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Ask HN: What are your favorite non-mainstream or as yet unpopular sites that you visit?

The question is mainly to extract the hidden gems that you have uncovered lately or in the past and would like to share with the HN community - so called Best-of-Breed sites.

Obviously, mainstays like search engines and rss readers would be assumed everyone uses regularly.

Good mashups are worth stating.

Social proof, especially here, is valuable.

( 6 comments | 11 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite non-mainstream or as yet u... by 0x47 on Friday May 08, 2009 @02:28PM (#600031)
I recently discovered etherpad: http://etherpad.com/

Which has been helpful in collaborative grocery list creation among other things.

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite non-mainstream or as yet u... by adrianwaj on Friday May 08, 2009 @11:04AM (#599717)
-- personally, I use a Twitter client that I built but won't promote so shamelessly here.

-- I also use a slinkset site aggregating many feeds of new website releases.

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite non-mainstream or as yet u... by davidw on Friday May 08, 2009 @11:44AM (#599774)
If you spent time building it, why would you be ashamed of promoting it? I mean, don't spam me with it every time you post here, but if you're proud of it, let the world know.
Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite non-mainstream or as yet u... by adrianwaj on Friday May 08, 2009 @12:09PM (#599809)
okay, it's here: http://twitya.com/

I am proud of it, traffic hasn't really climbed even after spikes from being linked elsewhere, like on a TC comment, so I'm thinking it's more of a very niche site.

It avg's only about 50 uniques a day.

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite non-mainstream or as yet u... by GeneralMaximus on Friday May 08, 2009 @12:19PM (#599823)
Why don't you try submitting it directly to HN, Digg, Reddit, <whatever>? If you have an interesting tool, I'm sure people will upvote. In fact, proggit loves homegrown projects.
Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite non-mainstream or as yet u... by adrianwaj on Friday May 08, 2009 @12:39PM (#599865)
I'll look into it. Thanks.

I'm generally averse to wasting people's time, I'm also somewhat detached to the worldly success of the site as I'm happy using it myself. Also, I think as a twitter client, there might only be 2 others that use it regularly for that purpose.

Side note: for a while I started collecting information about what people were doing on the site using ajax posts to the server as it's all client-side, and I found a regular Chinese user who'd possibly setup a bogus twitter account of a fictional gay character linking to products for all his followers.

It's going to need about 3 times more traffic to start getting feedback and PR momentum. I think the site will only stick with a small portion of people that visit it. So it'd need to be hyped a lot, which is not my thing if it ends up wasting people's time in the process.