Want to make your school yearbook much better? Have each student register with this site and include their Track-this.info link below their name, as shown in the example above. This permits students to easily contact one another, even decades after graduation, without the need to pay month after month, year after year, as they otherwise would on classmate sites. Students who register themselves as a topic can select the option to decide who is allowed to track their lives.

By choosing the option to permit people to view and post comments about them (with or without moderation), that person's Track-this.info comment page becomes a living addendum to the yearbook.

The class itself should be registered as a topic so people can be notified of reunions and notable news.

The model names and topic numbers shown above are examples only.

Since the inception of online dating, many millions of people have paid billions of dollars to contact people via dating sites. Why? Why pay for something you don't need? If you've participated in online dating, you know how those sites work: it's free to post a profile and search for potential matches. You pay for the privilege of contacting others because there seems to be no other way to send messages. Right? Wrong! We've given people several ways to communicate without paying a penny, including ContactMeFree.com, MySpamSponge.com, and now this site. How? Include your topic number in your profile. When you register this topic, select this power option: Allow people viewing or tracking this topic to contact me.

Online dating isn't the only Internet business based on the assumption that people aren't smart enough to figure out how to contact others on sites in which you can't send a message without a credit card. Many other sites, such as those focused on former classmates, are also doomed to fail once more people learn about our methods of bypassing their apparent "pay to contact" stranglehold.

While Track-this.info is primarily intended to notify people of updates to information they're interested in, it can also be used to communicate without paying those sites (see the above topic on Free online dating). However, one of our other sites, ContactMeFree.com, offers an even more powerful method of evading the need to pay those sites or to create an account with them.

Incidentally, this isn't just about saving money. It's also about saving time. You may need to wait days for your profile to be approved before you can contact someone. It's also about sidestepping one of the nasty big secrets of online dating sites: paying for a membership that permits you to send messages is usually a waste of time and money on sites in which the recipients cannot read or respond to your messages without also paying—which less than 5% of people with profiles on those sites do. Bottom line? 95% of your messages are wasted. We've given people ways to make 100% of messages get through even when no one pays.

At any given time, most adults are dating someone or married, but most of those relationships end. You've probably met many people when you were not available that were interested in you. If you're single and looking for love, you might very well wish to connect with some of those folks. But how?

Register yourself as a Track-this.info topic. If your current relationship never ends, you don't have to communicate with people who registered to track your life because you control the release of all info about you. However, if you become unattached, you can easily contact people interested in you.

When you register yourself as a topic, you can create one topic for everyone who wants you, or separate topics for each person, giving you more control. You can give your topic number to specific people (such as by handing them a card with your Track-this.info link), or you can post your Track-this.info button on your website, blog, or even a billboard! You can also choose to allow people to follow you as a topic only if you approve them.

Online dating and "rate my photo" sites should give users the ability to notify interested people if new photos or other profile content is added. Most of those sites don't offer this feature, but you can include it by adding a Track-this.info link or topic number in your profile.

No matter how interesting your content is, most new visitors leave your site and never return. People don't have time to scour intriguing sites for fresh content. RSS was supposed to solve this problem, but many users do not know what RSS is or how to implement it. Even RSS wizards cannot overcome its numerous inherent flaws.

You can register your website or blog (or a single page or posting) as a Track-this.info topic. With a couple of clicks, visitors to your site can add it so they can be notified of additions to your site. We give you the power of mailing list manager software without installation or usage hassles. You can also choose options such as allowing people viewing or tracking your topic to:

• Contact you without either party having to reveal their e-mail address.
• Contact other people tracking that topic who wish to communicate with your group.
• Track your topic only if you approve them.
• View and post comments about your topic. You or a moderator can approve comments before they are posted.

You can also opt to receive reports on how many people are tracking your topic. Knowing what people are especially interested in gives you an incentive to provide more of it.

If you're a good doctor, you know countless tips to improve patient care but never have enough time to give all of that info. You also know that many of your patients could benefit from new research. You want your patients to benefit from that research now—not weeks or months from now, at their next appointment.

You can educate your patients with little investment of time by using Track-this.info to send patient newsletters. You will probably want to create separate topics for specific diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. You could permit everyone to track your topics (and hence receive your newsletters), or limit them to the people you approve: your patients.

Similarly, if you're a CPA, stockbroker, business analyst, or personal trainer, you can easily send newsletters to clients without the many hassles of mailing list manager software. Tip: Don't make the mistake of using an e-mail client, such as Outlook Express, to manage a mailing list. When recipients change their e-mail addresses, you will either lose them from your list or need to take the time to manually delete old addresses and add new ones.

If you register a topic for others to track and select the option permitting people to contact others tracking that topic who wish to communicate with group members, you can form a discussion group focused on a topic that interests you, such as a good book, sports team, or support for a particular political candidate or point of view. Or the "glue" topic—the one that binds you together—could be a million and one other things, such as:

• Fans of a particular car or motorcycle brand
• A neighborhood homeowners' association
• A club, committee, business network, or event planning
• A support group for people with a certain disease or condition

This option gives you the easiest way in the world to form an email-based discussion group. Commercially available alternatives, such as the LISTSERV® email list software, are considerably more complex. In contrast, our system gives you the ability to form a moderated opt-in discussion group in a split-second. There is nothing to install or maintain. We do all of the work, and we don't charge for it.

Track-this.info gives authors and publishers an easy way to notify readers of new publications. Like other avid readers, the creator of this site has read thousands of good books by talented authors. Many of them likely published other books I would have enjoyed, but they did not have a nifty way to notify me of them—until now.

Authors can choose options that let readers contact them, form discussion groups with other readers, and post book comments or reviews. We give you all of the tools you need to create lively interaction that will spark continued interest in your writing.

You could have your own mailing list not affiliated with us, but if you do that, readers are much less likely to notify you when their e-mail addresses change. Furthermore, Track-this.info offers far more than mailing list manager functionality. We can help you gain new readers and retain old ones.

Most people rely on hit counters to assess the popularity of their web pages. That data can be very misleading because a page hit could be a visit by a Google bot indexing a page, a spam bot harvesting e-mail addresses, or a person who navigates away two seconds later. You need a way to judge what visitors are truly interested in because knowing what they want can help you to give more of it.

Track-this.info delivers that data. By registering individual pages as separate topics, you can accurately determine what people revel in. You can also evaluate what people want to see in the future by briefly mentioning it and providing a Track-this.info button so people can be notified when that info is available. For example, the creator of this site is a doctor who graduated in the top 1% of his class in medical school. He obviously learned more than other docs not only during med school, but after it, too. When other MDs were busy golfing or boating, he was busy studying more medicine and topics pertaining to it, such as nutrition and biochemistry. Years of extensive study and "putting it all together" have given him countless tips that other doctors don't know. He wants to compose a book of beauty tips if women seem sufficiently interested in reading about that subject. A Track-this.info button will give him the data he needs to decide if writing that book is worthwhile.

People wait until they want to sell before listing their homes for sale. Then they wait—sometimes for years—for a buyer. Then they pay a 7% commission to real estate agents. Is there a better way? Yes!

If homeowners registered their homes on this site as soon as they bought them, by the time they want to sell they could accumulate a list of interested buyers and even offers from them. This site gives buyers and sellers a way to connect and exchange information. Sellers can provide links to pages with more info, photos, and even video home tours.

Let's start a new trend: make Track-this.info Want to buy this home some day? plaques as common as address signs on mailbox posts.

Whether you're discussing the illness of a family member, the disposition of an estate, or simply planning a family reunion, members of an extended family group often need an easy and secure way to communicate with one another.

You might think that you could use one of the popular social networking sites, such as Facebook. Before you do that, though, you should read "How to Avoid Facebook & Twitter Disasters" in the August 2009 issue of PC World magazine. If your head wasn't spinning from their tips on how to safely use an overly complex site, it likely would have been the next month when PC World advised its readers to go online and read an updated article on how to deal with Facebook's "sweeping changes" regarding privacy settings. One thing is clear: even people who think they can safely use Facebook are often wrong.

In contrast to the nightmarish complexity of Facebook, Track-this.info offers an intuitively simple yet powerful user interface. If you want only members of your family to be in your group, just specify the option to permit people to "track this topic only if I approve them." To do that, it's just one click by one person one time. When the person who registers your family as a topic takes this simple step, the rest of you are automatically protected—forever.

Countless stock photo sites have given models and photographers a good way to sell their photos, but how can they notify customers when they release new images?

By using this site! Register your photos as a Track-this.info topic. You'll probably want to enable the option to permit customers to comment on your photos or to contact you via this site without revealing your e-mail address. Giving customers an easy way to contact you makes them more likely to provide feedback that can improve your photos, and hence sales.

Major software companies typically embed an update feature to let users know when a new software version is available. But what if you are an independent developer who creates CSS, JavaScript, PHP, or other utilities? The copyright notice in your code often gives the URL of your site, but how many users regularly visit it to check for possible updates? Very few. At best, that is a horrendously cumbersome method.

We have a much better way: register your code as a Track-this.info topic. Your users won't need to repeatedly check for an update that may never come. Instead, if you release a new version, you can send a notice to them via our site to let them know about the update and how to get it.

If you're a recording artist, create a Track-this.info topic to let fans know of your new releases.

By registering a topic and choosing the appropriate options, you can also essentially form an instant fan club in which you can communicate (one-way or two-way) with your fans. You could give them behind-the-scenes info on what's happening with your band. Were you interviewed on television? Planning a new tour? Tell your fans all about it!

It's human nature to want to know about updates to unsolved mysteries, such as what happened to Tara Grinstead or Jennifer Kesse. In today's fast-paced news cycle, it is easy to miss updates to news stories you want to track. We make it simple. You can sign up to track a story in two clicks, and be notified when new info about it is released—whether that is five days from now, or five years from now.

Pet owners often put "If found, please call ___-____" tags on their pets. But what do you do if your phone number changes? Have new tags made? Risk not finding a lost pet?

Here's a better way: register your pet as a Track-this.info topic and put your link on the tag instead of your phone number, or in addition to it. You will definitely want to enable the option to allow people to contact you.

Similarly, you can register your luggage as a Track-this.info topic and put your link on the tag instead of your phone number, or in addition to it.

If you have a seasonal business, customers often don't know when you open for the year. If you register your business as a Track-this.info topic, you can let them know when you open—and, just as important, close for the year.

Wouldn't you love to have a no-cost way to notify customers of new products, services, or sales? And wouldn't your customers like to hear about opportunities to save money and see the new things you offer? Track-this.info gives you an easy way to keep in touch with your customers.

If you contact a business and request a reduced price or a new product feature, you're more likely to receive polite laughter than what you're seeking. Rarely do businesses pay attention to individuals. You're just one of a million customers.

However, if you and thousands of other like-minded people band together to form a Track-this.info group, you have the strength-in-numbers clout to make businesses listen.

You can use the same group collaboration to get the attention of politicians, insurance companies, and others who think they're too big to listen to individuals.

Most sites don't offer a way to notify you of updates or additions to their sites. Of the few that do, 99+% have just one mailing list for the entire site. That's not good if you're interested in just one or two of their topics. Another problem arises when you've signed up for multiple mailing lists and your e-mail address changes. You may have dozens or even hundreds of sites to recall. Even if you have a photographic memory, you will soon discover that many mailing lists don't give users easy ways to manage e-mail address changes and other basic functions.

Here's another problem: You should read a site's privacy policy before disclosing your e-mail address to it. If you don't, you may be inundated with spam after they sell your address.

Track-this.info solves all of these problems. You're covered by one user-friendly privacy policy: ours. Your e-mail address is never disclosed to the sites you track with us, so they cannot misuse your address because they never have it. When your e-mail address changes, you can update it with us in seconds. Finally, we make it easy for people who register topics to add more, so they can offer a separate topic for every page or subject on their site. This gives people tracking those topics the ability to track what they are specifically interested in.

Sure, you can bookmark a page using your browser, but you'll lose every bookmark if your hard drive crashes or if you buy a new computer and don't complete the multi-step process of exporting and importing bookmarks. Track-this.info makes it much easier to permanently bookmark a page: once you are tracking a topic, you can access a list of those topics (which are automatically bookmarked for you) on the Topics you're tracking page. To see the topics you are tracking and the options available to you, click the link your mouse cursor is now hovering over.

As a doctor, I know that some of what I learned in medical school isn't true, or isn't the complete story. For example, we were taught that the appendix is a vestigial organ: one that is a useless evolutionary remnant. That seemed plausible, but we now have good evidence that the appendix does indeed provide a useful function.

If you are a doctor, computer programmer, or someone else who knows that education doesn't end on graduation day, you'd likely want to immediately correct the misinformation fed to you by your professors. But how? Professors should register every lecture they give as a topic, and students should track every lecture. Even if 20 or more years had elapsed since the lecture was given, the professor could easily send an update to every student he taught.

Manufacturers and consumers benefit when the latter register a product, but the traditional ways to do that are often so inconvenient that most consumers never register their purchases. They may therefore not receive recall notices, usage tips, or discount coupons, and they may have more difficulty with warranty coverage.

Solution? Businesses can register their products or services as Track-this.info topics so consumers can register in as little as two clicks and two seconds.

Tip: Create separate topics, such as one to register the product, one to be notified when new products are released, and another for discount coupons on future purchases. This gives consumers more control over the updates they receive from you, making them less likely to unsubscribe from following that topic.

If so, we'd love to hear about it and give you a free gift if it is a good new idea that we can use.

To contact us, please click the Contact link near the bottom of this page, or click the link your mouse cursor is now hovering over.