Social sharing applications are starting to get more intriguing as new startups formulate novel ways of letting people interact and display their interests. While Facebook and Twitter are terrific ways for bachelor’s or masters degree students to keep in touch with their friends and family, they’re not as interactive as other services when it comes to sharing. Many people are interested in what their peers are looking at, which is why social bookmarking platforms like Stumbleupon, Delicious and Reddit have become so popular. However the makers of Pinterest have taken this idea a step further by creating a visual bookmarking site that allows users to categorize web content by image.
What is Pinterest?
In a nutshell, Pinterest is a digital mind map that allows users to submit photos of products and places they find and like online. Once you’ve signed up and logged in, you can edit your profile to include interests and other information about yourself. Currently an invite-only service, those interested in signing up can request an invite either directly from Pinterest or from a Pinterest member. At present Pinterest is run by a seven person team, so resources are limited. However they are to refine the service before opening it up to the public.
How Pinterest is Different
Pinterest is fairly underground at the moment, but it’s attracted a lot of interest already from tech-savvy users and critics alike. Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest gives you a number of options when it comes to discovering new content. A user can create collections of different items that they like, and other users can choose to either follow that collection or follow the likes of the person that posted them. Items posted on Pinterest can also be commented on by users, giving each collection a forum or community feel that’s lacking in Twitter.
Design and Layout
The design of Pinterest is similar to Google+ in many respects. The layout of the site strips away decorative elements and lets content speak for itself. It’s clean, simple and attractive, and is extremely fast and responsive in everyday usage. Every image post supports comment threads which you can expand by clicking on its tab. Likewise, the manner in which Pinterest is designed makes planning for events or compiling shopping lists easy and intuitive. Basically, Pinterest is a digital cork board that can be rearranged by using the built-in search capabilities to bring up new images.
Final Thoughts
Pinterest is a highly visual way of allowing users to find things that interest them in the quickest manner possible. These days, the web is moving away from search and opting for discovery instead. Thus, expect services like Pinterest to garner more interest from casual web surfers as they learn what such visual discovery tools can bring to the table. While Pinterest attracted an overwhelmingly female following at the outset, it’s catching on with techies and other demographics as well thanks to its innovative concept and design. You’ll no doubt be hearing more about Pinterest in the coming months.
p.s. Follow us on Pinterest
Pachube is a great UK startup that has just been acquired by LogMeIn. LogMeIn is a remote screen sharing service that is simply amazing. The deal seems Pachube get $15 million in cash and join the LogMeIn team.
It now seems like LogMeIn will be able to extend its Gravity platform into smart embedded devices.
If you have been looking for a way to share your screen with friends, family or work colleages, then LogMeIn is the way to do it.
Im an avid reader of Business Insider and the NYTimes and have liked their similar content sharer for some time, but I have never been able to find a WordPress plugin that replicates this. Finally, I have found such a plugin!
The SimpleReach Slide is a great plugin that will show your readers a releated post while they scroll your articles. The widget is to show your readers related content while also increasing your pageviews and social media sharing.
The SimpleReach Slide is free and available to download from the WordPress site right now.
Join.me is a great new screen sharing tool for Mac and Windows. You initiate a screen sharing session on your desktop and it will provide you with a unique code that others may use to view your desktop screen from their own computers.
Additionally, Join.me has a iOS app that can be used on iPads and iPhones.
The apps are free, incredibly easy to use and also supports text chat so you may not just watch the presenter’s screen while on the go but also interact with the meeting participants.
Social sharing is what has made social media and the Web 2.0 era so successful. Rather than rely on emailing content we find interesting online, we are afforded the opportunity to share that same information with a click of a button to a global audience. It’s not uncommon for stories to gain traction extremely fast due to how widespread the social networks are. Driving traffic to your site, to a specific post, has never been easier with the access to the numbers of people we have today.
That being said, I’m sure Facebook never imagined it would be in the position it is today. Currently Facebook stands at a whopping 44% of social sharing activity. That’s almost two times more than Twitter and simply dominant over Yahoo and other sharing methods. With almost half the market, data is being shared at unimaginable rates online as people “Like” “Share” or “Comment” on content that their friends are posting.
Search engines don’t even really fall onto the radar with as much that is going on in Facebook. Some pundits are event commenting how Facebook may be where future users source their information as opposed to Google, Yahoo, or other methods. Twitter with it’s millions of users and faster response rate has nothing on Facebook.
So do you find yourself sharing more dominantly on Facebook than any of your other networks? Is this a shift in how people are consuming content and a tell tale sign of how people are engaging online? Should be interesting to see how long this can keep up and where Facebook will go with this.
As a writer and blogger, I often need to share files with clients and many times just my friends to get feedback on things. It could be a new guide I’ve written or a new design for my blog. A new tool I’ve found makes that a lot easier. It’s called Apollo. It allows you to upload a document and share it with people.
They can then add notes and feedback to the document using the simple ‘note tool’ which involves you just clicking on where you want to add your feedback on the document.
The thing I liked most about Apollo was how you can select exactly where on the document you want to add the note instead of describing it to the other person.
The interface is very easy-to-use and has only the basic tools you need to give or receive feedback. To but it bluntly, there’s no excess fat to get in the way.
To sum up, this is a great web app for freelancers and large companies alike. It streamlines what used to be a very tedious process involving countless e-mails between all those involved.
Check it out here.
It seems like these days you can’t go anywhere without tripping over a multitude of Twitter Apps, all of them struggling against each other vying for attention of the masses. Much like the people who use twitter. Well now it’s the turn of Filetwt.
It’s all very simple and convenient. Just put in your Twitter name and password, type in a description then upload a file. A link to that file will be posted on your twitter account.
Filetwt is a tool of convenience as it wouldn’t take too much effort to find one of the many other file uploading websites and then manually post the link to twitter yourself. That way you could have files larger than 20 megs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more well known uploading websites added a Tweet option.
According to the website if you sign up you can get Private Tweets, faster file uploads, updates and stuff. Personally I try not to sign up for anything if I don’t have to and the upload speed seems reasonable enough.
Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.
While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.
Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.
So, without further ado…
With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.
With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.
With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.
With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.
NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!
A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view
Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.
Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.
WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z, Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…
Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.
Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.
Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.
SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more
Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.
Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!
YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.
FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.
Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.
With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.
BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.
Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.
CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!
Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.
Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!
Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.
Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.
So which ones are your favorites? Discuss in the comments, and dont forget to give it a digg 
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
With the RIAA already suing teenagers for downloading pirated music, it’s time you move to the safer side and try another alternative. And yes, that ‘other’ alternative can be free and legal.
Tunerec is a web based service, that ‘records’ songs off internet radio streams and then tags them all for your convenience. Since it has to ‘record’ the streams first, it takes some time to save them in your database. But the patience is eventually rewarded. It has an iTunes like interface, where you can search for artists, songs and albums; Make playlists and also share them with friends.
Although I don’t understand why it has to ‘record’ songs for each user, and not just once for all its users, it probably doesn’t take much time as the number of songs i had last week jumped a whopping 100K this week, taking the total, as of now, to 1 Million.
It may not have all the songs you want, and likely demands patience even for those it has, the audio quality is commendable with very less buffering interuptions. As for the ‘legal’ thing you may be wondering about, the site mentions that it is completely legal and RWW also notes that Tunerec “ has worked out an agreement with the Swedish songwriters association STIM and the musicians (or at least the labels) get paid for every every song played on the service. ”
You can also invite your friends to the service and share your playlists with them.
Tunerec is currently in currently in closed beta but i was able to get into the service right away after i signed up. People living in Europe have a better option than Tunerec and that is Spotify. But sadly, Spotify is only available in Europe and will take some time untill it opens up to the U.S and rest of the world. Untill then, you have Tunerec. If you don’t like it, go buy your own CDs
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
