5 Social Bookmark Sites That Wish They Were Pinterest

Mashable recently published a list of Pinterest clones, pointing out the obvious similarity between them and the incredibly popular image collecting site, but they didn't answer the question of what sets Pinterest apart from these copycats and why it continues to be more successful than any other similar service. Let's take a look at each of these sites and see how they really measure up. Is it that the early bird gets the worm, or is there more to Pinterest than just a Masonry layout and bookmarking service aimed at collecting images?

Pinspire

What's Same:

Chinese owned Pinspire is a literal rip-off of Pinterest, from design and layout to categorization and features.Their legal page only offers the same terms of use and makes no attempt to justify its existence, passing off the business as an Italian startup (or maybe German?). Considering the European countries used are each active supporters of both SOPA and ACTA, Pinspire's most inspiring aspect is its audacity.

What's Good:

Infringement issues aside, Pinspire does try to improve upon Pinterest by offering a localized experience in several languages thanks to Google translate.

Where They Miss the Mark:

The localized features do not encompass true geolocation, so the Gifts category still shows you U.S. products in U.S. currency and new content or friend suggestions are not weighed by location. Facebook and Twitter are both offered as signup options, but attempts with both couldn't produce results, making it clear this site does not have approved app space with either service.

Stylepin

What's Same:

This social pinning site takes some usability and presentational inspiration from Pinterest, but does attempt to present its own style and brand. Image streams and pinboards are arranged by Recent, Top and Hot and users can still click a heart to like the pin or add a comment. Adding pins is identical to Pinterest, down to the browser bookmarklet.

What's Good:

Stylepin aims to build a niche community focused on fashion only, which could become a successful haven for fashionistas once Pinterest inevitably becomes overrun with cat memes and bathroom-cam "artistic" nudes.

Where They Miss the Mark:

There is a lack of top-level categorization, which may make filtering inspiration difficult for users hunting for specific styles or trying to build new boards. There is also no social network integration for login, but user profiles stick to the Pinterest layout, allowing users to add their social network links and discover new friends through the activity stream.

Gentlemint

What's Same:

There is actually very little similarity between Gentlemint and Pinterest aside from the image presentation. Each user post comes with a like and a comment option, but you won't find heart icons here - instead users Like an image by clicking a manly mustache. You can link your account with Facebook and view a stream of your own posts.

What's Good:

97 percent of Pinterest users are women, so giving guys a similar service is not only smart, but inevitable. The layout is minimal, down to providing only a simple stream of latest posts. The overall design and voice, along with an absence of "girly" features such as friend lists and pinboards, lends itself well to attracting the audience Gentlemint wants, which will allow it to survive and grow as a strong niche service.

Where They Miss the Mark:

Whether categorization is considered "girly" or not, it is one of the factors that makes Pinterest so successful. Without a means for users to easily search for and discover new content to create specific collections for a specific or personal purpose, you really just have a prettified version of Reddit's image stream. There is also no bookmarklet, so the service depends on active use within the site and isn't able to benefit from the instant-inspiration adds that make Pinterest so addictive.

Minglewing

What's Same:

The layout and design of Minglewing uses the same image layout, top navigation and secondary filter menus as Pinterest. Users can like or dislike an image on hover and post anything from across the web using the Minglewing bookmarklet. Login uses Facebook, but there are no profiles or friend lists here.

What's Good:

Minglewing expands on the social pinning concept by encouraging content sharing based on more than just photos, creating a visually driven news discovery service categorized by interest or topic. The zoom feature is a nice addition, allowing for some level of personalization on an otherwise very content-focused site. They also offer interface translation into several languages.

Where They Miss the Mark:

Facebook is your only option, and the login applet wont work in Chrome. The site is so focused on content and sharing options that it forgets about social integration - you can set it up to post directly to Facebook, but you can't follow other users or comment on posts. The design also seems to be on the back-burner, the navigation bar so cluttered with options it is almost overwhelming and none of the streamlined usability features in place that make Pinterest so easy to use.

Thinng

What's the Same:

Once again you will find images presented in a masonry-style layout with navigation on top and links to filter items by newest or most popular. Facebook and Twitter logins are supported, and user profiles feature a latest stream with access to social network links, streams from followers, personalized lists and a "follow" link. New items are easily added from the navigation bar or via a bookmarklet.

What's Good:

Thinng has added a user directory that makes it easy to find new people to follow at a glance by listing the avatar and link block of the user's lists in an easy-to-scan format. This idea may backfire if Thinng ever accumulates a significant number of members, but it's nothing a search or filter can't fix.The addition of Tumblr integration is also a great idea, considering Tumblr is the forefather of the social pinning phenomenon.

Where They Miss the Mark:

Thinng isn't clean enough in its design, which distracts from the visual attractiveness that draws users to these types of services. Its small differences are also not enough to convince people to use it over Pinterest. As long as Pinterest can manage to maintain its high content quality, Thinng will need to fine tune intself to appeal to a specfic niche before it sees any significant growth.

Conclusion

Social pinning is definitely the next evolution of social bookmarking, but the concept alone is not enough to make a successful service. Pinterest cracked a valuable user-experience formula by combining the functionality, control and visual appeal that would resonate with the widest audience possible, and had the social media promotion and makreting savvy to get it in front of the right people. We can expect to see a lot of these services surface in the near future, but in the meantime, Pinterest will likely implement localization, additional social integrations and better discovery tools that eliminate the edge these services have enjoyed thus far. Before launching your own clone, take a lesson from Gentlemint and Stylepin and ensure it caters to a specific niche.

Make Your Own:

• jQuery Masonry
• Shaken Grid WordPress Theme
• Imbalance 2 WordPress Theme
• TheStyle WordPress Theme
• Snippet WordPress Theme

Know of any other Pinterest clones that aren't featured here? Let us know in the comments!

This is a guest article by Vail Joy who is a long-time writer, designer and copy editor with 15 years of experience in corporate business writing, music journalism and internet media design. When she is not hard at work designing something, she loves writing for Wix.com, the free website builder.

Use Chrome to Play Music From Your Hard Drive

For most people, a web browser is all they need. Email, Facebook and a little surfing is pretty much all they do. Whatever documents they create or edit can be handled by Google Docs and Zoho. For playing music and video you have a bunch of streaming sites. You can also setup your own music streaming service to play your music collection from anywhere. Did you know, you can drag a music file and drop it inside Chrome to start playing? But you can’t keep dragging every file you want to play. You need playlists, and if possible, a library.

So, here are three Chrome extension that turns your browser into a full featured music player.

Achshar Player

Achshar Player is a powerful local music player built entirely of HTML5 and JavaScript. It can play MP3, WAV and OGG music, because that is all HTML5 audio supports. You begin by adding music to the player either by the drag-and-drop method or using the ‘+’ button next to ‘Music Explorer’. If you intend to use Achshar Player for some time, you might prefer building a library of your music. Achshar Player allows you to do that.

Once you add them, the music is automatically sorted by Song title, Artist and Album. You can play music directly from the library or add them to your playlist. Currently, the player will automatically progress to the next title only when played from the playlist, not when played directly from the library, which leaves some thing to be desired for. Shuffling the order of tracks within a playlist and repeating a playlist are supported. Achshar Player will also keep count the number times a title is played. It would have been nice if the player could utilize the stats to prepare a playlist of the most played tracks or something.

Achshar Player will show desktop notifications on track change, thanks to Chrome’s ability to show notifications out of the browser.

Achshar player is also a background app hence it will keep playing your playlists even after you have closed the app tab or even all the browser windows. This behavior is controlled by the ‘Background Apps’ settings in Chrome. You can switch this thing off, if it turns out to be annoying – I, for one, wouldn’t want the music to continue playing after I’ve closed the browser/player.

The app has multiple color themes. Along with predefined colors, you can paint the app in a the color of your choice by entering the HEX or RGB values.

Now what good is a Chrome app that can’t share what you are listening to your social network? Achshar Player allows users to share their current song along with album and artist info on twitter.

Drawbacks:

• Limited support for music format. 
• No equalizer.

Mew-Zik

Mew-Zik is a simple MP3 and OGG music player. It can’t play WAV files, so no music CDs for you. It supports music library and playlists. The library doesn’t group songs by artist or album, but there is a sorting feature. You can drag and drop to reorder songs within a playlist, but there is no auto-shuffle.

The player has an overall good interface, but feature-wise grossly inferior to Achshar Player. The only reason you might want to use Mew-Zik in place of Achshar Player is if you want to view the lyrics of the song that is currently playing.

Local Player

At the time of this writing, I’m not able to install Local Player. The developer may have recently updated the extension, but unfortunately uploaded a broken file. As such, I’m going to rely on the developer’s description of the app.

Usage: Drag mp3/ogg files from file browser into the window, or add music files from a file dialog, which appears when you click the '+' button. The player will automatically start to play the file.

This is the only Chrome-based media player that plays AAC, M4A and MP4 video files, over and above MP3 and OGG. There is no library feature, as far as I can tell.

Local Player supports keyboard shortcuts.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto

How to Backup Multiple Selected Registry Keys

Backing up the entire Windows registry hive, which you may intend to do when you move your programs to another computer or before you reinstall Windows, is pretty easy. Just fire Windows’ default registry editor tool regedit.exe and use the Export function from the File menu. This under-rated tool also allows you to selectively export registry keys. For instance you may want to backup the keys of a particular application, wherein you right click on the concerned key and use the Export function from the context menu.

So far so good, as long as you want to export only one key. How about backing up more than one set of keys? Sure you can backup each key individually, but you will agree it’s a tiring effort. The better way to do that is via the registry backup tool SMARegisTry Backup.

SMARegisTry Backup is an open source registry backup software that allows you to select the registry keys you want to backup. You can then save all the registry keys under a single .REG file. You can also save the list of registry keys as plain text files, and load the saved list later for backup.

SMARegisTry Backup will also restore registry keys one at a time or all at once by scanning a directory for all .REG files and importing them all into the Windows registry. Although there are several competing registry backup programs, they do not allow you to selectively pick your keys. SMARegisTry Backup is the only one that offers this luxury, at least, till now.

Move Windows 7 Start Button to Different Locations on the Taskbar

Start Orb Mover is a free software that lets you move or re-locate your start button and start menu to another location on your Taskbar. Currently it can move the start button to the right or center, for taskbars that are docked to the bottom or top of the screen; or move it to the bottom or to the center, for taskbars that are docked to the edges of the monitor. Additionally, Start Orb Mover gives users a quick option to do tasks such as Change Start Orb, Restart Explorer, Open an Administrative Command Prompt, Exit Explorer, Open Explorer, Open Start Menu and Taskbar Properties, Hide the Taskbar or change location of Start Orb, simply by right-clicking the Start Orb.

According to the notes released by the developer, Start Orb Mover is a work-in-progress and there are still a few areas where further work is needed.

1. You will notice that when you move the start orb to the far right or bottom position, there is way too much empty taskbar space between the start orb and the clock. This is due to the Notification Area having the ability to resize when more applications having Notification Icons are opened. This keeps the Notification Area from “under-lapping” the Start Orb. This has been set this way, and most likely cannot be fixed.
2. The start menu floats above disjointed from the start button and the taskbar. This looks odd.
3. The start menu flickers when you casually move the mouse pointer above the icons or click on programs. The original start menu also makes ghostly appearance during these moments.
4. The button/bar at the extreme right of the taskbar that shows the desktop disappears when you re-locate the start orb.
5. Sometimes when you open the Start Menu and scroll through the menu items on the right-hand side, it will leave an odd color hue behind. It appears to happen due to forcing the Start Menu to open in a position it was not designed for. The developer is working on finding a solution and the app will be updated if a fix is found.

Start Orb Mover is a portable application. You can try it out without any fear of messing with the system, although the developer recommends setting a restore point just to be on the safe side.

Two Excellent Free Markdown Editors For Windows

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that allows users to write in plain text format using easy to write markup, and then convert it to structurally valid XHTML or HTML. Simply put it’s a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web coders.

Let’s face it, writing HTML in a text editor isn’t the most efficient way to create webpages. It requires lot of effort and time, and all it takes is an accidentally misplaced closing tag to mess up the whole document. WYSIWYG editors rather than solving the problem further aggravates it by being too helpful with HTML tags essentially destroying your formatting. True, today’s HTML editors are smarter than what they were a few years ago (Microsoft Frontpage) but they still have a long way to go before they can start producing code like humans.

Markdown allows web programmers to write HTML code without having to worry about markup. It uses simple markups or syntaxes that are easy to write. For example the header tags <h1>, <h2> etc. simply becomes #, ## and so on. <blockquote> becomes > and lists have a simple * in the beginning. Most importantly, you don’t have to worry about the closing tag.

Here is a typical piece of HTML code.

And here is the Markdown version of the same code.

So now that you know what Markdown is, let us look at 2 free Markdown editors that lets you write in Markdown syntax and get output in HTML.

MarkdownPad

MarkdownPad is one of the best known Markdown editor for Windows. The code writing area is split vertically into a left and right panel. You type your document on the left panel using Markup syntax and the preview is displayed instantly on the left. Markdown formatting can be applied with handy keyboard shortcuts and toolbar buttons. Documents can be quickly converted to HTML by using the Copy to HTML command from the menus. You can also fully customize the style sheet.

Gonzo

Gonzo is a lightweight, open source markdown editor written for Adobe Air. Being based on Adobe Air makes Gonzo not just limited to the Windows platform; it runs on Linux and Mac OSX too.

Like MarkdownPad, Gonzo features a split-panel interface – you type your document on the left and see real time preview on the right. Unlike MarkdownPad, you can actually see the HTML markup as you type. Unfortunately, the HTML view is not editable and thus you cannot make make corrections/editions on it.

You can create markup using keyboard shortcuts or from the menu. Watch out for the shortcuts though, as they aren’t the universal editing shortcuts. For example, CTRL+I will not italicize text but insert image.

Also see Zen Coding, another speedy way to write HTML and CSS code.

Image credit: BigStockPhoto

One Year Ago: Automated Software Installs, Excel Task Manager and Windows Registry Shell Extension

A selection of articles published between February 5 and February 11 of previous years.

1 Year Ago

• Guide to Automated Software Installation: Install your software unattended, silently and in bulk. The complete guide.

• Browse And Edit Windows Registry From Explorer: A shell extension that integrates Windows Registry with Windows Explorer allowing users to browse and edit the Registry like they are folders and files.
• Microsoft Excel Task Manager: A partially functional task manager created in VBA and runs inside Microsoft Excel that allows you to view, kill or suspend selected processes.

2 Years Ago

• Automatically mute sound by window title text: Mute sound of a specific application when the title of a window contains text patterns defined by the user. Can be used to successfully mute audio ads on Spotify.
• Minesweeper or Flower Garden: Do you know Windows defaults to a different Minesweeper game style based on location of the user, because some people find mines offensive?
• iTuner: A system tray companion to iTunes that allows controls like global keyboard, lyric discovery and display, track dashboard, playback, and library maintenance from a mini player.

3 Years Ago

• How to interpret hard disk model numbers: The model number of a hard disk can reveal a lot of information about the drive if you know how to read it.
• Automatically organize files into dated folders: Reorganize the contents of a folder according to the date of creation of the files within that folder.
• Stardock Fences: A free program that allows you to draw “fences” around groups of desktop icons which then become movable and resizable containers.

4 Years Ago

• NetDefender: An open source Windows firewall
• Orbitron: Track positions of more than 20,000 satellites in the sky in real time.
• Enhance Windows' usability with DM2: DM2 can minimize any window to "floating icon", minimize window to tray, make it "on-top", adjust transparency and provide favorites files/folders in common Open/Save dialogs.

Winners of Auslogics File Recovery 3

Here are the winners of the Auslogics File Recovery 3 giveaway we organized a few days ago. Auslogics File Recovery is an easy to use file recovery software for Windows that can recover any type of files irrespective of the file extension/type from any kind of storage media. The 5 lucky winners are:

1. Himanshu Gohil
2. Peejay
3. Vinayak Rout
4. Eriol Sudikov
5. Paul(us)

Congratulations to the winners. Emails containing your license keys has already been dispatched.

In addition to the above winners, Auslogics has agreed to giveaway 5 more license keys under the condition that the chosen winners share this link http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/file-recovery/ on Twitter or Facebook or Google+.

So I’m publishing another 5 names. If you want to grab a license key, share the above link on any social network and post proof of the same in the comments below.

1. Grr
2. Dharmesh Goel
3. Sikkilibib Bob
4. John D
5. Douglas Bagnall

Stuff Organizer: Catalog Your Books, Games, Movies and More

Stuff Organizer is an open source, catalog application for Windows for organizing ebooks, movies, music, software - whatever you have that needs organizing. Using a simple folder/sub-folder structure you can organize any files on your computer. You cannot use it to catalog physical objects  – it’s not a home inventory software, only files. Aside from maintaining a fully searchable database of your files, Stuff Organizer will unpack archives and move your files around to organize them into clearly labeled folders. Stuff Organizer is not just a file tagging software, it’s a true file organizer and cataloguer.

Stuff Organizer creates a database of your files storing information about each file’s location and a description, that you need to enter manually, except for movies where there is an option to pull relevant data from IMDB.com. You can also add other information such as URL or image. Tags are automatically added based on filename, directory name, file type etc.

You can create categories and within each category, you can create sub-categories to sort out those files better. Keep in mind that the default behavior of the program is to automatically unpack archives such as ZIP and RAR and organize the contents within. Stuff Organizer also has the tendency to regroup files under a directory into sub-directories. If you to keep your files untouched, uncheck these options from the Queue window and just allow the program to create a searchable database of your files. You files will still be organized into categories and carry tags, but physically nothing will be changed on the hard drive.

On the other hand, by default Stuff Organizer will not delete the source file after copying them into the target directory, so you will end up having two copies of everything. Make sure you look for that option before you process the files. Apart from organizing files, Stuff Organizer can also clean up the unused files in the directory such as file_id.diz, .sfv, .nfo etc.

If you are looking for programs to catalog books Calibre works well. For movies check out these movie organizers. For managing your clothes you can try out wardrobe managers.

Download The Entire Pirate Bay to Your Computer. It’s Only 90 MB

Last month, The Pirate Bay announced that it will stop hosting torrents in the near future. Instead, it will list only magnet links, which are simply hashes of the .torrent files. Switching to magnet links makes The Pirate Bay much more portable and difficult to shutdown since the nature of magnet links is such that it allows users to download torrent files directly from a seeder or leecher without any need for the tracker. Another big advantage is bandwidth saving. A .torrent file can be from tens to several hundred kilobytes in size, whereas a hash of the same file is only about 20 bytes. This allows The Pirate Bay to pack millions of torrents, or rather magnet links, on their server at only a fraction of the space previously required.

Without torrents, the Pirate Bay also becomes extremely portable which makes it possible for people to download a personal backup. This is exactly what a Pirate Bay user “allisfine” did. Using a Perl script, he copied title, id, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of 1,643,194 torrents. The entire package is only 90 MB in size and 164 MB when unzipped.

The archive contains the hash of the .torrent file and not the magnet link structure. You just need to put magnet:?xt=urn:btih: before this value.

For example, if the hash is: 5316391aed813d4283178dce2b95c8ad56c5be72

The magnet link becomes: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5316391aed813d4283178dce2b95c8ad56c5be72

Paste this into your browser’s address bar and hit enter. If your torrent client is configured as the default handler for torrent files, it will open and start downloading the torrent. You can also paste the magnet link directly into your torrent client.

What this means for the user is that you have the entire index of the Pirate Bay locally available on your hard drive. If the Pirate Bay is blocked in your country or goes down for maintenance, you can open the archive in a text editor, search for the title you are looking and grab the hash from it.

A regular text editor such as Windows Notepad or Notepad++ is likely to freeze if you try to open the 164 MB file. For this you will need a Large Text File Viewer that can smoothly handle text files several hundred megabytes in size.

There is some confusion regarding the number of torrents in the archive and the total number of torrents on the Pirate Bay. The archive contains 1,643,194 torrents while The Pirate Bay lists 4,199,832 torrents in the footer on its site. However, the latter stats apply to the number of torrents that are available on several public trackers, The Pirate Bay itself only hosts a fraction of those. So the archive is indeed a full copy of the Pirate Bay.

Technically, it is now possible for anybody to host the Pirate Bay on a regular website or blog without being a tracker. 164 MB of text file is all it takes. Anyone still believes the Pirate Bay can be taken down?

[via TorrentFreak]

Start Button Removed From Windows 8 ‘Consumer Preview’

Apparently, Microsoft is not yet done changing the interface on Windows 8. Screenshots purported to be from Windows 8 Beta (build 8220), dubbed the “Consumer Preview”, posted on the Chinese website PCBeta, showed the taskbar without the Start button orb. In the Developer Preview, Microsoft had flattened the start button in an awkward attempt to match it to the Metro style interface. In the Beta build, the start button did the vanishing act.

According to The Verge, the start orb will be replaced by a ‘hot corner’.

A thumbnail-like user interface will appear in Metro or desktop mode, providing a consistent way to access the Windows desktop and Start Screen in Windows 8 regardless of touch or mouse input. The new interface is activated on hover from the lower-left corner of Windows 8 and includes a thumbnail preview of where you will navigate to after clicking on the new visual element. The same element will appear in touch mode, and we expect it will be activated by a swipe action. If you are in desktop mode then it will show a preview of the Metro mode and vice versa.

I’m not sure what The Verge is trying to say here. From what I get, there will be no start menu, instead we will get some ‘thumbnail preview’ of god knows what.

Microsoft will keep the Super Bar, whose functionality, without the start button or the menu will be reduced to a shortcut dock,. I’m sure there will be a registry key somewhere that will revert the change, so don’t make that sad face.

16 New Windows 7 Themes [February 2012 Edition]

This collection consist mainly of themes released/updated during the last two months since the last collection.

Previous collections: September, August, July, June and May and Windows 7 themes – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Arimo

Beginnings

Different Touch 7

MaMaMiya Suite 12

Memolotrys

Minimal

Next Level

Obsidian for Windows 7

Pre Silver 1.0

Shiroi

Kuroi

Simplify Visual Style

Simplify Skin Pack

Thema Luna

Windows 8 Start Screen Full 3.0 (For XP, Vista and 7)

Xbox Skin Pack 1.0