A social advertisement works in a very straightforward way: if you, by a coincidence or whatever reason, have liked a Facebook page or ad, your friends will see your “like” next time they see the same advertisement. You might feel comfortable with that, however most people are not aware of the fact that by simply “liking” something (and thus expressing a passive form of appreciation), they also start recommending the same thing to their friends. LinkedIn launched a somewhat similar form of social advertising this summer.

Another disturbing thing is that in both systems, you find yourself automatically “opted-in” the social advertising system. Yes, you can opt out, but only if you know about the system and can spend a little effort and a few minutes of your time to do a quick research on how to disable it for your profile. So here’s a quick guide for those who feel they don’t want to participate in social advertising at LinkedIn and Facebook.

Opt out of Social Ads at Facebook

Facebook social ads show an advertiser’s message alongside actions you have taken, such as liking a Page. This means that if you have liked a page which is being advertised through Facebook, your friends will see that you have once liked that page (and may feel more likely to do the same):

We have mentioned how to stop appearing in social ads at Facebook in our extensive guide on safeguarding your Facebook privacy. However Facebook is in a good habit of constantly moving privacy settings all around and now the necessary option seems to be in a completely different section.

To find the way to opt out of Facebook social advertising, click a tiny arrow next to “Home” link in the upper-right corner of the screen and choose “Account Settings“. There click “Facebook Ads” in the left-hand panel.

Now, scroll down to the second option, read about the social ads and, if you are still not convinced that you want to participate in them, click “Edit social ads setting”.

There you can at last set whether you want your friends to see your name in an ad or whether you prefer to opt out:

Note: Independent of this setting, you may still see social actions in other contexts, like in Sponsored Stories or paired with messages from Facebook.

Opt out of Social Ads at LinkedIn

LinkedIn took a step further in social advertising: it shows your photo alongside an ad. Here’s an example of such an ad from the official LinkedIn blog. As far as you can see, people who have been following a company group, are now unwillingly advertising their services:

To opt out, you need to login to LinkedIn and click this link. There click “Manage Social Advertising” and un-check the option allowing LinkedIn to use your name and photo in social advertising:

Do you feel inclined of opting out of Facebook social ads? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

** Editor’s note : This is Ann’s last post with MakeUseOf after exactly three years writing for us.  She is leaving to pursue her own projects and will be greatly missed by everyone here.  Please join me in wishing her all the very best for the future. **

That’s where the browser extensions we review today come in really handy. They allow you to listen to songs on YouTube together with lyrics.

Lyrics for Google Chrome™

Lyrics for Google Chrome™ is a fun Google Chrome extension that loads lyrics for the current song on request. Lyrics are automatically fetched from LyricsWiki™.

When you open a music clip on YouTube, notice the extension icon that appears in the Address Bar (omnibox). Click it to load the lyrics right next to the video and start singing!

If nothing was found in the database, you can do a manual search.

The options page lets you choose whether you want to load lyrics next to the YouTube video or open it in a new tab.

The extension also supports: Last.fm™, Google Music™ and Grooveshark™

Besides, the extension adds lyrics quick search that lets you search for lyrics from the omnibar by typing “lyrics …” + a title, artist or a couple words from the lyrics.

Another great thing is that the extension is actively supported as the developer answers all the comments on the extension page and seems to quickly implement all the suggestions (full support is provided here).

Obviously, it won’t fetch lyrics for any song under the sun, so it won’t always work. Besides, LyricsWikia isn’t licensed to display the full lyrics for some popular songs. However it ran pretty smoothly and found lyrics for most music clips I came across.

Here’s another similar extension that seems to be a little bit more simplistic: Lyrics for YouTube™

Music Video Lyrics for YouTube

Music Video Lyrics for YouTube is another similar extension that seems to have a bit smaller database of lyrics.

It installs an icon in the toolbar that signals when a YouTube page has some lyrics in the database (thus it saves you a few extra clicks as you only click the icon when it claims to have the associated lyrics).

It will also change the icon and load the lyrics even if you have opened the YouTube page in the background tab.

Clicking the icon will fetch the lyrics on the foreground of the page:

Unlike the first extension on our list, this one promotes itself more actively offering you to rate and share it each time it loads the lyrics.

Are there any other fun extensions for Google Chrome to offer that almost Karaoke experience? Please share them in the comments!

Other web-based applications to find lyrics we have previously covered at MakeUseOf:

• YouLyrics: Listen To YouTube Songs With Lyrics
• TubeOke: Find Song Videos With Lyrics
• Lyrics.com: Song Lyrics With Videos

Image NinjaPhoto

If you are interested to clearly understand how people with different color blindness conditions see colors, check out this simple tool and click through the color vision modes. More about color blindness forms and color contrasts can be found here.

It is impossible to quickly and clearly explain what color blindness feels like and how color blind people may perceive your website, but luckily it is possible to see it with your own eyes.

Here are a few very easy color blindness simulators to visualize color blindness for you.

See Websites as a Color-Blind Person

Colorblind Web Page Filter is an easy to use (yet sometimes slow) web-based tool that lets you browse the web to see it as if you were color blind.

Just give it your URL, choose the “coverage filter” (the filters are explained in much detail here) and click “Fetch and Filter!”.

Once the page is fetched through the filter, you will be able to see how a colorblind perceives the colors on it. You can click through the conditions to generate a new preview for each color blindness type.

Here’s how a user with the “normal” (usual) eyesight sees a page:

Here’s how a color-blind person sees the same page (according to the simulator):

If your page meets requirements and is found as color-blind-friendly, you can grab the page filter badge.

Another possible option for color-blindness simulating is Chrometric which is a free Adobe AIR application.

See Images as a Color-Blind Person

Apart from using the color-blindness simulator web browser above, try checking out either of the tools below that allow you to quickly preview any uploaded images using different color-blindness filters. It might be a good idea to use the below tools to:

• Preview any image you have created (like a logo you are going to brand your business with or an infographic you were thinking of publishing);
• Create a screenshot of your website home (or any landing) page and run it through the tools (this will make the web page test much quicker than with the web browser).

1. Colour Blindness Simulator: Just upload your image, choose the condition and run the test.

The tool will display both the image versions: for normal and for color-blind condition:

There will also be a lot of details on each condition below the result.

Limitations: You will have to make sure that your image is no larger than 100 KB, is 1000 x 1000 pixels or smaller and comes in jpeg in RGB format.

2. Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator: This one works similarly to the above one. There will be no side-by-side comparison with the initial image though. However this tool gives more freedom allowing you to quickly click through various color-blindness conditions and preview the resulting images:

Warning: Judging from the comments to the tool, it seems to be a bit inaccurate in processing some filters but the whole concept is quite clear.

Are there any other similar easy-to-use and easy-to-understand tools to help make your websites and designs more color-blind friendly? Please share them in the comments!

Further reading on making your (or your relatives’) life easier if you suffer various visual disabilities:

• 4 Tools To Make Web Pages Easier To Read For People With Poor Eyesight (Firefox)
• 7 Steps to Make Computers Accessible for the Elderly
• Easily Increase Firefox Address Bar Font Size
• How To Speech Enable Your Blog

Image Credit: John Machan (Fotopedia)

We have been talking so much on Twitter, but do you remember how all that started? Would you like to remember how you first discovered Twitter? Here are a few fun tools for you to do that!

1. What’s Your Twitter Age?

Tweet Years is a nice tool that will take less than a second to show you how many years you have been tweeting. You can easily share your result on Twitter as well.

How long have you been tweeting? works the same way but it will also offer to compare your result with any of your friends:

2. What Was Your First Tweet?

Do you want to check out how you started tweeting? Well, if you haven’t tweeted too much, you are lucky as you can quickly find your first Twitter message using Tweet 1.

However, if you have tweeted more than 3,200 messages, your older tweets won’t be saved by Twitter, so you won’t be able to find them using any tool (not that there’s no tool for that yet, it’s that Twitter doesn’t offer this functionality in the first place).

There’s also Twime Machine that requires a login using Twitter authentication and brings you back in time and shows you the oldest available tweet.

There’s also MyTweet16 that displays first 16 Twitter updates of any user but it has been a bit weird and hasn’t been able to find early tweets of some users for me.

3. Who Was Your First Follower?

One of the best-known tools for finding your first followers was FirstFollower which we reviewed earlier. However I was trying to use it for a couple of days in a row and it always gave me an error. I am not sure if it is still supported as their Twitter account seems to be quite abandoned, so I found another one and it seemed quite fun!

FirstFiveFollowers, as the name suggests, identifies your first 5 followers who joined your feed once you created an account on Twitter (the tool requires Twitter authentication in order to work). What’s more, the tool lets you see if you are still following those users (I wish it could also show if they are still following you as well). You can immediately friend your first followers back or unfollow or block them.

Clicking on any username in your list will bring you to their results – click any name to find out their first five followers. You can also check the last 20 tweets of any Twitter user (this way it is easier to tell if you need to follow your old friend again).

Are there any other fun tools to go back in time and check your past Twitter life? Please let us know in the comments!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by carrotcreative

The main reason why you would want to delete similar images is to save some space on your hard drive. Going through your image folder deleting extra images is too time consuming. Besides, many of the similar images can have different names which makes identifying them almost impossible.

Luckily, there’s a free tool to semi-automate the process.

SimilarImages is a desktop application that finds similar (or duplicate) images on your hard drive among different folders.

The tool has already been mentioned in our round-up of ways to find duplicate image files on a Windows PC but the tool definitely deserves a closer look.

Settings

The best thing about the tool is that it lets you configure the “similarity” threshold with enables you to configure which image pairs should be shown when comparing.

Image file pairs with a comparison value greater than the set threshold are ignored. Some recommended threshold settings include:

• To find duplicates(fastest mode): 0 – 10
• To scan through photos: about 12
• To scan through folders containing scans: 50 – 60

You can also set the folder preferences:

• Inclusive Search will only compare files located in the same folder with each other.
• Exclusive Search means that only files not contained within the same folder will compared with each other.

Speed

If you have a lot of images and photos on your computer, the first check will take quite a while. However the great thing about the tool is that it keeps its own index of scanned images. Next check will run across its fast Graphics Library. This makes scanning much faster.

The program even keeps track of your not-a-duplicate decisions: if you enable Cache-System, SimilarImages will remember when you indicate that a pair is not a duplicate. When you later check the same folders again it would bring up the same false-positives.

You can access and clear the gallery from the tool “Cache” menu.

(Semi-) Automated Deletion

The tool also aims at making deleting duplicate files faster. Semi-automated deletion feature helps you choose which file to delete from a pair faster: when enabled, one file of a pair will be pre-selected depending on your rules.

For example, you can set to always pre-select a smaller image in a pair or the one with lower resolution or always the newer file. This definitely makes deleting extra images faster!

You can always set the tool to auto-delete a duplicate image in a pair (based on your above settings).

Working with Image Pairs

Once the application is done scanning the specified folders, it shows you the similar image pairs. Each image has a thumbnail, file size, dimensions, last-modified date and other properties. You can delete any of the files or replace one with the other.

• The X-icon lets you delete the file.
• The TwoFiles-icon lets you swap the file. (Swapping means in this context: The other file will be overwritten with this file, thus the contents of the first file will be kept but with the name of the second file.)
• The Clear-icon lets you delete both files.
• The Runner-icon lets you delete the file marked for semi-automated deletion.

Looks like a great tool to sort out your stored image files and free up some space. What are your thoughts?

One of the best tools to listen to online conversations is Twitter and here are a few actionable suggestions.

How Do You Create Twitter Feeds?

Despite the fact that Twitter has weirdly removed the direct option to grab the RSS feed of any search, all the RSS links are still working.

To create an RSS feed, add your search query after this URL string:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=

For example:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=cool software
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=”cool software” (for exact match)

There’s also a simple web-based app to generate Twitter search RSS links:
http://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/

Here are a few useful tips we have previously covered on having fun with RSS feeds, which you are likely to find useful for using the search tricks listed in this article:

• How RSS feeds work in simple terms
• Best free RSS readers for the iPad
• How to mix and edit existing RSS feeds with Yahoo! Pipes
• Two easy tips to manage your unread RSS feeds better
• How to read RSS feeds on your iPad even when you’re offline

And now the actual tips on creating useful RSS feeds to track you and your business mentions on Twitter!

1. Reduce Any Clutter: Filter Out Retweets

While retweeting is great for expanding the reach of the update, retweets are actually one and the same message repeated again and again. Seeing multiple retweeted messages in your personal reputation management feed may result in one important update getting lost in the clutter.

Luckily Twitter search supports the – operator that lets you filter out all the updates containing a specific word from the search results:

["You (brand) name" -rt]

Example

2. Monitor Only Real Opinions: Filter Out Links

Let’s face it: most Twitter updates are aimed to share a link. If you blog a lot, your name (or moniker) is mostly mentioned on Twitter next to the post you have written. But do you want to only monitor “real” conversations?

Here’s a good way: Twitter supports the filter:links operator that searches only for tweets containing links. If we use the above mentioned trick, we’ll make it work vice versa excluding all linked updates from search results.

["You (brand) name" -filter:links]

Example

Similarly, you can also filter all updates referencing your Twitter username (you will be updated about these by Twitter itself via email or by your Twitter client):

[-from:username] – filters out all tweets coming from a user;

[-@username] – filters out all tweets referencing a user.

Example

3. Monitor Negative Mentions

This tip is especially useful for e-commerce site owners and geeky customer support managers. You can focus on negative mentions by including in the results.

["You (brand) name" ]

Example

4. Monitor Questions Mentioning You Or Your Business

Another great tip for service owners: you can create a separate feed to monitor all questions about you or your business name.

["Your (brand) name" ?] – make sure to use a space before the question mark.

Example

5. Include Your Name & Your Moniker(s) In Search Results

Lastly, here’s the easiest tip: you are most likely to be known by several names online: your name, username, site name, etc. You can include all these mentions in search results using OR operator:

["You business name" OR "Your name" OR "Your moniker]

Example

Are you tracking your name mentions on Twitter! I hope I have inspired you to! Please let me know your thoughts!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by krossbow

If you love gardening and like making things with your own hands, today’s collection is right for you!

This post shares ten most useful resources that will get you inspired and your creativity flowing: they share fun and unique ideas on how to turn trash into gardening gold!

 Instructables / Indoor Gardening

The section features more than 20 DIY projects by gardening experts. Find out how to grow your own herb garden and start seedlings indoors.

Favorite projects: iPlanter, an upside down planter made from the old plastic bag, and Fern Nursery, a green way to recycle a tennis ball container into an in-house garden on your windowsill.

Gardener’s World / Creative Projects

The best thing about the site is that each project has a detailed step-by-step guide on how to implement each idea.

Favorite project: Build a bug box (or bee hotel) and have fun watching bees come to live there (quite an unexpected project for gardeners as they usually get annoyed by bugs, but what a neat idea!)

 DIY Gadgets / Gardening

DIY gadgets blog features most interesting upcycling ideas on how to turn trash into useful things. Not all of the ideas have detailed instructions linked to but the resource can be a powerful source of creative DIY inspiration.

Favorite projects: light bulb into a mini green house and skateboard table.

Lonely Plants / DIY

This page features quite a few creative DIY gardening ideas to keep you busy for the whole year.

Favorite projects: DIY Hanging Garden to decorate your patio or balcony and DIY Bamboo Water Hammer to create a cool-looking stylish garden fountain.

Neat Ideas / Gardening

The gardening section of the “Neat Ideas” site is goldmine of creative DIY hacks: from watering plants (while you are away) to breathing a new life into old used tools. There are no step-by-step guides on realizing the ideas but they are great for inspiration!

Favorite projects: There are plenty of useful ideas on how to upcycle a used plastic bottle into useful stuff like Watering Spikes and Bird Feeder.

Life on the Balcony / Container Gardening

Looks like the blog hasn’t been updated for some time but its collections of links features so many DIY container gardening tips that it is still worth checking.

Favorite projects: DIY garden-inspired gift ideas that really prove the fact that the best present is one made with your own hands.

28 Upcycles for the Garden

The collection of useful ideas from an 8-year gardener on how to upcycle 28 (or more) everyday household items for gardening.

Favorite projects: Styrofoam cups with lids can be upcycled as micro green houses for seed starting and transplanting seedlings.

Re-Nest / Gardening

The collection of DIY and how-to gardening tips created by Re-Nest editors features a few gardening tips a day!

Favorite project: a recycled plastic bottle vertical garden, an inexpensive small space solution for growing herbs and spices.

Upcycled Garden

The category lists not many DIY gardening projects but the collection is really high-quality.

Favorite projects: Boot Tray, a practical and nice way to keep all the dirt from the garden boots inside (the idea looks similar to this stone bath mat by the way) and light bulb vases (hanging mini vases that would look great in any interior)

Recycled Garden Planters

The awesome collection of various ways to create unique garden planters by Recycle Scene (no instructions available but you are unlikely to need one for most of the ideas).

Favorite projects: Guitar planter and Shoe Planter.

Do you feel inspired? Please share your favorite DIY gardening projects in the comments!

Image Credit:cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by girlingearstudio

The best thing about these tools is that you don’t need any design skills or master Photoshop or any other complex image editing tool. Editing your photos takes seconds and in the end you get a high-quality photo effect. We have already mentioned the three tools below in our previous round-ups and reviews but hopefully this collection will get you inspired!

1. Photo505

Photo505 is a fun tool that has lots of built templates inside. Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to use the tool.

It’s very quick and fun: all you need to do is to upload the photo of your face or make a new photo using the web camera.

There are about 200 templates built where you can place your face in:

• Make your face appear in the newspaper or a magazine;
• Place your face in a street billboard, artwork, theater or “Wanted” poster;
• Put your photo in a T-shirt or tattoo.

The tool claims to use face detection technology to identify your face in a photo and place it in a new fun context. Frankly, the quality of the created fake photo is extremely high. See for yourself:

The resulting photo doesn’t have the Photo505 watermark, so you can freely use it elsewhere.

There’s also a Facebook application that lets you create funny photo manipulations using your album photos right inside your Facebook account. Besides using the app, you can quickly upload the edited photo to your Facebook account to share it with friends.

2. LunarPix

LunarPix is another high-quality online photo editor. It also features dozens of high-quality photo effects for you to choose from.

The tool will also apply photo filters to make your photo look natural:

Apart from offering plenty of awesome photo effects, there are also a lot of cool “face effects” featured. A “face effect” is a pre-built template (“face in a hole”) which you can put your face in to pretend you are standing next to a celebrity or appearing in a famous movie poster.

Face effects are broken down into “movies”, “celebrities, “costumes”, “kids” and “sport”.

Besides various manipulations with your face, the tool also lets you create pretty avatars and frame your photos.

3. WriteOnIt

WriteOnIt offers to create a card, photo montage, magazine cover or face in a hole photo.

The resulting photos seemed to be a bit lower quality than with the above two tools. Besides that, the tool adds a tiny watermark to it:

But the variety of photo effects offered still makes it a worthy tool to check out.

Besides, it works great for creating fake magazine covers. Not only can you feature yourself on a glossy magazine cover, you are also able to add fun text to complete the effect:

And here’s the outcome:

I imagine this can be a great tool to share your personal news with your blog readers or social media friends.

There are many more fun photo tools like these. Please share your favorite tools in the comments!

However LinkedIn isn’t only good for networking: those who maintain detailed LinkedIn profiles can turn them into informative online resumes to jump start their job search.

There are a few handy tools that will both allow you quickly import your LinkedIn professional summary, help make it look neat and professional and even let you host your resume for free.

Here are a couple of great options:

Resume Builder

Resume Builder is by far the quickest way to turn your LinkedIn profile into a professionally looking, minimalist resume. It was created as part of LinkedIn Labs and the whole process takes no more than a few minutes:

1. Start here and sign into your LinkedIn profile;
2. Look over your professional summary and edit / delete any information you need;
3. Pick a resume template that best suits your style: clean, modern, business, gray, law and more.

Now you can download your resume as PDF, print it, share online (via email, Facebook or Twitter). Note that you will need to set the resume as public to be able to start sharing it.

You can also use the “outline” mode to change the look of your resume: just remove or drag-and-drop the sections you want to change:

2. DoYouBuzz

DoYouBuzz is an excellent and very user-friendly website that lets you quickly build a detailed resume by fetching your professional information from your LinkedIn profile.

It has both free and paid plans (the latter has a few more appealing templates but I never needed them as the free version has proved absolutely complete).

The process is very well organized – you will be surprised how smoothly you are being moved from step to step until you have the resume ready:

1. Sign up for n account and conform your email;
2. Import your LinkedIn profile;
3. Edit / remove any sections that have been fetched from your LinkedIn profile (or add new sections)
4. Choose and customize your template (you can choose a design and then select your own color palette):

As a result you get a free online Linkedin profile resume that you can both link to or download to send to a potential employee:

Privacy settings and notes:

If you care about your privacy, there are a couple of notable things to mention here:

1. Your resume will have “nocache” header tag which will prevent Google from saving it in its cache. This means that your future employees won’t be able to access the resume previous versions and will only be able to see the current one (this is a very smart feature by the way)
2. There are a few privacy settings inside that allow you to hide your resume from public view, exclude it from DoYouBuzz search results or hide it from everyone.

Note: There’s another similar tool called Comoto but it is not that usable.

Are you aware of any other tools that make it easy to re-package your LinkedIn profile and turn it into the detailed resume? Please let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by michaeln3

Even if you don’t care much about who keeps track of your browsing activity, playing with these two addons will help you understand the Internet much better by showing you the “invisible web”.

Ghostery: See (& Block) Trackers In Real Time

Ghostery is a very useful and well-established privacy tool that has a huge database of trackers they can identify (over 500 companies).

Ghostery is your window into the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior.

Before using this addon, there are two very important things you should know about it:

• Besides identifying the trackers, it can help you block any or all of them (to protect your privacy)
• There’s a built-in system inside that sends anonymous statistical information about the trackers and ads you come across while browsing. It is called GhostRank and it does not make use of browser cookies or flash cookies and stores no unique information about you (not even an IP address). However, if you don’t want to send that information to Ghostery, you can disable that tracking.

Ghostery shows an alert bubble whenever you land on any page that shows the list of behavioral data providers, web publishers, ad networks, and other companies which are interested in your activity.

Each of the trackers found has a separate profile page containing the important background information on the company. You can access that information from the Addons Bar icon (that also shows how many trackers the tool has identified).

From the same menu, you can block any tracker as well.

Besides that, you can control the global performance and blocking:

• Scan and block all images, iframes and embed and object tags served off the matched tracker domain
• Look for and prevent redirection from known trackers
• Block any scripts, pixels and iframes that are set to track your behavior
• Block any cookies from the tracking companies in the gallery

2. Collusion: Visualize The Invisible Web

Collusion is another must-have privacy addon that visualizes who is tracking you and across which sites you have visited. It identifies cookies of the web’s most popular tracking companies and detects these cookies across many websites you are visiting.

Just have the addon installed and continue browsing the web as you used to. Then, after you have some browsing history, open this link in a new tab to see the impressive trackers’ visualization:

• Red dots are sites considered as confirmed trackers by Privacy Choice
• Sites are connected if they have been using the same tracking cookies while you were browsing:

Hover over any dot to see which cookies the site is using and which sites it is connected with:

I am sure there are many more useful tools available to find out who is tracking you online. Please share your thoughts about them in the comments!

Image Credit: DonkeyHotey