In the last few weeks I’ve discovered two sites that are pretty cool on the one hand and a little scary on the other. Tynt.com is a website that lets you “share the web as you see it” which you can translate into “put funny faces, notes, and other commentary of your own on any website you want.”

Tynt is just waiting to be used for playing a joke on your less than web savvy coworker or boss. You could really freak them out and tell them your site got hacked. Of course the way Tynt works is that it’s allowing you to do anything to the actual site but it’s giving you a mirror site to do with as you wish. It doesn’t take long to see the negative aspect of this either. Though technically someone’s website isn’t being hijacked here it kind of gives you that feeling.

I can really see the benefit of Tynt if you found an article or blog post and wanted to make notes on it to send some people so they could both read the article and see your additional thoughts. Like I said, this is pretty cool…and a little scary.

If adding your commentary to a video is more your speed then you’re going to love BubblePLY.  BubblePLY is kind of the same idea as Tynt, only it’s specific to video. I discovered it this week as the Nashville gas shortage video was making the rounds here locally. Again, I can see an upside and downside to something like this. The video I saw was quite funny (especially if you’re a Nashvillian, you’ll relate to this stuff…if you’re not a Nashvillian…you probably won’t like it) and shows what a little humor and creativity can do for a minor crisis many people are experiencing together. Likewise, you can see how someone could provide some negative commentary on a video you did.

In the end I think Tynt and BubblePLY are kind of like superpowers. In the hands of the right people it can be very good. In the hands of the wrong people it can be very bad.

Web applications are one of the six categories of web 2.0. I’ve become a huge fan of these apps and am always looking for bigger and better ones. In the photo editing world, I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for a while but although it’s free it’s not a web application nor has it really done everything I need to do when I want to edit pictures. A few days ago I discovered PXN8.com, and online photo editor, and compared to several other online photo editors I’ve seen, this one is the best. It’s got the most intuitive user interface I’ve seen with a host of editing tools to meet your basic photo editing needs. If you’re not sure what a particular control does there’s a handy mouseover box to explain what each action does and if you still don’t like what you did there’s an undo button to remove the previous action. If you thought you needed to buy photo editing software for your general photo editing needs, save the money and give PXN8 a shot.

Ok, so I had some other stuff to talk about tonight but I’ve been watching the Steve Jobs keynote this evening and I simply cannot focus on anything else. If you haven’t heard by now (where have you been today???) Apple Inc. unveiled their iPhone. I must say that the more I’ve seen of this tonight the more impressed I am. Earlier today I just thought it was cool. Now I’m blown away. Check out the demo on the Apple site or the live demo from the keynote today (which actually shows you a bit more about it).

The iPhone is due out in June through Cingular. I expect the race is on for applications that can work with the iPhone…in fact, this may help push the adoption of web applications like Google documents and spreadsheets or the Zoho family of products because you can use them through the web browser. Should be interesting to see what happens.