As with just about any type of social site, there are tons of gaming communities in existence. So what makes weplaythis any different from the rest? Well, according to the weplaythis team, “gaming sites are dark, geeky, and cramped with porn, popups and poker ads. We just don’t like that.” So they just don’t have it. Unlike the forum-based gaming communities that probably come to mind for most people, weplaythis this avoids the dark color scheme, typical ads, and forum-based approach, presenting itself as a truly friendly social network for gamers.

The primary feature of weplaythis is the Game Shelf, where users store a virtual collection of their game library. Each user is able to fill up their shelf with all the games they’ve played, define whether they loved it or hated it, and give them a rating of one to five stars. You can also mark which games you are currently playing. Publicly, users can display their six favorites or six least favorites, 3 of each, six recent additions, or six random games on their shelf. The over 37000 games are searchable by platform, keyword, or title, and everything from arcade games to PS3 titles are in the database, which the team constantly checks against the MobyGames database in order to keep it as up to date as possible.
Another feature that I really like is the Playground, where users can upload photos of where they do their gaming and tag the image with sticky notes to point out their favorite details. It’s a great way to get an inside look on not only where and how the people you meet game, but also on how they live. The rest of the weplaythis features are fairly standard of most social networks—friends, groups, and your own personal blog. weplaythis allows you to invite or search for friends and, of course, encourages making new friends through the site. In your profile you can define and group your interests, so when joining interest-specific groups you can find people who love Second Life, Nintendo Wii, or whatever else just as much as you do. Your blog is perfect for leaving your own game reviews, keeping track of progress, and ranting about anything game-related in general. You can grab widgets to place on your own personal site or blog, allowing you to take your weplaythis space with you and weplaythis always greets you with the latest that’s been going on with you, your friends, and the site’s progress when you log in.

In addition to what they’ve already got developed and available to beta testers, weplaythis is still working on a PC/Mac compatible application that showcases what you’re currently playing and shows what others are playing. weplaythis also encourages people to share their own creations via blog or group while they work on getting the object and theme contribution features working. If your work is good enough weplaythis will feature it on the front page. Other areas to explore that are still under development include the section for games and eighty-two platforms. weplaythis is currently in private beta, but you can request an invite here or learn more about it here.

With the sad demise of Jonkenpon and 8apps along with it, some people—myself included—may be looking for a new collaborative social network. While there are still plenty out there to choose from—such as 37signal’s BaseCamp–those looking to jump in on one that has yet to become full of members just looking to get in on the next new web app may want to consider giving YouFig a go.

YouFig describes itself as Demo Collaboration Community, aiming to connect those with common interests. Pretty simple, right? That’s the point. YouFig achieves its goal in the simplest way possible: by helping people find others to discuss their interests with and to provide them with a Workspace in which to do it. YouFig has twenty-four categories and multiple sub-categories in each, for a grand total of more than 200 individual interests. Each member is allowed up to ten tags and ten categories to define their interests and specialties. YouFig will look for Workspaces that might interest you and allow you to search for Workspaces and people by category or, of course, start a new Workspace and invite new collaborators to YouFig. You can also add collaborators to your network and keep tabs on what they’re up to. By being active in the community, which includes starting, joining, voting, or collaborating on a workspace, inviting others to join, and referring collaborators, members can earn points which can be exchanged for prizes later on.

Naturally, Workspaces are a vital part of YouFig. They are where people connect, discuss, and share information on their common interest. Being in private beta, the demo version of YouFig doesn’t actually have many collaborators to contribute, making the community seem somewhat weak at times. However, YouFig was created to provide a collaborative application to organizations that need one, such as schools, corporations, and research groups. Customized communities can be ordered for free.

So what do I think of YouFig? Well it doesn’t impress me. It hasn’t drawn me into a rich community of people who share any of my obscure interests. Then again, neither have any other collaborative networks or social networks in general. Then again, when you consider the fact that there are only about 500 members taking part in the private beta demo and that several of them are inactive, you can only expect so much. I think YouFig has great potential, but it requires either a large userbase or use by a private organization to really live up to it. Then again, YouFig was not really meant to be like the larger social networks. In fact, it boasts the fact that there is “no social network required.”

If you would like to learn more, you can read Mashable’s review or visit the YouFig website. Keep in mind that this web app is still in private beta, so you’ll have to request an invite to join! Or, if you’re part of an organization that is looking for a collaborative application, go here to place an order for free.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P2XBL7hTsQ[/youtube]

Mozilla Firefox is the web browser of choice for many a person these days, and in a world of highly customizable software and hardware, people naturally want their window to the web to be fitted perfectly to their tastes. Am I any different? Not by a long shot. Fortunately, Firefox is extremely customizable–with the abundance of add-ons available you can customize its look and functionality to best meet your needs. In addition to this, you can “hack” Firefox via its about:config dialog to make specific tweaks. This dialog is accessed by typing about:config into Firefox’s address bar. From there you can select preferences and change their values to get the desired changes. Here are a handful of my favorites.

If you’re anal about not having your software do things without your permission, then this is the hack for you. By default, Firefox automatically downloads pages from links it predicts you will click, regardless of whether you actually ever have or ever do visit the page. While I doubt it does any harm whatsoever, it gives me the same creeped-out feeling as cluztr, and therefore is something that I can do without. Setting the network.prefetch-next key to false will turn this function off.

The following hack is perfect for those who can’t live online without spell check. While Firefox does handle spell checking text areas by default, it won’t automatically check input text areas. To turn spell check on for input text, change the layout.spellcheckDefault key’s value to 2.

Last, but not least, the following hack will probably be the most beneficial to the most people, because no matter who you are, Firefox will hog your RAM if you let it. One way to avoid this is the limit the number of add-ons you’re using. Another way to prevent this is to change the value of the browser.cache.memory.capacity key. The new value will vary depending on how much RAM you have installed. If you have half a gig of RAM or less, start testing around 5000. The more RAM you have, the higher this value should be.

If you cannot find any of the keys defined here you can add them in the about:config dialog. To do this, right click anywhere within the dialog, hover the mouse over new, and click the proper preference type. If the preference value will be set to true or false choose boolean. If the value will be an integer (a whole number) then the type will be integer. For any other value choose string as the type.

For more Firefox hacks and tweaks, check out some of the following resources:

O’Reilly Firefox Hacks

Hacking Firefox

Geek to Live: Top Firefox 2 Config Tweaks

If you’re interested in learning about hacks and tricks for other applications, check out Google Hacks for Dummies and Gmail Tips and Tricks.

As Firefox is frequently updated, possible customizations are always changing, so I suggest checking out if there’s anything new from time to time. And as making changes to Firefox’s configurations is so easy, I suggest playing around to see what you can achieve; just be sure not to do anything you can’t undo if you have to!

Quoting others is a common practice in all forms of communication, written, spoken, or other. When typing, quoting more often than not involves copying chunks of text and pasting them into whatever word processor you’re using, hoping the formatting doesn’t get screwed up and links don’t get broken. This process is what kwout intends to change.

kwout, the product of Japanese HeartRails Inc. launched on December 25, 2007 and is accessed via a bookmarklet add-on for your web browser of choice. To use, go to the web page you intend to quote, click the bookmarklet, and kwout will guide you through the rest—a quick selection, a few customizations and you’re good to go. It’s painfully easy and delivers the quote as an image with or without an image map, keeping any links within the quote intact (as you can see to the right). When you’re done you can post directly to your Flickr and Tumblr accounts or embed the provided code somewhere else.

kwout may not be absolutely essential, but it makes getting clean quotes so hassle-free that there’s really no reason not to use it. Kwout is one service that I definitely hope catches on, as it is indeed “a brilliant way to quote.” Learn more at kwout.com.

Social networking sites have become a part of several people’s daily lives. It’s only natural that these sites help link you to new people with whom you may have things in common, or help you discover new things that you might be interested in. Conceptualized for “entertainment navigation and taste matching,” Project Loudmouth is designed to do just that, almost exclusively.

When you join or take the Project Loudmouth trial, you’ll be asked to describe yourself in five words and “pick a five.” It may be your five favorite animated movies, five album guilty pleasures, the five celebrities you’d like to slap the most, or a number of other things. Project Loudmouth will do the taste-matching and find you some ‘neighbors’–people with whom you might find interesting based on similar tastes. You build your taste network by tabbing those you do find interesting and you can then keep track of what those people add to their tastes (I think; apparently my taste network “hasn’t been up to much recently,” so I’m not allowed to know for sure).

And as far as I can tell, that’s pretty much it thus far. Project Loudmouth allows you to keep up with who else loves your favorite car, who else thinks your least favorite show is overrated, and other random stuff like that. I’d say it’s major downfall is the limited number of choices available at this point in time, which is to be expected since it is in trial mode and whatnot. So if you care about absolute strangers enough to really like the idea of finding out what they’re tastes are, check out Project Loudmouth at www.projectloudmouth.com.