Facebook Lite: Is it a move to counter Twitter?

Finally, Facebook opened its Lite version for public preview this week. Read the full story

Snow Leopard … is it a real OS upgrade?

I recently upgraded my notebook from Mac OS X Leopard to Snow Leopard. After exploring it in depth, I started to reckon whether I should consider it as a real OS upgrade or not.

There is no doubt in the fact that Snow Leopard has some really neat features like improvements in the assistive technologies, system preference pane and integration with Microsoft Exchange server. I also believe that Apple has made some under the hood changes to its OS X architecture to improve its overall performance. However, the question is … Does it really qualify for an OS-level upgrade?

To me, it is more like a service pack. Most of this functionality could have been provided via incremental updates over the past two years. It seems that the release of Snow Leopard is more of a marketing move to counter the upcoming release of Windows 7.

For those of you who haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet, I would recommend to wait for a couple of months. I am suggesting this because it has some serious compatibility issues with Adobe suite and device drivers. Like every new release, Apple would require some time to come up with the stable version. Besides that, it is not like real OS-level upgrade, so you won’t be missing a lot.

Making money is a dream for many, but it’s not as simple as many think it to be. It’s as hard as making money offline. There are always many ways you can make money online, you just need to find out what really suits you and where you picture yourself  working comfortably.

There is something for everyone on internet. Whatever you choose, it’s difficult to start earning good money straight away. Put some effort and reward would be furitful. We have included a few sites considered good for earning money.

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1. Get Paid to Advertise

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Image Credit:OneWeekplan

Google Adsense – World’st most popular advertising program. Make Money from $0.01 to $5.00 plus per click on site relevant ads.

Chitika – Offers various types of advertising to suite your needs. Rated 2^nd best after adsense by ProBlogger.

BulletAds – Performance based online advertising network. Sell ads from $20 to $2000 per ad depending upon the page impressions per day.

Clicksor – Offers Inline text link advertising, underlining words in your posts. We do not encourage new bloggers to use them as readers get irritated.

Text-Link-Ads – Offers you to approve or deny the advertiser links that appear on your site. They pay you 50% of the sale price for each text link sold on your website.

BlogAds – You can sell your blog ads here. To participate in this program you will need to get sponsored by someone in their network.

LinkWorth – Too many options to fit your advertising needs. Choose text based advertisements, sponsored ads and paid blog reviews to appear on your site.

Vibrant Media – Offers in-text based advertisements.

CrispAds – Offers you the access to over six thousand advertisers in their pay-per-click program. You can choose advertisers that suite you the best.

AdBrite – Allows you to approve or reject any ads purchased for your sites. Also gives you the ability to sell ads direct with “Your Ad Here” links.

Yahoo Publisher Network – Offers you to pay targeted ads on your site.

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2. Get Paid to Write

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Weblogs, Inc. – Apply to blog for one of their ninety plus blogs or submit your own topic idea. They will pay you per post that you write and you must meet their minimum post requirements.

PayPerPost – Get paid as much as $500 or more a month writing articles and reviews of their sponsors on your blog.

BlogToProfit – Make $250 dollars or more by writing new posts on your blog.

Creative Weblogging – Write 7 to 10 posts per week for their network and they will pay you $225 per month.

Smorty – Earn $6 to $100 dollars per post you write on your blog. Amount paid for each post depends on the overall popularity and page rank of your blog.

Blogsvertise – Their advertisers pay you to mention and talk about their websites, products and services in your own blog.

Review Me – After your blog has been accepted in their network, they will pay you $20 to $200 per post that you write.

Squidoo – Earn money by writing your new blog, or choose to donate your earnings to charity. Referred by some bloggers.

SponsoredReviews – Offers you to write reviews for their advertisers’ products and services on your own blog. They also charge some transaction fee for their services.

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3. Affiliate Networks and Programs

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Amazon Associates – One of the best paying affiliate programs. Link to Amazon’s products and services and earn up to 10% of the sale price. Best fit for product-focused sites.

Commission Junction – Offers you good commission on sales in exchange to product promotion by different advertisers.

LinkShare – Offers you the facility to use individual product links on your site and generate revenue from sales.

ClixGalore – Allows you to advertise products from 8000+ advertisers.

ClickBank – Allows you to promote 10,000+ products with huge commissions.

ThinkAction – This affiliate network claims to have the top payouts and the possibility of earning over $100,000 dollars per month which me to seem not real. But do give it a try if you like J

Avangate – Allows you to make money selling popular computer software titles through your site.

LinkConnector – This affiliate marketing network offers a zero tolerance fraud policy to keep you safe while conducting business.

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4. Paid Social Media Programs

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Youtube.com – Join Youtube’s partner program. Upload your videos and earn money based on the number of views you receive.

JustAnswer – Help others solve their problems and earn money for your knowledge.

MetaCafe – Upload your videos and earn money based on the number of views you receive.

Dada.net – Social site with a revenue sharing program that pays you for referring friends and driving traffic.

Jyve – Pays you to provide answers, advice and peer support to people in need of some help.

Cruxy – Specializes in social video, but serves as a venue to sell your digital media.

BitWine – Get paid to give advice and answer questions for people, on subjects of your interests and choice.

Ether – Make money answering questions for your peers over the phone. You set your rates and call availability.

UpBlogger – Social network site that pays you based on the amount of visits you receive to your uploaded content.

ChaCha – Get paid to offer support to members of their community.

AssociatedContent – Earn money by uploading your videos, text, audio and images to their site. Earnings are determined by the exposure you receive from your content.

myLot – Pays you for posting, commenting and using their social network.

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5. Earning Money Everyway

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liveperson.com – Earn online depending upon the expertise you have. Solve online problems, assignments and get paid on a fixed per hour rate.

Google User Research – Google Pays you money to participate in their user research studies online.

Microsoft Research Panel – Get paid from Microsoft for providing feedback on their products.

Amazon Mechanical Turk – Amazon pays you to complete simple tasks that their computers can’t understand. Payments are a matter of cents.

eJury – Earn $5 to $10 dollars per verdict rendered as a mock juror for practice trials.

WorkingSOL – Get paid to provide technical support for many large comapnies all over the world.

Mahalo Greenhouse – They pay $10 to $15 dollars per site you submit to their directory.

Focus Pointe Global – Get paid to join their focus groups and voice your opinion. Available to teens and adults.

Agloco – Sign up, download their toolbar and get paid to surf the internet. This site has been criticized as a “pyramid scheme”, although the founders deny the allegation.

Arise – Make online money providing support via phone, email and web platform for various companies on this site.

Tutor.com – Tutor people online and earn money.

ForumBoosting.com – Allows you to make money posting in forums.

Share-A-Pic – Share your pictures by uploading on this website.

SlashMySearch – Get paid to search the internet with their search engine.

Yesterday, Google has announced it officially that they will have their Operating System. Google has been competing Microsoft in many ways for quite long now. Google has started various projects over the years including Documents, Mobile, Search Engine and now the Operating System.

This shows that battle between Google and Microsoft is not new. Considering this, Ben Parr from mashable has performed some comparisons between Google and Microsoft, let’s have a look at a few highlights: Read the full story

Mozilla Firefox has already crossed 6 million downloads. How do we know this? Because Mozilla has launched a real-time tracker, where live downloads are being shown.

Read the full story

Facebook application development entails a very small learning curve. It has its roots in the contemporary Internet markup and scripting technologies. As a matter of fact, if you are a web developer, you only need a few more skills to develop your applications in Facebook. The required front-end skills include XHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Facebook uses its own markup and scripting languages known as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FBJS (Facebook Javascript) respectively. For backend, Facebook has its own version of SQL known as FQL (Facebook Query Language).

Other than technical skills, developers have other challenges when it comes to the social networking paradigm. In order to make their applications reach more users, developers have to come up with innovative ideas and marketing strategies to engage their users.

More to follow…