www.to.or.at:7272
tis.k2.net
www.sgi.com/ion/winter_96
www.entropy8.com
www.uk.cosmoasis.com
www.haddock.co.uk
www.privacy.org/pi/activities/idcard
www.redcat.org.uk/think.html
www.liquid.org
www.virtual-design.com/cgi-bin/Voodoo.pl
www.replay.com/remailer/index.html
slugfest.kaizen-net
Newcomers to the Web are baffled by the lack of a comprehensive online email directory. After investing time and effort entering the information age, they're pretty darn miffed to find that the fastest way to find Uncle Phil's email address is to ring him up and ask. Several sites are racing to fill this obvious gap in the market.Rather less self-evident is how any of these sites are going to get a return on the hefty investment required to collate a decent directory. It's a fairly trivial task to fillet newsgroups and popular mailing lists for addresses, but a comprehensive directory needs to persuade people to register their own addresses, as well as haggling with ISPs for access to their members' details.
Granted, advertisers love the kind of repeat visits directories like Four11 attract. Listing nearly eight million email addresses, Four11 is still a long way from being comprehensive, but it's not bad, especially for US addresses. The site generates the bulk of its income from webverts, personalised according to the details stored in the directory. Four11 promises never to sell its listings to direct marketeers with a junk email agenda. Other directories are less fussy, and, in the long term, doing deals with direct marketeers may prove a more sustainable business model - provided the punters can be kept sweet.
Younger and only marginally less comprehensive than Four11, Bigfoot is an Anglo-American start-up launched earlier this year. The company used an initial investment of £100,000 to build a prototype, followed by an astonishing £1,000,000 investment in February of this year, much of which has been spent promoting the site. Bigfoot differs from Four11 in that it reserves the right to use the details you enter to make you aware of relevant, personalised offers from advertisers - filtered junk mail, if you'll excuse the oxymoron. Users can opt to join the "Bigfoot Privacy List", promoted as a definitive index of all those who do not wish to receive any junk email, period.
Another strong contender for the mantle of mother of all directory sites is WhoWhere?. This site offers the added bonus of an online directory of US residential and business telephone numbers via a link-up with Switchboard.
In a bid to persuade more people to register, the directories are offering freebies, such as "Bigfoot for Life", an email forwarding service which aims to solve the problem of ever-changing email addresses. Bigfoot also plans to offer some serious server-side email ingenuity (email-to-pager, email-to-fax, kill files) for around a dollar a month, while Four11 offers a "sleeper service" which alerts you when friends finally get online.
But why use the Web at all if it's an email address you're after? An email client is the natural home for an email directory - something Four11 has realised. It is currently talking to several software companies with a view to incorporating access to its directory into email clients. Now that's smart.
- Tom Loosemore
As pukka 3D environments go, VRML is still a bit of a joke, and in the case of the Virtual Toy Shoppe, a rather bad one. First, the "toys" are deeply naff. Second, they cost US$1.99 to download. Stick to Playdough, kids.
- Daniel Pemberton
Come the end of the year, there are going to be a lot of JavaScript books going cheap. Real cheap. How so? They will no longer be accurate, since the language's specifications have been a moving target for several months. This poses a dilemma for publishers: should they rush out a book to cash in on the demand or wait until the final version of JavaScript is released and then produce a definitive work?O'Reilly Associates has decided to take a leaf out of the software industry's book by placing what amounts to a beta of its latest JavaScript book on the Web. The catch? You have to order the printed version and pay up front. Then you're given access to a constantly updated Web site and the printed book is shipped to you once it's finished. But why bother to send the printed version at all? An online version of a book - particularly one about JavaScript - will be of more use than the printed version. Free text search, hyperlinks, the ability to copy and paste code and even run the example programs in the browser - dead trees just can't compare.
O'Reilly is also considering introducing an annual charge for unlimited online access to the reference books on its site, and even a licensing charge for companies which want to make them available to their workers over an intranet. "We dip toes in water around here," says Linda Walsh, an O'Reilly spokesperson.
They're not alone. Encyclopedia Britannica already has its foot well submerged - it charges US$14.95 a month, or $150 per annum, for access to Britannica Online, its Web-based edition. Meanwhile, Microsoft is moving its popular CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta, onto the Web, along with all its other CD-based titles. ("It used to be a CD. Now it's a Web site," is a common refrain in Redmond these days.) And Oxford University Press overcomes the perennial problem of pirating by offering its physics books as downloadable Adobe Acrobat files, encrypted using Ç-Dilla software. The "books" cost £20 each, or £3 per chapter, offering a saving of £60 on hardback prices.
Online reference works are clearly going to be a winner, but can they still be described as books? You tell me.
- Tom Standage
It sounds like the ultimate Mission: Impossible - find a movie critic guaranteed to share your own bizarre cinematic inclinations. Short of abducting Barry Norman and forcibly re-educating him with a baseball bat, the Reliable Film Reviewer remained mere fantasy. Then along came www.moviecritic.com. This indispensable utility advises you which releases will either tickle your individual fancy or bring a lunch to your throat.MovieCritic is that inevitable office cine-anorak: doesn't say much, but his recommendations tend to be irritatingly spot-on. On your first visit to the site, you rate a selection of randomly chosen flicks, allowing MovieCritic to hone its profile of your personal predilections. The more movies you rate, the more accurate it becomes - it even clocked my admittedly perverted tastes.
And for those who retain a social life outside cyberspace, it'll select a picture by combining two users' preferences. So instead of blaming your date for making you endure three hours of enigmatic Merchant-Ivory eyebrow-raising, you can now blame your computer. And - huh - why not?
- D. A. Barham