Luckily for me, the delightful Roy and Shachar at All My Faves (yes, they are reading this…), invited me to come be a part of their ambitious project to turn the vast, confusing, inaccessible world of the internet into one visual page. One page where you can find the best websites for any category or interest. But also one page that contains hundreds of smaller, customizable homepages filled with specially selected sites made to satisfy your own specific niche interests for anything; from watching free TV online, to entrepreneurs, to the best music sites.

And my own personalized version gives me all of that, as well as my own ‘faves’, accessible on the computer, my friends’ iPads, and my mobile phone.

For me though, the best thing about having an All My Faves homepage is that I can customize exactly how it looks. Everything from the order and shape of the way you put your favorite sites on a homepage tab, to the actual logos of the sites is customizable. And that got me thinking. I’m from Manchester. And I’m a massive fan of Manchester United. So why not build a homepage dedicated to the team I love? For the first time I wouldn’t have to lose out on all the great Man United sites I could be using. For the first time, I would be able to access all the best news sites, blogs, sites to watch games live, sites to download match highlights, twitter feeds, and anything else Man United I could think of, all in one place! And it would look great, because I can upload my own created logos for every site.

So I built it. All My ManUtd Faves. And it soon became clear that this wasn’t going to be just a personal page for me to use. This was the sort of resource that any Manchester United supporter would find useful. It would allow them to discover and use the best sites related to their team. It would be their Big Red Tour Guide to the Big Red Internet. And all I did to create this was customize an All My Faves homepage!

What it shows you, is that you literally can make anything with a homepage, whether it’s a fan page for your soccer team, or a brand page for your business. All you need is a bit of creativity and imagination. And of course you can always tweet me on @dannyjdavies to get any hints, tips, advice or even get me to make a logo for you to use on your page!

Tweet #allmyfaves

And in even better news, we’ve asked our users to help us find the 10 absolute best free games of 2011… And they’re in a nice easy to access list for you below! Just click on the pics below to get playing

You can add these games, along with all the other sites you love, to your own personalized homepage, making it easy for you to navigate around the web, with All My Faves. Click here to find out more!

Tweet #flashgames

1. Most Useful Internet Tool

Decide.com – I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “The Age of Austerity” being bandied around by media commentators this year. We’re embarking on an age of penny pinching and bargain hunting. And Decide.com has positioned itself perfectly with the times. It’s a website and a free iPhone app that helps you make those big electronics purchases at the right price at the right time.

In other words, Decide.com uses clever prediction algorithms to warn you if the price of any given electrical product is about to drop, increase, stay the same, or if a new model  is about to be released. So you’ll know exactly when to buy that camera, laptop, smartphone or plasma TV you’ve been itching to get your hands on. It’s a great tool, and our users agree, voting it one of the coolest websites of the year. Get smart with your gadget purchases by clicking here!

2. Best Internet Music Player

uWall.tv – I’m absolutely not surprised that this  beautiful, free online music player was voted by our users as Best Internet Music Service of the Year. It’s basically an interactive wall of Youtube video playlists featuring the most popular artists and bands of all time. And it’s really simple to use, as well as being great to look at.

You either click on the picture of an artist you like, or search for them in the box provided if you can’t find what you’re looking for on the wall. And then you watch a nicely curated playlist of their music videos from Youtube. Click here to get listening on 2011′s coolest free online music player!

3. Best Education Site

Grovo - 2011 brought us tons of amazing new sites and saw many others grow incredibly fast (Twitter being the prime example). But for the average person using the Internet, most of these sites at often inaccessible (or just downright annoying!). And that’s where Grovo – a vibrant hub of online video tutorials – comes to the rescue.

Designed to help you make the most out of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Ebay and a whole lot more, Grovo is a terrific service. If you sign up for their free, trial version, you can access the majority of their content (including professional video courses for Google Analytics & AdWords, Facebook Pages & Ads, and Basecamp). For full, unlimited access to Grovo’s courses, they charge $9/month or $99/year. But hey, All My Faves users have voted in their droves to crown their favorite education site of the year, so they would agree that it’s worth every cent! Click here to see if Grovo could help you get to grips with the Internet.

4. Best Site to Browse on Your Coffee Break

What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? - The popularity of this site among our users in the 2011 vote tells me one thing: I’m not the only employee who (occasionally…) drifts off at work and thinks about what movie I’m going to watch with my hot chocolate/hot date as soon as I get off work!

WMSIWT is a really, really, simple site. It provides you with random movie trailers, organised by genre (which you select from a drop down list on the left of your screen). And that’s it! So on your next coffee break, click here and enjoy a couple of great movie trailers on ‘What Movie Should I Watch Tonight’.

5. Tastiest Food & Recipes Site

Punchfork.com - Here’s a site with a nobly delicious concept: to collect the Web’s best recipes in virtually any category you can think of, and to showcase them elegantly with big, juicy pictures, on its homepage. Moreover, Punchfork uses social media channels to find out what’s hot in the cooking world right now, and shares that on the site too. Punchfork’s visual approach is just so much more rewarding and helpful in recipe search online.

I couldn’t have picked a better winner of the All My Faves Tastiest Food & Recipes Site myself. In fact, I’m still positively salivating from having browsed Punchfork’s amazing looking array of visual recipes! If you want to enjoy what so many of our users have been enjoying, click here and find your next dinner with Punchfork.

6. Best Travel Site

UsingMiles – This is a flight and hotel search and booking site with a difference: It’s totally aimed at getting you to use your hard-earned frequent flyer miles and hotel loyalty points alongside your equally hard-earned cash.

In a time when we all really should be trying to squeeze every last bit of value out of our vacations, it’s amazing how many of us waste all the loyalty points and miles we build up (according to UsingMiles, $16 BILLION expire without being used every year!). So UsingMiles’ success is in walking the fine tightrope between spending and saving really well! See how far your miles can get you with UsingMiles by clicking here.

7. Site Most Likely to Improve Your Life

Quirky - Now these guys mean business. Quirky offers a mighty innovative platform where anyone from the global online community can pitch an idea for a practical, life-improving invention, or a radical improvement of an existing product. Quirky handles the actual product development and marketing aspects, which pushes forward amazing ideas and makes them a solid, retailer-sold reality.

Quirky’s framework is so brilliant, they produce a new product every few days, and users are invited to take an active part in products’ development. Depending on their level of participation, contributing community members earn hard cash from the products’ sales in stores. And the best part of Quirky isn’t even that… it’s the Shop, where you can buy many of Quirky’s manufactured products that make life so much easier, induced by people like you and me who shared their great idea. A worthy All My Faves winner. Get inspired on Quirky by clicking here.

8. Most Stylish Website

EatSleepDraw - 2011′s most stylish website is a completely open, free space on the internet for people to submit their art. You’ll find everything from the sublime to the bizarre on there. But either way, it’s totally worth checking out.

Whether you want your art to get found, or to find some great art, click here to browse EatSleepDraw, the All My Faves Most Stylish Site of 2011, as voted for by you clever users.

9. Site Most Likely to Make You Go Wow!

The Museum of Me – Voted as the top site in our “Cool & Wow” category of websites, there’ll already be a lot of you out there who already will agree with me when I say that The Museum of Me is, well, cool and makes you go wow! For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, it’s a quite remarkable visualization of your Facebook account (including friends, photos, Likes, locations and more) into an amazing video tour of museum exhibition all about you.

The end result is commendable and compelling, and you can share it on Facebook of course, as well as upload it in album form to your account and wall. The Museum of Me is a nice visualization of your Facebook account that aims to make your social circles come to life. Have a go by clicking here.

10. Most Interesting iPhone App

Skyview - This is an app worth every cent of the $1.99 it costs. Fresh from its success as being named Education App of the Year in iTunes’ very own review of 2011, the Skyview team can now crack open another bottle of vacuum-packed, Space-friendly Champagne, because they’ve also been voted as our users’ favorite iPhone & iPad app of the year.

Skyview is an amazing little app that uses the awesome ‘augmented reality’ effects on the iPhone and iPad to allow you to walk around with your own virtual planetarium in your hands. Watch your favorite stars and constellations fade in and out of your camera view, search for stars and planets’ current location, and track celestial objects’ path through the skies in a 24 hour period (including satellites and the space station!) Available on the App Store on iTunes, you can learn more about Skyview here.

Tweet #Bestof2011

Well folks, the nominees have been announced. Amid a flurry of elbowing, scheming and shadowy wealthy donors (not really, that was an attempt at a joke), the candidates have jumped every hurdle and secured enough votes in the primaries to make it onto the Official Longlist for the 5th Annual All My Faves Site of the Year Awards.

Every week of every year, we explore the depths of the internet to bring you 10 awesome sites and apps we’ve discovered in our Weekly Faves. Out of those sites, we’ve picked the most interesting, coolest and most unique sites in each category. And it’s up to you to vote on the internet’s best of the best! It’s a great way to either support a site, app or game you love; or to discover the most unique and interesting sites we’ve found this year.

Click the Pic to Discover Cool Sites, Apps & Games & Vote for the Best of 2011!

The power is in your hands. It is up to you to decide which website, which app, and which game should take home the coveted crown. Simply go to The All My Faves Vote 2011 page, and “like” the sites and apps you think deserve the title. And remember, the sites that win each category will have prime featured space on the All My Faves site all year. So if you want to support a site or an app you love, and get them thousands of new users… Or if you fancy discovering some awesome sites, apps and games… Click here to discover and vote away!

Tweet #BestOf2011

1. Kindle Fire

This isn’t an iPad. It looks a lot like an iPad, works a lot like one, and most importantly, is under half the price of an iPad! Ladies and gents, this is the Kindle Fire: the MUST HAVE gadget of Christmas 2011. It’s a simple, well-crafted tablet PC that lets you read books, newspapers and magazines; watch videos; play games; and browse apps, all in the palm of your hand. It’s sharp display, intuitive touchscreen and beautiful user interface are just amazing for a price of $199.

2. Arcam rCube

The Arcam rCube is one for the sound enthusiast in you. This is probably one of the absolute best high-end speaker docks for your iPod in the world. It’s expensive, but not overpriced for the utterly gorgeous sound quality it gives you. It looks as stellar as the music coming out of it too, and is compact enough to fit in even the smallest space.

3. Sony PS Vita

The handheld gaming market’s been all about Nintendo’s 3DS this year. But now Sony’s fighting back. The Sony PS Vita is all about gaming quality, and your kids (or you!) will love it. It feels nice to hold, has amazing graphics, great games, and a touch screen for easy browsing.

4. Samsung MV800

One for the narcissists among us. Samsung has brought out this absolutely lovely little camera, with a touch screen that flips out in a way that makes it easy to take pictures of yourself! And if self-pics aren’t your thing, you can bet every one of the $199 it costs that your teenager loves ‘em. By the way, it also takes great photos of other people too!

5. Nike+ SportWatch with TomTom GPS

If you like running, you need this! It’s a watch that uses TomTom GPS systems to find your location during a run; and tells you your pace, distance, time taken, and calories burned. Connect to a PC and it shows you maps of your runs and uploads your stats. It even acts like a personal trainer on your wrist, motivating you verbally while you run, and reminding you if you haven’t run for a few days!

6. Casio TRYX

The Casio TRYX is one of the most innovative camera designs ever. Because you can twist its body in all sorts of directions, it can be used as a tripod, hung on a hook, adjusted to allow for a camcorder-like grip, and tilted to make shooting overhead and low-angle shots much easier. There’s nothing else like it!

7. Roku LT Streaming Media Box

There’s a new way to watch HDTV, and it only costs $50! This is Roku, a box that streams music and video from a HUGE variety of high quality sources, onto your television. No longer do you even need a cable subscription: this streams tv shows and movies from sources like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant, Pandora, HBO Go, Crackle, Disney, NHL Gamecenter, among many others. The list is endless. And Roku is an essential purchase this Christmas!

8. Lomography Diana F+ Medium Format Camera

Retro is cool. And so is this Lomography camera. Really cool in fact. It allows you to take professional-looking, classic shots, and even develop them like the ‘olden days’. And it’s relatively cheap for a camera, coming in at an affordable $80.

9. Native Union Play’s Video Memo Pad

With this ingenious little gadget you can leave video reminders for you or your family and friends! It’s the post-it note of the digital age and does what it says on the tin. You record a video using the front camera, and leave it somewhere you’ll see it as a useful reminder to yourself. And it’s magnetic, so yes it can go on your fridge!

10. Apple iPad 2

Ok, shocker, it’s an iPad. I’m pretty sure you don’t need me to be the billionth person of 2011 to tell you how amazing it is, but hey, it’s amazing! The Kindle may be great for the price it’s being sold at, but there really is nothing out there that beats the sheer usability of Apple’s iPad 2. My 70 year old uncle even has one, and trust me, that tells you just how easy it is to navigate around, browsing news, internet, the app store or the music player. If you haven’t got one yet, think seriously about it here.

Tweet #BestOf2011

At All My Faves, we have seen this challenge as a personal calling, which is precisely why we created the multi-tab Business page -our solution to the daunting information-is-everywhere plight. This special business page offers a much saner and more practical tool to businessmen and women both at the office and on the go. As you can see below, this page is perfect for tablets and touch devices.

The all-new business page is packed with the Web’s best sites in a number of topics under the big Business umbrella. Each tab offers numerous online sources -all free- for you to take advantage of. You will find all the top online resources of business and finance news, blogs, investment info and tools, marketing (strategy, advertising, and tips on both), TV & video, and top resources for entrepreneurs and small business owners. In addition, we’ve dedicated an entire tab to freelancers, providing job listing sites, advice and tips on growing your business and more. My personal favorite tabs are mobile apps, and the crucial coffee break.

If you are involved in the world of business, investment or marketing, the Business MiniFaves page will make your life easier. Much easier. Try it out for yourself if you don’t believe me. And if you would like to have your very own multi-tab page like this one where you can add all your Web favorites, sign up – it’s free!

Search fatigue is becoming a widespread downside to the world of online search, and SEO-savvy spammers and marketing freeloaders try to grab your attention on that very first results page, under the pretense of offering valid and useful content.

At All My Faves we hate the lack of productivity and relevance in online navigation just as much as you do. That’s why we take the entire process of content filtering super seriously, and do it manually, with the help of our devoted team of human editors (yes, a team of actual people). We think our users deserve nothing but the Web’s absolute best content at a click’s (or tap’s) distance, and we’re willing to work very hard to do it right.

[Photo: Team Spirit, December 2006 by Jiheffe]

So how exactly do we choose the websites and online resources you find on the various pages and tools featured on allmyfaves.com? We receive hundreds of site pitches each week and our team of editors reviews each and every one of these. The filtering process becomes even more challenging when there’s a new content page in development. What we look for is websites’ high scores in all our criteria:

• Popularity – The more the merrier, as it goes. If lots of people visit the site everyday, it means something good is going on.
• Content – We look for useful service and/or information users can benefit from. It has to be interesting and valuable.
• Security – The Web is filled with malicious entities praying on innocent users. Having a safe navigation experience is one of our top priorities. Therefore, we rule out any offensive content such as porn, gambling and other improper content right off the bat.
• Design – The site has to look and feel good. There’s no way around it; looks play a major part in sites’ overall quality, even though this premise comes with some ethical contradictions.
• No annoying distractions – Although a 100% ad-free website is a rarity these days, we try to pick sites that keep their advertisement space to a minimum, or at least contain it to a specified part of their page.

Although our content selection process can be painstaking at times, it’s not something we’re willing to compromise on. Whether you are seeking quick access to the high-profile websites you already know or, if you are seeking new top-notch sites in whatever you’re into, All My Faves is your ticket to the best content online.

In addition to designated pages offering the top sites in travel, business, blogs, education, kids, entertainment and shopping, we have created over 50 different Mini Faves pages to suit an entire array of tastes and interests, from art and design to cooking, finance, tech, style and politics, just to name a few. A world of exciting discoveries awaits you. We’ve worked hard to make it the best ever. Come in and let the faves begin!

The Argentinian homepage includes a visual showcase of the top online resources for Argentinian citizens, and as always, our team of human editors worked very hard to make sure only the best websites are listed for easy web navigation. So please give a big warm welcome to allmyfaves.com.ar – Vamos!

The page includes the most popular categories Russian users look for and visit on a daily basis. These include the obvious email, video, news and entertainment categories, but also interesting categories such as Books, Finance and Travel, just to name a few. All My Faves’ homepage for Russia marks a special milestone in our country-specific homepages list and we’re very pleased to be able to offer the best of the Web to the Russian community worldwide!

Why NPO?

At All My Faves we are dedicated to making users’ access to the Web’s best content a fast and easy experience. But when it comes to charity organizations we discovered the Web lacks a simple, trusted and filtered one-stop place listing the best NPOs operating in various fields. How many times have you seen a ‘How You Can Help’ news article following an earthquake or tsunami event (as was the case with Japan this month)? Thanks to our NPO page, now there’s an easy, 1-click way to help those who need your support the most, and you don’t necessarily have to wait for a crisis to occur to help out.

What will you find on the NPO page?

The alphabetically-ordered NPO page addresses both post-crisis and ongoing support-based organizations across the entire assistance programs gamut. This means you will find the best giving options for the benefit of locations and communities in need of immediate relief (such as that offered by the American Red Cross and the Mercy Corps), but also NPOs addressing more basic needs such as clean water (Charity: Water), food (Feeding America) and many others. Here are some of the NPOs featured on the page. For the entire list of categories click here.

Additional NPO categories include health, women, HIV/AIDS, children, military, animals & wildlife, environment, social ways to give, even non-monetary ways to contribute (clothes and food donations). More importantly, we’ve also included an ORG Watchdog  category so you can double-check any non-profit organization’s credibility prior to making a donation. In addition, the NPO page offers valuable resources for those in the non-profit industry; you will find the best relevant news, jobs, volunteering, fundraising and tools resources for non-profits online, just to name a few.

We invite you to explore the new NPO page, where you will find familiar organizations alongside lesser-known charities that all make wonders in people’s lives. Giving is a blessing, and remember there’s a tax break for charitable donations!