Tag: Online Tools

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Reviews

Flip Through Flickr Photos With Your Friends in Real-Time

Flickr has become a favourite place for many to share photos. Off-late it has become more of a place to share professional photos rather than personal photos.
This has happened because of Facebook and Google+ becoming more easy to use for sharing photos with a group of friends.

Flickr has now introduced ‘Photo Session‘ which allows sharing photos in a stream in real-time with friends.

  • Just sign into your Flickr account and start looking up your photo-streams.
  • A new option for sharing a photo stream appears which is photo-session. Simply create a photo session and share the link with friends or invite them from their Flickr accounts.
  • Once they sign-in you can start the photo-session of looking up photos in real-time. 😉

This is a great idea, as people can comment on photos and communicate as they look up photos in a real-time with friends. It is like having an online photo-viewing party.

Here is a video on how photo session works:

I like the idea of sharing photos and viewing them in real-time with comments. It is I guess a way to become more social for Flickr.

What are your views? Do drop in your comments.

Link: Flickr Photo Session

Related: Share Flickr Photos on Twitter, Facebook and Blogger with a Single Click

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News

Delicious Makes a Great Comeback!

In December 2010, Yahoo announced it was going to shut down Delicious – the popular bookmarking service. This led to a bit of an outrage from people who used Delicious. Probably to avoid further PR disaster, Yahoo declared it will not shut down Delicous but sell it off. Sure enough, rumours started flying around of Stumble Upon buying Delicious; but they were wrong.

Then Delicious was sold to the guys who founded YouTube and ever since, there have been expectations on a revival.

And Delicious has been revived with some neat new features and design changes.

The New Delicious

  • After Delicious was bought by AVOS, it decided to start afresh. This included doing away with Yahoo accounts and getting people to migrate to new accounts. If you had an old delicious account, chances are it is gone now.
  • A new feature called ‘Stacks’ which allow adding links on similar topics and created a grouping of those links. These links behave like a playlist of links.
  • Also the design and structure of Delicious seems to have changed focus from being a place where only stored links to a place where people shared links.
  • There are still some issues with managing tags, in the sense it would be nice to explore tags by alphabetical order which is not available at the moment.

Here is a video introducing the new Delicious features:

I like the new Delicious and have started using it. I had moved my bookmarks from Delicious to Google Bookmarks thanks to an online tool; but if Delicious stays the course with its improvement I might need to search for a new online tool that does the reverse. 🙂

Do try out the new Delicious and let me know your views through comments.

Link: Delicious

Categories
Reviews

Get Alerts on Newer Models and Prices Before Buying a Gadget

Most times when we buy gadgets, we run the risk of actually buying it just a month or weeks before a newer and better version of it is released. Another familiar instance might be we buy a gadget and the prices drop only days later.

For instance, say I wanted to buy a iPhone 4, which is quite expensive. A good idea would be to wait for iPhone 5 which is rumoured to being unleashed by Apple in the coming months.

In such instances, I found Decide.com very handy; which lets users know about future models and even if price changes being expected.

Decide, allows searching for latest televisions, laptops, cameras and phones. This makes it a must for research before making a purchase.

It shows an estimated time a new model might get released and even if the prices are expected to rise or fall for the gadget. This means if you are buying something a good idea would be check if it would be cheaper say in the coming weeks.

If users want to set an alert for new model of something they like, it can be done using Facebook credentials.

What service do you use for research before buying a new gadget? Do drop in your comments.

Link: Decide.com

Categories
Reviews

Listen to Bollywood Songs Free with Chrome App

I am a big fan of Hindi music, especially older songs. My usual choice to listen to some old Hindi songs is YouTube but it is inefficient as YouTube is mainly about videos and not exactly an audio directory.

Saavn is a neat website which streams Hindi film music and its free. You can create an account to register or simply install its App on your Chrome browser and sign up with your Google accounts.

Features

  • Saavn App is available at Chrome Webstore. If you are visiting from India, it will show it up as a featured App to be installed. 🙂
  • It has a nice search feature and database which has thousands of songs to choose.
  • I could choose from latest music to features playlists. I could alternatively also choose to create my playlist from different songs I searched on the website.

I use Chrome and I liked the layout and user-interface for Chrome users more than the user-interface with other browsers.

If you like listening to Hindi films songs, do try out Saavn and drop in your comments.

Link: Saavn.com | Saavn Chrome App 

Categories
Tips

Stabilize Shaky Camera Motion on YouTube Videos

YouTube not only has the latest videos on music, entertainment and current events, but it is very popular way for sharing home videos with friends and family.

Home Videos are often shot usually on hand-held cameras and one issue is the camera is usually not stable and appears to be quite shaky. This is very evident especially on videos shot from a mobile phone.

YouTube now allows users to stabilize shaky camera motions on uploaded videos with a simple click of a button in new ‘edit’ mode.

How to Edit Your YouTube Videos

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Login to your YouTube account and look up the list of all the videos you have uploaded.

A new option ‘Edit’ will show up with every video. Click on it to get into the Edit mode for that video.

In the ‘Edit’ mode of the video, simply click on ‘Stabilize’ button and the shaky video does improve a great deal.

Other than the stabilize feature there are other options like color correction, rotate video, changing color intensity and adding other effects.

If you edit a popular video which has been viewed more than a 1000 times, then a new video is created. All edited changes can also be undone if you are not happy with the changes .

See a video below with all details on Editing Videos on YouTube

Do drop in your comments.

Categories
Reviews

Create Facebook Lists with Google+ Circle Interface – Circle Hack

 

Update: This post is about Circle Hack which is a service that has been discontinued.

One particular feature of Facebook, that has stood out like a sore thumb after Google+ was introduced. It was the way people used ‘Lists’ on Facebook and the way ‘Circles’ were created on Google+.

It is probably this reason, that Facebook has introduced new Friend Lists. Organizing friends on Facebook is still a cumbersome process.

But some very resourceful developers have created an online application which allows you to create Facebook friend lists using an interface of Google+ Circles.

Circle Hack Features

  • Just visit the website and allow it to access your Facebook details.
  • It will load a user-interface which resembles Google+ Circles but actually has Facebook Lists.
  • Create lists and simply drag and drop Facebook friends.
  • Contacts can also be moved from one circle to another.

I am definitely going to use Circle Hack until Facebook comes up with a better way to manage Lists. Do drop in your comments.

Link: circlehack.com/

Categories
Reviews

Collaborate and Create Mind Maps for Instant Brain Storming Sessions – Bubbl.us

Brain storming sessions can be quite useful yet very unorganized. Great ideas are floated around but not all of them are executed or sometimes even remembered. This is where simple chart or mind-mapping tools are very useful.

These tools get even better when a full team can collaborate in the creation of such mind-maps.

Bubbl.us Features

  • Create an account and start creating your mind map. Invite others with an account to edit and add to the map you are creating.
  • If you only want to share a read only version, just share the URL of the map and share it with your friends via email.
  • We can also create a HTML-embed code to share it directly on your website/blog.

Do use Bubbl.us and drop in your comments.

Link: Bubbl.us

Related: 3 Free Online Mind Mapping Tools

Categories
Tips

20+ Categories to Find Recommended Google Plus Users to Follow!

A few weeks ago, Google Plus started showing the verified sign, to show that a particular Google+ account of a famous person is the real deal. But it has no way at of looking up interesting users with Google Plus.

Twitter has a search function which allows searching for trending topics which at the moment Google Plus lacks. This makes it difficult to run into interesting Google+ users from different niche.

Recommended Users, offers a solution but hosting an unofficial directory of famous Google Plus accounts.

The categories are many and a simple click shows a list of related Google+ accounts. One of the best parts of this directory, is it has more than 24 categories.

Next time if you are wondering who are the really interesting people on Google Plus, who are writing about food or web designing, then give Recommended Users a try.

Do drop in your comments.

Link: Recommended Users Google+

Related: 10 Great Tools to light up Google Plus Users.

Categories
Reviews

[Online Tool] Simplest Way to Create Beautiful Posters!

Online posters are very popular online and often get become viral. Not everyone is a photoshop expert or even have expertise on how to go about creating posters with other image editing tools.

Posterini is a nice online tool, to quickly make professional looking posters within minutes.

Posterini Features

  • Just upload an image which you want to create the poster with.
  • Then choose several poster styles and apply it. This can range from cinematic styled posters to even magazine covers types.
  • Add the text as you want with your poster. The placement of the text can be customized by just dragging the text box around. Also the text can be customized for size and more importantly various fonts and colours.

Once you generate the poster it can be downloaded as an image or even shared on Facebook or Twitter. So next time you want to create a poster within minutes, try Posterini. Do drop in your comments.

Link: Posterini

Categories
Reviews

PrivyTalks – Encrypted Anonymous Chatting Online

(Disclosure: This is Sponsored Review.)

Privacy is a big deal on the web, especially in recent times when social networks makes finding individuals very easy. Anonymity and encryption are two vital way to maintain your privacy. Also there are many instances when we want to not share our Gmail or Skype ID but use something temporary but what to discuss something with someone from a forum or a group.

With free online tool PrivyTalks, we can chat anonymously and also have the exchanged information which is encrypted and hence safe.

Features of PrivyTalks

Just visit the PrivyTalks website and start the chat. A link can be shared to invite others to chat with them.

The messages are encrypted from the browsers using the service. The website claims they only transfer the encrypted data and does not have access to any of the chat messages shared.

This makes it truly anonymous and secure way to share and share information. People sharing passwords to a service might find this PrivyTalks very useful.

If you are interested in online privacy refer to this guide. Also check out this link for chatting on any webpage anonymously.

Link: PrivyTalks

Note: PrivyTalks is in beta testing stage as of now and will be launched on Friday, Sep. 2, 2011.