tech2all.com » Reviews

Top 5 Social Blogging Tools

Ruhani Rabin — Sun, 09 May 2010 19:12:15 +0000

Each and every day social blogging become more and more popular among the crowd. There are plenty of web 2.0 tools that would assist you to get into social blogging. However it is not always a easy choice to select the appropriate tools for your needs. Before all of that, we need to simplify the meaning of social blogging..

Social blogging is a popular concept developed due to the advances of weblogging, micro-blogging, and social networking. These ever-changing constructions represent the new way of communicating for people who like to express their activities and share their common interests.

Source Wikipedia

Choosing the right social blogging tool varies from person to person. Because each individual has their own type of interests. This post is not necessarily directed to micro-blogging. There are tons of posts on twitter and so on.

Each social blogging tools offers various features which enables users to do web scraping and share it amongst their favorite social media platforms. Web Scraping includes features such as re-blogging content or part of a content and media captured from several sources.

Lets get down to the features of some major social blogging tools.

Posterous

Posterous made the simplest possible way to do social blogging. Excellent email to post, web scraping and blogging using the simple yet powerful bookmarklet made it an winner in this crowd. Widely used by beginner bloggers, casual bloggers and social media professionals. Able to collect HTML fragments, youtube videos, photos and even some audios from various websites. The simplicity of Posterous made it a power tool for Social Blogging. It also supports custom domain mapping, multiple contributors, themes, css customization and multiple blogs.

Web Scraping: ★★★★☆
Social Sharing: ★★★★☆
Hosting: ★★★½☆
Easiness: ★★★★½
Browser Bookmarklet Integration: ★★★★½

Examples: TweetDeck Blog, HolyKaw (AllTop), My Own Posterous.

Tumblr

Tumblr is another powerful and simple way to do social blogging. Features Email to post, web scraping and blogging using the simple yet powerful bookmarklet. Very widely used by designers bloggers, social media professionals. Powerful content creation options using various social networking sites. Able to collect/create HTML fragments, youtube videos and photos from various websites. The minimalistic artsy part of Tumblr made it a power tool for Social Blogging for beginners and designers. It also supports custom domain mapping, a large number of themes, css customization and multiple blogs.

Web Scraping: ★★★★☆
Social Sharing: ★★★½☆
Hosting: ★★★¾☆
Easiness: ★★★★☆
Browser Bookmarklet Integration: ★★★★☆

Examples: Twitter Media Blog, My Photo Music Tumblr Blog.

Amplify

Amplify is another power tool to do viral social blogging. Features excellent web scraping and blogging using the really powerful bookmarklet. Widely used for collecting content from various social media sites. Able to collect/create HTML fragments, youtube videos and photos from various websites. Powered by WordPress Multi User so it has common WordPress features. It also supports custom domain mapping and sidebar customization.

Web Scraping: ★★★★¾
Social Sharing: ★★★★½
Hosting: ★★★★☆
Easiness: ★★★★☆
Browser Bookmarklet Integration: ★★★★½
Examples: Vikash Yadav Blog, My Amplify Blog.

Soup.io

Soup.io is another power tool to do social blogging. Features are almost similar to Tumblr. The minimalistic artsy part of it a power tool for Social Blogging curators. Ability to Re-blog and inline content creation using various social networking sites included under the hood. It also supports custom domain mapping, a few themes, css customization and multiple blogs.

Web Scraping: ★★★★½
Social Sharing: ★★★☆☆
Hosting: ★★★½☆
Easiness: ★★★½☆
Browser Bookmarklet Integration: ★★★¾☆

Examples: Typography Soup, My Soup.io Blog.

Meemi.com

Meemi is a different type of social blogging platform developed originally at Italy. They provide a different approach to content posting and discovery. It might not be so easy to understand at the first glance, but it definitely worth the time spent.

Web Scraping: ★★★☆☆
Social Sharing: ★★★☆☆
Hosting: ★★★½☆
Easiness: ★★★½☆
Browser Bookmarklet Integration: ★★☆☆☆

Example: My Meemi Blog

This is based on my thoughts and experience. As you might notice I’ve just dropped out Yahoo Meme from this list. Do you know another one which is supposed to be in this list? Which one would you choose from these and Why? Please do share your thoughts in the comments.

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WebKlipper allows you to annotate any website and share it easily

Ruhani Rabin — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:30:39 +0000

There are times when you really like to comment on pieces of information from a web site. Usually what we do is copy and paste certain part of that website and email that to our friends or share with others. Having said that; it doesn’t solve all the issues of missing images and formatting problems. Then there came WebKlipper. Personally I found it the most easiest way of sharing interesting parts of websites. Lets take a look inside shall we..

What is WebKlipper?

WebKlipper is a highlighting tool for webpages. You can highlight sections of webpages on the internet. Your highlights gets saved with WebKlipper and you get a permanent URL to the same webpage. Once someone visits that URL, he/she gets to see you highlighted sections on the page.
You can modify your highlights any point in time. Once you do so, visors of your URL will start seeing your latest version of the modified webpage. What’s cools is that you can add comments on the page too. You can position the comment wherever you wish on the page. These get saved too; which means visors to your URL will get to see your comments on the page. Like highlights, you can modify the positioning and contents of your comments anytime.
Other than highlighting and commenting you can also extract content from any webpage using WebKlipper. This means that you can literally pull out anything from any webpage using WebKlipper. Once you do so, WebKlipper will generate a unique URL for the extracted content. You can share this URL with your friends. Once they visit the URL, they just get to see what you have extracted (minus all the clutter in the original webpage)

Now that’s something! I know about Posterous (In somewhat extent) and Amplify almost does the similar things but WebKlipper goes into another level of annotating a website itself.

What Made the Difference?

Able to share the clipped/commented website or extracted contents of the website with unique URL and
Notify the readers about the changes on clipped comments or websites

A sample annotated page:

WebKlipper Sample with Bar

The Basics of WebKlipper:

Get the extentions for your Browser or Enter the URL of the site you want to clip/comment/extract .. from WebKlipper site!
Go to a website you want to clip a comment or extract and use the browser WebKlipper toolbar. Alternatively there will be a toolbar if you go to a site using WebKlipper website.
Choose appropriate operations from the blue bar at the bottom of your screen
You can easily check and change all your clips from MyKlips panel

WebKlipper has widgets which you can easily integrate on your blog or web site.

Getting started with WebKlipper is very simple and it doesn’t even require an account! Here is a Sample page where you can see a comment with WebKlipper. I would recommend you to try it out!

What I would Like to See in WebKlipper:

Involve the social science..
Automatic posting with Posterous, amplify, facebook, twitter and even ping.fm
I couldn’t make the comments dialog change position with Chrome … maybe a system glitch?

Don’t forget to add your thoughts in the comments!

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Foller.me know more about your twitter followers

Ruhani Rabin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:18:26 +0000

Twitter is huge and everyday it’s becoming more popular in the crowd. Everyday from a geek to a carpenter uses twitter in many different ways to enhance knowledge, relationship and reaching a mass audience which eventually brings passive business. Today I am introducing another twitter tool called Foller.me. Foller.me is a creative and research initiative by one of my great twitter contact @kovshenin. Today is the live date of this product. So lets take a look at his startup.

So basically what does Foller.me do? In simple words it lets you know more detailed useful information about your followers. It’s a pretty short version of analytics of a twitter user to understand them and the tweets they mostly talk about, who mostly they connect to. Foller.me is a third-party Twitter service that renders instant detailed information about a particular Twitter user’s latest 200 posts. It would generally take hours of scouting and pulling together information from hundreds of posts to scrape up some sort of insight into the user’s topic interests on Twitter. Foller.me does this in a flash, providing 3 tag clouds which represent the user’s key topics on Twitter.

How does it work? Foller.me gets access to the profile of a user via the Twitter API, scanning all the public info and his/her latest 200 tweets. It builds up three tag clouds: topics, #hashtags and @mentions, based on the user’s recent activity, excluding all stop words.

You enter your desired username you want to know about and press enter

Foller.me will look up the user profile via twitter API in a blaze and bring out the
details, such as the users recent topics

Addition to that it will also scan and bring out recently used #hashtags, mentions
of other users (from RT and conversations)

For example let’s say you’ve received 25 new followers today and you cannot decide whether to follow back or not. You do NOT have the time to read 200 tweets on each of them, correct? Nevertheless, you can’t just follow everyone, since you’ll get unwanted tweets in your friends timeline. Here comes Foller.me into the picture: Just take a peek at his Foller.me profile and you’re done!

Best of all you don’t need to put your username and password OR you don’t have to signup. So why don’t you give it a shot and share your thoughts about it. Found a little bit more about the service. Don’t forget to check out the authors announcement too, that might be the place you want to give your response. It’s still early beta and there are much room for improvement, my thoughts would be Twitter OAuth integration.

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Twiddeo upload and tweet your videos

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:11:58 +0000

Everyday millions of users reaching each other using Twitter. It’s today, it’s trend and it’s now. Even for micro-blogging, users might want to share photos and videos included into their twitter posts. Now there is few other services that allows users to upload a photo to a site like TwitPic and create a short url for them to include it in their twitter posts. But how do you add a video, or upload a video and create a short url for it? Finally it’s possible via Twiddeo, they enables users to upload, capture or send video from their mobile phone and tweet about it together. Now thats something I wanted to see for a long long time. Twiddeo was first created as a proof-of-concept mash-up between the Twitter API and vSocial’s Social Media API. After receiving some great feedback from our users, they decided that it would be worthwhile to redevelop the UI, integrate some new features and really make it look spiffy.

The Problem:

Twitter post is limited to 160 characters, so it’s difficult to post a long link to a video. Only possible way to do it is to upload the video to any video hosting site such as YouTube and shorten the video direct link and paste it to twitter. A kind of hassle it is.
Twitter post only can contain simple links and text

The Twiddeo Approach:

Use your current twitter username and passwords to login to the site
Upload a video straight from your computer and tweet about it right from the Twiddeo site or
Record directly via your webcam and tweet about it or
Send an email from your phone including the video and Twiddeo will process and post it as a video and use the email subject as the tweet text
It automatically creates a short direct link for the video
It uses own flash video player
Enables you to embed the video with the player anywhere
Social sharing tools integrated
Comments on the video

Under the hood (Powered By):

Twitter API
The vSocial Social Media API
The vSocial Media Player
The Disqus Commenting System

Future Expectations:

I would love to see more video formats support
Interface and usability improvement or re organization
Make the short link shorter
More player features

Now lets take a look inside the site:

Standard Video upload Interface, Max 113 chars for twittering and rest is for the video link

Public Timeline view of the uploaded videos

The vSocial media player interface

Video sharing, Embed, Linking and Comments options

Twiddeo is still in early beta stage, please provide feedback to them and help them improve this handy little tool. I can see a lot of potentials for this application. I’ve just send and email with a video and it took few minutes to make the video encoded and tweeted you can see the video here. Why not give it a try by yourself? All you need is a twitter username and password. If you like to post your feedback via twitter you can add them into twitter too.

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Closr.it – Upload your high quality images and get a zoomable widget

Ruhani Rabin — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 05:35:00 +0000

ClosR, the simplest way to share and zoom your images.

Simple, easy and fast solution to help you in solving the common task of displaying images on the internet, more over if they are big images.Even though ClosR looks very similar to the product from Microsoft Labs PhotoZoom, yes I’ve written about it before. But Microsoft PhotoZoom uses silverlight instead of flash. Both of these products comes with high quality image streaming. Actually I meant when you zoom to a specific area, it streams that certain area, rather than downloading the whole image. Here are some shots of the product:

This is the standard view of the large high quality photo

This is a zoomed area of the high quality photo

Widget sharing options including Embed codes

Since it’s free, why not try by yourself and give us some feedback about the product. If you sign-up (free) then you can manage your images and widgets too.

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AlternativeTo – Lets you find better alternative applications for your OS

Ruhani Rabin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:30:42 +0000

AlternativeTo lets you Find better Windows, Mac, Linux and online applications. It is a new approach to finding good software. Select what application you want to replace and they will give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, they make each application into a category. It’s more like a forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you’re not satisfied with. And the “blog posts” are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes.AlternativeTo interface is simple and easy to use. Just select the application and you will be presented with a list and rating of Alternative applications for it. Beside that it’s pretty interesting to see the twitter stream about the selected application.

What I like about the site:

Clean and simple presentation
Easy navigation
Application Tags (Yeah it’s web 2.0)
Plain listing with ratings
Link to downloads/site
Web/Online applications listing

Take a look below to see some of the elements

Each alternative application includes ratings, likes, comments, twitter stream and new application suggestion options.

Check out AlternativeTo today, it’s free and doesn’t require registration. Don’t forget to let us know what you think about the site

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Photovisi have fun making your own Collage photo wallpapers

Ruhani Rabin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Photovisi is a web application that allows you to make your own collage photo wallpapers out of your photos and images. It’s a pretty straight forward application, just select a layout and upload the photos. Once you are satisfied, continue to download the wallpaper in your desired (currently 3 screens supported)screen format.Photovisi comes with a few preset layouts that you can choose from. The steps are simple and easy. No need to signup to the site.

What I’ve found useful

Easy and simple steps
Slick and simple interface
On the fly cropping of images
Import from Flickr
Sort the image list
Replace any image on the list

Photo manage options

What I would love to see

Custom layout options
Save and restore layouts and wallpapers (I know this one requires user sign-up)
More wide screen resolutions support for the generated wallpapers

Image preview before download

It’s fun and really easy to use. Why not try by yourself. It doesn’t cost a cent.

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Doorfly interesting concept for the home buyers to find real estate agents

Ruhani Rabin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:10:16 +0000

Usually in US when people want to relocate or want to by a new house they head over Realtor.com. Now that is not the end of the story, they need to find a real estate agent who is really trustworthy and dependable. Who will help them to look out for the new home, secure the best possible deals and continue with the process till the end. But it’s not that easy to find a real estate agent who fit their needs.

Doorfly.com came into the picture to help out people to find best agents according to their needs. Rather than calling up so many agents, Doorfly lets you find your agent who fits in their criteria. Convenient huh!When a buyer signed up at Doorfly they will be asked to fill up details like where they wanna live, desired home features/utilities, how much they are willing to pay and more. This will be posted on the site for the real estate agents to read and contact the person who wants to buy a house accordingly. These real estate agents are already the member of the site, they can also sign up like any other persons. In fact Doorfly acts similar to a agents directory too.

Image: The agents directory

Now what makes Doorfly really “Stands out of the crowd”? The real estate agents can offer an incentive rebate from their commission at closing to finalize the deal. Yes thats an awesome way to save up some money from the buyers point of view. The percentage of the incentive can run from 5% to 20% from an agents total fee.

Image: The auctions made by the agents

How does it really work?

Home buyers tell motivated real estate agents their home buying needs, such as location, estimated price, and desired home features.
Real estate agents then “sell” themselves, by showcasing their knowledge, experience and expertise AND offer an incentive rebate from their commission at closing.
Home buyers compare the offerings and choose an agent that best fits their needs. The end result – a qualified agent and some extra cash in the home buyer’s pocket.

Doorfly is still very new and they aren’t covering the whole of united states yet but it seems to me it could be a great comfort for the home buyers. Signup is free and it takes barely 2 minutes to sign yourself up. Have a look at it yourself? You should.. Just head over to Doorfly.com. Want to communicate or simply want to know more tips about home buying, don’t forget to check out their blog. It’s pretty informative.

Feel free to share your comments and thoughts it might help the application developers to make their application more stable, secure and useful.

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PizzaShare – Share your favorite pizza place and find other places

Ruhani Rabin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 06:56:21 +0000

Yet another smart and simple example of Google Maps API mashup. Pizzashare allow people to share pizza places that they are passionate about as well as see what other pizza places others are really into. This is a user generated database of the best pizza places in America, so you can always find a great pizza place to go to. Yesterday I was talking about JungleThingy which is similar but little bit more different approach of using Google Maps API.

The process is really simple, You type in the name and location of a pizza place you really like and think everybody should know about and then click the bubble then click share. The more people that share it the bigger the red dot gets therefore the more popular it is. If the place is not listed, you can help to add the place into the database and ask your friends to share that too.

Check out the site or check their blog for the latest news and happenings, since it is in a early alpha stage so your feedback and comments will be highly appreciated.

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JungleThingy – Search for Travel Books on Amazon using Google Maps

Ruhani Rabin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:30:52 +0000

JungleThingy is a mashup of Amazon web services, Google maps API and the power of javascript. Basically it’s a straight forward interface where you can see the Google map on the left side of the screen. You can click on the map to get a list of the possible locations at the middle box, these locations are being pulled according to the location you’ve clicked and once you’ve selected a location from the list, you will be able to see the books related with that specific geological location. These listing of books actually comes from the Amazon web services.

JungleThingy - select the location from the map and find the book related to the location

JungleThingy is created by Cartosoft, they are a innovative geospatial startup based out of Portland, Oregon. All of their products and services are based on Internet Mapping Solutions (IMS). They provide applications, tools, and services that enable a variety of users to view and analyze data on a map. Specialized in the process of web mapping APIs, such as those offered by Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth. They also integrate existing open-source solutions such as GeoServer.

Even though it is in a experimental stage, why not take a look at it and share your opinion.

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RetailFans.com – web 2.0 social networked shopping trends for women

Ruhani Rabin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:30:29 +0000

RetailFans.com might not be designed for the guys in mind but it will seriously catch the attention of a smart guy. Why? Because a smart guy can find out about the latest fashion trends about the urban women are craving about. Basically RetailFans is a website where people come together to share the latest in fashion, cosmetics, jewelry and anything else that takes their fancy. So you might find all the geeky glitter girls roam around this place and make their voice about the fashion products they like. Finally a place for the girls to have their own Digg about the latest fashion-ware. RetailFans.com is pretty straight forward and easy to use website. Simple but effective ajax integration for smoother operations experiences.

Anyone can submit an item they’ve found on another website and vote on items that others have submitted. Items with the most votes rise to the top of the list. This way, users of the site collectively determine the most interesting items. This site is build on a web 2.0 style architecture so you might find similarity to the concept of delicious and digg itself. Previously I’ve seen a slightly similar site called HerFabLife, you might wanna check that out too.

Every item has a discussion attached to it, so you can join in the conversation and share your thoughts with other fans.

And now lets take a look the features:

Digg a-like voting system along with list integration. Vote and become a fan of a product or Item and additionally add it to your list (which can be any list) for further consideration, these lists acts like categorized favorites
Share your comments on any product
Search and add products from around the web
Use a browser bookmarklet to easily add a product location while you browse any shopping site
Add multiple store locations for a product
Rate store locations, which locations are better and which are not, rank them
Web 2.0 style tag cloud of products

Screen Gallery:

This is the listing of the products, it can be by categories or by trends

The product details page displays information about the product, links to the store location, ratings and comments about the product itself

Look up a product from around the web using the search or simply put the web url of the product store location

This is a very simple example of your custom lists where you collect your favorite products

The tag cloud view might remind you about many social boomarking sites

From my own point of view this site can be a serious trend settler and a unique place to find products from different geological location. I would like to see a rating system for the products besides the number of fans option. Why not take a look at it by yourself and test it out. Registration and using the site is free and fast. Do you have your own opinion? Feel free to share.

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5pmPoker bringing the fun back into web 2.0 poker playing

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:33:20 +0000

When Alan Curtis requested me to take a look at the 5pmPoker.com which is a new free Ajax-based Texas Hold’em Poker playing site. Honestly, I was confused about myself for a moment. Sorry to say it but I don’t know how to play poker, I’ve only have the technical idea of the game. But the thrive to explore the technology behind it, I couldn’t resist to peek a look at it. Yes they have proven that a web based game can be fun and interactive even it is not using flash. I was surprised with the site features, application and graphics. The site is not about gambling, its about having fun and being able to play with family and friends using friendly-looking characters while learning the game. The browser-based game was developed using the Google Web Toolkit, while the illustrations and animation elements were drawn by one of the regular artists of MAD Magazine (DC Comics), Tom Richmond. You will get the feel of the graphic once you are there. Tom’s incredible work was matched by his professionalism and understanding of the requirements in the digital workspace.

The site features public tables with up to eight players and varying chip stakes. It also has the Internets only tournament-on-demand feature, where players can start heads-up tournaments at any time with different chip rewards for the top three finishers. There is a chat feature so players can communicate directly with each other, and a side panel shows the probability of your hand winning and the likelihood of hitting each of the possible poker hands. Why not we take a look the features this site is giving you for free.

Features:

Rich javascript powered interface, it’s not only slick; it’s total fun. Don’t you ever get tired of Flash based games
Built and powered with the power of Java and Google Web Toolkit (GWT) javascript engine
Capable of playing with 2 – 8 player in a table
Rich graphics and character cartoons, they are simply awesome
Tournaments on demand, Public tables and Private tables options
Communicate between players via integrated chat
Probability panel for checking your hand winning and the likelihood of hitting each of the possible poker hands
Less ads, I’ve only noticed a few google adsense ads

The Screen cast (Yes pictures always says a thousand words):

Range of tables to Join in the game, Also you will notice the Tournaments and Private tables tab where you can select your game accordingly.

This is a sample public table where you can join and sit in. As you can see the graphics are pretty interesting

Another view to the table while observing

People behind the Scene:
5pmPoker.com is developed an managed by Digital Beach Software located in Southern California and Honolulu. The company was started by Alan Curtis and John Randall, two software industry veterans and creative innovators. Curtis has been developing software for 20 years, he most recently spent 5 years as Chief Technical Officer and two years as head of Corporate Development at Peerless Systems, a NASDAQ-listed public company. Similarly Randall has been developing software for 20 years and is an alumni of Apple and E-Trade. Randall specializes in the design and development of interactive web applications with an emphasis on creating innovative GUI experiences.

Well I guess you have enough of the information. I can just add 2 cents that this site just bring up the fire inside me to learn the game. You might not take my word as granted so take a time out now and head to 5pmPoker.com to make yourself believe. Creation of account is free along with fun provided.

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TweetBoxLive beta enables international SMS service with twitter account

Ruhani Rabin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:11:56 +0000

I’m not sure whether you’ve noticed recently Twitter is not accepting SMS posts from many asian countries. So what if you are on the road or in a party and you want to update your status on the twitter, better yet you might want to direct message someone or reply to a status. A few days before I was trying to SMS an update but I’ve seen the SMS get delivered to the twitter post phone number, but the tweet doesn’t appear in the twitter profile. After some researching finally I came across TweetBoxLive Beta, a little web application allows you to update your Twitter status along with direct messages and replies using SMS to a specific number. Now thats more like it. TweetBoxLive also enables you to receive tweets in you mobile phone via SMS, but it seems pretty expensive to receive twitter updates from friends. First of all lets take a look at the features TweetBoxLive is offering.

Features:

Send updates from your phone using SMS even Twitter doesn’t accept it from the country you are staying
Send direct messages to users using SMS
Send reply to a user using SMS
Long list of supported countries
Use your current Twitter user account to register
Select your friends you want to receive SMS updates (yes this can be seriously handy)
Search for a specific friend you want to receive SMS updates (yep this is handy too)
Post updates to twitter using the web interface
Purchase credits using Paypal to receive tweets, replies and direct messages via SMS

Now here is the application with screenshots so you can have a look into it:

This is basically the web application interface

A long list of supported countries

You can register using your tweeter account information

Overall settings for receiving tweets, direct messages and replies

Setup preferences for a list of friends to enable direct messages, tweets and replies to your phone

Search for a specific friend to setup preference for that person, it's really helpful if you have a long list of friends

Credit purchase options for receiving tweets, direct messages or replies to your phone via SMS

And finally here is a tweet published which I've sent a SMS to the TweetBoxLive service phone number

Well for the Instance the pricing option for receiving tweets SMS to your phone is pretty expensive. I’m hoping they will reduce the prices in future.

So how do you send an update using SMS. First of all, you need to send a message to the TweetLiveBeta service phone number which you will find once you sign up to the site and logon. It’s located under settings page, if you do not send the verification message then your device will not be registered with the service. You need to send a SMS message using the text (sample only, real verification number contains alpha numeric characters) “Tweet M verifciationcode” to a number +447797800300. As you can see from the telephone number this site is hosted and located at United Kingdom. Once you verify your device, the settings page should display ACCOUNT:ON text. Well you are good to go now.

Send your tweets like this – “Tweet This is my twitter message“, yes you need to prepend the text Tweet with a following space. Then send the message to +447797800300

If you want to send a direct message it would be like – “Tweet D username This is my direct message“, yes you need to prepend Tweet D username, where username is the person you are sending the tweet to. Then send it to +447797800300

Sending replies are similar too, as example – “Tweet @username Here is my reply“, yes it follows the similar way you post a reply at twitter itself. Like before send it to +447797800300.

Note that standard international carrier rates applied when you send a SMS update to the number +447797800300. If you are sending the SMS from Japan to UK the rate of the SMS will follow your local carrier costing.

Ok, thats more of it. Now it’s time for you to do a test drive on it. Sign up here, It’s free.

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GTDAgenda – productivity web application to let you accomplish your goals and get your things done

Ruhani Rabin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:41:08 +0000

Would you like to use a productivity application, to organize your activities, in work, business, or personal? Such as GTDAgenda web based productivity development tool. It’s a web project and task management application based on David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done), pretty obvious though. It has the usual features like Projects, Contexts and Next Actions. But also other unique features: Goals & Vision Wall. What are the Goals? Goals are bigger outcomes you want to reach, with a deadline. A goal can be accumulation of multiple projects. On the other hand the Vision Wall is formed of inspiring pictures that you can link to your goals, and have them delivered to your e-mail daily so you are motivated to take action. Pretty neat. Checklists – For the repetitive tasks that you have to do, on a regular basis – take it as a to-do list. In fact GTDAgenda is not that new, it came out beginning of 2008 and still improving itself along the way.

GTDAgenda is available in few price flavors excluding the free version. There are subscription plans starting from $4.45 / month (or $39.45 / year), up to $7.95 / month (or $69,95 / year). So what is the free and paid plans offer? The Basic plan, which starts at $4.45 / month (or $39.45 / year) gives you 10 goals, 30 projects, 30 contexts and 30 checklists, it also includes the Schedules and Calendar sections and doesn’t include any third-party ads. The free version is supported through advertising. The Premium plan, which starts at $7.95 / monthly (or $69,95 / year) gives you unlimited goals, projects and checklists along with all other features described above.

Feature Set:

Active workflow object interface
Vision wall, an image oriented display of your visions which actually consists of your goals. It’s not dynamic but it’s motivational
Goals Archive feature
Calendar view
Highly configurable Checklists or to-do lists
Daily email to motivate you with your goals, projects and tasks compilation
Goals can contain multiple projects
Projects can contain multiple tasks
Create tasks based on contexts or you can say by topics
Daily and weekly scheduler
Calendar Events, appointments and meetings
Immediate display of upcoming actions/tasks
Total mobile version is available for hand held devices such as iPhone

Lets take a look at the pathway of using GTDAgenda. GTDAgenda consists of Goals as I’ve said it’s the bigger picture. Lets take a look at a scenario for Instance. I named the goal as “Increase Online Revenue”. So to complete this goal I will need to sort out my projects, as example one of my project under this goal is “Build Loyal Readers” and I’ve set it as a approximate 1 months long. The projects are contains of various tasks, for example I’ve few tasks called “Build Contacts in Facebook”, “Build Contacts in Twitter” and “Interaction with Online Contacts”. These three tasks are part of my project. Now I’ve to sort out the to-do list or checklist I need to do in a recurring basis which will help me to build the tasks I am going to achieve. This is also the same with Schedules and Calendar events. Well schedules are defined into 2 types which are “Daily Schedule” and “Weekly Schedule”. Think of it as the tasks needed to be done in a daily or weekly manner, on the other hand Calendar Events such as appointments and meetings which are specific to date and may tie to specific context or project. Ok, Now I have checklists/to-do list which i need to accomplish, for example “Publish new Blog Entry”, “Share Blog Entry with Twitter Contacts” and “Share Blog Entry with Facebook Friends“, so I fill up specific details for all this to-do lists. Then I’ve created a daily schedule called “Check Google Analytics Data”. Moving on to the Calendar events, I’ve added a meeting calendar event with my local facebook friends called “Hangout with Local Facebook Friends & Share thoughts about your blog”. So this is the stuff basically I need to accomplish to achieve the goal of “Increase Online Revenue” because I need loyal readers for my blog, and the more readers I will increase my online revenue. To do so I need to build a loyal reader base by building, interacting and socializing with online contacts and if possible offline contacts too. Also I need to build interactions via my check listed items by doing them in the regular cycle. And last but not least I need to check my Analytics improvements too.

Now as you see the project pathway, you can see it in real example screen cast below.

Goals management screen allows you to define, process and set parameters to your Goals

Projects management screen allows you to manage and perform specific actions to your projects

Creation of a task which might associate with a project and Context

The task management panel, allows you to perfrom modification and actions

Checklists are like to-do lists but in GTDAgenda checklists are highly configurable and comes with a checklist performance chart

Schedules are actions that you need to perform daily or weekly, also allows you to perform actions on the scheduled items

Calendar events helps you to setup meetings, appointments or events

So far I’ve described the benefits of this product but as usual not all products have only benefits. So lets talk a little bit about the future expectations from this product:

Features that should be there:

More usability, general users might find the interface a bit too complex to operate
User Interface improvement, fancy Icons and more web 2.0 look, css optimization and re-organize color palette is seriously necessary. I’ve notices serif and sans-serif font types and size mixes. Need a overhaul of typography sizes too
More spacing between objects and make the important objects focused
Ajax implementation, implementation of Ajax frameworks which can dramatically improve the user experience and peace of mind
Step by step interface model might help a novice user to accomplish their goals easily
More generous prices would be really nice

GTDAgenda is a really featureful, useful and promising web application for productivity. I would love to see more out from this application in future. I definitely want to use this application in a everyday basis but as I said I would like to see the Interface improvement for sure.

Maybe you might have different points about the application. Why not share it with us. Get a free account from GTDAgenda and feel free to share your thoughts. It also helps the developers of the applications to make their application better.

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WOT – protecting you against scam, phishing, spyware and dangerous websites

Ruhani Rabin — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:07:56 +0000

There are literally uncountable websites around the world. How many sites you can suspect while there are few hundred thousand of sites to steal your identity, do phishing and harm your computer or even worse. You might say hey I have an Anti virus or personal firewall installed in my computer and I am secure. But in that case you’ve spend enough money to secure your computer. Nevertheless not every time an anti virus or firewall software can detect a fake or low privacy site. Previously I’ve tried to use SiteAdvisor from McAfee the popular anti virus maker and Internet Explorer’s Phishing site checker but honestly both of them didn’t really fit my expectations. Then recently I’ve introduced to WOT (Web of Trust) software from one of my online contacts. WOT is a Mozilla recommended security add-on that also works with Internet Explorer and has been downloaded 3 million times. WOT addon warns you about risky websites to help you avoid spyware, browser hijacking, identity theft, phishing and other Internet scams. WOT is a user contributed site checker and comes with a huge database of known sites. This software comes in a flavor of plugin for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, the 2 most used browser on the globe. It represents the safety marks in a ring format. Dark green is most safe and Dark red represents no safety at all. The colors are designed in Human behavior so it takes a less than a second to understand it. As long we understand Red light is No Go and Green light is a Go. Lets take a look at the features this product offers for Free:

WOT have website rating information on over 21 million websites that is updated continuously by the user community and trusted sources such as listings of malware and phishing sites.
Instant automated site checking while browsing the web
Provide detailed accurate details about the site you are browsing
Allows registered users to rate a website
Keeps and displays site security scorecard details online such as Trustworthiness, Privacy rate, Vendor reliability and Child safety scores.
Registered users can comment on site profiles
Search your favorite site ratings via home page search option
Registered users are able to change and customize the behavior of the WOT software
Easy colored rings to instantly display the appropriate security rating of a website
Integrate with your search engine results display so immediately you get the security rating of a website. Results are shown on Google, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, Wikipedia, digg and many other sites.
Customizable settings for Child Safety options
Dynamic and Static widgets for your website and blog to display the security score of your website
User Contributed Ratings for sites

Well this is not all of course. Lets take a look at real life screen shots of this product.

Displaying a site rating scorecard

Displaying a site ratings popup

Customization and setup options panel

Displaying risky sites in a search result

Displaying a popup while accessing a risky website

Displaying safe sites in the search result

Last but not least sign yourself up with WOT to enjoy maximum protection. At the same time you can share and contribute your ratings about websites and let the database grow. Get a WOT badge for your website or blog.

Ways to get in touch with WOT team and updates:
Via Twitter
More Screen shots at Flickr
Watch Videos at Youtube