Facebook Lite: Is it a move to counter Twitter?

Finally, Facebook opened its Lite version for public preview this week. Since I was not in the testing phase, I couldn’t write anything definitive about it earlier on.

Anyway, now that I have explored it in depth, I couldn’t help establish that it is an ambitious move to counter the rising popularity of Twitter.  Facebook Lite provides twitter-like functionality and is really a stripped down version of the original Facebook. Basically it has a wall, a mail box and a capability to post photos and videos. Apart from being skinny, it has the added advantage of privacy by limiting access to a well-defined social circle.

With the recent acquisition of FriendFeed, Facebook’s most likely course of action would be the complete integration of FriendFeed technology with its Lite version in the months to come.

However, this should not come as a shock because this was rather anticipated. Given the recent media attention to Twitter, it was only natural for Facebook to come up with something to retain its user base.

Well… We are now just a few days from LinuxCon. For the unapprised, The Linux Foundation will be hosting this high-tech event from 21 to 23 of September in Portland.

The aim of this conference is to create awareness about open-source technologies. It would also serve as a platform for open-source people to meet and interconnect with each other.

As far now, the confirmed keynote speakers include Linux Torvalds (from the Linux Foundation), Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu), Joe Brockmeler (from openSUSE), Bdale Garbee (from Hewlett Packard), Imad Sousou (from Intel) and Bob Sutor (from IBM). Apart from keynote speeches, 75 conference sessions and various roundtable sessions are scheduled as well.

Like myself, don’t get disappointed if you cannot manage to make it to Portland. Linux foundation will be providing free live video streaming sessions for the keynote speeches.

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.

This is a 10 minute guide to Twitter for newbies. If you still haven’t figured out what is Twitter and why you should use Twitter then you can start with this post.

Youtube has hundreds of Tutorials for Twitter beginners. Whether you want to get yourself started on Twitter or want to learn about some Twitter’s desktop tools, the following YouTube videos will keep you entertained while educating you about various aspects of Twitter.

1. Twitter Tutorials – Getting Started

2. Twitter in Plain English

3. Top Twitter Tools Exposed

4. Twitter Tutorials – 5 Desktop Apss

5. TweetChat – Letterman – Kevin Spacey Tweets with Dave

Yesterday, Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business, a guide for getting started and establishing your business using Twitter. It covers all basics of Twitter, how to get started, terms, keywords, and includes case studies. Here is what Twitter says about their business guide:

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

This business guide would be a really important move as a big number of Twitter starters are quitting to use Twitter.

Kazaa is back in music industry with a new business plan. Kazaa, the most popular file-sharing service was shutdown in 2006 as part of agreement with the music industry. Now they are launching a web-based legal music download service with the support of all four major labels.

Kazaa’s sudden rise has been featured on CNET, Gizmodo, Billboard.com and BBC News, to name just a few. This new Kazaa service appears to be launched with the help of music industry because Kazaa’s download offering is going to feature almost 1 million tracks from all the major genres. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM and offers unlimited download for around $20 per month.

The company issued a press release 2 weeks ago that was as strange as they come: The Kazaa.com domain name was misspelled; a well-known hacker who committed suicide last year endorsed the service. And it featured a number of links labeled “free music” that was pointing to Kazaa.com.

This is just the beginning; Kazaa will have to do a lot to make a solid impact!

It did not occur to me as a surprise, when StumbleUpon decided to launch their new URL shortening service “Su.pr” back in June, 2009. Starting your own URL shortening service is not a new thing these days, Digg and Twit this services are already doing it.


There are other popular URL shortening services also available like TinyURL, bit.ly and is.gd. Ever since the popularity of Twitter, use of such URL shortening services is doubled.

But the features for su.pr are not limited to URL shortening only. It also lets you see live clicks response on your shortened URL. You can also connect directly to Twitter and Facebook and post the shortened URL direct on those web sites.

The best feature it offers is the time setup for your posts. You can choose what time of the day it should submit your post. The Su.Pr Wordpress Plugin has also been made available for download.

I personally liked su.pr very much and i’m really looking to make some good use of it.

Facebook continues to battle against cyber criminals, as they now launch “new verification procedures” to get rid of spammers. Yesterday on their blog, Facebook announced the new tool to Secure Compromised Accounts. Now, if you have ever had your Faceboook account taken over by someone to spam your friends, or if you have been the exclusive spam victim yourself, you should be happy to hear that Facebook is doing something about it.

Facebook also describes how they will handle such accounts. Each time an account is suspected to send spam, the user will get an email from Facebook which will take them to a new verification page to confirm ownership of their account by asking them to pick a new secure password.

This new feature will not only help users but also Facebook in enhancing their web site security. Security is being the next big issue for all sites right now. After hacking of Twitter, ImageShack and various such sites, this issue has to be taken seriously.

Twitter background images have become an important part of user profiles. Background images really help users build their own brand. On limited platform like twitter, backgrounds are the best way to communicate a little out of the box.

Twitter also offers some delicate simple background designs for all user profiles. But if you are to establish your personal brand, add some more contact info, personal expressions, pictures, and other important links to your profile then creating your own Twitter background image is the best way.

One way is to spend some good time while creating these backgrounds, where you can best utilize it if you happen to be a good user of designing tools. But if you are not familiar with how to use design tools or do not want to spend time creating one, this HOW TO Guide is for you. We can get such pre-built background from many resources growing each and every day. These resources offer free, and self-customizable paid backgrounds which are pretty easy to use and usually are installed direct from these websites.

In case you decide to build your own background image for twitter, there are few things you must know. Your background image should be large enough not to tile when installed on your twitter profile. To achieve this, the total image size should be around 1600px wide by 1200px tall. Also, if you build a left-hand column, make sure that it covers the central Twitter content.

Here is a list of websites which can help you:

1. TwitterBakcs : Twitter back provides you a big number of free and paid background images. They also allow you to download customizable templates in PSD format. They are also my personal favorites; can you guess which twitterback theme is installed on my twitter profile?
2. TweetStyle : Tweetstyle offers free custom twitter backgrounds.
3. MyTweetSpace : This site is offering cool themes and Twitter profile badges for free. If you want a highly personalized Twitter profile promoting your product or brand, you have to pay a minimal amount.
4. Twitter Background Images: Big Cool collection of twitter background images.
5. KillerTweets : offers some of the coolest Twitter backgrounds. When we say cool we mean, the gothic-artsy-kind of cool. And it’s relatively cheap as well at $9.
6. TwitBacks : They offer an tool for creating background images. This one specializes in left-hand column-based background images.

There are many websites who are offering such free and paid services, but we are listing just a few good of them. If you know some more good sites, please do add to comments.

These days there are much cases of illegal copied music available on the Internet. However, there is still plenty of music on the web that you can download free and it’s legal. We will list only a few of such hosts which provide legal free downloads but these downloads are not available for all songs.

Image Credit: JeffStateOnline

1. Amazon

The popular amazon site often lets it’s users download limited free music sorted by artists. Regional users may also get special offers.

2. iTunes

iTunes is apple’s online store that offers you free music tracks, usually by up and upcoming artists. This site also varies in offering different track downloads depending on user’s country.

3. Live Music Archive

Live Music Archive has a large collection of track downloads, live recording from a wide range of artists. This site lets you download music not only by top artists but also by upcoming artists and bands.

4. ArtistServer

5. Epitonic

6. Download.comCNET’s

7. eMusic

8. MyMojo

p.s This is probably not the complete list, there are hundreds of more sites that allow free track downloads, so if you know any more places where you can download free legal music, please feel free to add them to comments.