Hello web fanatics. I thought I’d start doing a few website reviews for all of you who just can’t get enough of all the free and amazing web brilliance out there. It’s short and sweet, easy to digest and easy to refer back to. Here it goes. Rate it or hate it entry number 1: Gentlemint…
Here are all the things you need to know about Gentlemint.com:
Image by: etsy.com on Gentlemint
Background
Brian Mckinney and Glen Stansberry are co-workers at their day job and say the following about launching Gentlemint just a few months ago:
“We had been working on an amazing but challenging side project for over two years without so much as a public beta. So in order to shake things up a bit, we decided to take a single day and build a simple website, from start to finish. We decided on the concept of a “manly social site”, one built with the mindset that if the site never did anything, at least the two of us would get a chuckle out of it.” Gentlemint Blog
Image by: www.manifdest.com on Gentlemint
Concept
The concept is easy to get. You add the ‘mint it’ button to your bookmarking tool bar and whenever you see a “manly thing” you can pin it to your mint set which also adds your image to the general ‘mint‘ populating their site with images with a ‘manly’ theme from all across the web.
Aside from having a cool title and sticking to a ‘manly things’ theme, you have to wonder just how much more Pintrest can be re-produced with Gentlemint joining the already existing group of image share sites such as weheartit and Pinspire that mimic the original Pintrest website.
The ‘dynamic duo’ are set on defending themselves against accusations that they are yet another ‘rip off version’ of popular and original image share website Pintrest. They said the following on the topic when interviewed by Forbes.com:
“We see ourselves as more of a complement to Pinterest,” co-founder Brian McKinney told me over cigars.
“They’re a site that lets you grab everything,” added co-founder Glen Stansberry. “We’re focused on a particular set of content. We’ll never have that big of a user base.”
Whether they are or aren’t copying Pintrest -imitation is the sincerest form of flattery- this duo is quickly climbing the social site rungs of development with user numbers growing by the day proving that this niche site could succeed after all.
Image by: www.manlyvinta.com from Gentlemint
Usability
A list of goods and bads on Gentlemint’s usability:
The Goods:
- Niche: Finally, an image share site that isn’t all pretty cupcakes, pretty hair styles, pretty puppies, pretty art and crafts! Arg! Why shouldn’t there be a place where you can image bookmark without being bombarded by pretty things all the time? Gentlemint definitely solves this problem.
- Cool logo: Finally an image share logo that doesn’t look like Pintrest’s!
- Profiles: Aside from not allowing much diversity in creating sets and the like, I quite like that our Nerd Insider mint looks so clean and manly! Very effective and keeping with the niche theme of the site!
The Bads:
- No groups: there is just an ‘all’ section and a ‘popular’ section so you’ll end up in one or the other. Hoping they’ll create different themes according to tags -which they also don’t have yet- at a later stage
- No sets: you can’t arrange your images into thematic sets so all your images get ‘minted’ to the same home page on your profile. This is a definite down side as it makes it hard to keep your images in an organized fashion
- Faulty image search: You have to really play around with the type of image URL you enter into the link search. It’s much easier just to add the ‘mint button’ to your bookmark bar and just ‘mint’ as you go a long your day
Image by: www.rawstory.com on Gentlemint
Rate or hate?
As much as there is wrong with Gentlemint I cannot for the life of me hate it. It’s filled a gap for web users everywhere, men and women who just don’t dig pretty things, and that’s a great achievement.
As they grow and develop, the little things should resolve themselves and the site should only get better in time.
I’m hoping to see big things from Brisky Business and Gentlemint and for now I’m rating it. 3 stars. Get in!
Watch it
Check out the video below on how Gentlemint has ‘taken the Internet by storm’.
Tell us if you’ve set up a Gentlemint account and how you’re finding it!
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March 20, 2012
Social & Internet