You can view other people's drawings and who's got the top draw. I have no idea how they calculate that ranking, but who cares! Check out my drawing ... I tagged my last blog post, oooooh living on the edge! (I did not have my Wacom Tablet hooked up)

For some reason, though, I can't save my drawings. I'm using Firefox, but it just hangs while I'm saving. To be honest, I really don't see myself using this tool a lot. It's a cool novelty, but why would I keep using it? I love how all these cool web 2.0/3.0 tools and sites that are popping up everywhere, but it really makes you wonder if the founders are actually thinking about there product from the perspective of the customer/user.

I really like how they've leveraged Javascript to make this tool a 2 second install. All you do is drag the “draw here” link into your bookmarks and your set. Click on “draw here” and the drawing tools automatically load up and you're set! If only my audio software installed so easily ...

Sounds good so far ... Most of the successful services create a system for displaying new content that's brand new. Digg's got there "upcoming" page, StumbleUpon throws in new pages to see how users react. But what about RawSugar? I looked, and looked, and looked, and realized that RawSugar isn't displaying any new submitted user material. And on top of that, all of the links listed on the homepage (and subsequent pages) are all submitted by the same user (prakash)!!

What's the purpose of this site?!?! It's basically prakash's bookmarked sites playground! It doesn't display any new sites from other users! Booooo! Way to kill early adopters!

Rule #2 for web 2.0 startups:
Give users obvious vanity reasons to use your service. Why do people add random friends on MySpace? So there proverbial MySpace muscles are bigger!!

Judging by there blog, they've got about 100k users and launched Picnik around January of 2007. Take note, Flickr and gang (Yahoo) may be plopping some doe on these guys to integrate this tool directly. It totally fits into there toolset (they probably designed it that way!) Take a look at Flickr's set/collection editor .... very similar. Except, Flickr uses Javascript/Prototype/Scriptaculous type tools instead of Flash based tools. But then again, having Javascript perform white balance and saturation and sharpening would be a huge task (imagine the cross browser compatibility nightmare that app would spawn!!)

I ripped there Picnik widget off of there blog code and posted it below, linked it to the Landscape Photography group. Click on one of the photo's and give Picnik a whirl!

Today, I "stumbled" onto an awesome flash animation using drum programming sounds. It's called "Drum Machine" and it was created by "tokyoplastic" (as stated on the page). It takes a few minutes to build up, but once it get's going it's DAMN cool.

A cool feature in StumbleUpon is the "send to" button. Having that "send to a friend" feature so close and handy (and in the same spot over and over) is beginning to get over used by me! I know I know, your thinking "most sites have a send to a friend feature, whats the deal?" The fact that it's in the same spot and remebers the past emails is HUGE! It's all about the little things.

Along with the japanese "Drum Machine" flash, I stumbled on some really cool time wasting pages! I built a face in flash! Found some amazing lightning photography! Watched a stunning guitarist sound like an ensemble of instruments in a new guitar playing technique (at least new to me)! And found a photographers gorgeous portfolio of 4x5 camera work. Oh look! Three hours just went by. Awesome!

I gave this time waster it's own paragraph! It's a physics modeling thingy called "Soda Constructor" that lets you play god on this wireframe robot object. It's WAY cool. Go ahead, play with it! You get controls to model the gravity and "stuff" that interacts with the object. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time on these things (because there fun).

So in the end, why do I use StumbleUpon? Or more importantly, why would I keep using it? Pure social entertainment. I have yet to try out the recommendation features, so I could be missing a huge piece of the pie. But, am I going to "Stumble" onto a key piece of research or website that I've been hunting for? Not likely. But, I'll have a great time "stumbling" onto fun time wasting sites.

Quintura is a groundbreaking search engine that visually leads you to results. You type in "music" which leads you to "classical" which leads you to "guitar" which gets you to "classical guitar lesson" pages. Awesome! One problem ... I can never remember the damn name! Quantumn - Quintuple - Quindble - AHHHH!

Rule #1 on startups (yes I'm making this rule up ):
Pick a name that people can communicate over the phone. Like Google. MySpace. Yahoo. Granted, our brains are visually imprinted with these brands constantly now ... but there still easy to communicate.

UNLESS! It's a brilliant marketing ploy to get people to struggle to remember the name which creates activity in wanting to use the technology. Hmmmm.