Read on to learn how doing a social network search with Google Social Search works and how to use it.

Content from your social circle

Google Social Search adds content that is linked from your friend’s Google profiles to the search results. This content includes websites, blogs, public status updates (like Twitter and FriendFeed), other Google profiles and items from your feeds on Google Reader.

It is an opt-in experiment, so you have to turn it on to make it part of your search results.

Enable social search

Here is how to enable Google Social Search:

• Log in to your Google account (you always have to be logged in for social search to work).
• Go to Google Experimental.
• Click ‘Join this experiment‘ next to ‘Google Social Search‘.

From now on when you search Google it will also do a social network search and integrate results form your social circle at the bottom of the results page (from my experience that only happens when Google is set to display 10 results per page).

Get only social results

Alternatively, you can get only results from your social circle. Once you’ve enabled social search, it becomes one of the search filters available as part of Google’s New Search Features. In the results page, click “˜show options‘ under the Google logo and in the sidebar that opens click ‘Social‘. See an example of the results in the image below.

Asking help from friends

There are two advantages to getting these social results. First, it is somewhat more likely that they would be more relevant, at least in certain topics. For example, if you’re looking for something related to your field of expertise, your friends and people they know might have more relevant information.

Second, you do not only have access to the information you find, but possibly to the KNOWLEDGE the people who created it possess. Since the results include information about your relationship to the person who published the content, it might be easier to contact this person since you know him/her or know someone else who does.

Who’s in your social circle?

Your social circle is made up of your connections in various Google services. First, there are your social network connections, such as Twitter and FriendFeed. You have to list these social networks in your Google Profile for the people in them to be part of your social circle. Next, your circle includes people from your Gmail chat list and some of your Gmail contact groups. Finally, second level relations (friends of friends) are a part of your social circle – providing these relationships are public.

Note that if you do not list your social networks in your Google profile, or if you don’t have a lot of connections in them, you will probably not get too many social results.

On the other side, if you want your content (blog, videos and the like) to show up in your friends’ social search, you should list it in your profile as well.

Have you had the chance to try Google Social network search? Was it useful for you or just too much noise? Tell us in the comments!

The new options help to refine your search to show results in various types and sources (video, blogs, forums, reviews); narrow the time range to show results published within the last few seconds (i.e. real time) or longer time periods; exclude or include pages you’ve already visited; and play around with the way the results are display to show images, more text, plot them on a timeline, and more.

Get started

To see the new Google search options, click ‘show options‘ under the Google logo.

A sidebar, called the option panel will open up next to the result. Let’s see what it offers.

Filter by type

The first group of options lets you refine the search results to show only certain types and sources of results.

Videos: The Videos filter returns only video results. Alongside each result there’s a preview thumbnail. The option panel changes to display video related options, such duration, publication date, quality, and only closed caption (i.e. with subtitles).

Blogs: choosing blogs will return only blog posts. At the bottom of each search result there is a link to other posts by the same blog (not necessarily related to your search) and a link to pages that link back to the search result page, if such exists.

Forums: Next, you can get only results from discussion groups by choosing Forums. This will be handy when you have a specific question, because you can ask for further elaboration form the people who’ve already related to the subject.

Reviews: This filter will show results from reviews sites. In addition to the usual results display, you’ll see other aspects of the review, such as rating or a quote of the review about the product or service.

Time frame and previously visited sites

The next option group lets you set the time frame for the results. You can choose recent results, which will return real time results. Longer predefined time ranges are also available ”“ one hour, 24 hours, a week, and one year. You can also choose a specific date range.

Below that group you can choose whether to get back only Visited pages or Not yet visited pages.

Refine and extend your search

The third group enables you to expand your search or narrow it down by offering related search terms or using alternate displays for the search terms and search results.

Related searches: Adds keywords and search terms that can help you refine your query. These show up as links above the search results.

Wonder wheel: This might be the most extraordinary new feature. The Wonder wheel is an actual wheel that shows up next to the search results. It helps you to extend your search by displaying associated search terms. When you click a term, it immediately suggests more related terms and display related results.

Timeline: The Timeline view adds a graph that illustrates the results over time. This view also groups the results by date. Use it to find information about an event or other historical venue or person in which the time aspect is important.

Images, shopping and more text

Finally, you can alter how the results look like and choose whether to get more or less shopping sites.

Images from the page: This display is helpful to understand the search results with a single glance. It displays an image or two from each page, allowing you to visually comprehend the results without having to read each of them.

Fewer shopping sites/More shopping sites: According to your underlying purpose, you can choose whether to get more or less results from shopping sites. If you choose more shopping sites, Google will display items and prices directly in the search result page.

More text: In the standard mode, Google returns 130 characters of description for each search result (about 20-30 words). Choosing More text overrides this limitation and returns much more text for every search result, making it easier to find the right one.

What do you think of Googles new search features? Are they useful?

You can easily create free websites instantly in order to share content with the world. Here are some web applications that will allow you to share files and emails, create anonymous web pages and annotate links you share.

Note that all the applications presented here are registration-free and only require one or two mouse clicks to get going. Another advantage is that they save the time of opening attached files or reading text offsite. After you set them up you can easily share them via Twitter, email, Facebook and so on.

Transform an email into a webpage

Moomeo is a nifty little web service that transforms an email into a public webpage. Just forward any email to post@moomeo.com and within a minute you’ll get back a link you to a webpage you can share.

The webpage contains exactly the email you sent, with the attachments displayed in a sidebar, along with some sharing options (Twitter, Facebook and more). At the bottom of the page people can comment. See a screenshot below or visit a live example.

Go ahead and try it right away! Send an email to post@moomeo.com.

File to webpage

file2.ws is a great tool for sharing files by using them to create free websites instantly. It can handle numerous kinds of files, including images, audio, documents, programming source code, web documents, and archive.

To set up a file based webpage, click ‘Choose file‘, browser for a file on your computer (up to 15 MB), and click ‘Start conversion‘.

Once uploading is done, you’ll see a link to the webpage. People with whom you share it will be able to see the file without downloading or opening it. If they do wish to save the file to their computer – there is a direct link at the bottom of the page.

Here is an example of an Excel file I’ve shared.

Start from scratch

Several services will let you create a standalone webpage from scratch. Copytaste, Dinkypage, and Pastehtml will all do the work, each with its own special features. The services vary in the ability to comment,  adding or not adding advertisements and so on. All work within a single click and allow you to edit the HTML or just write plain text.

Annotate any webpage

Pagetweet is designed to let you annotate webpages before you share them. You can add a 140-character comment at the top of any webpage.

After you enter the page’s URL and add the comment, you’ll get a link to the exact same page, with the comment at the top of it. People who visit this link will see the webpage along with your comment. If they forward it – other people will see your comments as well, so it is better than just sharing a link via Twitter or email.

See below how an annotated webpage looks like. Visit the actual page here.

Do you know other cool ways to share content online? Share it with us in the comments!

Image Credit : Immagina

For a great example of Google Maps in action, visit the MakeUseOf Team Members map. In this particular shared, collaborative Google map, you’ll find details about the whole team, along with the location of each of us. It is the first time the map is publicly revealed – so feel free to visit it and get to know the MakeUseOf team better.

Now, let’s see how to create a shared Google Map where each of the team members can locate himself.

Set up a collaborative Google map

• Go to Google Maps and sign in. Click ‘My Maps‘ on the upper left side of the page.
• Just below ‘My Maps‘, click ‘Create new map‘.

Add the title and the description of the map, and choose whether it should be Public (shared with everyone and will be published in search results and user profiles) or Unlisted (shared only with selected people who have its URL).

Still in the same screen, above the ‘Title‘ filed click ‘Collaborate‘.

Fill in the mail address of your team members and set their permissions (you can allow collaborators to invite others and allow anyone to edit the map).

Finally, add a message explaining the team members what this map is all about and how to add themselves to it.

Use these pre-made instructions!

To make the process easier, I’ve created generic instructions for you to use in the last part, where you explain to the team members about the map.

Copy the section below, customize the part surrounded by angle brackets and paste it into the message box (shown in the 6th step above).

I’ve created a custom Google map for all of us to put our location on. Please click the above URL and follow these steps to add yourself to the map:

1. Use the search box to locate your city, state, and country.
2. On the marker that appears, you’ll see a link that says ’Save to My Maps‘ within the bubble.
3. Click the link and select the <write here the name of the shared map>.
4. Put your name as the title for the marker, and within the bubble provide whatever info you’d like.

Share and embed

Once everybody has finished putting themselves on the map, you can embed it into a website or share it via email with people who are working with the team. To get the embed code or direct link to the map, click ‘Links‘ in the upper right side of the map.

Thanks to Jorge Sierra for his help in writing the post and for the great idea.

Get started with Google Maps.

Readtwit is a 3-step service that will seamlessly integrates this aggregation power of the people you follow – into your RSS reader.

3 steps and you’re good to go

Readtwit, a new web service by Lionite does one simple thing ““ it captures weblinks from your Twitter stream and then publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading application to read it.

The process is composed of the three following steps:

• Go to Readtwit and press the big ‘Get fed‘ button.

• Allow Readtwit to access your Twitter account (no password needed).

• Choose your RSS reader (and if it’s not there click the ‘Get me the feed‘ button and paste the feed into your reader)

The image below displays the result: the original tweet and below it the full text, in Google Reader.

Information-overload preventing  features

Readtwit automatically prevents content duplication caused by retweets. It does that by grouping together similar links that are sent in the same time-frame. Once you’ve set up your RSS feed, you can further tweak Readtwit to prevent (or at least minimize) information overload.

First, you can filter out specific users. This feature will help you keep focused on useful content, as you can set it to not display links by people who post too much (and also exclude yourself, in order to not get back the links you post, as retweets).

If there are topics that do not interest you, it is possible to filter them out as well. In the image below, you can see that I have set Readtwit to not display iPhone related hashtags – as it does not interest me. I wish I could set this filter to my whole RSS stream, but at the moment I’ll have to do it only with my Twitter links.

Next, choose whether to get the full stories or just a summary and set the Feed update interval, which determines the amount of content you get.

Twitter as a human content-aggregator

Effectively, Readtwit closes a circle that turns Twitter into a human content aggregator. This is because you can now subscribe to top experts in your field of interest and get an RSS feed with the best content ““ chosen by them. You might even want to set up another Twitter account, one that will serve you only as a content source.

Future additions

The guys over at Readtwit are working on other additions for the service, among them are the followings:

• White-list filtering (Twitter username or hashtags) to include targeted content only.
• Filtering by popularity (over or under a certain threshold).
• Creation of specific feed types (technology, sports, politics etc.)
• Multiple feed management (with separate filters / content type)
• Feed analytics.

Follow @readtwitapp for further updates.

Check out Readtwit

This post offers ESL tools and practices based on real life experience that will help significantly improve your written English.

On-the-fly misspelling correction

TinySpell is a little software that detects spelling errors as you type (compared to spellcheckers that requires you to manually check the text). It is a great addition to the built-in spellchecker in your text editor, since it allows you to correct misspelled words without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Another advantage is that it reduces the need to search for the right spelling of words that the built-in spellchecker couldn’t correct.

Are you using the right word?

But a spellchecker won’t tell you if you chose the right word and surely won’t help if you’re having a problem finding the right one to use.

For these cases you should download and install the WordWeb dictionary as an ESL tool. Use it to find synonyms or make sure the meaning of the word which you chose. For example, if you’re in doubt whether to use ‘then’ or ‘than’, you can check their definition within a single click, without even leaving the application you’re in.

You can also use the online English-English dictionary YourDictionary as an ESL tool to learn the right way to use a word. Just search for that word and then click the ‘Sentence examples‘ tab. There you will find examples of use in sentences (see image below).

If you know the word in your native language but not in English, use an online dictionary such as WordReference to translate it. If your language does not show up in WordReference, use Google to find one in which it does and save it to your bookmarks for future use.

Find the right word in a given context & make sure the sentence is correct.

When you’re not sure if a sentence is correct, or can’t remember how a phrase goes, use Google as an ESL tool. Often it’s enough just to copy and paste the sentence or a part of into Google to get the rest of it or to see how others have written it differently.

For example, if you search for ‘it is not over until‘, the first results will tell you that the rest of the sentence is ‘until the fat lady sings” (see image below).

When the sentence you’re writing isn’t that trivial, you have to be more specific for Google to help. Copy the sentence and paste it into Google enclosed in double quotation marks. The search will return only the exact sentence. If it shows up in high frequency, it is likely to assume that it is correct.

If you’re not sure about certain words within the sentence, replace them with an asterisk (*). That tells Google that ‘something should be here, but I don’t know what’. The search results will contain variations of the sentence, from which you could learn the right way to write it.

For example, searching for this query: “paste it * google” (including the quotation marks) would have taught you to write “paste it into google” rather then “paste it to google”.

Problematic sentences & paragraphs

You’re over with the spelling and missing words. But did you compose the sentences correctly? Did you choose the right words? The people over at UsingEnglish, the English language discussion forums, will be glad to help you.

Just write the sentence or paragraph you’re not sure about, and you’ll get an answer within a few minutes or hours. Another possibility is to ask Aardvark for an opinion about the sentence ““ it has been working great for me.

Full text grammar check

Spellchecker is an online spelling, grammar, and thesaurus checker. Having accomplished the previous steps, you will probably not need to use the spelling feature spellchker offers.

The grammar checking, on the other hand, is very useful and worth going through. It detects mistakes such as sentences that do not begin with a capital letter; correct grammar mistakes such as “to” vs. “too”, and warn you from being too wordy.

Find the unfindable mistakes

The final step is to use Google translate. The secret here is to use it in reverse. That is, take the finished text in English and translate it into your native language. This step takes a lot of time, and surely there is no need to apply it always, but I find it crucial for important texts, such as blog posts I publish.

Reading the text in your native language enables you to detect mistakes you wouldn’t otherwise detect. For example, no spelling or grammar checker would correct the sentence “it seams like a bed idea to fill out this from” (where “seams”, “bed”, and “from” should have been “seem”, bad” and “form”, respectively). You wouldn’t even know the mistakes are there to ask for help, but in the translated version this sentence would just not make any sense.

What are your tools and practices for better English? Tell us in the comments.

Image Credits : Håkan Dahlström

But first, let’s think for a moment why you should find and download podcasts. Personally, I prefer to read, rather than listen, when I’m next to a computer. But when I’m not, podcasts are the best (if not only) option.

Listening to podcasts can make your daily two hours drive to and from work into two hours of learning something new, updating on the latest news, or reading a book.

Set a Delicious based stream of podcasts

Start by setting up a stream of podcast suggestions right into your RSS reader with Delicious. Go to Delicious’ tag based search and in the search box type ‘podcast‘ (already included in this link) and another tag that represents your topic of interest.

For example, the combination of ‘podcasts‘ and ‘technology‘ will deliver links which are tagged with both these terms, as shown in the image below.

If you don’t have a bookmarklet to automatically detect the page’s RSS feed, subscribe to the search by clicking the icon at the lower left corner of the page. Add the subscription to a folder in your feed reader so that you can get all the podcasts at once, or unsubscribe from them if you don’t want to get them anymore.

Once subscribed, you will keep getting new podcasts recommendations about the topic you chose.

Repeat this process with other topics, to get a variety of podcasts that you can download.

Subscribe to blogs and websites

Occasionally you’ll encounter blogs or websites that are dedicated to the topic that interest you. You can subscribe directly to them, as an addition to the podcasts stream you’ve set up in the previous step.

Download podcasts

When you get interesting podcasts, download them to a dedicated podcasts folder on your computer. Once in a while burn a disc or sync the folder with your portable device.

Juice it up – download a podcast receiver

Personally, I prefer hand picking the podcasts I download. Just as you don’t read all the posts in your favorite blog, some podcasts are interesting and some are not.

But, if you want to get all the podcasts from a given source, there is a way to do that as well. Download Juice, a free, open source podcast receiver (or another podcast software).

One you’ve downloaded and installed Juice, go to the ‘Subscriptions‘ tab. Add the feed URL of the source you want to download automatically.

Unsubscribe generously

Finally, remember to unsubscribe from sources that do not stand up to your expectations. The web is full of podcasts on various topics and in various levels of quality. It’s important that you distill your list of subscriptions to prevent information overload. If you hear 2-3 bad podcasts from the same source – unsubscribe.

How do you organize your podcasts and where do you get them from?  Let us know in the comments.

Let’s go over some cool Twitter search tips and see how to set up queries that will get you a personally tailored stream of great content.

Step 1 – Choose A Topic Or A Combination Of Topics

In Twitter’s search engine, write a search string that contains the topic or topics that interest you. For example, let’s search videos about productivity.

Our query:

productivity video

Note that writing more topics (words), or ones that show up in lower frequency will yield less results. This is not necessarily a bad thing since you don’t want to be flooded. You want to set up the optimal query to get you just the desired number of results – not too much, not too less.

Step 2 – Get Only Links

People’s opinions are great and interesting, but usually you’d like to find links to full content and not just the 140 characters tweet about it. To find only tweets that contain links add “filter:links” (without quotation marks) to the query.

Our query:

productivity video filter:links

Step 3 – Remove Unwanted Results & Spam

Sometimes you have to filter out popular topics (because they keep showing up in the search results) or spam-tweets. You might also want to refine your query to not find topics you don’t find interesting. Add to the query the topics you don’t want to show up and the Twitter accounts of the spammer, with a minus sign before each of them.

In the example query I got a lot of tweets from an account named @xxxtuber (see image below), so I added “-xxxtuber”.

Our query:

productivity video  filter:links -xxxtuber

Step 4 – Filter Out (Or Get Only) Retweets

If quite a few people retweeted the same link, you might get it over and over again in the search results. To prevent this, filter out retweets by adding -RT (notice the minus sign before it).

On the other hand, a retweet might indicate a higher quality result. This is because at least two people recommended that link – the person who originally tweeted it and the person who retweeted it. Therefore, you can try to add the word RT (without the minus sign) to the query. It will filter out tweets that were not retweeted, and may upgrade your search results.

Our query:

productivity video  filter:links -xxxtuber RT

Step 5 – Subscribe To The Query

Now that you know how to use Twitter to build the perfect query for your needs, be sure to subscribe to its RSS feed. Click the RSS feed for your query in the top right hand corner of the screen.

I recommend you refine the search query once in a while to get better results. Add different words, try with or without retweets, filter out certain results, and so on.

Please share with us your favourite Twitter search tips and search queries in the comments below.

It’s time to get things straight. Let’s see how to print an Excel sheet the right way.

[All the Excel tips shown here work in Excel 2003 as well]

Step 1 ““ A new sheet filled with data

I used Google tables to get some excel suitable data. Currently, it looks like this:

This is how our sheet looks like at the beginning

Step 2 ““ Convert the data to a table

(If you do not use a tabular structure in your sheet, you can skip this step.) One Excel tip to make the data look better and easier to scrutinize with, start by converting it to a table. Select the cells that contain data and press Ctrl + L. in the opened window click OK .

The sheet now looks like this:

The data designed as a table

Step 3 ““ Set the area to be printed

Another Excel tip to print only the part of the sheet you need is to set a print area. Select the cells (if it’s a table, click somewhere inside it and press Ctrl+Shift+8). On the ’Page Layout’ tab, in the ’Page Setup group’, click ’Print Area‘, and then click ‘Set Print Area’.

Step 4 – Wrap the text in the cells to make it visible

In order to make all the text in the cells visible, leave the cells from the previous step selected. On the ‘Home’ tab, in the ‘Alignment’ group, click ‘Wrap Text‘. Doing so will make the lines spread down and the text within them visible. This is a useful Excel tip when you have long lines of text in individual cells.

wrapped Text

Step 5 ““ customize the data to fit into the desired size and number of pages

Now is the critical part. In order for the printing to look well and make sense, you need to set it right in the print preview mode. Go there by pressing Ctrl+F2.

Click ‘Show Margins‘ in the Preview group. The page margins will be displayed. Stand on each of them with the mouse and drag them to the edges of the page, as much as your printer can handle (you can also choose one of the default margin values by going back to the normal view and in the ‘Page Layout’ tab, in the ‘Page Setup’ group, clicking ‘Margins’).

Now, choose ‘Page Setup‘ in the Print group. In the opened window, fill-in the desired values under ‘Fit to‘. If you set it to 1 page wide by 1 page tall, as I did in this showcase, your data will be printed on a single page. The cost of doing so is that the text will become smaller (since all of it has to fit into a single page).

Step 6 ““ Center the table and add a header and a footer

Still in the ‘Page Setup’ window, click the ‘Margin’ tab. Under ‘Center on page‘, select the ‘Horizontally‘ and ‘Vertically‘ check box.

Now move to the ‘Header/Footer’ tab, click ‘Custom Header‘, and fill-in a header. You can include text, page number, images and so on. Click ‘Custom Footer‘ to add a footer. Click OK.

Step 7 ““ customize row and column sizes

As different cells contain different data or information, you might want to change the length or width of the rows and columns. You can do that in the print preview mode, by standing with the mouse exactly on the borders of the cells and dragging them right or left.

Since now some of the cells might be bigger in length then they need to be, lets make them automatically fit the text inside them. Press the ESC key to go back to normal view. Select the entire sheet by pressing Ctrl + A, and double click the separator between line three and four.

You may need to repeat step 6 several times until the table fits perfectly to the page.

The final display is present below. You are ready to print.

How do you achieve perfect printing? Do you have any Excel tips of your own to share? Let us know in the comments.

[To use the bookmarklets, simply add them to your bookmarks bar. Right click them and choose "Bookmark This Link" or just drag and drop it to the bookmarks bar]

1. Subscribe to a website with Google Reader

Add or drag to your bookmarks bar ——> Subscribe

Here is a known scenario – you visit a cool blog and want to subscribe to it. Now you need to find and click its RSS icon, get to the Feedburner site, choose ‘Google Reader’ as your RSS reader, get to the ‘Add to Google’ page and choose ‘Add to Google Reader’. Easy, right? Well, why not make the process much easier – use the ‘Subscribe’ bookmarklet. Just click it, and you’ll immediately get into Google reader, one click away from subscribing to the site. Life’s good, isn’t it?

2. Speed read online content

Add or drag to your bookmarks bar ——> ZAP read

The ZAP reader bookmarklet opens a new window where it flashes text at high speed (text which you  previously marked in a website). Not only that it makes you read much faster, but it also improves your speed reading abilities (I can personally testify).

It’s a good idea to use a speed that you can read relatively easily when the text is important and you have to completely understand it. Use higher speed when the text is of less importance, in order to gradually increase your reading speed.

3. Tweet a link and monitor it

Add or drag to your bookmarks bar ——> Bit.ly

The Bit.ly bookmarklet is the most useful way I know to share links through Twitter. The bookmarklet pops-up a sidebar within the site you are in, shortens its URL and lets you tweet it without leaving the page. Moreover, it tells you how many people have got to the site through a Bit.ly shortened URL and how many got there through your link.

If you think about it, Bit.ly lets you measure the effectiveness of your tweets. By telling you how many people you’ve reached, you can know if people are reading your tweets and what is the content they like the most. I make sure to check out my Bit.ly stats once in a while to better understand what are my best tweets and how I can reach more people.

4. Share sites via email

Add or drag to your bookmarks bar ——> Email this

If you feel like sending a website via email rather then tweeting it – ‘Email this’ is the bookmarklet that I recommend. ‘Email this’ opens a new email in your default email client (including web based ones) with the site’s title as the subject and the link to the page in the body. All that is left for you to do is add recipients and click send.

‘Email this’ is suitable for work settings, where you would usually share content via email. It’s also better to use it when you need more then 140 characters or you just don’t want to share something publicly.

5. Read any language

Add or drag to your bookmarks bar  ——> Translate
‘Translate’ uses “Google Translate” to display the content of the page in English. More or less, it means you can instantly read sites in any language. Really useful

If you think that there is enough content in English – try to think of situations where local content is better. For example, if you’re going on a trip to another country – reading about it on local websites will get you better results. That is where this bookmarklet will come in handy.

Don’t forget to check out the other bookmarklets that MakeUseOf has written about! What are your top productivity bookmarklets? Share them with us in the comments!

Image credit: vramak