Monitter is an easy-to-use application that allows you to monitor Twitter for any three keywords and see what people are saying about them. Monitter can be useful for many things such as finding Twitter users with similar interests as you or monitoring what people are saying about you and/or your website. Personally, I like using Monitter to see what other people are saying about some of my favorite sites and applications such as Digsby, Zenbe, and Feedly.
Facebook have been experimenting with their new design since the beginning of the year, but only this week was it released to general users. Trying it out before required manually adding ‘new’ in front of your Facebook profile URL. However the official Facebook blog has now announced:
“Starting this morning, more and more users started seeing prompts on their home pages inviting them to switch over and try out the new Facebook. We’re also really happy to say that anyone can try out the new site now by visiting http://www.new.facebook.com.”
Socialbrowse is a new social networking website similar to Stumbleupon. Since Socialbrowse is still in beta you’ll have to enter your email address when you arrive at the Socialbrowse website so that you can be invited. When you enter your email and hit the ‘get it!’ button you should probably receive your invitation instantly.
At the moment there aren’t many people on Socialbrowse because it is quite new so I recommend that you sign up and give it a go because it has quite a nice community.
With Friendfeed growing more and more in popularity, never a week goes by without another new application popping up claiming to make your Friendfeed experience an easier one. The latest one doing the rounds is StumbleRead which allows you to “stumble” through the latest stories on Friendfeed very fast so you can rapidly leave lots of comments and “likes”.
With all the social media sites available to us now, it’s very easy to go into social media overload. There’s no possible way that one can keep up with even 10 sites, let alone the hundreds that are created each month.
In order to keep up with the social media phenomenon, there are numerous aggregation sites & applications popping up on a regular basis. It seems like most people are now using FriendFeed to stay updated with things but what about the other social aggregators out there that are less publicized? Do you use any of them?
Retaggr is a new online service that lets you build a mini-profile that can attach itself to comments or photos that you post. Another way of looking at it is that Retaggr is your online business card. It gives a summary of all the different types of social networks or websites that you work with or on and it provides a great way for people to connect with you.
Once you sign up for Retaggr, you must fill out a few different things in order to give Retaggr enough information to populate your Profile Card. This Profile Card isn’t just limited to screen names and basic information. There is a lot of room for customization.
In the past, TV could be quite a lonely experience, if no one shared your preference for the passive home entertainment. With the internet, TV has also changed. Fanpages, chat programs, and social networks gave people a way to express themselves, to share, and to connect. The internet brought individuals together that otherwise would never have met.
With TIOTI, short for Tape It Off The Internet, a community for TV lovers has entered the scene. TIOTI is a social media platform for television shows, with a touch of Wiki-ness, providing information, links and ways to mingle with like-minded individuals. If you have a Facebook account, you won’t need to set up a separate account with TIOTI.
So far I have not been a huge fan of any social site. Don’t get me wrong, I love social sites like Digg, Del.ico.us, Flickr, Twitter and so on, but that list is one reason I haven’t used them much. I need to visit four different sites to manage myself, not to mention additional stuff like StumbleUpon, Youtube and some more I use. Even if I use desktop clients, I still need to download separate tools for most of these sites.
Well… maybe that’s a little optimistic, but for someone who is creating amateur music clips or something genuinely funny, there are actually ways you can make money online from your videos.
Read on to find out about some websites that give you the ability to monetize your clips.
MetaCafe is a video sharing website which claims approximately 25 million unique viewers a month and over a million registered users. It isn’t a website like YouTube for hosting any dubious video that you want to upload, in Metacafe’s words the site hosts videos which are:
The internet, like anything else, goes through fads. Just like the rest of the world, those fads start at the top with celebrities and trickle down until no one really knows how they got started. Several weeks ago, some of the top names on the internet like Kevin Rose and Veronica Belmont began asking their friends to join them on a new site called Plurk. Slowly but surely, their regular fans on Twitter and Pownce begin to traipse over to Plurk, joining their favorite celebrities in birthing a new social network.
We know that the search engine market is primarily dominated by Google, followed by Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search. Hence today, if a new search engine is launched on the same lines and if it produces search results in a similar manner like the big players, then it is highly unlikely that it will survive in this field.
Keeping this fact in mind, the new players in the search engine market are trying to be innovative and do things differently. One of them is Addict-o-matic, which lets you type a query and then instead of displaying the results from the entire web, it shows the results from certain other sites like some top social media sites, in a single page.
New media, social media, networking… who cares what its called? The fact is, for better or for worse, I find myself using it more and more these days. Profiles have always been a pain. Who doesn’t get sick of filling in details and interests and photos, but lately having an up-to-the-minute status message seems to be the in-thing.
Networks like Facebook and of course Twitter started it, and now everyone seems to be adding them in. MySpace now has numerous Facebook-like features including the current status message, newsfeeds and applications.
With the news that Friendfeed has introduced the capability for users to create public and private rooms, I’ve decided to start a new social media experiment by starting the Make Use Of public Friendfeed Room.
The thinking behind it is this. When a Make Use Of story is published, I will put a link to it in the Friendfeed room. Everyone can then drop by the room, comment on the stories, chat to one another and generally have a jolly good time.
In spite of the availability of numerous social networks and some of them like Facebook and My Space being insanely popular, you may sometimes feel a need to have a network of your own where you decide what features it should have and you create the community rules. And thats when tools like Ning, Snappville and CollectiveX come into the picture.
Although there are about ten to fifteen such sites which offer you the facility to build your own social network, most of them aim at web developers and primarily offer the software platform to create the social network on it. Therefore we decided to pick the following three websites because creating a social network on them is extremely simple and can be done in minutes.
To me, the internet is the best invention since someone slapped a piece of cheese on a slice of bread, stood too close to the fire and subsequently discovered grilled cheese sandwiches. But the World Wide Web has the potential to get MUCH better when the average internet user actively participates in adding content to the web and validating what’s already there. Now I’m not talking about revising your My Space profile or updating the viagra offers on your website but instead taking part in some of the voluntary online projects or web services that are trying to “evolve the web” and make sense of what’s already out there. You only need donate a couple of hours a week which in itself would make all the difference. Here’s a snapshot of what you can get started with :
After getting my blog installed on Wordpress, the next step was to consider how to properly market it and promote it. One of my many thoughts turned to StumbleUpon, that giant monster of internet traffic, which is properly utilised, can turn you into the next Seth Godin (with hair preferably!).
But you don’t have to be a blogger or webmaster in order to appreciate and enjoy Stumbleupon. Anyone can use the site to enrich their internet using experience. With lots of different categories, groups and tools, StumbleUpon can change the way you look at the net - even someone as jaded as me who sees countless new pages every day in this job and finds it hard to be impressed with the Next New Thing.
Posted by makeuseof guest-writer Mark O’Neill
With all the hype surrounding Del.icio.us and Digg, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that they are other bookmarking sites out there on the Information Super-Highway. If you are a blogger, knowing about the “alternative” bookmarking sites can be very useful for spreading the word about your latest blog posts.
Some of the following services have niche subjects such as news or blogs, while others allow you to bookmark pretty much anything.
So, there are at least over 50 Social Bookmarking Sites and well probably hundreds of Social Media Sites and definitely thousands of Social Networking Sites, unfortunately most of them suck (I’ve tried and signed up for many). Big Time. I suppose there’s a niche site for every niche out there, but here is what I (still) use:
Social Networking:
1. Friendster - My “original” Social Networking web site (although apparently classmates.com is debated as the first) Friendster was the first, best designed as we know it today. Still a classic.
Youtube is another web application that has stormed the web and created a whole new global community. Youtube.com is the biggest online video sharing site, serving more then 100 million videos views daily. Around 65.000 videos added to the database daily.
So what can you do with it?
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website belonging to Yahoo that let’s you store, share and organize yours and discover others favorite links. While this may not sound very enticing as many people can simply store their favourites on their computers, there are two main things del.icio.us gives that your locally stored bookmarks don’t. Firstly, by storing your favourites on del.icio.us server you can access them anytime from anywhere as long as you are connected to the internet. Secondly, and most importantly it provides you an access to favourites of other del.icio.us users, and there are millions of them.
Digg.com is one of my favorite sites and so is for 800.000 (and growing) people that visit it on a daily basis. So, what is all the fuss about it?
If you visit traditional news sites regularly, you probably have experienced that a big portion of news you get either about something you have no interest in or just boring. Digg.com solves this problem by providing you only with news which were recommended by other readers. And it turns out to be just the right way
