iUseThis - Cool Mac Site

I've been busy lately - not much time to post - but gathering lots of materials. Sorry for the silence.

Anyway, I caught this site mentioned on PowerPage - iUseThis - a site for Mac users with an interesting tweak on the social networking angle. Basically it maintains a list of MacApps and a database of which registered members use them. You can submit the apps you use which are missing, and select other users of your favorite apps and designate them as 'friends'. You can also make comments and suggestions to app postings.

There doesn't seem to be a way to see or search the entire Friends list for particular users (at least when I tried it), so adding "Friends" is difficult. I could only do this by looking at the user list for each app. There is also a "neighbor" list, but I'm not sure what this is. There is also a "Recommended Application" list for registered users, but it didn't seem to be functioning. (It said, "Not enough data to determine recommendations" or something like that...)

Loading app data is a bit problematic, as you have to cut and paste URLs from another browser window. And loading program icons was confusing. I assumed you could select the program via the browse button and it would snatch the icon. Unfortunately, this gives you an error when you submit. Also jpegs don't seem to work - you have to get the icon in .png format. So, what you get are not real icons, but screen captures of icons or website graphics. Perhaps they have some of these bugs worked out.

The site got a lot of hits yesterday, and apparently it is offline today for maintenance. Let's hope that they get it up so everyone can try it. I'm also hoping they'll add more features, like adding your blog links to your profile, and a way to see what web SITES are most popular with Mac users. Or even music, hardware or related things might be neat to add.

Anyway - go check it out when they get back on line! Looks like it's up now.