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Facebook’s Asking Questions
Facebook has a way of balancing good and bad… or maybe I should say distracting us with something good when something bad is actually happening. With all the privacy uproar going on recently, Facebook has just come out with a pretty cool, new feature to make us forgive them.
Similar to Yahoo! Answers, Facebook Questions lets you ask a question about anything and direct it toward your Facebook community. There will be a new “Ask Question” button on the homepage that gives you easy access to the Questions feature. Even though this sounds an awfully lot like Yahoo! Answers, there are a few characteristics to set it apart.
Let’s say you have a picture of the amazing cake at a party you recently attended. And man, you really liked that cake. But you wish you had the recipe… Well you can post the picture of the awesome cake on your Facebook with a question attached like “Did anyone get the recipe to this delicious confection?” Maybe the host of the party will let you in on their culinary home run. This scenario leads me to think of other examples that might be in the future of this feature. Think Texts from Last Night meets Facebook… Eek!
Anyway, another advantage of this Q&A is the large pool of voters you’ll have. Asking an opinion question like “Should I go see Inception? Or save my $10?” I know, I know. I don’t see how you’d get two sides to that argument either. However, asking any kind of multiple answer question on Facebook will allow you to do a little polling. Facebook has 500 million users, remember? That is quite a sampling pool to pull your conclusions out of.
You can also use the Facebook tagging feature within questions maybe to direct your question at someone specific or to narrow your audience (or to compare cuteness of friends). Facebook also allows you to follow a question from its birth to its end. That way you’re not left wondering forever what the answer was. You will also be able to browse through Facebook questions by category. Categories have to do with the topic of the question. Or questions can be sorted by author.
Happy Facebook questioning!
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Solar Powered Laptop with Surprising Price Tag
Tablet, touch-screen, solar powered, 9 inch screen… All of these words would lead you to believe I’m talking about a solar-powered iPad, or something equivalent. You probably would never guess that I am describing a new $35 laptop developed in India.
Yes, it has a 5, 7, or 9 inch touch screen with battery and solar power capabilities. And a $35 price tag! Just last year America came out with a $100 laptop to be used in the non-profit One Laptop One Child program. Now, India wants to help in the push to better educate the developing world. Currently, the developers are looking for a partner to mass produce the product and make it available to developing countries. They also hope that through mass production, the price will be driven down to as little as $10.
The computer runs on a form of Linux OS and comes with Web access, a PDF reader, media player, among other features. One down side is how it doesn’t have any storage space. So you would have to save files to a memory card. The solar powered aspect gives it an advantage for potential owners in developing nations because owners might have limited access to charging.
This could be a huge opportunity for developing nations if everything pans out accordingly. The major step to getting out of a poverty stricken area is education, and increased access to the Internet and technology would definitely help educate the masses.
Read MorePosted by Angela | 6 Comments
Check Your Tone Before You Send that Email
We have all experienced the humiliation of sending a slightly rude email to get the attention of the reader only to realize later that the problem you were blaming on the reader was in fact just a miscommunication. It’s embarrassing. (I’ve done it one too many times.) Well, Lymbix is trying to fix that problem with a new “Tone Check” tool. Still in beta version, ToneCheck will tell you when your email is being mean. This program will analyze your connotation in an email just by clicking a button.
Let’s look at an example of how ToneCheck works:
Here I started an email to the Keystone information email address about a broken email account. As you can tell from my language, I am pretty upset. Email is important to me and obviously I do not like when it is not working. But then I click the ToneCheck button before I send my email just in case I’m too harsh.
Well what do ya know, ToneCheck says I’ll make the reader feel humiliated and shameful. Instead of just labeling my language as generally negative, ToneCheck identifies a range of emotions when it describes your sentences. The range goes from friendliness, enjoyment, amusement, and contentment to sadness, anger, fear, and humiliation.
ToneCheck lets you edit sentences that it finds offensive in any way. Here, you can see I’ve tried to edit my sentence, but I guess I’m still being a little too firm because the system finds my connotation to be angry. I’ll try one more time to get it right…
There we go! I finally got a “contented” verdict after having to use the word “please.” Then, I’ll hit the accept button and my original sentence in the email will be replaced with this last one.
ToneCheck is a pretty interesting tool, and I can see it being very useful for people who are known to send off messages in the heat of the moment. A few flaws I found in the system were how it seems to clump firm sentences in with the “angry” label. I don’t think my second sentence up there was very angry. I was just stating a fact that I have a problem with my email. I had to use the word “please” just to get “contented,” not even “friendliness.” Also, when the program finds my sentences offensive it doesn’t give me any kind of suggestions. That may be something the developers should look into when moving it out of beta.
Despite these minor shortcomings, ToneCheck is a much needed program in the world of email. And if you know anyone who needs a little censoring on their emails, just forward them this post and they’ll get the hint.
Read MorePosted by Angela | 2 Comments
The Best and Worst of Online Tools
We took an office-wide survey of most useful, and un-useful, Internet tools to provide you, the reader, with a reliable reference list of online tools. These tools are mostly free downloads and are only a click away.
Keystone’s Favorite Web Tools:
Netvibes – Part RSS reader, part start page, Netvibes gathers the feeds of all your favorite websites together in one place so you can instantly see new reading material without clicking through bookmarked sites. Netvibes also acts as a home page that you can customize to show only what you want to see. You can add a weather widget, your Twitter feed, a Facebook feed, email widget, etc. It provides one-stop-shopping for your Internet news needs.
WuFoo – This form builder is not a free service but takes the hassle out of online forms. They offer all kinds of tools around a basic form building outline. Wufoo can even provide payment integration into your form.
TweetDeck – One of my personal favorites, TweetDeck is a Twitter management tool that allows you to update your Twitter and spread that update across Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleBuzz, Foursquare and more. This is a great tool for any business trying to break into social media marketing. It puts all of your social media on one platform.
Flickr – Flickr is a free photo hosting service to store your photos and edit them with Picnik online. Flickr also allows for photo sharing and it’s all free.
FileZilla – Free FTP program to transfer files from one computer to another through the Internet. Easy and free, this FTP program is perfect for a quick file transfer.
Support Details – SupportDetails is a very helpful service that instantly tells you the specs about your computer that your tech will need to know. For example, it will tell you what your operating system is, DNS stuff, etc. Not free, but awesome. It provides information on domain names and domain records as well.
PopScreen - This video bookmarking service lets you sign up and drag the PopScreen icon to the top of your browser… Then, whenever you see a video you like that you want to watch again later, just click that browser button and it’s added to your bookmark list. Outstanding.
Tumblr - Blogging boiled down to its simplest form. Also, the Tumblr community allows users to “reblog” any Tumblr post they like and it will appear on their own blog. Then you can view most “Tumbled” blog posts of the day or week, etc. Also, with tons of smartphone apps, your tumblelog can be updated very easily from your phone.
Google products – Google products include mostly free products and services that are as good or better than competitors that cost money. Analytics for site stats. Checkout for online payments that has special . Calendar (with sharing). Gmail (kicks all other free email’s butts). And gTalk for inter-office text, voice, or video chatting.
AdBlock Plus – AdBlock Plus is a Firefox extension that detects and then blocks ads on web pages.
Pandora – It is just fantastic. Lets you listen to the music that you really want to hear by creating personalized radio stations. Not only is Pandora free, it also suggests other music you might not have heard before.
Hulu – Hulu may not be the best for your workday, but we couldn’t forget it in our favorite online tools. Hulu gives access to online TV show streaming and some videos for free.
YouTube - YouTube might be more of a distraction for some of your fellow co-workers, but we think it deserves “best online tool” status. Not only does YouTube have tons of entertaining, random vidoes, but it also has tutorials and informative videos on almost any topic. Try your favorite video in XL.
WordPress – WordPress is free blogging software that is robust, always improving, and feature-rich. Plus it’s very easy to figure out.
Keystone’s Least Favorite Web Tools:
StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon is a Firefox extension that shows you random web pages based on the category of pages you choose. You can vote each page up or down and eventually, you’re on there so often that it begins to know what kinds of random sites you like to look at. We think this tool is entertaining if you like looking at random pages of the Internet, but it’s mostly just a time-waster.
Foursquare - What’s the point of “checking in” at different locations? So people know where you are every second of the day? We think Foursquare and any other mobile “check-in” service is a little too stalker enabling for our business.
LinkedIn - Even though most of us have one, LinkedIn has provided very little results for us. Twitter and Facebook are starting to provide more business connections than the “professional network” that is LinkedIn.
Delicious - This bookmark manager is good for scoping out the hottest websites right now, but not one we’re going to sign up for. It may be good for organizing bookmarks if you can’t organize your own bookmarks, but we don’t like the idea of other people looking through our bookmarks.
Yammer – Yammer is just like Twitter, a micro-blogging social network, except just within your company. This might sound like a great, innovative idea to some people, but we think Yammer is just unnecessary. Why would you update your Yammer when you could just send a gTalk to someone across the office in real time? For Yammer to be successful, all your co-workers must be logged in on all workdays, and that is just unrealistic.
Facebook - Now, we don’t all agree that Facebook is a “Least Favorite” (uhum, I do not agree that it is a “Least Favorite”) but I’ve been out-voted. Facebook has turned into more hassle than it’s worth. All the security setting, ads, and constant updating make Facebook not worth the work to some businesses.
We hope you will try out some of our favorites, especially if you’ve never experienced them before. If you have any suggestions or objections, you can email your comments here.
Read MorePosted by Angela | 0 Comments
Apple is Stirring Up Trouble Again
Apple and Steve Jobs have stirred up more trouble regarding antennas just when we all thought the drama was over. It all started about a week ago at the Apple press conference to address the iPhone 4 problem. Ole Steve Jobs started out his presentation not with an, “I’m sorry for all the antenna issues,” but with a “We’re not perfect.” By we he meant all smartphone creators. He said the Blackberry Bold 9700, HTC Droid Eris, and the Samsung Omnia II all have the same problem and proceed to show footage of each one’s signal dropping.
That was a little underhanded, but he was trying to make a point. If you missed the conference or weren’t following along online, Apple created a page on their website dedicated entirely to antenna failure among all smartphones. The website has footage of the iPhone 4, BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Droid Eris, Nokia N97 mini, Samsung Omnia II, and iPhone 3GS each dropping signal strength when a finger or a hand cover the antenna.
Blackberry maker RIM decided they won’t sit back and let Jobs get away with pointing fingers at them. RIM’s Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie released a statement here saying, “Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claim about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation.” They go on to say, “One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity.”
Just after that statement, where RIM is very clear that their phones do not have any antenna problems, a video leaked of someone playing around with the new BlackBerry 9800. The video, which has already been removed, showed the unreleased phone to have some serious death grip issues. Sure it was a pre-release version of the phone, but should be the final design.
Since this huge blowup with the iPhone 4, new smartphones are going to be under a magnifying glass when it comes to antenna performance and “death grip” symptoms. Something that (if Apple’s right) has been going on since the beginning of smartphones will be noticed and talked about more than ever. So this is a heads up. We’re going to be hearing a lot about cell phone antenna performance… as if we haven’t already heard a lot.
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