Replaces Gmail
- Unlimited Storage and Undelete : One can never think that Gmail's huge amount of memory storage would seem insufficient, but that's a problem for a lot of people these days. Outlook promises that the inbox capacity automatically increases as you need more space. You can even ask Outlook to recover your deleted messages.
- Email aliases : outlook lets you create emails 'aliases', such as 'mysubscriptions@outlook.com', which can be really handy when signing up for a new website. Since your alias can be autosorted into its own folder, unassociated mails won't mess up your inbox. Additionally, you can choose to delete this alias at any time.
- Social Networking : Outlook has tight integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. When you open an email, the sender's LinkedIn info as well as latest twitter or FB posts show up in a pane on the right, along with options to 'Like' or 'Retweet'. In addition to that, you can chat with FB friends with the built-in messengers app.
Replaces Facebook
- Hangouts : Perhaps the killer feature of Google+ is Hangouts the real time group video chat platform. Whether you are on the phone or using a computer, you can quickly set up a Hangout with up to 10 friends. 'Live Hangout Stream' lets you broadcast a live event to the whole world.
- Events and Photos : If you are hosting a party or a function, you can make an Event page for it. The cool part is that anyone attending it can upload their photos to Event page in real time, or at a late date. You get one page with pictures from everyone who clicked them at the event, and Google+ can create a fun little slideshow video out of them. If you use Picasa, you can upload high-resolution photos to Google+, by passing the default 2048x2048 size limit.
- Explore : FB puts you in touch with your own friends, but it doesn't really let you discover people beyond that. Google+ comes with an Explore section that collates the top posts that you may be interested in, based on analysis of your profile. Not only does this feature let you find new interesting people, but it also keeps you abreast of the latest happenings news through the trending topics.
Replaces Flickr
- Design : Photography is a visual art, and it should be displayed in a pleasing interface. Flickr has long fallen short of that, but 500px makes up with a gorgeous design. The site helps you discover new photographers through daily selections. And then there's the 'Flow' section of the portfolio, which automatically arranges a user's images by their aesthetic value rather than the upload date.
- Community : Flickr used to be an amazing community for photo enthusiasts and professionals in the early days, but those glory days are long past. However, 500px is where several professionals are heading after quitting Flickr, so the community is quite robust. And given that each photographer can have its own discussion, its a great place to learn more about the art.
- Sell your work : Much like an artist selling his painting, you should be able to sell your photographs. And 500px makes this a lot easier by letting anyone buy an image on the site. The user earns $40 for every canvas print and $2 for a direct download of an HD image.
Replaces Google
- Zero-Click Info : Search for any item and DuckDuckGo will give you a quick summary by collating information from different sources. So if you were to search for a movie, it will grab info from IMDB, Wikipedia and may be booking site to give you relevant results. And you can ask the search engine "Who won the Oscar for the Best Actor in 1992" to get instant answer.
- Privacy : Google is seen as the big bad villain when it comes to mining your personal info on the Internet. DuckDuckGo goes the other way by not collecting any data about you, as well as not sending your private info to the sites you click on.
- !bang : A feature that DuckDuckGo users swear by, !bang is a shortcut that lets you search within your intended site. For Example, if you want to search for the word, 'world' in Facebook, just type !Facebook World in the search box and you will directly taken to Facebook's search results for the term.
Replaces YouTube
- Finding Quality : Finding an interesting video on YouTube is the proverbial needle in a haystack. Vimeo makes this much easier with the several 'channels' it has - started by users themselves - which curate cool videos from other users. Additionally, Vimeo does nor allow commercial videos, gaming videos, pornography or non-user-generated content, ensuring that the clips are safe.
- Unlimited runtime : In the free account, YouTube restricts the user to a maximum runtime of 15 minutes per video. So if you have anything longer, you need to split it before uploading. But Vimeo doesn't have any such restrictions.
- Download It : When you come across a cool video, Vimeo allows you to simply download it for future consumption. There's no need to fire up some fancy third party downloader like with YouTube.
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