Facebook Tips You Never Knew Whom to Ask
When something is as important as Facebook and as deeply-featured too, anyone who doesn’t stay tuned in to latebreaking news with Zen like powers of concentration is likely to feel a little overwhelmed. Here are some expert tips on how you can get the best out of Facebook.Get Xoopit
Firefox is such a universe of add-ons, you could be forgiven for leaving one or two out. Try Xoopit; this add-on is meant for Gmail when used on Firefox. It lets you easily browse and share files on Gmail with your friends on Facebook. You can also use Gmail as a remote control box for Facebook with this add-on.
Get a URL for your Facebook page
Socialtoo is a website that allows you to put down any URL you for your Facebook home page choose (in the format yourchosenname.socialtoo.com ); it helps because, now, your friends will not have to go to Facebook and look up your name from a dozen choices. Of course, it will be awkward explaining to your friends why an address that doesn’t have the word Facebook in it should be your Facebook address; but they will get over it.
Set your mobile to talk to Facebook
This is possible now; on your Facebook page, look up the mobile button, and make the adjustments necessary; you can upload anything from your cell phone, photographs included, directly into Facebook.
Nifty search tips
To begin with, make yourself as findable as possible. Put in as much information into your profile form as you can manage, your age, where you went to school, your favorite band, and so on. When you are searching for other people, Facebook offers you the use of a number of special search characters to narrow the people you have in mind down by how old they are or any other characteristc you fill out. Look up Facebook’s search tips on the help page.
But the best thing about Facebook of course is the fact that you can use third-party apps. The Twitter application is one of the best. You can use Twitter with this, to update your status on Facebook. There are dozens of other applications to as you’re no doubt aware of. Digsby is a great new app; it can run unobtrusively to give you streams of everything on Facebook chat and all the other chat clients you have. If you come to think of it, getting the best stuff done on Facebook all comes down to third-party websites or applications.
Google Dashboard Seems to Admit to Intruding on Personal Space; Not that it Seems to Matter
Privacy advocates around the world have always been strongly critical of Google for its ability to obtain , store and study information obtained from users over the course of a regular Google search or another service. When a visitor uses a Google service, Google installs a tracking cookie on the user’s browser, to remember user preferences and to improve speed in the event of a return visit. Why is this a problem though? The problem lies in the loose way privacy laws are able to be interpreted. Take a lawsuit that Google encountered about four years ago that got all privacy advocates very concerned. In that case, the US government summarily subpoenaed Google for all the search information it had received over the preceding couple of months. That particular subpoena did not ask for identification of who had searched for what; but it legally well could have. Gmail also studies by automated computers, all the information on your private email, to be able to target advertising to you.To give the protesters’ cause a boost perhaps, and also some bite to their bark, Google has released an easy-to-access , Google Dashboard service that allows account holders to see exactly how much information Google has gathered about them over the years. The Google Dashboard application is available on the Google account holder’s home page for the eyes of the authenticated account holder only. You might wonder if the information you share with Google today was really significant enough to get worked up over. A quick look at a Google account holder page shows how little usable personal information there is to be found there. They have information about how many e-mails you store on your account, what YouTube videos you have watched ever, and what kinds of searches you perform. Things only get on there however when you do them while signed in.
Perhaps it is the principle of the thing that gets the privacy advocates concerned. It is completely conceivable that the main concern here is that to let go of a little privacy now could start society down on a slippery slope of ever-receding individual rights.
You May be Legally Liable Offline for your Actions Online
The lines between reality and virtual reality are getting increasingly blurred. In Japan a woman was arrested and charged for murdering her husband. A tragic but commonplace crime you might say but the husband she was charged for murdering was not real. The woman, a 43-year-old piano teacher, and her ‘husband’, a 33-year-old office worker were players in an online game in which their avatars met and got married. Suddenly, one day, the online ‘husband’ divorced his online ‘wife’. The enraged lady retaliated by logging in to the game using his login and killing his character thereby murdering her online ‘ex’. The bereaved man lodged a protest with the police and she was arrested, not for murder however, but for illegally accessing the account.
As more and more people create identities and lives online the definition of materiality is being altered, perhaps, forever. Take, for example, Second Life – a 3D virtual world developed by Linden Lab that enables its users, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents (avatars) can explore, meet other residents, socialize, even get married and divorced, and create, own and trade in virtual property and services, or travel the world, which is called the grid. Second Life has its own virtual currency – the Linden Dollar which can be traded on real life currency exchanges. Some countries even have embassies in Second Life. A theft or fraud in Second Life can have material consequences in the real world.
It is becoming generally accepted that virtual property has real value and virtual crimes have spawned a whole new class of crime in real life. Not just virtual crime but crime committed using virtual space is also coming on the radar now. Shannon Jackson of Hendersonville, Tennessee was arrested after she violated a court order by poking a woman on Facebook. The alleged poke was considered a violation of the terms of the order which were, “no telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner.” Internet users must understand that online actions can have serious offline consequences and be very careful about how they work and play on the Net.
VivoWeb: Facebook for the White Coats
Three centuries ago, the mathematicians Newton and Leibniz are said to have conceived of and worked on the mathematical concept of calculus independently of each other, with no knowledge of how each was not the only one. When they published their results in the scientific publications of their time, a bitter feud erupted over who was to receive credit for the invention. This might be the most enduring story of how scientists can end up working alone on identical projects just because there was no way to find out about concurrent research on their subject, sometimes in the same University even.
When scientists working on similar subjects happen to run into each other they usually consider themselves uncommonly lucky to have found partners and collaborators in their venture. The scientific community though is giving up on hopelessly waiting on serendipity, and is trying to make luck happen for it; the conception that will help them do this is a new Facebook-like service called Vivoweb; and it is supposed to bring scientists together to help them discover one another and collaborate in a more reliable fashion than traditionally has been known.
The Vivo project originated at University of Florida six years ago at Cornell’s Mann library. In the beginning Vivo was a network of scientists at Cornell University alone; over time though, Vivo has expanded across several universities, indexing scientists, projects and collaborations all over to help the scientists across the country find one another through a Facebook-like interface. As more and more American universities and institutions have come to accept the standard set by Vivo, the network has begun spreading outside of the country too. Universities in Australia and China, indeed in disciplines outside of the medical profession too are beginning to explore networking with Vivo. Conservative people have always complained about the pointlessness of social networking; happily, news of this kind is certain to gladden the heart of many a censorious fogey.
Google Squared
Launched with a lot of hype in early 2009, Google Squared, Google’s semantic search engine, failed to live up to expectations, often returning rather nonsensical results and unleashing a volley of criticism. The true power of Google Squared, which is still in Beta, lies in its ability to perform a grid search, i.e., in being able to gather and display structured data, turning the random information found on the Internet into computable data. Google Squared is very much a work in progress and Google recently announced updates to its Google Squared service that should hopefully make it more usable.The updates include the facility of exporting the data to Google Spreadsheets, from where it can be sliced and diced to mine information. The columns have been made sortable and the default number of facts per search has been increased from 30 to 120. Squared now has the ability to learn from the modifications and corrections made by users. It seems also that Google Square has become more selective and the quality of the data has improved.
There are other companies working on the semantic web, a key one being Wolfram, the publishers of Mathematica. Wolfram’s Wolfram Alpha is a semantic search engine (Wolfram call it a computational knowledge engine) focused on scientific and mathematical applications. Alpha’s approach is to build its own database of information from what is available on the Internet and then run the queries on the database. Google Square on the other hand deals with all the data available on the Web and tries to extract meaningful information directly from it.
Both are very different approaches targeted at very different audiences. Wolfram’s approach works best for a specialized user base that is looking for reliable and vetted results in specific areas such as astronomy or physics, etc. Google Squared is aimed at the common users of the Web who are try to extract meaningful information from the reams of data available on the Net. For example, a user who wants information about dog breeds will get a table that sorts the results in different columns by breed, images, description, size, weight, etc. The semantic web is the new frontier for cutting edge search technologies and search as we know it may be rendered extinct soon by these emerging search paradigms.
Rethinking the Forum – Is Discuzz on to Something?
Anytime you have a question that pops into your head in the middle of the night about how good that Ewan McGregor performance in Trainspotting really was, or what people really think a Core2 Quad adds to a Guitar Hero performance over a Core2 Duo, who you gonna call? A feature-packed YouTube clone? You’ll probably want the simplicity, the businesslike directness, of a well-moderated forum on movieforum.com or Tomshardware.com, or a Yahoo Answers clone.You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how someone seven years ago had the very same question you have now, that was answered by eighteen people. Not all the technology-enabled bells and whistles can take away the value of the simple written question and answer. But as you go visiting forums around, you’d be surprised how often you see unimaginatively designed, messy-looking reforms that could look right at home at the turn of the century.
You should try visiting a state-of-the-art forum on the Internet maybe one like, ChatDaily or Spunner, to see how they really win. One of the best ways to be encouraged to design an engaging well thought-out forum is to use great forum software. There are quite a few out there, a few new kids on the block with the latest and greatest ideas, and a few that have been around the block a couple of times. Tangler is a brand of forum software that has been a part of the attempt to reinvent the forum for quite a while.
Ahsan Technologies’ Discuzz is the latest player in this field, and has drawn a lot of positive reviews for its customer support and its modern feel. The best innovations in Discuzz are its abilities in offering SEO-friendly URL’s that get the rankings up; Google started indexing forums recently, and this feature is a product of its times. Discuzz’s inviting administrator interface is another in-demand feature. The forum is clearly the hottest trend in the Web 2.0 world. One needs a forum, actually, to keep up with all that goes on here.
You can find out more information about Discuzz here.
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Social Networking: the New Tool for Social Scientists
There are times in life when you all of a sudden get to see a familiar sight in such a novel angle it can get a bit dizzying. Consider the humble concept of the survey; researchers who need to tap into the opinion of a community of people, traditionally have set out with a well thought-out survey questionnaire and have gone knocking on doors. A survey done on a modest sample size of even 1000 respondents is usually considered thorough, for the practical difficulties involved in even such conservative attempts.
But here we have social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter today – websites that brim with exactly the kind of information that researchers look for, and from millions of respondents at that. There are people from every kind of demographic, social level and educational background to be found, and they all like to share their hearts out about what they think of every topic under the sun. What is more, what you find on social networking sites are voluntary, are people’s honest opinions and are words that they put out with little thought; in other words, the choice of words and the casual sharing of thoughts to be found here is likely to be more honest than any survey can hope for. The question is, how is this wealth of information to be put to use to something really significant?
There is already evidence that research done with Facebook and Twitter information as raw fodder, is likely to reward sociologists with radical new insights into society: what people really think when they get married or before and they get divorced, what they talk to friends about, about a movie, and so on. The French government is reported to be experimenting with using social networking information to judge the happiness of their society as a measure of national progress, just like they measure their GDP. Google is known to try to interpret the tons of data that passes through its servers in useful ways; but for social networking sites to do the same is a new development. Some wonder if this gives them too much power.
Make Some Noise For Agriya’s Volume
Volume is back in the limelight again, the latest version of its premium audio sharing script Volume that is aimed at serving the music enthusiast community the way Rayzz video-sharing script props up the video-sharing community.The comparison with Rayzz is especially appropriate, it turns out. Earlier versions of Volume were built with the Joomla engine. As cost-effective and efficient as this was, the evident trend seen today on media sharing websites toward ever-rising bandwidth demands and intense traffic pressures points to a need for a new approach that will help Volume’s new customers stay ahead of the curve. Today’s Volume is built on the highly successful Rayzz framework.
With a new foundation come new features to help webmasters create and manage a better website experience. A Volume-designed website is easy to set up for even a novice website creator, especially so with Agriya’s dedicated support staff. But ease of use in this case comes with great customizable features too. The entire website is easily rearranged to individual needs, and compatibility with the Smarty templating system makes things very user-friendly. Today’s Volume automates the file uploading and job to a large extent. Multiple audio files are easily uploaded at the touch of a button with a batch file uploading feature. Associated audio metadata are automatically picked up in the process as well.
Sending newsletters, announcements and other forms of communication to the members of your music sharing website becomes easier too. An Artist Management section also allows the webmaster to keep tabs on the best-performing acts on the website.
Music sharing today is often just a setting for young people to conduct more meaningful social interaction in. The Volume script natively includes social networking features; website members are able to make playlists and comment on other people’s choices, and communicate by method of internal messaging and mailing. A popular music website is hopefully going to attract advertising interest from sponsors too. Volume’s new advertising management features help the webmaster remain open to the possibility of advertising revenue.
Agriya’s vice president of marketing, Sheerin Banu, sees the latest release of Volume filling an important need in the market. “In certain age groups, shared music exploration happens to be a more important way to bond than other forms of interaction”, says Ms. Banu. The more easily deployed a music sharing site is, as it will be with Volume, the more swiftly will audiences be able to react to shifting trends in music, she feels.
Find out more information about Volume.
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Google Commerce Search – Another Indispensable Google Innovation?
Google has a new search product out; and it is here just in time for the holiday shopping season this year. The problem that the product has set out to solve is the lack of an effective search technology that is customized to retail and business. Google certainly offers a generalized search function to any website that cares for it and pays to have a Google-powered search-box on its website. But this new product, and it’s called “Google commerce search,” is specifically built to help with retail.What does it mean though to call something “customized search”? To begin with, Google Commerce Search will allow customers to search by parameters that are specific to a retail context. The ranking of the search results that arrive this way will be done to best suit customers looking to locate a product just as they would at a store, with a salesman’s help. Spelling alternatives will be considered with better sensitivity and business owners can do things like place product promotions at the top of the rankings, no matter what.
They call this, Product-specific Search; Yahoo Music has rolled out such a product too to help visitors to its music site, in searching for and exploring music; the new Yahoo Music website is special in the way it interprets the searches visitors perform. Perhaps this is the next step up from Mozilla’s advance a few years ago giving people browser tabs to use in place of separate browser windows – to help people keep their Internet exploring focused and manageable. In Yahoo Music search, when you search for a musician, say Robbie Williams, the original search stays, and a pane on the left shows choices of his most popular videos and songs.
Retailers who pick Google Commerce Search can call in on other business-oriented Google products like Google Product Search and Google Analytics too to help collect statistics how their visitors like to search while on their visits. How much would it cost for a company to order Google Commerce Search integration in their websites? The word on the street is that Google charges about $50,000 for a yearly subscription to its services. For that kind of price, most small retailers should feel locked out; but Google would perhaps do well to take another look at its familiar and stark search results presentation style. Retailers are all about visual appeal; Google’s no-nonsense approach in a sparse format could work for faster search; but what would it do for the retailers who cannot do without visual appeal?
Everyone Knows Twitter is the Most Popular Social Medium – or do They?
For success in the world of social networking, exactly how aggressive do the marketing strategies employed have to be? Get this, the hub that seemingly captures the most news on every kind of medium, Twitter, gets less than 2% of all social network traffic today from US residents, according to statistics published on Experia. Twitter does grow with remarkable tenacity, posting a ten-fold growth this year; but where does that take it – to a grand total of less than 2%. So what does the scoreboard look like among the social network giants? Surely no one could have beaten Facebook and Twitter?As it turns out, Facebook is unbeaten in what is almost 60% of the market. We have all been regaled with news reports of the death knell of MySpace for about a year now – how they departed from their roots in music in attempting to become a major social networking hub, and were snubbed by users for turning their backs on their musical origins. MySpace actually is not doing badly at all; it finishes second with about a third of the market, though it’s user base has shrunk considerably. The surprise bronze medalist in the race is the relatively low-profile Tagged.
“Why Tagged?” one may ask. What have they done? How could they have beaten Twitter? Twitter gets such glowing press and the best that Tagged got to do all year was to get negative press for an e-mail scam earlier this year and their hard sell tactics in getting memberships up. Perhaps all the hard-edged tactics have worked. Not only is this company getting sign-ups, it is also retaining those members with great page view statistics, time spent statistics, and financial profitability.
Twitter finishes last in the top four. Has there been a data error totaling up the numbers? How does all the great press Twitter receives about addictive tweeting not get it better rankings? It is possible, in fact that Twitter is merely a master at working the press.
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