Everybody tweets about their daily lives on Twitter or just updates about it on Facebook, but have you noticed how many spelling and grammatical mistakes they make ? Well, sometimes it is fine because sometimes they are just too hilarious to be ignored.
Stuart Gilbert has created this site that fetches Twitter and Facebook status updates that have certain spelling or grammar mistakes. Those words are highlighted in the sentence. You can also control the speed of scrolling using the slider which is present at the top left hand side of this page. If you find this funny you can also share it with your friends on Twitter or Facebook.
In the video you can see what people write and have a good laugh about it. 🙂
When I logged in to my Facebook account this morning I noticed small fonts. I was almost furious that who changed the settings on my computer. I even tried the ‘Ctrl +’ method to adjust it, but all in vain.
Well after tweaking a bit I realised that it is Facebook that is trying out a new feature. Facebook has switched to a smaller font for their feed to make the wall look a bit cleaner. So well let me tell you all please do not worry let Facebook try new things if they are trying to make it better.
As far as I think, I do not like this feature. May be I am so much used to it that I do not like it or the new small fonts strain my eyes. 🙂 One good thing about the new feature is that it will let you have more feeds on your wall and the bad thing is that I really have to strain my eyes to see it.
Just for some people who cannot see the smaller fonts, I have a snap shot for you all.
Earlier it was like:
and now it is :
What do you think? should Facebook continue with it or it should change it back? Share your views with me through the comments below. 🙂
Do you want to Market yourself/your brand or want to be known? In a world of social media, everyone is trying as hard as possible to be into some news by using online media. I do think there is a certain amount of how a person presents himself/herself in front of others which is very important.
And what else can be a better place to present himself/herself on social networking than sites like twitter, Facebook etc. You do need to present yourself in a way that interests people. Here are 15 tips that may help a person or brand :
Always keep an interesting name for the Facebook Fan pages. Remember nobody would like to click on a boring name. 🙂 You can change the name as and when required so no issues in that too.
Pages can behave as profiles for different brand names. Earlier people used their Facebook profiles for promoting their business etc which was against the Facebook Terms of Service. A page can act as the best way to promote your brand or your self :).
Your fans can get the latest news by you. Imagine you have written a new blog and updated about it. It gets delivered to all the fan’s home pages just like feeds.
Facebook has improved its latest news feature ‘highlights‘ and news feed which gives every fan a better idea on what is going on.
Other blogger or brands can also join the conversation going on your Fan page and be a part of it. Sharing ideas is what makes networking sites cool :).
You should always try to start the conversation. From my personal experience I have observed that any reply posted by a Fan page owner makes the Fan feel good :).
Try to use a unique image on the fan page. The display image speaks a lot. If I would like to stand out I would choose a great image as my promotion plan. You should be extremely careful in choosing the image and it should be great enough to hold on to the user’s attention.
Ever heard about the Canvas page? Well it is the space given under header and left to the ads sidebar that is the space given to you to be used intelligently.
It is a general suggestion that any user should not be able to view the wall of the Fan page unless and until he is a Fan that is he has joined the page before. You should always try to send the user to join page if he comes to your page. It is important because there may be some conversation going on and you do not want a complete stranger to land into the conversation having no idea of it.
Being a Fan page owner you should try your best to keep your readers engaged and interested. By starting the new topic, sending notifications and replying to users you can be in touch with everyone. It makes a user feel important :).
Publish relevant and interesting articles. Keep your fan base interested and updated.
What is better than using some of the Facebook’s application including events, quizzes etc to keep the users busy. Who would like to end up on a plain page and get bored? Such events and quizzes keep the user engaged.
Organize events and tag people( your fans). Here you should keep in mind the privacy issues of users. Never tag someone who does not want to be tagged.
Try to avoid updating too many things about yourself and making a mess out of it.
If you find something interesting that your Fan has written about do comment or re publish it just as re tweet. 🙂
Earlier there were many flaws with the Facebook pages but they are getting improved now. So, by keeping all these things in mind I think you can get what you desire. A good fan following, better internet image, better publicity and promotion of the blog. If you have more ideas as to what should be done, do update me by your comments. 🙂
How many of you have Fan pages and how do you manage them? Share your Fan pages and interesting things you do to keep the users busy.
Way back in the 1840s the telegraph changed the way the world communicated. Messages were passed across hundreds of miles within seconds. All this was because of the Morse Code used by the Telegraph system. The world was a smaller place suddenly.
Twitter has done something similar. It has managed to get people from different places and interests to share and communicate about anything and everything that is happening around the world. With Morse Tweet I could send tweets in Morse code. 🙂
Visit Morse Tweet website and just type in your message.
The message is then converted into a Morse code. Morse code is in many dots and dash per character and hence we can only send messages up to 45 characters. 😐
The tweet is displayed in the code along with a link. Clicking on the link can take you to the message in English. 😀
From a practical point of view I do not think it serves any purpose except it would be fun to send some secret tweets to people who do not know about this. Well I guess if you are reading this post, the secret is out. 😛
If you liked this post you might want to check some other interesting Twitter based services which allow
Twitter is often used by many internet service companies to reach out to their end users. Twitter is often used to sort out and answer simple queries. It can be a double-edged sword as if the company gets it right, it can be good publicity. If they get it wrong, the word spread around that much faster on Twitter.
Mozilla Firefox is taking it a bit forward. They are the crowd sourcing support with Twitter. This basically means they allow Firefox fans (people like you and me) to use their twitter account to help others who have issues or question on Firefox.
All you have to do is visit the Firefox ‘Army of Awesome’ page. Here you will see the latest Tweets mentioning Firefox.
If you see a tweet you can help out with, sign in with your Twitter account and help the person out.
This can be used to basically respond to any Tweet. I did not see many real queries on Firefox but they seemed to be filtered in some way.
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This is a novel way to actually allow Firefox geeks to help out others who might be new to the browser. Considering the way Internet Explorer is losing its market share, it might have a lot of new users with a lot of new support queries. Who better to give advice that other regular Firefox users?
I guess it is also consistent with the Open-source philosophy.
What are you views on crowd-sourcing support on Twitter? Is it a good thing or do you think it leave room for mischief by some people.
Many Twitter users had to deal with onMouseOver issue with Twitter. This was created because of a security vulnerability on Twitter. That vulnerability has been fixed for now but one of the most basic vulnerable part of Twitter are the short URL’s. The reason is mainly that we do not know where we are being directed. This makes it a little dangerous.
URLXray is a nice online tool to quick look up a short URL and display the complete URL. This usually is very useful if you are using Twitter through the browser and not a desktop application.
Just enter the short url in and click on X Ray button. This shows the original URL where you are being directed.
Visiting the URLXray website every time to unravel a short-url is not really practical. This is why URLXray has a nice clean bookmarklet which works with most browsers out there.
I liked URLXray because it has a simple and clean interface. Also it has a bookmarlet and add-on or extension which works with one browser only.
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I use Twitter and Facebook extensively. As a blogger I do end up clicking on a lot of short-urls. I do not recommend looking at all the links with URLXray but only the tweets or updates which are suspect. This is usually when there is a generic message or no message accompanying the short-url.
Do you know about similar web tools that unravel where a short-url takes you? Do drop in your comments with your views.
Twitter has always had the potential for being a security risk. This is mainly because the links that are shared are trusted but as most of them are short URL links there is no way to know where that link was pointing towards.
Recently according to Sophos, there is a link which is being posted on Twitter. These links are usually onMouseOver JavaScript code. This mean even if you are surfing on Twitter and mouse over the link it can end up redirecting to unwanted pages.
I am pretty sure Twitter will close up this security hole. But there are some things we can do avoid this sort of JavaScript Code on a link.
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How it affects your account?
You end up sending links or retweeting a link without permission. This can make using your twitter account from the website pretty impossible unless you delete the retweeted link.
There is a pop-up. Until now these pop-ups have been harmless but the potential to infect or redirect to 3rd party website is there.
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Tips for Security with Twitter
Ideally this is infecting only accounts of people using Twitter.com website. This means if you are using 3rd party apps you are reasonably safe.
Do not click on any tweet which only has a link. Even if this is from an account you trust. The same goes for Direct Messages (DM).
As this is activated even with mouse-over and not just on clicking on the link best is to avoid visiting Twitter.com. I am sure because of re-design a lot of regular users are also visiting Twitter’s website.
Are short url’s a real blind spot when it comes to websites like Twitter or Facebook. Few years ago we hardly clicked on links sent on email. We are more prone to do so with Twitter and Facebook around now a days. Do drop in your comments and views on this.
An exercise at redesign is a very tricky thing to do. You always end up with the risk of displeasing a certain section of loyalists who might prefer the older layout. Most redesigns are good when they serve a purpose and usually the purpose has to be based on future plans. So when Twitter introduced ReTweet on its layout, people did not like that it did not allow them to customized the ReTweet.
Initially not many used this feature but slowly I see a lot of people using the retweet feature from Twitter instead of the usual prefix of ‘RT @username’.
What has Twitter planned?
The new features will include showing Retweets, Mentions, Lists, Saved Searches above the timeline and not on the right.
On the right will be shown related information. Also it has tied up with Flickr, TwitPic, Vimeo, YouTube and Kiva which allows you to look up images and streaming videos on Twitter website.
I am guessing Twitter wants to make it’s website as user-friendly as possible without the need for any Twitter apps like hootsuite and Tweetdeck.
How will it affect the users?
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I am not prolific on Twitter. My Twitter account ( @adityakane ) does not have thousands of followers and I do not follow hundreds of accounts either. I do share links, images, quote almost daily. Personally I use TweetDeck and sometimes HootSuite but that is mainly to schedule messages. I schedule tweets only when I have too many links to share on the same subject. I try to spread them across different days.
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Mostly I use Twitter from its website and not a Desktop app. I do not have a smart phone so those apps are out of the question too. So I think if I can view videos and images shared on Twitter on the homepage itself I would be very happy.
New users on Twitter are notorious for not being retained. Some estimates I read were, that 40% new sign up do not stay on Twitter for more than a few days. That will change as all the things that you discovered over time will be laid out in front of you on Twitter.com
What happens to Twitter Apps?
This will be an interesting development. I think this will wipe out all Twitter desktop apps. Why would any user on Twitter will use TweetDeck or HootSuite if he/she can use Twitter.com website just as effectively.
This development might mean the end of Twitter Apps unless they come up with some radically new ways to use Twitter. 😉
Here is a video from Twitter about its new re-design.
So what do your think about Twitter’s new design changes? Will it wipe out Twitter Apps or will prolific Twitter users still stick to the apps. Do drop in your comments with views and opinions.
Social Networking sites has made this world a small place to live in. Sitting here in India you can find out what a person in France is doing, just by following him on Twitter or Facebook. Social Networking sites has undoubtedly removed international boundaries.
But there are times when language becomes a barrier. What if a person you follow, tweets in a language that you don’t know? If you are thinking about Google Translate which pops up every time you open a site in a foreign language, well that does not work with sites like Twitter or Facebook. See the example below:
One way is to copy the message and go to Google.com/translate. Easier way is to install Social Translate– an extension for Google Chrome.
Social Translate is an extension for Google’s Chrome that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language on the fly using Google Translate. At present it supports Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Flickr and Amplify. From my experience it works best for Twitter at present.
Once you install it, go to Extensions (or in Chrome address bar type chrome://extensions/) and click “Options” for Social Translate.
Here you can set your preferences regarding Translation Quality, and setting up Primary and Secondary Language.
Social Translate in Action
Once you have Social Translate installed, you’ll see the Social Translate icon in the address bar for the pages where the extension can work. It translates the status message automatically. You’ll see the icon next to the tweet that has been translated, and if you click on it, it’ll show the original message below the translated tweet.
This is a must-have extension for those who spend time on social networks as it automatically translates messages to your native language. However, the translation reliability is not very good for small messages (which is clear in the above message). But that is because of limited ability of Google Translate which this extension uses.
Do you know of any other extension that can be used for translating messages on Social Networking site? Do share it with us.
Twitter recently announced that 3rd party applications will no longer be allowed to store your user-name and passwords. Even though applications will not save the password, it can still be used to access your Twitter account even if you change the password. This happens with the OAuth service which requires to sign in only once for a third-party app. This means potentially all the apps you have used for Twitter can access your account.
Twitter has settings which allows controlling which app is allowed to access your Twitter account details.
How to revoke access for certain Apps?
Just login into your Twitter account on the website. Then look up Settings.
Under Settings there is a the Connections Tab.
Clicking on Connections will show you a complete list of all the apps that can access Twitter. This is very useful as under new guidelines Apps will not need to have you sign in more than once to get access to your account.
Simply look up the app you do not want to have access of your Twitter account and revoke its access. 🙂
I have tested many applications with my Twitter credentials. So revoking access to some apps is a great boon.
Do you use a lot of apps to use Twitter? Do drop in your views through your comments.
