Twitter Releases Link Shortener

Posted by Laura McCulloch on June 9th, 2011 at 08:05 AM | Comment!

Twitter released its own link shortener this week. It’s about time. Now you can paste any link into your tweet and Twitter automatically shortens it to 19 characters so you have more characters available to impart your wisdom, sales pitch, IMHOs or one-liners. Read all about it here! If you want to use a 3rd party link shortening service for analytics, you still can. So go to town, people. Tweet your links fast and often.

Face-off at Facebook

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on June 8th, 2011 at 10:10 AM | Comment!

For the last couple of years, whenever my friends get together (in real time), out pop the iPhones. A few hours later, it’s the “tag your it” game on Facebook. There we all are, hoisting wine glasses, kissing our girlfriends, or smiling with jubilation at the notion of fun and frolic. New social caveats include, “Don’t Facebook this,” or, “Wait, Facebook my good side!”

Well, tagging is mostly all in good fun—a sort of cyber thank you, for being part of a great time. But, doesn’t it seem spooky that Facebook seems to be able to identify people you know so readily? Yes, friends, I’m talking about the Tag Suggestions. As if Facebook were your partner, tapping you on the shoulder and inviting you to tag one of the 500 friends you may have inadvertently left out of your tagathon.

So, here we go again. Under attack repeatedly for privacy abuses, Facebook is back in the hot seat for presuming a questionable default when it comes to privacy settings. According to the report, from Sophos, Facebook recently began changing its users’ privacy settings to automatically turn on a facial recognition feature that detects a user’s face in an image, instead of allowing users to “opt in.” I don’t know about you, but this sort of pisses me off. I mean, my real friends KNOW what I look like, they don’t need a third party app to tell them, and it creeps me out that Mark Zuckerberg and co are crawling around the site “recognizing” my facial features. Y’know?

A little uncomfortable with Facebook’s presumption yourself? Here’s how to fix it:

* Go to your Facebook privacy settings (under ACCOUNT).

* Click on “Customize settings”.

* Under “Things others share” you should see an option titled “Suggest photos of me to friends. When photos look like me, suggest my name”.

* Unfortunately at this point you can’t tell whether Facebook has enabled the setting or not, you have to dig deeper…

* Click on “Edit settings”.

* If Facebook has enabled auto-suggestion of photo tags you will find the option says “Enabled”.

* Change it to “Disabled” if you don’t want Facebook to work that way.

* Press “OK”

Apple Shaped Cloud or Cloud Shaped Apple?

Posted by Laura McCulloch on June 7th, 2011 at 08:00 AM | Comment!

Woo hoo. Mr. Steve Jobs returned to the stage yesterday to announce Apple’s i-cloud. Now what the heck are we supposed to do with it and what does it really mean? The smart guys over at Business Insider offer up a couple of short and sweet explanations to help us understand and navigate this deal.

How to use iCloud

Everything You Need To Know About Apple’s iCloud, Including What The Hell It Actually Is

And if you want the scoop directly from Mr. Jobs, click here to watch his keynote address at the WWDC event.

Book Trailers: the good, bad, ugly

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on June 6th, 2011 at 10:03 AM | Comment!

What do you get when you combine a movie trailer with a book jacket? A book trailer, silly! With the explosion of digital media, cinematizing an encapsulated brand-feel of your book is now not only a good idea, it’s an expectation.

Here’s last week’s finalist list for the Moby Awards. 

Which ones won? Click here to find out!

Is Twitter the SM Avis?

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on June 1st, 2011 at 06:56 AM | Comment!

Trying their best to close in on Facebook in terms of user numbers, Twitter is now in bed with adgrok. So to tweet.

Twitter acquired adgrok today, along with two-thirds of the founding partners. (The third guy defected to rival, Facebook.) With this new partnership, we shall soon see a plethora of new apps and advertising optys churned out of by the growing Social Media entity. Since, according to a market research report, Twitter advertising revenue this year will reach 150 million, (as compared with Facebook‘s $4 billion), Twitter obviously has some catching up to do. Speculation is that a lot of the development will be in photo upload apps, since a picture is worth, uh, 140 characters, but the first big fix had to do with adding a Follow Button that allows your blog/website readers to follow without rerouting them off the web page. (Yes, it’s on BPC’s list o’ things to do, asap.)

Want more deets? Check out:
The rumor
The confirmation
The plan

Summer’s Here

Posted by Laura McCulloch on May 31st, 2011 at 07:48 AM | Comment!

Memorial Day weekend has come and gone so now we turn the page to summer. Kinda. I know it’s not really summer until June 21at 10:16 P.M. PDT, but it always feels like it to me after Memorial Day. Here’s my favorite Summer Song. What’s yours?

Summer’s here
I’m for that
Got my rubber sandals
Got my straw hat
Got my cold beer
I’m just glad that it’s here

Summer’s here
That suits me fine
It may rain today
But I don’t mind
It’s my favorite time of the year
And I’m glad that it’s here

Old man wintertime
He goes so slow
It’s ten degrees below, you know
You can take your ice and snow
And let my balmy breezes blow

Yeah, the water is cold but I’ve been in
Baby, lose the laundry and jump on in
I mean all God’s children got skin
And it’s summer again

Old man wintertime
He goes so slow
It’s ten degrees below, you know
You can take your ice and snow
And let my balmy breezes blow

Summer’s here
I’m for that
Got my rubber sandals
Got my straw hat
Drinking cold beer
Man I’m just that I’m here
It’s my favorite time of the year
And I’m glad that it’s here, yeah

Spotlight on Tumblr Spotlight

Posted by Laura McCulloch on May 26th, 2011 at 07:17 AM | Comment!

Check out Tumblr’s new Spotlight, the latest way to discover interesting blogs on the Tumblr platform in the categories of your choosing. Here are just a few of my favs!

life
fresh air
i can read
i love charts
writers and kitties
vanity fair
mother jones

QR Codes

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on May 25th, 2011 at 04:11 PM | Comment!

If you haven’t heard of them yet, you’re about to. QR (or, Quick Response) codes have been all the rage in Japan for a while now, and they are the latest must have in layering your visibility.

You can find QR codes storing addresses and URLs in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards, or almost any object about which users might need information. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text, contact information, connect to a wireless network, or open a web page in the phone’s browser. This act of linking from physical world objects is termed hardlinking or object hyperlinking.

One important application is for Indie booksellers—a way to compete with, say, Amazon, and have the advantage of a hard-copy model. Here’s how it works: booksellers include QR codes on their shelves that link to individual eBooks in their catalogs. Shoppers can browse the hardcopies in the store and use their cell phone to buy the book on the corresponding website.

So, how do you get a QR codes? Here are some free tools Kaywa, GoQR.me, or QR Stuff.