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Nowadays, it seems that everyone’s sharing pictures all the time on Facebook and Instagram. It only takes a few seconds, and everyone you know can keep up with your life. However, it’s not quite so simple when you have to share those photos with people who are not on any social network. One way to share the photos with them would be to email them every day or upload them on cloud storage services like Dropbox , but that’d be a very annoying task, and the majority of us would forget one day or another.
The solution to this simple problem is PicDigest, a handy service that allows users to automatically send the photos they upload on Facebook or Instagram to people who are not registered on these websites. Want to turn your photos into a quite nice little email newsletter? Here’s the app for you.
When I first started to use Twitter about three years ago, I saw it more as a social tool, a place where I could let people know what I was up to and see what my friends were doing as well. It took me a good five months or so to truly realize how powerful Twitter could actually be and how beneficial it could be for me. I finally understood that it was more than just a place to tell people what I just ate, but it was a way where I could almost instantaneously get news and breaking stories on just about any topic that was going on in the world.
Fast forward a couple of years, and Twitter has continued to evolve. Not just the app itself, but the way that Twitter is used has changed. Take, for example, the hashtag. At first, it was a nice way for us to label tweets as we wrote them. But over time the hashtag has become a powerful way to aggregate tweets and to cut through the noise.
Now, there’s apps built fully around Twitter hashtags, such as Tagboard. Tagboard specializes in this and is able to hone in on making hashtags even more powerful than they already are.
If there’s one web app that always manages to stir up controversy, it’s Facebook. The world’s largest social network has slowly gotten most of us used to sharing our personal information, locations, pictures, the apps, movies, books, and music we like, and the things that are going on in our lives. Most recently, Facebook has tied all of the likes and personal info we’ve all put into Facebook together, and turned it into the powerful, yet somewhat creepy Graph Search.
Redefining what sharing means with each passing generation hasn’t been without its set of problems. Almost every time Facebook releases a major change, you’ll hear people adamantly declare that this time, they’ll really quit Facebook for good. Then, before long, that dies down, and everyone’s still on Facebook. Google Trends captures this, showing peaks of interest in quitting Facebook after major changes, with a gradual increasing interest in it overtime.
Facebook may not be the most popular brand network – Twitter seems to have stolen that crown, as we saw during the Super Bowl – but Facebook has remained the place where we, well, connect with friends online. Are you still using it, or has the introduction of Graph Search scared you off?
If you’ve ever quit Facebook, or plan to, we’d love to hear your story!
If you use Facebook, chances are you’ve written about what’s going on in your life, RSVP’ed for events, liked your favorite groups, posted photos, and more. You might have your education, employment, relationships, religion, and favorite quirky quotes listed for all the world to see. If you’ve tagged photos with location and people, you’ll have quite a clear record online of the people you spend time with and the places you’ve been. Or, you might just have a history full of spamming your friends for help growing carrots on your flourishing fake farm.
Either way, there’s a ton you can find out about yourself from your Facebook profile, data that’s sitting there ready to be mined. It used to take going to each of your friends’ profiles to find out this info, but with Facebook’s new Graph Search, it’s just a click away. We’ve just gotten access to it, so here’s a quick look at the newest iteration of the world’s most popular social network, and how it might affect the way you use it. (more…)
Over the past couple of years I have built a pretty solid, interactive group of people on both Facebook and Twitter, including close, personal friends and others that I have met through various opportunities. I appreciate the most that I can throw out an idea or question to my friends on both networks, and I can usually get a wide range of responses. Sometimes you get recommendations from someone that are just awesome ideas, while others confirm that your original hunch was correct. Either way, you’ll end up with a ton of things you want to try out.
With the new year arriving, I started to make some lists for myself and our family, goals that we want to see ourselves accomplish over the next year. As I started down this process, I was making all kinds of lists, and remembered an app called Well.io that helps you create lists with a social twist. The gist behind Well.io is that you create a list and have others help contribute to it, which lets you get ideas from friends in a more structured format than what I’d been doing.
I will be perfectly honest and say that I am not the best when it comes to buying gifts for people. I tend to not know what to buy or am too lazy to go out and shop. With Christmas coming up, I dread even going within a 100 feet of a mall if I don’t have to. I like to do all of my Christmas shopping online if I can.
Well, now there is a new way to give a gift to someone that you love or just want to surprise: Treater. It’s a web app that integrates with your Facebook account and gives you the opportunity to purchase and send gifts electronically. At first, I was a little skeptical by it, but when I tried it out it actually worked okay and I can see something like this being the future of gift giving. Let’s take a look at it.
Instagram was one of those iPhone apps that was easy to use, gave you a way to share your precious moments with others, and quickly gathered an impressive fan base that couldn’t quit sharing their love for the app. In fact, just last April, Instagram was so hot, that Facebook decided to buy the company for $1 billion. Now talk about a pay day; that is unbelievable for company that just produced a simple camera app for the iPhone.
But, if you are an avid Instagram user, you always knew that something was missing. The fact that they made it so hard for you to access your pics on the web and to interact and see other friend’s Instagram photos was just a little strange to me. Before they sold to Facebook, I had always thought that they were sitting on a gold mine if they could successfully launch the web side of their app. Well, the day has finally arrived when we can now look at our pics online and have the ability to interact with others. I want to briefly show you around the new profiles on the web as well as talk about what could possibly lie ahead for the future of this app.
Ever find you’d like to share a bit more than your Facebook status update or Tweet will let you? Perhaps you’d be interested in writing more long-form content, or sharing more context with your images, but you don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up a blog. You have a story to tell, and you don’t want to have to figure out 50 thousand settings to just write and share what you wrote with your social network friends. And if you discover other great stories from other people in the process, that’s great.
Sounds like you need Storylane. It’s the latest twist on an almost-blog app that feels more like a social network. Similar to Tumblr, but even simpler, it lets you have the space to tell your full story, not just 140 characters of it. And it’s rather fun to use, too.
Facebook may be the world’s most popular social network, but it’s sure not universally loved. You can go anywhere and see people using it on everything from ancient XP desktops in IE6 to iPhones and Android smartphones, and odds are you’re a member of it right now. But then, it’s also likely not the app you’d think of first when you think of beautifully designed apps you love to use. We use Facebook because everyone else does, and after all, it takes a village to make a social network actually social.
Every time something changes on Facebook, you hear people complaining that this is the last straw and that they’re planning to leave Facebook for good. Then, weeks later, you get an email that the person you heard complaining just tagged you in a picture. On Facebook. My fiancé and I have joked many times about leaving Facebook, even though we started dating though it. And of course, we’re still on it.
Facebook’s taken over casual emails, and has wisked away the chat market from IM and Yahoo! Messenger, but even at that, it’s hardly the only game in town. We all could cancel Facebook if we really wanted to.
That’s the question: do we really want to?
Have you canceled your Facebook account, or do you still enjoy using the world’s largest social network? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Jump back in time eight years and one of the biggest sites in existence was Digg. It was a new approach to news sharing which revolutionized the way in which many people used the internet. After gradually sinking into relative obscurity, Digg is back and it’s better than ever.
Despite the fact that this is a relaunch following the recent acquisition by Betaworks, the site is still known as Digg v1. There is a completely new look to the site which has gone for a far more visual approach to things but there’s a lot more to explore.
