@dvocable

Of  late, I have been doing some online research on the sites that exist today in India on personal finance. It’s kinda nice to see the plethora of sites that are mushrooming up. They certainly on the first glance seem to offer you comparisons of financial products available in the market – insurance products, mutual funds, credit cards, etc.. However, you soon realize that most of them want your name, address, phone number, email and many more things before you can simply use any of the compare feature they provide. If you provide your contact details, you soon get a call asking if you want to buy any insurance policy, etc. In a nutshell, these are the online insurance agents, sort of.

However, some do provide good comparisons and a few offer their services without you having to enter your personal details.

Site   -  Unique Visitors per month (according to Google Ad Planner data)
ApnaPaisa.com – 130000
BimaDeals.com – 32000
ChildInsurance.in – NA
Click2Insure.in – NA
CompareInsurance.co.in – NA
GetMeInsure.com – NA
IndiaBima.com – NA
InsuranceMall.in -   NA
InsurancePandit.com – 11000
iTrust.in – 63000
InvestmentYogi.com – 9400
PaisaWaisa.com – 64000
Personalfn.com – 36000
PolicyBazaar.com -  350000
RateKhoj.com – 27000

I like ApnaPaisa among the lot as I can do a quick comparison whenever I want. But you want to drill deeper, then it also  starts asking your personal details. One thing they lack – recommending which is the est product of the lot – can be found at PolicyBazaar.com. However, here you have to submit all your personal details before doing any search or comparison. Personalfn is good to read up on financial topics but they are limited beyond a point. InvestmentYogi is a new site and they are trying hard and it would be good to see how they fare int he coming months.

• Twitter Links for February 2009: Social Media and Twitter Resources : The Get Smart Blog – This list is a collection of social media and twitter resource links that were shared and retweeted by @GetSmartWomen in February 2009. In this list you will find the best, most interesting, and most useful of our favorite shared Twitter links.
• 4 Multi-Search Engines You Should Consider For Your Home Page – Some search engines that are not Google but you want to try out.
• WeightMirror – See a weight loss of up to 50 lbs from your own photo in seconds! – This fun tool lets you see how you will look when you take off 10lbs or 50 from your weight.
• 7 Ways to Keep Fresh Content Flowing On Your Blog – This is a question that most bloggers face at one point or another – particularly bloggers who have been blogging for 6-12 months.
• 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something – Like the name says it all

• PeopleBrowsr – You take all your social media profiles form Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. and put them up on a dashboard and play jiggle, analyse, cross-promote everything around. ..a la Radian6 dashboard style. You don't want to miss this one.
• Vacatweet – Twitter vacation auto response – Send vacation response while you are on holiday, when your friends DM you on Twitter.
• Public timeline – MicroPlaza – With so much of Twitter noise, this tool helps you makes more sense of the plethora of links you get from your friends on Twitter, nicely formatted.
• My Social Buttons – A neat solution to your needs of social networking sites' icons for display on your blogs and sites.
• Vunky Search – Most of us have a version of Photoshop in our computers sometime or the other, and all we could do with it was perhaps brighten/crop an image. Of course sometimes, we look for tutorials online. Now Vunky Search is one place you won't want to miss to find good tutorials.

• Twe2 – Get your Twitter Alerts via SMS worldwide for Free – Twe2 is Free Twitter SMS alerts that you can use to get free alerts on your mobile phone, and customizable too.
• Twe2 – Get your Twitter Alerts via SMS worldwide for Free – Twe2 is Free Twitter SMS alerts in Europe and beyond.
• Tynt – Tracer – When your content is copied, Tracer automatically adds an attribution link to claim it as yours.
• Twippr – Pledge cash by Tweet – Twippr is an interesting concept where users can use Twitter to pay other Twitter users cash using Twitter. The simplicity might just click.
• feedly: a magazine-like start page – Feedly pulls in your Google Reader List and displays the latest content in a easy to read newspaper style format. Lots of options to play around with. Smooth sharing options to Twitter and other social sites. I’m hooked on to this one.
• TinyChat.com – Create a free chatroom – Meebo changed the chat landscape by allowing users to chat without their desktop IMs, and now Tinychat is doing it again by allowing users to chat without any restriction of user IDs, etc. Simple create a room and start chatting.
• Delicious Toolbox: 80+ Updated Tools and Resources – Here are over 80 tools for everything from your mobile device to your blog, and more, that can help you view your bookmarks in new and unique ways, backup your bookmarks in a secure location, take your bookmarks with you on the go, blog about your most recent saves, and then some.
• How to Get Retweeted – The best measure of someone’s quality as a Twitter user is not the number of followers but the amount of retweets. Guy Kawasaki provides 6 practical tips to get retweeted on Twitter.
• 11 Free And Useful Open-Source Alternatives For Designers – Opensource, Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers – Listing here 11 Free And Useful Open-Source Alternatives For Designers in which most of them are cross-platform.
• Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs | Best Colleges Online- From blogs that focus on writers still trying to make it in the publishing world to those providing updates from best selling authors, you’ll find all kinds of information geared towards improving and informing your creative writing.
• 18 Tools I use as a Designer & Blogger | Fuel Your Creativity – Cool web tools that you can use to quickly learn web designing and be more creative.
• 15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My First Blog – Neil Patel shares 15 tips to remember when you start your blog. A must for every newbie entering the blogoshere and for regular bloggers too.
• 12 Twitter Stream Aggregators To Make You Smarter | Online Marketing Blog – 2 cool Twitter post aggregators to get you smarter on Twitter
• 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine – ere are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them.
• HOW TO GUIDE: 60+ Great How To Sites and Resources – Here’s a run-down of more than 60 great how-to sites and guides covering everything from building a mashup to being more productive, creating a website and more.
• 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers – Learn-gasm – These free open courseware classes can help any web worker get a step up on the task with courses including web design skills, media arts, photography and video, writing and communication, technology, and even classes to help freelancers get ahead with marketing and entrepreneurial topics.
• 42 Free Online Magazines for Designers | Graphics - There’s a huge pool of free design magazines on the net; we meant those softcopy magazines you can either browse online or download (.PDF, .SWF) for offline viewing. Not only they have high quality content, each issue released is also free.

Sometimes viewing pictures in rows and columns can be dull. Luckily, there are a number of services dedicated to making the photo search and viewing experience more interesting.

Check out my latest post on Mashable for 8 sites that provide a new approach to searching and looking at pictures online.

Also one that came on the comments that I would have loved to include is Tag Galaxy. Check it out.

We all are aware of Google News Alerts, that nice service from Google News that keeps us sending email alerts on a particular tag/word we specified. Now take that into a new level with Alerts.com. This new service supports not just news alerts but more than dozen types of alerts including birthdays, gas price, corporate press release alerts, forecasts, horoscope, jobs, wake up calls, flight alerts, traffic alerts, hotel price alerts, RSS update alerts, and more. You can set up a to do alert as well.

Aother nice feature is that Alerts.com can send you the alerts through email, SMS, or voice on your mobile phone, home phone, or work phone, depending on how you want it. If you prefer, you can set up a ‘Do not disturb’ time period when you don’t want any alerts.

Currently the SMS and phone alerts seem to be working only in the US, but I am sure they will soon support more carriers globally. Despite this, the service is neat and I am really starting to like all my alerts configured under one service.

Do you know Linkedin is the smartest website in the world, followed by Facebook and Simple Spark? This is the ranking calculated from the cumulative IQ scores of their users. MySpace ranks 5th, Twitter is on 8th, and Google is on 9th.

Might be fun to calculate the IQ of your site as well. Head to IQ League where you can calculate your and your website’s IQ. You can take a simple 60 second test to determine your IQ level.

For you website, it is a little elaborate as your website readers are the real IQ of your site. You need place a link on your site and ask your readers to take their IQ tests. For each visitor, IQ League will remember were he/she came from and automatically add that visitor into your site’s data. Once you have 5 people taking the test from your site, IQ League will calculate IQ of your website. You can view the stats at http://www.iqleague.com/group/mysite-com

Is it a surprise that India is the smartest country in the world, followed by Netherlands and Serbia.

Web18 seems set to become the destination for your social bookmarking needs, video and music sharing, online travel portal, start up page, feed aggregation, and emails. Their latest venture, In.com, so apparently, is a huge effort in this direction. If the name, targeting all those who yearn for small email addresses, doesn’t strike you, then check out the features. These guys must have figuring out hard all this while on what kind of online sites tick well with the masses. And when they did, they assembled all of them together in one. So now you have your Digg, YouTube, Gmail, MakeMyTrip, Netscape, Zapak, and JukeboxAlive under one domain. That’s the story.

Do I like it? Definitely. In fact, I dare say this is finally a web 2.0 site from India after a long time that I honestly like. The design and look are neat. The music and video streaming is fast even on my dialup. The email service is with a whopping 10 GB space and I particularly find it quite thoughtful that they have introduced folders, made compose editor or for that matter every mail that you read open in a new tab. The inbox page is clean and they don’t insert any ad on the footers of emails that I send to my acquatntances, like our so big Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail do. Plus, In.com is a 2-letter good name (it has supposedly costed Web18 2 crores) to have an email with and being new, you can have all the mayank, sita, teena, and what not @in.com, instead of going for the tenna20008 type usernames.

In.com doesn’t have to worry about the news. They aggregate it from other sites. Maybe many people would prefer that instead of having one publication house to read the news from.

What the site lacks is the functionality in some areas. Site navigation can still be a pain. if you venture somewhere as when you are adding your feed or reading a feed, you cant find the go-back buttons so easily. You cannot move back to any part of the site from your inbox.

Would I prefer In.com over gmail? Unlikely , but it can definitely become my second best and I can close down my Rediffmail, Yahoomail, AOL, and Hotmail.

I hope they keep the site clean and don’t insert ads like there’s no tomorrow, something so characteristic of web18 sites.

Final words: This site is here to stay and so watch out, Indiatimes and Rediff. I cannot yet start comparing it feature by feature with the biggies like Gmail and YouTube, that won’t be fair, but I think web18 has got it right.

For users like us, all I can say is grab your ID before anybody else does (provide your mobile phone number not email for instant invite code on the site) and the ad campaign starts.