Love listening to music on YouTube? Hate the clunky interface and totally unrelated ”related videos”? Never fear, internet music addicts, Tubalr is here! Your friendly web app DJ, Tubalr allows you to effortlessly listen to a band’s or artist’s top YouTube videos without the ads/spam videos/inefficiency that YouTube can bring. Just type a band’s or artist’s name into the search box and select only or similar, and Tubalr will instantly serve up an excellently selected playlist of YouTube videos in its own sleek site. Perfect for parties and discovering music!

BeerMe is the digital equivalent of having a bar tending best friend in every bar in town. There are just three simple steps to ensuring that you can track down your favorite craft brew whenever it’s on tap in Los Angeles: input your favorite beers into BeerMe, follow your favorite bars from BeerMe’s curated list, then rush to the nearest bar to enjoy a pint of local Idiot IPA. 

We love beer, we love curating, and we love the find-a-favorite platform that BeerMe is pioneering.

Remember those cute little Japanese virtual pets that you wore around your neck in clusters of five to make sure they never died a sad digital death? Well…I do. And I like to think I’ve grown up a bit since then, so this Biome Smart Terrarium caught my eye. It’s an iPhone/iPad controlled flora terrarium that promotes ‘digital downtime’ by finding an alternative use for smartphones. Rather than shooting off emails or Angry Birds at the speed of light, use your iPhone to control Biome’s climate, water level, nurients, and low energy  lighting that replicated sunlight. The creator, Samuel Wilkinson, says  that the Biome  “encourages their owners to consider a slower life. The control and nurturing of a real mini eco-system takes patience and care, contrasting with the immediacy of messaging or tweeting that is so characteristic of the smartphone generation.”  The Biome is a beautiful marriage between analog and digital that doesn’t undermine today’s necessity of high-tech, but capitalizes on it to create an eco-system of one’s own.

When amending your every thought to 140 characters gets tiresome, don’t despair—write a letter. A letter? Like on paper? Yes, with a real pen that goes through the magical mail system. How nostalgic! This resurgence in stationery is driven by social-media gurus, who are writing more letters than ever in an effort to solidify virtual friendships into “real” relationships.

An article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, “Stationery’s New Followers,” reported that stationery is increasingly popular among people like Twitter exec Elizabeth Bailey Weil (who produces witty cards by hand with a letterpress in her garage for her own custom card company Paperwheel Press and personally welcomes Twitter employees with cards to make the startup feel small again) and blogger Hannah Brencher, who was admittedly “so addicted” to her online community that a 45 subway ride made her feel lonely, but now has written more than 400 notes to interact with her blog followers, stocking up at her local card shop weekly. Pen pal rehab!

People are willing to pay $4+ for a unique, beautiful card—many of which are discovered via social media or on Etsy, where more than 66,000 items are listed in the stationery category. Cards that ironically play off of social network catch phrases are especially successful, as seen here. The more custom design and hand-made process involved in the design, the better. Independent sellers like Weil and those on Etsy have experienced exceptional growth because of the personal connection customers feel when they know the seller made the cards with their own two hands. 

So, will Twitter be replaced by unsustainable piles of cutesy paper? No, but we’ve finally reached the point where social media overload has prompted a 180 degree switch back to embracing paper.  Yet it is happening in conjunction with social media, even driven by it—could this be the beginning of social mixed media?