Missing Link between Facebook and Twitter

Most of the modern time bloggers recognize the value of the social networks to promote their blog post, sharing the related information on the multiple sites and creating additional web links to your blog, which plays positive role for your site ranking.

Among the two leading applications in the social networking are Twitter and Facebook. Free web service Natter will save you time by linking your two accounts in these communities. As you register to the Natter account, all your tweets will be monitored by the Natter service and instantly posted to Facebook. The same way, your every comment posted on Facebook, will be automatically reposted to Twitter in real time. So you can follow your Facebook right from your favorite Twitter client.

Main Features:

• Post tweets to your Facebook profile.
• Post Facebook comments back to Twitter.
• Only post tweets containing a hashtag (e.g. #fb) to Facebook.
• Finds and displays links in your tweets as a Facebook post.
• Translates twitter names to their real world counterparts.

Website: http://natter.r10.railsrumble.com/

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Do you have too many "real" friends on Facebook?

"Remember five years ago when no one had Facebook and you didn't know what the guy you took high school biology with was having for lunch?" Jimmy Kimmel asked the audience on his show last night. "Remember how that was fine? Let's go back to that."

If you didn't watch "Jimmy Kimmel Live" November 11, you might think Kimmel started a campaign to end Facebook, but he's not. Instead, he announced a new national holiday called "National Unfriend Day," where he encourages you to "cut out some of the friend fat in your life" on Facebook and otherwise.

Today, November 17, Kimmel wants you to look at all of your Facebook friends and decide: who is really your friend? A friend, as he says, is not someone who "asks what 'Harry Potter' character you are."

See two Video Presentations (watch one after another as they are logically connected):

National UnFriend Day

National UnFriend Day (part 2)

On his show yesterday evening, Kimmel celebrated the arrival of National Unfriend Day with its very own anthem sung by country artists Brad Paisley and Darius Rucker.

To all the friends I've un'ed before

Who sent me quizzes about Jersey Shore

You made my life a hell

With your stupid LOL

To all the friends I've un'ed before

To all the guys from grammar school

Posting shirtless pictures by their pool

Your fat and sweaty back

Really makes me want to yak

To all the friends I've un'ed before

Our time on earth goes by so quickly

We have to make each moment great

So I cannot waste one more minute

Reading your dumb status update

Kimmel may have a point, but this rather funny joke of a holiday seems to be more a late night comedy sketch than an event manufactured out of real concern for the status of friendship.

Still, National UnFriend Day is good natured -- at least for those not being unfriended -- and you might even consider taking the day to cut some friend fat of our own.

Facebook had no immediate comment on how the festivities were being marked at company headquarters. Needless to say, Zuckerberg is not likely to be adding Kimmel to his friends list anytime soon.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://100searches.blogspot.com/2010/11/national-unfriend-day-clean-your.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/04/national-unfriend-day-jim_n_778742.html

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/11/national.unfriend.day.mashable/

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20023121-501465.html

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/11/08/jimmy-kimmel-national-unfriend-day/

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All Social Profiles in One Button: SocialFollow

SocialFollow is a cool new web application that combines all of your other social networking and social bookmarking profiles. You probably as many active bloggers, or just social networks customers, have your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, and many other profiles around the net. It would be nice if your blog visitors will become your followers on one or few sites, where they have accounts as well.

With SocialFollow, you are able to combine all of these profiles into one handy button. These are great for embedding to your blog, sharing in your forum signature, or posting it anywhere around the web!

Through the freely available services, you can create a button that can be embedded wherever you choose on the web, contains personalized links to the social accounts that you use. All your blog visitor has to do is rollover the button to find the links to your accounts. Not only can the accounts that are linked to be customized but the appearance of the button itself can also be changed to some extent. With a Social Follow button, you can consolidate everything one time and not have to think about it again.

You just sign up online and then add the corresponding social links one by one. A string of code will be generated for you to embed at your blog or web page.

Website address: http://www.socialfollow.com/

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Uncover personal secrets with Spokeo Social Networks Aggregator

When you enter Spokeo for the first time, you immediately notice the program slogan: “Want to see something juicy? Spokeo searches deep within 48 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers”. While that might be attractive for some visitors, there is definitely not too pretty slogan for me. However, let’s not look too close on the façade, but review what this site can do for you, and how it can enhance your social presence on the Web.

Mashable.com called Spokeo a simplest of the social networks aggregators today. It is useful for the Internet fans, trying to cover all bases in the multi-sites virtual presence and bring all the contacts together under one single “roof”.

What can you use the application for?

Spokeo is a powerful online application that is designed for syndication of information available publicly across the Internet. In other words it is a social aggregator that allows the users to aggregate photos, videos and blogs available on the web. It often happens that the people/friends of the same group use different online services as per their liking and preferences and it is very difficult for them to aggregate themselves at one common place and they keep hovering around looking and searching about what their friends are doing. Spokeo aids users to maintain separate profiles of all friends and it automatically scoops important information from all the contacts (without letting them know that someone is keeping an eye on their activities). Spokeo is an important technique to manage all information of the user under one roof and let him decide what information is to be provided to others and what not. One of the main features of Spokeo is 'recommend', when any person recommends a message or post on the website it will automatically spread through and show on the home pages of everybody in the contact list.

What is the history of the application?

It was started by Harrison Tang and three other Stanford graduates in the year 2006 with a view to provide a helpful interface to the users if they are unable to keep up with their friends.

What are the differences to other applications?

The website is pretty useful and beneficial for users who have large friends base. It keeps tracking all the contacts across 48 social sites and concurrently updates the action. With its features like Recommend and Contact Ingestion, Spokeo has tried its level best to eliminate the deficiencies and fill-up the loopholes of other service across the web.

How does the registration process work?

The user can easily join Spokeo service by just providing the e-mail and passwords of AOL, Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts and in just 5 minutes the user can follow up his/her friends on 48 social networks. And in case a person doesn't have the e-mail he/she has the option to create it at the same place itself. No credit card details are required for registration.

What does it cost to use the application?

Getting registered with Spokeo is free and easy. The site is funded by 'Angel Investors'. Spokeo also provides for advertisements with the concept of 'sponsored insertion' in which the advertiser is allowed to specify the blog that he wants to promote.

Who would you recommend the application to?

Spokeo is a social aggregator and is beneficial for such users who remain wired up on the Internet all day long and have a big bunch of friends across the web. It is likely that they face difficulties in tracking them and updating their actions and activities on numerous sites. So this site can be recommended to the persons who wish to enlarge and maintain their communities across the web.

Control your privacy

Spokeo respects the privacy policies of your social networks. Your content can only be read in Spokeo by the same people allowed to read it in your network.

Currently supported networks

• 43 Things
• Amazon
• Bebo
• BizShark
• Blogger
• Buzznet
• dailymotion
• deviantART
• Digg
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Flickr Group
• Flixster
• Fotolog
• Friendster
• Goodreads
• Hi5
• iLike
• imeem
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• Multiply
• MySpace
• Netlog
• Pandora
• PhotoBucket
• Picasa
• PictureTrail
• Slide
• Stumbleupon
• Tagged
• Target
• Twitter
• Upcoming
• Veoh
• Vox
• Web Results
• WebShots
• Windows Live Spaces
• Wretch
• Xanga
• Yelp
• YouTube

You can access and instantly sign in for the Spokeo membership at http://www.spokeo.com/

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8hands – Free Services for Lazy Social Addicts

If you maintain accounts on multiple social sites, like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and you want to stay always updated on what is going on there, but without desire to waste too much spare time, consider get help from a free social assistant - 8hands.

The 8hands Desktop application organizes all your different online profiles into one place, and sending you real time notifications upon new events via desktop alerts, allows to be on top of the things (when friends upload new pictures on Flickr, or there’s a new comment on your Flickr photos, or when you have private messages on Facebook or new tweets on Twitter) without manual visits to your profile pages on all the different websites.

When you are away from your computer, 8hands Mobile will instantly connect your social networks to your mobile device.

List of Supported Networks:

• Facebook
• Flickr
• MySpace
• YouTube
• WordPress
• Twitter
• LiveJournal
• Blogger
• FeedBurner

With 8hands Desktop you can:

• Get notifications of new comments, messages, friend requests, videos, feeds and more - in real time!
• IM and share online content with your friends: Just drag and drop your YouTube videos, Flickr pics and more into our easy to use chat window
• Receive summaries and statistics on your social networking activities
• Easily access your community locations from a single entry point.
• Use "best friends" algorithm, for more accurate matches in your friends tab
• Use Post back options in features like private message, wall to wall, friend request
• Get Image display on incoming events

To download 8hands click here.

More information on the developers website: http://www.8hands.com/about

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Optimizing Images for Search Engines, Social Media, and your Readers

People do not just search for web pages; they also search for certain images. By optimizing your images, you can enhance the entirely new channel of the visitors to your site. Yes, it is true that the search engines are not smart enough to decrypt an image and tell exactly what it is, like human eye can. But you can assist search engine to figure out what keywords your images are related too. So, we will discuss in the article as how the images can be optimized for the best perception by the Search Engines, Social Media Sites, and People.

Image search, by one definition, is query results, accompanied by thumbnail graphics and supplanted by contextual information, that best match users’ search queries. Such information can be generated and submitted by the image creator, by site owner where the image resides, or by 3rd party reviewers.
Places where image search results appear, and are indexable into general search engines’ contextual results, include:

• Major search engines - either within contextual search results or vertical image search
  
• Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Webshots, PBase, Fotki, ShareAPick)
  
• Social image sharing sites (MySpace, Facebook, Flyxia, YouSayToo)

The panel, consisting of both image search specialists and search engine product managers, concurred that image search is the fastest growing vertical in the search arena today. Statistics from Hitwise show it to achieve 90% growth year after year, with over 360,000,000 searches per month across the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN, and AOL. All in the "Big 5" have a search vertical dedicated specifically to image results, with 3 of them (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) integrating images into some contextual search results.

The recommendations for the images optimization in relation to the main optimization focus are as follows.


Optimize your images for search engines:

• Keywords in alt text, text around the image, image name, page title. Give meaningful names to your images. For example, GreenToyotaCamry.jpg is better than image1.jpg. Add long description tags to your images. For example: longdesc=”1998 green Toyota Camry driving down the highway”. In addition to a long description, an alt tag should be used as a short description. For example: alt=”Toyota Camry”
  
• Preferred image formatting for photos is JPG, and for other graphic image types - GIF. Search engines are going to interpret a GIF as a standard graphic image with 256 colors, and JPGs as photos (because photos have millions of colors).
  
• Separate SE accessible image folder.
  
• Image freshness. If you’re targeting high popularity keywords, try experimenting with re-uploading your pix, since image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and might affect relevancy.
  
• Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.
  
• Reasonable image file size. But note that the bigger images usually have a higher priority than smaller images.
  
• Limited number of images per page.
  
• Popular and reliable photo sharing hosting.

Optimize your images for social media:

• Use really great images to give your readers another reason to spread the word.
  
• Image originality. There is a special advantage to taking original photos. You can brand them with your logo, URL, or trademark.
  
• To get Digg thumbnailed submission stick to jpg format and make sure the images can be resized to 160Ч120 or 160Ч160 pixels (Unless you have an image that can be resized that way Digg will not offer the submitter a thumbnail to go with the post).

Optimize your images for people:

• People pay more attention to a clear image where they can see details (choose high quality images).
  
• Clean and clear faces in an image get more eye fixation. (Don’t use abstract images too often).
  
• Keep them relevant: images are not the first thing a visitor sees on a web page but they can compel him to stay (according to the eye-tracking research web text is prior to images; when looking at a printed article people see images first; with web page they see text first - nevertheless images make the visitor stay and remember the page via relevant associations).

Gender specific:

• Women are better at recognizing facial emotions than men.
  
• Men seem to be more likely than women to first look at faces rather than other parts of a nude body.
  
• Women are more interested in images with more than one person.

Beautiful Pictures

Beautiful Pictures

 

Beautiful Pictures

Sources and Additional Information:
http://www.seosmarty.com/image-seo/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/02/02/how-to-optimize-your-blog-for-search-engines/
http://searchenginewatch.com/3624327

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