther displays the most recent 30 entries evaluated on the site as well as the most 30 valuable domains that it found over the service’s lifetime. In the later category we can see entries such as google.com (worth 54 billion dollars) or several yahoo domains with different ending extensions…

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Empires and Allies – New Zynga Game

Empires and Allies

EmpiresAndAllies.com is the newest Zynga game. Launched on 31st of May 2011 (17 days ago), the game has over 10 million users.

The game combines CityVille, the previous Zynga top social game built upon the Facebook platform, with a turn-based strategy combat simulator featuring campaigns and locked missions which can be unlocked as the player progresses throughout the game.

To advance quickly to the next levels, the so called “empire coins” are required. These are given at the beginning of the game in a small quantity, but as the game evolves, players need real cash (USD) to procure them in order to advance their cities.

Zynga is a company renowned for its metrics – they measure everything that has to do with user engagement and satisfaction, and they social engineer their games to maximize the number of friends from your Facebook account that you bring into the game. This tactic is easily understandable, economically speaking; in this game, it can cause some interesting allied fights with the enemy, so the game is at least worth a try for those that never played a Zynga game before (and it’s a must try-on for CityVille or FarmVille fans).

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Time Off Manager – Track Vacations on the Web

Time Off Manager

TimeOffManager.com allows companies to keep track of vacations for all the employees using a web-based management system.

Traditionally, leave of absence is being tracked via email, with the obvious disadvantage of no centralized up-to-date situation for each employee with the number of vacation days used until now and the number of vacation days remaining. If we add to the feature list the desire to track the left-overs from previous years, the situation complicates pretty fast.

TimeOffManager comes to the resque. It offers a 15-day free trial to test the product and its interface, and then it charges 25 CAD for up to 15 users (then tends to reach 0.75 per user per month as the number of users increases).

The team is from Canada and the domain has been registered since 2007, but Compete doesn’t have enough traffic info to show a traffic profile for the site. The signup form on the site requires 11 fields just to get a trial allowing you to check-out the app interface, which is a little too much for the short attention span of the 2011 web surfers. Ideally I’d like to see an integration with Google or other 3rd party login providers to be able to sign up and play with the app almost instantenously. I hope the project evolves in this direction or finds another way to get the desired traction.

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InvoiceMachine.com – Invocing, Simplified

Invoice Machine

The InvoiceMachine.com is an online service which simplifies your invoicing and makes it beautiful.

The service takes a new clever approach to online invoicing. Its beautiful and simple-to-use interface makes producing professional looking invoices a very pleasant experience.

The site has a freemium model for up to 3 invoices per month; it charges money starting with the 4th montly invoice, up to a maximum of 48 USD per month for unlimited invoices.

The interface is beautiful, simple and elegant, and Compete shows the site enjoys around 5’000 unique visitors each month. Based in Sweden, the product team is lucky to have found the right combination – the right set of features in a nicely-packed beautiful interface.

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Minutes.io – Take Notes and Share Them Right Away

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LessMeeting.com – Improve Your Meeting Process

Less Meeting

LessMeeting offers tools to simplify / improve your meeting process and make it more effective.

The features offered are either web-based or integrated with Outlook and consist in tools aimed at planning, running and following up on the meetings in a better, structured way. A meeting should result in a set of action items that can be followed-up via the LessMeeting interface by the team members which participated in the meeting.

There’s a 30-day free trial; afterwards the service costs $12 per user per month, with discounts available for 10+ users and 100+ respectively.

I was impressed by the site’s usability; in fact, it turns out that the project’s creators paid special attention to keeping their site simple and usable; they wrote a great blog post about this, which you can check here: Lessons Learned For Startup User Signups. If you feel you’re waisting an important amount of time in your meetings, give LessMeeting.com a chance and you might be surprised how effective things can get.

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CountdownCalendar.net – Counters Made Easy

Countdown Calendar

CountdownCalendar.net offers a simple and intuitive way to create countdown calendars on the web.

The widget being generated can be customized with different colors; different text can be shown next to the actual count-down counter.

This service is currently free as they don’t charge anything for the count-down creation. The site currently operates on an ad-supported revenue model.

The service was launched in October 2010 but failed to attract significant traffic since then, according to Compete.com. Nevertheless, I find the service effective and the interface intuitive enough to give it a try next time I need one of these count-down timers 🙂

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Capturely.com – Awesome Coming Soon Pages

Capturely

Did you ever had a project that wasn’t quite finished yet, but you wanted to have something simple to show for, until it got ready? Capturely.com offers you exactly that – with the added bonus of collecting the emails of the people interested to hear about the big launch event.

You can choose between several templates available for the “Coming soon” webpage, and you have direct access to the site’s CSS. Prices start at $5 monthly for one page or $15 monthly for up to 7 coming soon pages.

The site is great for validating ideas before starting to work on them. If you have several ideas, you can make a Capturely coming soon page for each one of them, then send some traffic or advertisement towards them and see which one takes off by capturing more emails interested about their launch event. In this way it can be avoided to work for something that nobody is interested in using.

The domain got launched in October 2010 and had several thousands unique visitors in November 2010 but afterwards it seems the traffic dried up according to Compete. There are minor comebacks at the beginning of this year but nothing serious; personally I like the idea and I hope the app catches on.

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TryMyUI.com – Remote Usability Tests for Your Site

TryMyUI

TryMyUI.com allows you to see how a user interacts with a specific website while trying to perform a series of steps specified by you.

You don’t need a site to try the service, you can attempt to do it on other people’s sites or on your competition! For each test you get to see what the other person thought, typed on their keyboard and where they moved the mouse, and you pay $35 per each video result that you get.

The site has been around for about 18 months and it has a couple thousands unique visitors monthly according to Compete. The trend is pretty volative but overall is going upwards, I hope they’re using their own service to find issues with their site and address them – it would be a shame if they weren’t using themselves to improve.

For webmasters and site creators, this is an awesome tool. Sometimes we lose focus on a project – because we’ve worked on it for so long, we don’t realize how it looks like to a random person that doesn’t know anything about it. I recommend to every webmaster to do one of these tests at least monthly, it can really be an eye-opener when it comes to user behaviour and how the world perceives a given site.

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Tricider.com – Perfect Decision Making in Teams

Tricider

Tricider.com allows teams to make decisions collaboratively on a variety of topics using a web-based interface.

Currently the site doesn’t require registration and it’s completely free. Team members specify what they want to decide and they receive an URL that can be used in order to submit answers or to vote on existing solutions.

The project is relatively new. Nevertheless, the site impresses via its simplity, clarity in explaining what it does and how to reach those goals, and the fact that everything is login-less (however the URL for deciding something contains a secret token, allowing only the people you invite to actually participate).

Tricider’s creator is based in Berlin, Germany and its interface is available in both English and German. For decisions where trust is not an issue, the simplicity of the interface makes it an ideal candidate to be used for reaching a consensus in a collaborative fashion.

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