Pokki solves this problem by giving you a smartphone like app experience on your windows desktop. By installing Pokki, you can access and stay updated with all your web accounts right from your desktop – with just a click.

To install Pokki, all you need to do is visit the Pokki website and hit the download button on top. Installing Pokki does not take more than a few minutes. Once you have Pokki installed on your computer, the Pokki icon will appear on the taskbar.

All the web apps can then either be downloaded from this icon or from the website itself. An icon for every web app that you install keeps appearing next to the Pokki icon on the taskbar. Sign in and authorize each app to use it. A number next to each icon indicates the number of notifications and gives you real time updates for all your authorized accounts.

The ease of use along with the number of applications available makes Pokki a must have for your desktop. Popular apps include Google Search, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Wikipedia and more. If you are still not satisfied with the number of apps and can code in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript, you can head over to the developers page and publish your own web app.

The design of Pokki is amazingly good and user friendly. Moreover, it provides users all the controls just like a web browser. This means that one can check mails, send or mark them into folders while viewing ones email account. Similarly, while checking Facebook account, you can view your news feed, notifications, messages, events and friend requests. Since all these and more are only a click away from your desktop, it saves both time and effort to check your account besides adding an eye candy to your work.

All in all, Pokki is an excellent software that brings the best of web experience on your desktop and the only limitation being that it requires Windows platform to run. Do let us know through your comments about how you liked the software and what other apps would you like to see in it.

Related Posts

• 4 More Free Web Based File Sharing Services
• Trim your MP3 files online for Free
• Glide OS – A web based free operating system
• Run Windows inside your browser with Windows4All
• Quub: A Better Take On Micro-Blogging

The essential difference, though, between Instagram and all of it’s competitors is that Instagram is hugely popular and successful while the rest are just, mostly, imitating it.

So, when I was contacted by a rep from a company last week about their latest photo sharing called PicYou, I was (rightfully) skeptical.

And how wrong was I !

PicYou is an online photo sharing website that also offers Instagram style filters and lets you share your masterpiece with your Facebook and Twitter friends.

Uploading photos to PicYou couldn’t be easier. Login to the website using your Twitter or Facebook credentials, upload your photos and apply the available filters. That’s it.

Play around with the various filters available and when you’re satisfied, tick the option to share your photo on Twitter/Facebook. PicYou also has the concept of followers, where other users can follow your profile if they like your photos interesting, so you don’t have to share your photos with all your Facebook and Twitter friends to be appreciated.

Now, let me be absolutely clear. PicYou is not better than Instagram and is not going to replace it for the majority of you. Hell, PicYou is, as far as I can tell, not even competing with Instagram. Instagram has a dedicated network of photo sharing (camera) trigger happy users that are not going to jump ship to any other similar social network unless all their favorite Instagram photogs do so.

PicYou users, on the other hand, are the kind of casual amateur photographers who would like to share their latest masterpieces instantly with their Facebook friends and Twitter followers. They’re not, necessarily, looking for appreciation. Their goal is to let their friends and family see their photos and the filters just make those photos look a lot more interesting. The big advantage, of course, is the fact that Picyou is accessible from a browser while Instagram is an iPhone only app. I’ve been told that a PicYou mobile app is also in the works, though, and that should make things interesting in this space.

Which is your favorite photo sharing app ?

Related Posts

• How To Backup All Your Facebook Profile Data
• 7 Desktop Tools To Get The Most Out Of Your Facebook Account
• Yogile Makes Photo Sharing In A Group Easy
• How to add Facebook chat to iChat on Mac OS X
• How to download an album from Facebook

The last few years have seen an explosion in image sharing websites and it is quite difficult to chose one over the other. In this post, we are going to list 7 of our favorite sites that allow users to share their images online.

Picasa

Picasa is a popular image sharing site owned by Google. It allows users to store and share images online. You can chose to set different privacy levels for each photo or on a per album basis and the maximum  space that Picasa web provides for album and pictures is 1 GB. If you’re a Google+ user, though, and use the G+ mobile app to upload images to picasa, you have unlimited space available to share your mobile pictures.

Flickr

Flickr is one of the top images sharing sites and is widely used by artist, painters and bloggers. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and it allows uploading photos, tagging and also creating new groups and joining them, but the maximum space that a free users gets to upload his/her images is limited to 300MB.

Imgur

Imgur is one of the simplest image sharing websites around; the user interface can be used and understood by even a kid without any help. The maximum size for non-animated files is 10MB and for animated files is 2MB.

Photobucket

Photobucket is not only an image sharing site but it also allows users to share their videos online. You can also share your media files on various social networks. One can also create photo albums and can share with others but the space allowed is limited to 500MB after which the user has to pay for extra space.

Fotolog

This website can only be used for sharing images and users can create a photo blog and a diary and can share them with their friend and relatives without worrying about the space limit as Fotolog offers unlimited space.

ImageShack

This website is one of my favorite as it not only offers image sharing in different formats but also offers option to convert all the uploaded images into .png format and gives you the HTML and BB code for linking the images from a website or a forum.

Shutterfly

This website is also a great place to use for sharing your images. Users can upload their memories and keep them forever with the free unlimited space. Users can also create different photo books for their personal purpose or can make all photo books public.

These were some of our favorite media sharing websites. Did we miss any ? Which online websites do you use for sharing images and video online for free ?

Related Posts

• 7 Great Photo Sites for Your Blog
• 3 ways to search photos online for reusing on your blog

Spam, without a doubt, is a problem which we all face. Many a times we are asked for an email address to sign up for a newsletter or register at a forum and then we usually end up with getting our email address spammed. Mailinator, an email service, has a very unique approach to solving this problem.

What does it do ?

To put it simply, Mailinator provides you with a temporary, disposable email address. Users can also create email addresses on the fly. This means that there is no need to register beforehand. Just use an email address of the form of email_id@mailinator.com and visit the website to check your inbox.

Needless to say, it’s not very secure to use Mailinator for sensitive information. Anyone can check your inbox as it does not require a password. But then, the site is not meant to be used as regular email service.

How does it reduce Spam ?

Very often, we need an email address to receive only a single email, such as a confirmation email for registering on a website or a forum. In case you have such a need, use any Mailinator email address and visit your inbox straightaway to receive the email. Once you are done with it you can simply choose to forget the email address, or use it the next time you require a temporary email address.

Before you use this service, do keep a few points in mind. As I have already mentioned, Mailinator does not require a password to view anyone’s inbox. So, it’s always a good idea to think of an unusual mailinator address and use it to prevent the inbox from being accessed by others.  Moreover, emails received on the site are deleted after a period of time. All attachments and emails with size more than 120k are also deleted.

To use the service, think of any name (upto 25 characters) and use it with any of the following domains :

• @mailinator.com
• @mailinator2.com
• @zippymail.info
• @suremail.info
• @suremail.info
• @binkmail.com
• @tradermail.info
• @safetymail.info
• @spamherelots.com
• @thisisnotmyrealemail.com

When you receive an email, you can read it by entering the email address in the “Check your inbox!” field on the website or by using the RSS field that Mailinator provides for all Inboxes.

Alternatives

There are a number of other alternatives available which offer similar service to that of Mailinator:

• myTrashMail.com : Offers similar functionality with the domain @mailmetrash.com and also lets you create secure password based accounts.
• 10 Minute Mail : Provides disposable email addresses that expire after 10 minutes. Time can be extended by 10 minutes each by clicking on the “Give me 10 more minutes” link on the website.
• Mailexpire : Lets you create email addresses and then forwards all emails received on this address to your regular address for a chosen period of time. Useful in cases where the user is not sure about when he will receive the expected mail.
• GuerrillaMail.com : Similar to 10MinuteMail except that the email address lasts for 60 minutes.

Conclusion

Mailinator is definitely a very good way to avoid spam that lets you use your “on the fly mailinator account” without any hassles of signing up and leave the task of eating all your spam to them.

Related Posts

• Get All Round Security For Your Android Phone with Avast
• Mac: How To Encrypt An External Hard Drive In Lion
• How To Make Your Google Account More Secure
• How To Backup All Your Facebook Profile Data
• How To Enable Private Browsing On Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer

Photographs !

That’s right ! Photographs are actually the most used social application across all social networks. Facebook, for example, claims that it is the largest photo sharing website in the world, well ahead of the pure photo sharing sites such as flickr, smugmug and the likes.

The only big problem or rather annoyance that I find with most photo sharing sites is that they only let one person upload pictures to an album. I mean, if you’re calling uploading and sharing photographs your biggest social feature then atleast open up the albums to multiple people.

This is exactly what Yogile does. Like the other photo sharing websites, Yogile also lets you create an album that you can upload photographs to. Where it differs, though, is that when you share a Yogile album with your friends, your friends can also upload their pics to the same album.

Imagine you’re at a wedding with a few of your friends and everyone is taking pics with their own cameras. It will be a royal pain to get all of your friends to upload their photos online and then collecting them in a single location. With Yogile, you can just create a single album and let all of your friends upload their pics to that album instead of having them create their own seperate album.

How Does Yogile Work

Signing up for Yogile is free and with a free account you get a bandwidth quota of 100MB which is reset every month. If you think you’re going to use more than 100MB, you can purchase a premium account for $24.95/year and remove all quotas from your account.

When you create an album at Yogile, you’re also given an email address that you can email your photos to that will be automatically saved to the album. This is a pretty cool feature if you, say, take a lot of photos with your smartphone.

When you’re done uploading all your photos to the album, its really easy to share it with your friends. Click on the Share button and Yogile provides you with a unique URL that you can yourself share with your friends, or let Yogile email them.

If you created a password protected album, like I did, Yogile will also share your password with your friends so that they can also upload their photos to the album easily.

Conclusion – Easy Photo Sharing

I am a flickr pro user but I think Yogile serves a niche market and will prove itself useful when you really need it. Do you guys think you’ll be making use of Yogile’s album sharing features anytime soon ?

Related Posts

• PicYou – Add Instagram Style Effects To Your Facebook And Twitter Photos
• Manage your Photos with Firefox using GPhotospace

As I grew up and the Internet came into my life, all my reading has more or less shifted online. I still like reading encyclopedias and learning about new stuff but instead of reading real books, I now go to Wikipedia for that same pleasure that Encyclopedias used to give me till a couple of years back.

The only problem with wikipedia is that, I can’t really read it on the go. Sure, I they do have a mobile optimized interface and GPRS/Edge/3G is almost everywhere but it still isn’t as convenient as having a real book at your bedside all the time … Unless, there is a way to print a collection of articles from Wikipedia and read those … Just like a real book.

Well, it turns out there is. Wikipedia has developed a Custom Book Creator tool that you can use for this very purpose.

Making a PDF book out of Wikipedia Articles

Start the Book Creator tool using the link given above. You will now see a rectangular box on the top of all Wikipedia pages that you surf to.

Now, you can just browse through wikipedia as you normally would. When you come across an article that you’d want to have a copy of in your PDF book, Add the page to your book, using the link in the Book Creator box on the top of the page.

Repeat the same process to add any number of pages that you want in your book. When you’re done, click the Show Book link.

You can now give your book a title and also drag and drop the pages to change their ordering. When you’re done with that, just hit the Download button to download a PDF copy of your book. You also have the option of downloading the book in the Opendocument text format.

If you’re feeling generous, though, I’d suggest that you buy the printed book and support the wikipedia foundation.

If you’re logged in to Wikipedia (I didn’t try this), Wikipedia will store your books in your user directory and the advanced users can even edit the template and change the layout of the PDF file that is created.

Related Posts

• Read, Create and Edit PDF Document Online with PDFescape
• How To Combine PDFs Using Automator
• Live PDF: Search PDF Files using Google or Bing
• Manipulate and Manage PDF files using Preview – Mac
• View PDF and HTML files on your Kindle

Before I got the iPhone, I used to own a Nokia E50 that I was (at the time) absolutely in love with. It was the first phone I owned that could play real MP3 files without the need to convert them to some esoteric light weight format.

The E50 could also use MP3 files as ringtones and that was arguably my favorite feature. Taking an MP3 and trimming it precisely to get just the coolest part of the song was something I used to spend a lot of time at – Not because the process took time, but because for this process I had to use an Audio processing software and, I’ll be the first to confess, I’m not good at those. I chose Audacity for the purpose which seemed to be the easiest to use, but even that had a problem. I had to be on my desktop to use it.

Now, after all these years, the cloud has finally come to my rescue. Today, I came across a cool little web application called Cut Mp3 that lets the user upload an audio file and cut portions of it using an interface that is so simple that even your grandma can understand !

To trim an MP3 of your choice, you must first upload the MP3 by clicking on the Open MP3 button. Select the file that you want to trim and depending on your internet speed, you’ll be presented with a screen similar to the one below.

You can listen to the audio by clicking the Play button and find the exact spot that you want to trim file from.

Once you’ve found the part from where you want the trim to start, bring the Start Slider to that position and then play on to find the part where you want the music to end. Bring the Stop Slider to that position.

You’ll see the size of the split’ted file and the exact positions in the box below the sliders. Press Cut to let Cut MP3 do it’s magic. Save the resulting file on your desktop and you’re good to go.

Cut MP3 is free to use and doesn’t even require you to register.

Cut MP3 is an easy to use website that provides a pretty useful service. Give the site a try and let me know what you think.

Related Posts

• CoTweet helps companies use twitter efficiently
• Experience Web Apps On Your Desktop with Pokki
• 4 More Free Web Based File Sharing Services
• Glide OS – A web based free operating system
• Run Windows inside your browser with Windows4All

If you’d like to see results from only PDF files from Google and don’t remember the special keywords for it, try Live PDF.

Live PDF is a free web service that lets you search PDF files from around the internet using either Google or Bing. The search engine to be chosen can be selected by the user.

The links that you get in the search results point directly to the PDF file so downloading the linked file is as easy as right-clicking and selecting the Save Link As option.

Related Posts

• Read, Create and Edit PDF Document Online with PDFescape
• Two Search Engines To Find You Stuff Google Can’t
• How To Combine PDFs Using Automator
• How To Create Your Own PDF Encyclopedia From Wikipedia Articles
• Manipulate and Manage PDF files using Preview – Mac

So, what do you do when your website inevitably goes down ? Inform your webhost about it ? Open a support ticket sit in one corner of your house sulking ?

While it is true that you can’t do much to bring your website up once it’s down, you can definitely reduce the downtime by informing your webhost about it as soon as you come to know about it.

Wasitup makes the process of monitoring your website as easy as letting them know the URL of your website and the email address to contact when the website goes down.

You can monitor upto 10 websites for free and WasitUp checks each of those websites every 5 minutes to see if they’re responding or not.

If you’ve filled up your quota of 10 websites, you can go to the Manage Monitorings link and remove some URLs from the list to make room for some more.

While website monitoring services are dime-a-dozen and some of them offer a lot many features, WasitUp distinguishes itself from the crowd by being the simplest service possible for the task. And it gets my vote for exactly the same reason.

Do you guys use any service to monitor your website for uptime ? Which are your favorites services for the purpose ?

Most Popular Posts

• How To Recover data from an iPhone backup
• How To connect to a Cisco VPN using Mac OS X 10.6
• How to read HFS+ volumes on Windows
• How To Get Music Off your iPod
• How to uninstall Mac OS X .pkg packages

This, as you can imagine, doesn’t really bode well for sites that rely solely on advertising to cover their costs as advertising spots for all but the biggest sites are usually pretty low.

A lot of streaming sites have gone under trying to perfect a monetization strategy for online music and only a few have managed to survive. Among them Pandora is the most famous and while it is one of the few sites making any money, it is only accessible to people living the United States.

For people outside the US, Grooveshark is an excellent alternative to Pandora.

Grooveshark is an online music search engine as well as a music streaming service that lets users upload their music collection to their servers and then listen to it from any computer anywhere in the world.

Visitors to Grooveshark can also just search for their favorite music from the homepage and listen to songs without even registering.

Hop on to Grooveshark, type in the name of your favorite artist or favorite song and click search. Grooveshark will display a list of the songs from it’s catalogue that match your query. Select a song (or two) and either click Play to play the song(s) directly or Add to add the song(s) to a playlist.

If you don’t want to create a complete playlist and would rather just trust Grooveshark to do that for you, click the big Radio button on the player. Grooveshark will now automatically populate your playlist with songs based on the type of songs that you’ve already selected. How cool is that ?

And getting all this done without even having to register !

Of course, if you register and login, Grooveshark will also let you save playlists and mark songs as favorites so that you can come back to them later.

My favorite feature of Grooveshark, though, is the Popular songs Smart Playlist which is (I presume) a dynamically generated playlist with the most popular songs being played on the service at any time.

If there is a song that you really like and would like to purchase, Grooveshark lets you do that via Amazon or iTunes. They earn a small commission on that, of course, and if you’re really a fan, I’d suggest that you buy the music anyway.

Grooveshark is, in my opinion, a very worthy alternative to services like Pandora and for people living outside the United States, probably the only decent alternative.

Give it a try and let me know what you guys think of it.

Related Posts

• Create A Playlist Of Your Favorite Music on YouTube with Loudlee
• How To Listen To Turntable.fm And Pandora Outside The US
• Create a playlist to suit your mood with PlayListNow
• Music search engine Fizy is seriously fast !