Three websites you’ll be glad you now know

Woman using a laptop

For many people, getting onto the Internet is a core part of the computing experience on a phone, computer or tablet. From how-to tutorials and catching up with friends, to eCommerce our reliance on the Internet keeps growing.

This week, we’ll feature three of the many websites that enhance the browsing experience, making it more productive, more convenient and even simpler to do.

10 Minute Mail (10minutemail.com)

In surfing the net, you can’t help but notice how many sites require us to sign in with our email and password to get access to a given resource. For many of the most commonly used websites, this makes sense as it customises your experience based on your sign-in credentials.

However, this isn’t necessary for all sites. For some, asking you to sign in is just a way of harvesting emails for later use, either for advertising purposes or for sale to third parties. Back in the day, people would just provide a random statement with an ‘@’ sign in the middle somewhere, jot down a simple password and continue on to the access the resource.

Unfortunately, site operators wised up to this and nowadays require that you confirm that the email is yours by sending an access link to the address you’ve provided.

This is the dilemma 10 Minute Mail seeks to address. It’s a website that provides what it says on the box - a 10-minute email address. This comes in handy when you don’t want to give a website you’re on your actual email. So you go to the site, use virtually any name to set up an email and get access to an email that self-destructs in 10 minutes.

Account Killer (accountkiller.com)

In the face of the recent privacy scandal at Facebook, many people have questioned their use of social media given how much information we seem to give these platforms. Some users have even decided to delete their data and/or accounts from major social media sites – remember #deletefacebook?

Sadly, as many have realised, setting up a social media account is easy, but erasing it and all the data associated with the account is not. It involves a bunch of convoluted, ambiguous, half-hearted temporary controls that seem designed to make you give up on your quest for independence.

This is what Account Killer aims to help with. It’s a delete manual, if you will, that provides detailed information on how to get rid of any type of account on the many social media platforms that exist. It also lets you know the level of complexity of the process and how much of your information you can actually get rid of.

Down for everyone or just me (downforeveryoneorjustme.com)

This website does exactly what it says. It simply checks whether a given website is offline for everyone or just you. There are times when websites or even apps become inaccessible for one reason or another. This can either be the result of a poor Internet connection, workplace firewalls or the website itself going down. The information provided by this website comes in handy to determine what’s causing the inaccessibility and if it’s within your power to change things.