In recent times it’s rare to come across a social networking website with a genuine unique selling point so when I discovered redkaroke i was understandably refreshed.

RedKaroke lets its users sing, record and share karoke songs. It has a surprisingly large collection of music for users to sing along to and each has the lyrics that flash up on screen as your singing.

I signed up with the intent of recording a song and embedding it here but after numerous failed attempts (nothing at all was wrong with the system, just my singing) I decided to embed a song from one of the sites top users.

This embed is just an audio track but users also have the option of recording a video to go along with their singing.

The two co-founders (and brothers) Miguel and Richard Ferreira had the original idea. They both have years of experience in the Spanish internet industry, having worked for Yahoo! Spain, Terra.es, and Ya.com. They saw the increasing popularity of music shows, and worked through the technical difficulties, ultimately coming up with the Spanish site, RedKaraoke.es which proved to be very successful. This is the international version which launched recently.

I’d love to see some indiestartups.com readers trying to do some karoke. If you feel brave post links to your attempts in the comments.

Twitter has a wonderfully loyal and dedicated userbase so when twitter inevitability goes down people get rather annoyed. It’s also no secret that twitter has been having some recent scaling issues so twitter has been going down noticeably often. So often in fact that it prompted someone to make a handy “is twitter down?” website.

When twitter goes down, twitabit steps up. It lets you que up tweets that will then be submitted the second twitter comes back online.

I’m haven’t tested this out yet (twitter is currently up!) but it looks like it’s a handy little app for twitter addicts. Stick it in your bookmarks then next time twitter goes down you’re covered.

Rifflet is an interesting project that lets musicians share unfinished parts of songs in the hope that other musicians can collaborate and combine musical ideas to form new ones.

Rifflet was produced for $0, in roughly two weeks, from idea to launch. It’s a great example of a solid idea executed very well for very little cash.

I heard from the sites founders, Jon and Kelly. They we’re more than helpful with helping me source this post.

It’s amazing how fast the Riffflet community is growing, and every day we hear from people about how much they love the site. We just had one member produce the first song built out of pieces on the site, so we’ve actually help something get created, which is really exciting.

I love little startups like this. They noticed a gap and they produced something quality for very little money to fill it. If more people were doing this the Internet would be a much better place.

There is already some good stuff going on over there. If you’re a musician check them out.

It’s rare that I find a site that I instantly fall in love with but Tengaged is one of those sites. The idea is simple. If you’ve ever watched or heard about “Big Brother” you’ll feel right at home.

Upon sign up you’re prompted to design your own charecter by scrolling through numerous different face, body, hair, eyes options to create a unique avatar that will be used throughout the rest of the game in a very “mii-esq” way.

After you’re registered you’re thrown into a “game” with 9 other users. A game lasts for 7 days and someone is “voted off” at the end of each day. To increase your chances of staying in the game you’re encouraged to interact with other members. Spark up conversations, post pictures, stories and generally try and keep the other members entertained, much like in the big brother house.

I spoke with Carlos Fernand, the guy behind Tengaged earlier today.

There is no point to have 2000 friends in your profile if you dont even know them, there was a need to create a different way to know people.

This is a really unique way of getting users to interact with one and other. I can see a lot of friendships being formed on this website. It’s really refreshing to see someone doing something completely new.

What’s even more impressive is that to date Carlos has only spent 1,000 Euros. Saving a lot of money by designing and developing the entire website himself.

In a nut shell flingmix is a free location-based, adult personals site built using the google maps API.

Brain child of John Blazer and built over a 2 month period working on weekends.

Other dating sites ask you all these survey questions, trying to find a perfect match for you based on a full set of criteria. I realized there’s a market for people who just want a quick fling with a very small footprint. Usually they are seeking a discreet sexual encounter.

On FlingMix.com, a user can literally search for a user and map them by distance within only a few feet. There might be another user in the hotel room next to you and you can see them on the map. You can email them immediately. No sign up, no registration, no credit cards – just a direct email. It’s similar to craigslist’s implementation of anonymous emails. You can be sending an email to an interested user in two clicks.

I spent a few minutes messing about with the system and it is pretty solid.

The site has all the features you’d expect to find on a site like this but flingmix seems to do what most other personal listing sites do in a very elegant way + the added google maps implementation.

John managed to keep startup costs considerably down by developing the site and system himself. To date he has only spent around $50.

One of the main selling points of this site is that it is free. That said, the money has to be made somewhere. Currently the site relies on revenue from adverts as it’s only source of income. The way the email server is setup means that when people send messages to user-xxxxx@flingmix.com (a unique email generated for each listing, keeping your real email address a secret) John can attach an advert to the footer of an email before it is delivered. It’s nothing amazingly new but i’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs would have missed this opportunity.

It’s a pretty sweet site and i’m sure it fills a gap in the (arguably saturated) market.