TwitTruth – Twitter Lie Detector

Do you want to learn who is who on Twitter? Who are your new Twitter friends – promoters or engagers, what are chances they will respond to direct messages, what percent of their posts contains links, retweets, hashtags, etc.? Learn the truth at TwitTruth.com. It gives various statistics about Twitter accounts registered in TwitTruth.

You can add your account by simply logging in to Twitter and allowing TwitTruth to access your account. Also, you can invite other Twitter users to add their accounts.

One more interesting thing – on a home page of TwitTruth.com you will find a list of the top 500 Twitter users and statistics for their accounts. Go and learn the Twitter Truth!

Firefox 3.5 New Features and Useful Tips

In a year after the record braking Firefox 3.0, Mozilla releases Firefox 3.5 to make web surfing even faster and handier.

Here are the new features of FF 3.5 and tips how to use them:

Private Browsing: surf the Web without leaving a single trace. Start to browse privately by clicking  Tools > Start Private Browsing or Ctrl+Shift+P.

Forget About This Site: the option to forget about a particular web site you have visited that means all entries related to that site will be removed from your browser history. To forget a site, go to History > Show all history (or press Ctrl+Shift+H) and in the Library window right-click the site you want Firefox to forget about and select Forget About This Site.

Smooth Scrolling through Tabs: if you have a lot of tabs open, put your mouse on the row of tabs and scroll with the mouse wheel through tabs to easily find the one you need. Note that scrolling works only when you have so many tabs opened that the scrolling arrows appear on the right and on the left of tabs row.

If you have not so many tabs opened, you can try this shortcut for fast moving to the tab you need: press Ctrl + the number of tab you want to view, for example, Ctrl+2 for the second tab.

Location-Aware Browsing: Firefox 3.5 comes with a new location-aware browsing (geolocation) feature that is enabled by default. It identifies your location using your computer’s IP, Google’s random client identifier, etc. and share it with the websites that ask for location data. Don’t be scared, data isn’t shared without your permission. Any time a website asks for your location data, Firefox will show you a message so that you can choose whether you want to share or not to share geolocation data with this website. Settings you chose can be remembered for this site so that you shouldn’t click buttons every time you visit the website.

If you don’t like the idea to share your geolocation data at all, try more advanced way to solve the problem. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar, enter geo.enabled into the filter form. Double-click geo.enabled entry so that its value become “false”. Geolocation feature is now disabled for you.

Social Mention – a Real Time Search Platform

Real-time search is what everyone talks about and looks for nowadays. Are you not satisfied with usual organic search and want to have the latest news only in your search results? Try Social Mention search.

“Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information”.

The number of social media monitored by Social Mention is rather big – more than 80 including the most popular like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, Yahoo, WordPress, Technorati, etc.

Social Mention search is not very fast, but the results you get for every query are really up-to-date and rather relevant. Results can be sorted by date, source, and post rank; you can view results for a specified time only. As well as in Google, you can apply phrase search (”your query” – in quotes) to narrow your search and get the most relevant results.

Social Mention also provides social media alerts. They are much like well known Google Alerts, but for social media – free daily email alerts on selected search phrases. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for mentions of certain keyword and save your search results as CSV\Excel file.

Besides, you can get a kind of analysis of your search term popularity – you can see strength, sentiment, passion and reach values for each query. Also you’ll see the info about average time per mention, last mention time, unique authors, retweets, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, rank of the posts that mention your search term and sources where your term is mentioned most often.

Maybe, search results provided by Social Mention sometimes need to be more relevant, but I like the idea and believe  that Socialmention.com is a good implementation of real time search idea and it will be improved in the future.

iCal calendar on your desktop

iCalendar or iCal format for calendar data exchange was initially developed for use under Apple Macintosh operating system, and you can find tons of info how to show iCal on Mac desktop. Nevertheless, iCal calendar can be displayed on Windows desktop as well and there are short reviews of Windows desktop calendar tools that support iCalendars. They let you exchange iCal data between iPhone, iPod, Google Calendar or other web apps and your PC.

1. Desktop iCalendar – desktop calendar consisting of 4 widgets – monthly calendar, events, to-do list and weather widget. Allows to sync calendar and to-do list with Google calendar, exchange data with any device which use .ics (iCalendar) format.

2. Active Desktop Calendar – desktop calendar with appointments notes, tasks, alarms and contacts. Allows data exchange with Outlook and Google Calendar. Supports iCal and CSV formats for data import \ export.

3. Screen Calendar – desktop wallpaper calendar and reminder, shows small or fullscreen calendar for one or two month. Allows easy synchronizing events with MS Outlook. Supports iCal fully that lets you subscribe to iCalendar sources, import events from iCal calendars (including Google Calendar) to the desktop and export events to .ics files.

Google Squared – the New Shape of Search

Do you yahoo? Remember that question? In spite of all Yahoo efforts, “yahoo” hasn’t become the verb that means “search”. Everyone knows the word which means web search nowadays – it’s “google”. And now Google takes one more step towards leadership – the new search tool Google Squared released last week.

What’s great:

• search results are displayed as a chart which gives not only links, but also other related information. For example:
• rows and columns in a result chart can be added or removed. ‘Add column’ field suggests various parameters to add or allows to type your own.
• squares can be saved to your Google account and easily removed when they are not needed.

What can be better:

• amount of search results is extremely small in comparison with the amount for the same queries in usual Google Search.
• in most cases, column values for one item are taken from different websites that can adversely affect search relevance. Nevertheless, you can view other values for most parameters and choose the most reliable one.

Google Squared still needs a bit of work, but it has a potential to simplify and improve web search in the future.

Tips and tricks to customize WordPress.com blog

If you have a blog at WordPress.com, you know that inspite of all good features, WordPress.com customization is very poor. WordPress dot com doesn’t allow third-party widgets, doesn’t accept certain html tags, and so on, and so on. Still, there are some tricks you can use to add something interesting to your wordpress blog. This links collection is especially for you, my fellow wordpress[dot]com bloggers!

1. GetSocial – the best thing ever: easy adding social bookmarks buttons to WordPress.com

2. Free surveys and polls – a list of free services that will help you to add polls and surveys to your WordPress.com blog

3. Easy comments moderation – shortcuts for quicker and easier moderation of your WordPress.com blog comments

4. Easy post editing – keyboard shortcuts that will enhance your WordPress.com visual editor

5. Free copyrights for your blog – protect your content by adding free copyright

6. AddThis button for sidebar – how to use AddThis button in your WordPress.com blog sidebar properly

Hope you’ll like these links just like I do!

Firefox add-ons for Twitter

My favorite Firefox extensions for Twitter:

TwitterFox - maybe, the most popular of Firefox plugins for Twitter. This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets. Also it has a small text input field to update your tweets.

TwitterBar – allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small Twitter icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left.

Twitzer -a Firefox extension which lets you post text longer than 140 characters on Twitter.com.  It also shows you the true adresses of TinyURLs so that you are sure you are clicking on safe links.

TwitThat – post current page to Twitter via twitthat.com. The simple button sits in Firefox toolbar and enables you to twit current page in one click.

Social Whale – create short URLs for use with Twitter or any other service with just one click. Additionally you can upload images using the twitpic.com service.

TwittyTunes – allows to post your currently playing songs to Twitter with a click. You can also post the websites you’re visiting, videos you’re watching and regular updates.

Search Cloudlet – tag clouds inserted into  Twitter home-page, search page, profile page, favorites and even into public timeline. Also, on top of traditional simple tag clouds, Cloudlet adds various context-sensitive clouds, such as Author Clouds, Recipient Clouds and Hashtag Clouds. Also works with Google and Yahoo.

Twitter sidebars for Firefox:

Twitbin – allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar. Send messages, receive messages, share links, and more from Twitbin.

TwitKit – has a 6-section interface, using tabs to separate content. You can view the Twitter public timeline, your user timeline, a list of your friends and their latest tweets, a list of your followers and their latest tweets, @replies made to you, and stats about your account.

Enjoy your twits!

Coming soon: Firefox extensions for Digg, Reggit, Facebook, StumbleUpon etc. Stay tuned!

Firefox addons for sharing and social interaction

Social networks are on the peak of their popularity. How to make sharing in social media easier and faster? Use the best Firefox extensions for sharing and bookmarking content within social networks:

AddThis – one of the most popular sharing tools is now presented as Firefox plugin. By adding AddThis to your browser, you have all your social bookmarking and sharing tools at your fingertips. Share any page, anytime, with anyone.

Shareaholic – enables you to quickly, and very easily share, e-mail, bookmark, and blog links via a wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking, bookmarking, blogging, and e-mail services. Shareaholic supports over 40 services including Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Delicious, MySpace, Sphinn, etc.

Share This – makes sharing any online content quick and easy. The ShareThis plugin allows you to share text, pictures and video to any contact via email, IM, text message, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter and many more services. You can also store your shares for later or re-share them with the ShareThis ShareBox.

Social Media for Firefox – status bar that shows the number of Diggs, Reddit Votes, Stumble Thumbs and or Reviews, and Del.icio.us tags, Tweets, Sphinns, Mixx, and Tip’d votes so you can quickly see how popular certain content is. Also scans said social sites to show you what content hasn’t been submitted to other social news sites so you can be the first to add it.

Yoono – simplifies your social life on the web by centralizing all your social networks and instant messaging in one easy to use browser sidebar. Get all your friend updates automatically wherever you are on the web and update your status instantly across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more. Easily share these discoveries with your friends via your social networks.

Minggl – a social interaction manager. The Minggl toolbar makes it easy to manage information, communication, and navigation across (and independent of) social networks. Minggl works with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, Digg and… more soon.

SynergyShare – allows you to share any web page with over 50 social networking sites through the right-click menu. The only shortcoming is that SynergyShare is only compatible with Firefox 1.5 – 2.0.0.

Coming soon: Firefox addons for Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc. Don’t miss the next posts!

April’s most interesting and important news

What’s new this April?

1. Winamp 5.552 was released. What’s new:

• Improved iPod Sync Support
• New iTunesLibrary Import
• New Online Services Gallery
• New OurStage Radio Online Services
• New Spinner MP3 of the Day Online Service
• New Turkish, Romanian, and Portuguese Language Packs

2. Firefox 3.0.9 and 3.0.10 stability releases were delivered to fix some security and stability issues.

3. Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is available for download and testing. New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

* Beta is now available in 70 languages .

* Private Browsing Mode.

* Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

* The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.

* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

* Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

4. Facebook opened up its developer API stream that gave third-party developers an opportuniny to  connect to their users’ streams and let their users read their streams wherever they want. Now with the Open Stream API developers are able to create new applications and services with new user interfaces for the stream. One of the first examples of using the Open Stream API is Xobni – an Outlook plug-in which enables you to keep track of your social network activity immediately from the mail client.

5. Gmail presented two new features in Labs: suggesting new recipients while composing messages and easy inserting images into mails.

6. Hitwise company published stunning data about Twitter growth.

Twitter’s growth in Australia was 1,067 percent since the start of this year. The number of visitors to Twitter has more than tripled in New Zealand since the beginning of the year. Twitter’s share of online visits in the United States and Britain had increased by 570 percent and 621 percent respectively since the start of the year.

Vista Start Menu – an alternative to usual Start Menu

There are lots of various Windows enhancement softwares. Today we have the new version of one of them which can enhance Windows Start menu – a small yet powerful piece of software – Vista Start Menu 3.15. This program can become an alternative to usual Start menu, especially if you have tons of programs installed and therefore spend a lot of time looking for the needed program in your Start menu list.

The Start menu appeared in Windows 95 for the first time. After that only cosmetic changes were made in it and only in Windows XP there were first worth mentioning changes. The menu was expanded to two columns: the left column for installed applications, and the right one for access to user’s documents and system functionality. In Windows Vista, Start menu was also changed – there was added Search box. Nevertheless, no changes were made concerning the most important purpose of the Start menu – launching programs.

Do you need any changes in the Start menu? No, you don’t if you have only a dozen programs installed. If there are more programs, launching one program requires time directly proportional to the number of installed programs. The problem is partially solved by the Quick Launch Panel, but it also becomes almost useless when the number of programs increases.

Vista Start Menu software was designed exactly to solve this problem. There are some key features of the program:

• Program in the list always stay in their places and are easy to find because they are exactly where you left them. This reduces time spent finding the needed program.
• Start menu is resizeable and can be easily moved to any part of the screen.
• Keyboard shortcuts can be used to launch programs and to control the power. You can simply remember the shortcuts for the most often used programs and launch them in a few seconds.
• The icons of programs are displayed near their names, that cuts search time significantly. It’s much easier and quicker to find and recognize an icon than read a program name.
• An amazing feature is quick access to the Internet search directly from the Start menu. Usual Search box serves either for search (Google search or simple PC search) or as a run option. You may begin typing immediately when the Start menu is open and then simply use keyboard shortcuts or mouse to select what to do with the text you typed in – find on your computer, search in the Web or Run.

All in all, I seem this program to be a very convenient alternative to the usual Start menu for people who have many programs installed. Besides, the basic version is free (all the features I’ve mentioned above and a few others are included with the basic version), and the price of the Pro version is reasonable for the feature set it offers. So Start working with pleasure!

*For writing a review, materials from Vista Start Menu website were used