Who are these Beautiful People, now? “An exclusively beautiful community, founded for the purpose of creating personal and professional relationships… an elite online club, where every member works the door.”

How it works is that you have to upload a complimentary profile of yourself to the website to apply to join. Your photo will then be rated based on whether people think you’re beautiful or not over a period of 48 hours by existing members of the opposite sex. Should applicants secure enough positive votes from members, they will be granted a full membership to the BeautifulPeople Network.

Seriously though, why on earth would anyone (a) stoop to such levels and vanity and (b) submit themselves to that kind of possible rejection, and we’re talking rejection on a world wide scale here? Apparently lots of people do though, ‘coz at last count BeautifulPeople, called ‘The sexiest website in the world today’ by CNN was working like a charm in 16 countries.

Try it out if you dare. The answers may not always be pretty but at least they’ll be honest.

For something in a similar vein… but slightly less vain, check out Juggle. It’s a site that allows you to figure out how popular something, or someone, is by providing “factual information on hundreds of thousands of the web’s most popular topics and products. By using basic semantic technology, Juggle assesses and combines facts and information from the most trusted sources on the web to create a complete information set on each product and topic in our database.”

There is no foolproof recipe for creating great, believable, attention-grabbing creative. Until now. Great and believable you’ll still have to come up with yourself, but for ‘attention-grabbing’ you can try Feng-GUI (www.feng-gui.com), a website that “generates a visual heatmap” for your creative.

In their own words, “Feng-GUI empowers designers, advertisers and photographers to effectively analyze Attention and Attraction in visuals.” They do this by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of exposure to visuals, then creating heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at. “This offers designers, advertisers and creatives a Pre-testing technology that predicts performance of an image, by analyzing levels of attention, brand effectiveness and placement, as well as breaking down the Flow of Attention.”

Which is all really just a way of saying ‘Hey, test your image on us before you use it to see if it’s going to sell a damn thing.’

To use Feng-GUI, you simply browse for an image using their browsing tool at the top of the home page, then press ‘heatmap’. The image should be less than1MB and either in jpg. or png. format. The site will then bring up the same image you uploaded, just with various colours and numbers on it. The numbers show the order in which a person’s eyes move, while the colours show the quantity of interest – bright blue means minimal interest, aka lose it; and bright red means it’s a main focal point.

Quite nifty really. Especially for those of us who use words like ‘nifty’ when trying to produce world-changing creative.

There I said it. Judge me if you will… but I think you won’t when you see what I’ve found to make this whole invisible friend thing just a leetle more grown up.

PC users, say hello to your new friend: the talking desktop buddy from Deskbot (http://www.bellcraft.com/deskbot/), “A freeware, multi-featured Clipboard Reader, Text Reader, Time Announcer, Desktop Application for Microsoft Windows featuring Microsoft Agent Animated, Talking Characters. For use with Microsoft Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista.” (For Mac users, try the Dragonball Z Desktop buddies at http://desktop-buddy.smartcode.com/)

Once you’ve downloaded the app, a little blue Genie will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen, allowing you to start setup. You can set him to greet you every time you start up your computer. You can open up entire text files and have your talking desktop buddy dictate the text while you finish other tasks. Your character will let you know the time as often as you like, and offers a bunch of different characters (far removed from the annoying Word and Excel help dude) and voices in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

It’s silly, but it’s fun and we like it.

Okay, so we exaggerate. But Google CEO (and we all know Google is still the guru of everything) Eric Schmidt does believe that five years from now the Internet will be dominated by Chinese language content. What’s more, he made this revelation at recent techie heaven expo – Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 – in front of thousands of IT gurus, so it must be true!

The good news for those of us who don’t speak Chinese is that other radical changes will occur in the next five years which will actually benefit us. We won’t send you to watch the full 45-minute interview available on YouTube – it’s a super-snooze fest and besides, the kind, now-snoozing-no-doubt ReadWriteWeb (www.readwriteweb.com) folk already did that for us. But we did think these points he made were interesting (highlighted by aforementioned now-snoozing ReadWriteWeb folk):

1. The Internet will also be dominated by social media content. (We could have told him that!)
2. It will be delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. (Super-fast? Well, us South Africans can live in hope.) We’re talking broadband well above 100MB in performance.
3. Content will move towards more video. We love us some YouTube.
4. Real time information will be recognised as being just as valuable as all other information, and will be included in search results.
5. Google specifically will also be looking at how to rank real time info. “The fundamental shift towards user-generated information means that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that is the great challenge of the age.”

That, and learning how to speak Chinese so we can follow it all.

As Mashable reports, Facebook has fallen victim to the “insensitivity of the algorithm” with their ‘reconnect’ feature – it’s managed to upset a bunch of Facebookers by telling them they really need to get in touch with old friends. And dead friends.

The idea is quite noble in theory – it aims to reunite users with friends they have not communicated with for a while – but within minutes of launching this feature they’d managed to reconnect a whole slew of users with the grief they felt when their friends first died!

Upset users took to Twitter, one of Facebook’s mortal enemies?, to write about it: “Facebook just told me to reconnect with a friend of mine who died a couple years ago. Not cool, Facebook,” one user tweeted. Another says: “One of my friends on Facebook has passed. FB keeps asking me to reconnect with her… FB will never be smart enough…” And another: “Facebook just suggested that I ‘reconnect’ with someone who passed away 2 years ago. That’s so messed up.”

The list goes on. And on. In fact, there are now more than 950 000 users who have reacted against new changes to Facebook by joining a Facebook group – the irony just kills me (excuse the pun) – called ‘Change Facebook Back To Normal’. We’d have to agree that no more Whoopi Goldberg Ghost moments would be good.

Apparently I’m arrogant. (I think it must be that whole involuntary one eyebrow arched thing I do every time a camera even points in my direction.) well, that’s according to the majority of people who voted on my picture at SpeakingFaces.com.

SpeakingFaces.com is a killer new startup (revealed to the world at large by KillerStartups funnily enough) that allows you to upload a photo of yourself and then get unbiased opinions on the first impression you make from a pool of totally neutral, anonymous people. Totally neutral, anonymous people with no obligation to be nice. Eek.

Luckily, SpeakingFaces allows you to use the service over and over again. Give any pics you plan on using for your CV, a social networking photo, or a dating service a trial run on SpeakingFaces first. Just in case, you know. That way, should your first first impression be really bad, you can go back and work on it – change your clothes; wipe that smirk off your face; practice a look of angelic sweetness; remove all offending eyebrows – then post a new pic for new feedback.

PS: Users voting on the site also have the option of offering constructive comments to help you change your first impression. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Anyway, this is how it works: you want to go all old school and retro and send someone a snail mail, but you’re too lazy to actually go to the post office, buy the stamps, lick the stamps and then, your aching tired handwriting arm, put the letter in the post box yourself. And don’t even get you started on the dramas of trying to find an actual envelope! Anyway, why would you when you’ve got The Mail Monster to do it all for you.

Basically, Mail Monster allows you to create a letter online, preview it in PDF format, before printing, envelope-ing and posting the mail for you using actual real, live, old school, postal mail. Mail Monster also has options for postcards and gifts. And all this for free for letter-sending types in the US and Oz and a flat US$3 for shipping to other countries.

There’s nought stranger than fiction I tell you. Snail mail indeed.

Anyway, inane ramblings aside (another sign that maybe my brains are actually being scrambled, possibly by me cell), turns out I’m not the only one concerned about cell phone radiation. So in that, at least, I’m not completely psycho. On my side, I’ve got the Environmental Working Group who’ve actually launched an online cell phone radiation chart. Check it out here.

The site lists the radiation levels emitted by various mobile phones, allowing you to check what are the safest models out there while you’ve still got the brains to figure it out. The site lists data for over 1 000 phones currently available on the market, including a feature listing the best and worst phones ranked by radiation.

As for those of us who have so little brain power left we can’t be bothered to search the lists, it even has a very groovy little tool that lets you to look up your own phone by name, provider or manufacturer. They’ve even gone so far as to turn it into an embeddable widget for you to add to your website allowing visitors to check their phone radiation levels. Just in case, you know.

Why should I care about my handwriting (or indeed allow myself to be placated by such an insipid insult about the rest of my being)? Well, thanks to FontCapture.com, and Killer Startups who found FontCapture and broadcasted it to the world, my handwriting is now actually something I can use to make the world a prettier place.

In their own words, “At fontcapture.com you can create a font from your very own handwriting. There’s no software to download and install, all you need is a printer and a scanner.” It couldn’t be easier: fill in the font template, scan and upload to FontCapture.com and then download new font to your computer – and it works with both Windows and Mac. Added bonus: it’s for free.

All of which is great if you’re a graphic designer looking for true originality; somebody employed specifically to create new fonts (font making 101: how to make money using your 500 closest friends); or a p-d off woman giving her insulting ex-boyfriend the finger. (Or the full writing hand as the case may be… it’s the small things that count isn’t it?)

Anyway, thanks to Daytum designer Nicholas Felton, I’m told the meaning of life is within my grasp… Felton first started discovering who he was using personal infographics in 2005 when he issued his first Annual Report. He tracked his time spent working, the countries he’d visited, his favourite books, his favourite refreshment, creating a life report that was a mix of pie charts, bar graphs and lifestyle-based statistics. Today, this has morphed into a bigger community site for the masses, in an attempt to help the rest of us restless souls track our own day-to-day data and discover what it is that makes each of us unique.

“There is a lot of honesty in data,” explains Felton of his tool, “and better tools for recording and displaying information help everyone. This may be a greater knowledge of self and an accurate image of habits (good and bad), a more nuanced portrait of a person, or a macro-image of an event or issue. There is much to be gained from this transparency.” Try it out for free here.

Of course, if you don’t trust the data and still don’t know who you are, what you like and if you’re hot or not, you can always just fake it. Most people do anyway. Trusty old Google to the rescue to help you with that even – check out Google Trends.

As Mashable.com puts it: “With millions of Google searches performed every day, it makes sense that what people are searching for can be a good indicator of what has captured the interest of the US and the rest of the world” (ie. anyone and everyone cooler than ourselves). And this is what Google Trends does: “tells you what’s currently popular on the search engine via its Hot Trends feature, which displays how popular the search is and graphs out the volume of searches over time.” Hot Trends also gives you upfront the most-searched trends/topics each day.

Google has also just announced that it has now integrated Google Trends in actual Google Search results – but as far as we can tell this has only been rolled out in the US and Japan so far. What you can expect though is that now when you search a hot trend, you will find the trend and its graph at the bottom of the search engine results page. Whatever you search for, you will also find its hotness, how it ranks in the top 100 most popular searches, and the search volume graph.

Simple but pretty cool. (Do we still say ‘cool’? Hot or not?)