On 11.19.09, In iPhone/Android, by Matt Brian
You could have called me an iPhone fanboy, there are plenty of articles on WillINeedIt demonstrating the fact. I recently had the chance to take possession of a new HTC Hero, a Google Android powered phone, and I wanted to see just how well it stacked up against the mercurial Apple device.
I am a week in to my experience of being an Android phone owner and I think it’s safe to say I will be sticking with the open framework and ditching the restrictions and closed nature of the iPhone. I have found that the two devices are very similar and that most of the apps can be downloaded for both platforms.
There are quite a few Android Market list articles floating about on the web and I am going to add another one to the list. This article is for people who have recently moved from an iPhone and want to know just what apps will mimic the functionality of their old device, helping their transition from the walled garden of the iPhone to the glorious pastures of the Android operating system. All of the apps listed here will be downloadable from the Android Market, we will try to either link to the Market or the official homepage of the app itself.
Over the last couple of days you may have noticed an inconspicuous toolbar located at the bottom of every article on WillINeedIt. This toolbar is provided by the pioneering web based instant messaging company Meebo and will offer the functionality to log into your favourite instant messaging services anywhere on the site!
Not only will you be able to chat with friends on a multitude of different networks, you will be able to share images, videos and the pages themselves on Facebook, Twitter and Email as you browse the website using the impressive “Drag To Share” function. To take advantage of this, simply hover over the content you wish to share and you will be asked to drag the snippet to the location of your choice (shown in the screenshot below).
Users can also share content with their friends as they chat, again by dragging the specified image or video into the dialog box of the person you are chatting with.
On the far left of the toolbar is the option to share the website instead of particular parts of it. To take advantage of this, click the “Share Page” button (shown below).
We hope that you enjoy being able to read and share our content whilst chatting with friends, if you have any comments or suggestions, drop us a line in the comments section.
Website owners are starting to realise the impact that social media has on their traffic and site interaction but for some it can be a thankless task. Webmasters need to identify the best social networks to submit their content to but they also need to supply the tools so that their website visitors can submit also.
In one of our recent articles we mentioned how Facebook was making inroads into traditional social media sharing sites, standing out as a large traffic referrer on it’s own. Whilst, there are quite a few tools that enable you to share your content with friends on Facebook, one really simple and easy to setup button stands out for me, so much so it now sits pretty on this very site. This article details how to install a Tweetmeme-like Facebook share button onto your website or blog, giving your website visitors the opportunity to distribute your articles amongst their friends.
Facebook is a behemoth, harbouring over 300 million users, housing 40 million status updates a day and hosting 14 million new videos a month, it’s easy to see how the service has started to make inroads into the other media sharing services like YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr.
One of the most popular types of media shared on the website are photos, mainly down to the simple usability of the site and the fact you can add and tag photos of friends. This allows users to view lots of different user submitted photos, possibly from the save event from many different perspectives. With 2 billion photos uploaded a month, the proof is in the statistics.
There is one drawback of having being tagged in a set of photos from the same event you attended, you don’t physically have a copy of them. Sure you could sit there and download them, one by one, but that would take all day and night if it was a particularly big album. Luckily for those people who use the Mozilla Firefox browser, there is a clever little addon that allows you to download entire Facebook albums with the click of a button.
A few months ago, Facebook went the way of their competitors (Myspace, Bebo et al) and enabled it’s millions of users to personalise their Facebook profile by registering a unique username that could be directed to their personal profile page. These usernames, or what the internet media have dubbed “Vanity URL’s”, were snapped up quickly by internet savvy users but the service is still available for all today.
In a recent Facebook blog post, the company released information stating that users could now use their Vanity URL to log into their Facebook account, removing the need to enter an email address when wanting to access your account. Read after the jump, how to register your own Vanity URL if you don’t already have one and then how to access your account thereafter.
Some people have a love affair with Facebook, they use it to organise their lives and keep in touch with their hundreds, possibly thousands of friends. Others have an account to simply say they have one, they hate the idea of updating statuses and sharing their lives with people they don’t know.
There comes a time in every Facebook users life when they want to give Facebook the chop and delete their account. Most of these people think they have deleted their account but all they have simply done is deactivate it. This article shows you how to completely delete your account and everything associated with it.
If you are a regular reader of technology websites, you may have stumbled across this toolbar on your travels. Located at the bottom of these websites sits the Wibiya toolbar, an embeddable script that sits on top of your website and integrates services, applications and widgets.
The Wibiya toolbar has seen a massive rise in adoption, mainly because it is free, it can be added by placing a simple line of code on your site and does not require any hacking or coding to make it play nice with your website.
Just three days ago, we published an article on how Google had introduced social features to their online services. At the bottom of the article I mentioned how it was possible Google would push live new features without many people knowing it was coming, today they did exactly that.
Google Reader now has the option to share feed content via a number of different social networks. We will show you how to access this and have your feed reader setup to spam any number of different services.
Social networking, love it or hate it, has made it’s way into the big time. With technology evolving to keep people better connected, it’s the social networking services that are the tools that enable this to happened.
Perhaps the biggest and most well known is Facebook. According to Compete, Facebook attracted 121 million visitors in the month of June, the third most trafficked website on the internet. As the website continues to grow and more and more people sign up to the service, we thought we would prepare a little summary of tips that can help you get the most out of Facebook.
On 12.21.08, In How To, by Matt Brian
I have been a long time fan of Pidgin, using it on both my Windows and Linux systems. More recently I made the switch to Digsby, famed for it’s built in social network support and ability to handle emails, but after a couple of months using the application, I started getting weary of the increased memory and CPU usage, as well as the long load times.
So I came back to Pidgin. It loaded quicker, it supported more networks than before but it didn’t support one network I had become used to using more and more; Facebook Chat. Luckily for me, a quick Google search revealed a way to get Facebook Chat on my system.
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