Each day I come across some very wonderful sites that each deserve some recognition. Some I find from other sites such as lifehacker and tech crunch, others I find from the other writers here at the tech brief. However the main reason I don’t cover many of the smallest sites out there is because they just don’t have enough to them to justify a full post. Well I decided that I would compile my list of the best little sites on the web. These sites are all relatively small and offer very few services (generally just one or two) However they are great sites that could help some you out.

Shipgooder (beta) is awesome. You simply type in the information required and bam it will give you the cheapest shipping rate available. What is better is it actually gives you a table that you can compare shipping cost and time. If you do a lot of shipping Shipgooder could be your next best friend.

You can learn more about shipgooder (beta) over at this post on Lifehacker.

I found out about his fun little site over at lifehacker too. I like to change my wall paper a lot. With social wallpapering, the quest for good looking wall paper for your computer just got a little bit easier. With hundreds of images to browse through, I am sure you can find something that suits your fancy at the moment. However I have to admit that this site will remain kind of limited until it gets well known and more images become available. However I have every belief that it will be around for quite some time. check out social wall papering here.

If you are about to embark upon a major life changing event, you might want to set your browser over the first thirty days (beta). This site is designed to help people out during their first thirty days of making a massive changes such as buying a home, going green, loosing weight etc. Basically it’s there to offer encouragement and advice so that anyone making a change feels like they have some support. Again this is one of those time will tell kind of ideas, but I like the idea, and could actually find some use for it. you can read more about it over at this post at the tech crunch or visit the site here.

Now this site is just plain fun. You go to tipjoy, get a button, place the button on your blog or website and are pretty much ready to start receiving tips. While I seriously doubt this will lead to the next mogul blogger, I do think that it is something a lot of indy bloggers could find a lot of use for. The service is still very new, but I think they got a great idea and if enough people get behind it, I think we will start seeing tip jars all over the blogosphere. check them out at here.

Have you ever agonized over the decision of booking a plane ticket while wondering if now was the best time to buy, or is you should wait?  Well if you have, perhaps you would like to shoot over to Farcast.com.  This site makes it possible for you to know wether or not a fare will likely remain the same, go higher, or go lower.  I gave them a quick try and found that they actually have some pretty good information behind their predictions.  So next time you are planning a trip I would recommend you head over to Farecast.

So that is it for today.  I hope you find at least one of these little places on the web to be worth visiting.  Also if you happen to know of other little places, feel free to let us know.

I have heard it said many times that the best thing to write about is personal experience. This is one of those times that I was wishing I wasn’t. To make a long story short, my daughter has been diagnosed with a life threatening brain stem tumor and is currently receiving treatment. One of the things that was required of my family was to make a trip across the country, because of this trip and that both my and my wife’s families are scattered all over, we knew that keeping in touch with those who were concerned would be difficult. However there is a place for family members to go that allows you to update information on a loved one or yourself and that allows those who care to visit and leave messages of encouragement and even virtual gifts. This site is called Care Pages.

Using the sites own words, care pages is about connecting friends and family to those who are unwell. Started by Eric and Sharon Lanshur, Care Pages was initially meant to keep their friends and family informed about the status of their son Matthew who had been diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. However they soon decided that many people could use a place to share information with loved ones across the globe and started Care Pages. In the five years since its opening Care Pages has allowed more than 2 million people to reach out to their loved ones during a time of great need.

One of the reasons it is so successful as a tool for people to reach out is because it is easy to set up a personal page, and it is easy for people to leave messages of encouragement and hope. After you register you can either visit a page or start one of your own. If you are merely there to visit a loved ones page, leaving them a message of encouragement is as simple as typing it into the provided box and clicking the post button. While this may seem a simple thing, leaving a message that shows you care is comforting to almost anyone.

If, however, you go to care pages looking to start up a page for yourself or a loved one, this is also an extremely easy process. Simply provide the asked for information click a couple times and you are ready to launch your very own Care Page. Once luanched you can update your information freely, post up to 100 photo’s and receive messages and updates from friends and family. While the page itself is fairly cut and dry without to much in the way of personalization, it does create and effective way of staying in touch with the rest of the world without requiring knowledge of web design or purchasing a domain and server space.

In the end I like Care Pages for its ease of use. However the one problem I have is that even just visiting someones page requires that you register. I understand that we don’t want just anyone browsing personal places such as Care Pages, however there are people who would choose not to leave a message simply because they do not wish to register with the site. But if they are not willing to register, do they really care that much anyway? Another small complaint I had was the lack of customization. While I understand the purpose of the page is to create a space for updates and what not, it would be nice if I could personalize my daughters page a bit. Yet something is better than nothing.

Just in case you have been on a recent trip to mars, or for some reason are out of the loop on what is happening on the internet, social networking is not just a big thing, but a huge one. In fact social networking is credited as being one of the major forces behind another buzzword web 2.0. While there are many social networks out there ranging from the general like myspace to the more specific such as Famundo I found a fun little place that allows you to start your own social network. That’s right, now you can get the feeling of what its like to be Tom by beginning your own social network that can be about anything you want. Are you way into video games? Why not create your own social network. Want to stay in touch with fellow bloggers? Create a social network space for bloggers and their fans only.

Started in October 2004 by Co Founders Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen Ning now hosts more social networks than any other social network. Their idea was to see what would happen if anyone could make a social network about anything. Well it looks like the idea was fairly popular, boasting more than 7,000 unique social networks and growing each day Ning could be on the verge of becoming a household name just like Google and myspace.

As is to be expected there are critics of this service stating that one of the main reasons behind Ning’s success is that there are several social networks geared towards porn. However as revealed in this post over at the tech crunch, Ning is not about pro porn but pro freedom. It is actually quite refreshing to see a company stand on its two feet and support the idea of freedom for everyone not just the main stream. However this could also be what ultimately stops Ning from becoming as widely used as more ‘family friendly’ social networking sites. Either way I hope that the later is not true for Ning has so much to offer to everyone who is interested in social networking.

First out of all the companies and sites I have visited it seems that Ning is one of the most committed to customer satisfaction. They are so committed to the happiness of their users that they have actually developed a team of programmers that can help you develop your social network. This team is called Team Advocacy and you can learn more about them at this blog that is hosted by Ning itself. It is reasons like this that I believe that Ning can be the next big thing. While many similar social networks give the user a pre set choice of styles and designs, Ning actually allows its users to pretty much design their own look and feel. Also you don’t have to be a coding genius to make Ning work, they are there to help you out as much as they can. They do care about you and go out of their way to prove it, don’t believe me? Check out this blog about how easy it is to use Ning.

I also figure that letting you have a look at my own attempt to create a social network might be kind of fun as well.

You can check out Ning and build your own Social Network by going to their site at www.ning.com

and a video with one of the founders

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

I did a review of Remember the milk a few months ago and at the time I raved about how awesome I thought it was. Now it looks like RTM has decided to improve itself. How you are asking? Well they now allow you to link RTM directly to your GMail account. This means that you can pretty much do anything you would want on RTM directly from Gmail. You can assign tasks, remove tasks, send reminders, well pretty much do it all from gmail. It does take a download which you can get here, and you can only use the firefox web browser with it at the moment.

I am personally very excited about this latest update for Remember the Milk and think that it takes two great functions and combines them into one. In fact one of the only complaints I have had about most of the task management applications available is that while you could be emailed reminders you couldn’t set reminders, or do other things from email, but now you can with this update.

Some of the more useful things you can to with this plug in

Manage your tasks:

When you install the plugin there will be a task management pane on the right of your gmail. From here you can manage your tasks just as if you were logged into RTM, but from gmail. This is a great feature, now I don’t have to have multiple URL’s opened when I am dealing with scheduling.

Connect Tasks with specific emails:

Now when you get an email that has something you want to remember to do, or that you want to reply to at a certain time or after you have completed a task. Simply add the email as a task and it will remind you too take the action you when you mean too. I really like this, now I don’t have to worry about forgetting that I needed to email so and so and such and such a time.

You can read more about this fantastic plugin here.

I recently entered the realm of over powered cell phones, you know the kind that allow you to do pretty much anything you want, browse the web, write full size documents etc.  Well Since I got it I have been looking for an app that makes using the small internet screen easier.  Well Zumobi is not the one for me that is for sure.  I first heard of Zumobi a couple days ago and immediately downloaded it to give it a trial run.  After waiting for it to download and the time it takes to install it (both pretty quick processes) I opened it up and started toying with it.

What I liked:  I liked the way it looked, it has a neat display that looks like an open flower (this is probably why they call it a flower).  I also liked most of the preloaded stuff that it comes with, I always enjoy checking out random photos from Fkickr, and the other 12 apps were ones I enjoyed as well.  However that is about where what I like about it ends.

What I didn’t like: I found that getting new apps for the open 3 spots to be something of an exercise in frustration as nothing I wanted to put in seemed to work right. Also I tried to remove a couple of the already installed apps and for some reason they just would not go away.

In the end I decided to ditch the whole thing and keep looking for more apps for my phone, however I do believe they got a good idea I just think that the folks at Zumobi need to do some work on making apps easier to change and update.  I also see where this cell phone app could be really useful to people who like the apps that come with it.

You can download Zumobi here.  And you can check out their website here.