10 of the Best Twitter Tips To Promote Your Website

Twitter is one of the best promotional tools online to attract people to your website. You can use it to raise your profile within your niche, find targeted followers, advertise your products/events, alert people to new posts on your blog, etc.

The following is a list of 10 Twitter tips that you can use to help promote and drive targeted traffic to your website.[A guest post by Matt Smith of OnlineIncomeTeacher]

1 - Drive Traffic To Your Website

Millions of people across the world use Twitter everyday. That's a lot of people, but obviously most won't be interested in what you have to say. The key is to find the people that ARE interested!

Search for people who tweet about the same things as you, post links to similar content to your site, talk about subjects that you talk about. These are the people who you want to be targeting. When you find people like this, make sure to follow them and try engaging with them. Once they realise that you are of interest, they will follow you back.

Your aim is to grow your followers with people who are specifically interested in your website niche. Then, when you Tweet about your new content, you are more likely to get a response/get people to click through to your website.

2 - Blogging & Twitter Go Hand-In-Hand

If you run your own blog or website, then Twitter is the perfect marketing tool to promote your site on. Now, there are a few ways to do this;

One of the best and easiest ways is to place a visible link to Twitter on your homepage or sidebar, perhaps via a Twitter button or “Follow Me” icon. This will direct targeted traffic to your Twitter account page, allowing people to follow you and keep up to date with your latest tweets.

You can display a 'Recent Tweets' box on your website as well. This is a great way to display your most recent tweets to visitors of your site. As well as being able to see any useful tweets/links, they can also see that your site is active.

Another excellent way to utilise Twitter on your site is to display sharing links on your posts. As you can see, at the top of this page and to the left of the post, there are links to Twitter (and other social media sites) allowing people to share the post with their online community.

Don't forget to Tweet this very post!!!

3 - Self Promotion On Twitter

There are a lot of people on Twitter, so it's important that you try to make yourself stand out from everyone else. This is where creating your own brand identity is needed, which in the long-run will benefit your site.

To start with, you need to write a short 'bio' about yourself, which will appear on your Twitter profile. This 'bio' helps people understand who you are, or in the case of a website, what the website is about. This may sound really simple, but you need to spend time thinking this through carefully. You have a limited amount of space to write your description in, so it's vital that you get all the information that you need in.

The key to self promotion is to (surprisingly) self promote! Tweet regularly about your site, new posts, news, related products, promotions, etc. and keep your followers up-to date with what is happening.

A good tip would be to Tweet about other people's content within your niche, as well as your own. This way, your followers see you as a source for valuable information instead of only being interested in yourself.

4 - Get To The Point!

You only have 140 characters to Tweet with. This means that you need to get to the point of what you are saying.

This is easier said than done, but the more Tweets you send, the better at it you get. Try to always provide the most vital bits of information and keep everything simple and short, whilst being easy to read.

Remember that you need to allow room for links and hash tag categories (i.e. #blogging) within your 140 character limit. Shorten your links with URL shorteners such as bitly.com and don't use too many hash tags.

5 - Be Social

Twitter has a huge active community of people on it, so interact with people and get your name out there. Whatever your niche, get involved with the people interested with it. Make friends, ask questions, chat, share ideas, re-tweet others, etc. You can't expect to grow your number of followers without being social.

It always amazes me when I get followed by someone that has never tweeting anything! They may be following several thousand people, but have never bothered to interact with any of them. Now this is fine if you only have a small interest in Twitter, but for someone who is promoting there own website/business, this is like shooting yourself in the foot.

You can not expect to grow followers and build a brand without interacting!

6 - Listen To What Your Followers Are Saying

I love Twitter for all the reasons on this list, but by far my favourite and probably most useful is how it can be used to improve your existing business. Think of it as an amazing tool for conducting market research with millions of users, and its all completely FREE!!!

You can get instant reaction from your followers, so you can see what is working and what isn't. Ask them what they like about your website, what they don't like, what they would like to see in the future, etc. What ever aspect you want to learn about, you can ask your followers.
Just make sure you listen to what they say! After all, it's pointless getting all this valuable information if you don't intend on acting upon it.

7 - Talk To People

Sounds simple... and it is, but you would be surprised how many don't do this. Twitter is full of people having conversations, with plenty of useful information. The key is to get chatting to people, ask questions, respond to other peoples questions, and generally interact with others.

8 - Be Open & Honest

Whether talking about your business or life in general, honesty is always the best policy. People are smart, it's easy to tell when someone is talking a load of nonsense, or trying to sell you something “vital” that clearly you don't need. This only results in loosing business.
Be open and honest about your business. Be honest about who you are and what you are talking about. Trust is a vital part of life, if people have trust in you they are much more likely to listen to what you have to say and do business with you.

Always be honest whilst on Twitter. If you happen to find something that you found interesting, or which you think your Twitter followers would like, then Tweet it and tell them about it. Similarly if you find something that you dislike, then again tell people about it. Your followers may not agree with everything that you say, but in the end they will value your open and honest opinions, which is much better in the long run!

9 - Customise Your Twitter Background

You can upload a customised Twitter background for your profile. This lets anyone that visits your Twitter profile to see your customised background.

This can help you stand out from the crowd. Include your website logo, URL address, product promotions, event dates, etc. Check out my custom Twitter background @matt_oit

10 - Useful Twitter Tools

As I have said, Twitter is a great tool for promoting your website, but you need to remember to spend time working on your site and not spend all day Tweeting. Thankfully there are plenty of tools that you can use to make life a little easier.

You can use online tools to automate things like following & un-following people, scheduling Tweets, thank people for following you, etc. Some of the best that I use are 'Tweet Adder', 'HootSuite' & 'MarketMeTweet'

I find that scheduling a few tweets at night helps to promote my site to people on the other side of the world. Just think of all the people online who could be reading your valuable content whilst you are asleep!

This is a guest post by

Matt Smith

Matt runs his own blog 'OnlineIncomeTeacher' which teaches people how they can earn money online and set up their own website/blog. You can follow him on Twitter @matt_oit

10 of the Best New Chrome Add-ons

Chrome is now more popular than firefox, and there are lots of ways to make it even faster and smarter. AppsMaster.Net picks 10 of the most useful extensions for Chrome 13.

1 - Listen to Music as you browse the web

+Music is an excellent new Chrome extensions that lets you listen and to share songs by your favourite artists as you browse the web. Simply search for an act to view available tracks and then click to play them. The add-on continues to work in the background as you go about your online activities and lets you queue songs by other artists to listen later. +Music also features Facebook integration for sharing streams with your friends.

2 - View related web content as you type

Google Related helps to speed up your web searches by finding links, photos, new stories, videos and other web content relevant to the page you're viewing. These related suggestions are displayed in a thin toolbar at the buttom of the screen that doesn't obstruct your main view. The extension is particularly useful for displaying information such as maps and reviews of business and products, without having to open a separate browser tab.

3 - Add Facebook events to Google Calendar

If you use Google Calendar to organise your life, this handy extension will let you add Facebook events such as birthdays to your calendar in a couple of clicks. It saves you having to enter or copy and paste the details manually. Once you've installed the Add Facebook Events extension, an 'Add to Calendar' option will appear at the top of Facebook event pages. Click this, then click Save to add the event to your Google calendar.

4 - Share content on multiple social networks

Recognising that many of us have accounts with Facebook, Twitter and Google+, this extension lets you post links, messages and photos to all three social networks simultaneously. Publish Sync for Google+ and Facebook (Green Edition) also lets you share content from one site on a rival service and, in the case of Google+, choose which circles it will appear in. You can easily log out of an account to prevent your post being synchronized.

5 - Look up definitions of words on web pages

If you come accross a word on a web page that you don't recognise or understand, you can use the official Google Dictionary extenstion to find out what it means. Just double-click the word to view definition in a pop-up bubble, or click the toolbar button, enter a word and click Define. Foreign words are automatically translated into English and the latest version of the extension lets you click a speaker icon to hear a word's correct pronunciation.

6 - Always bring a new tabs to the front

When you right-click a URL in chrome and choose 'Open link in new tab', the page always opens in the background behind your current tabs. Install Tabs to the Front, however, and new tabs will open in the foreground by default, so you can view their content immediately.

7 - Change the appearance of web pages

Stylebot lets you adjust the way websites look and feel by playing around with custom style sheets (CSS). Usually, this involves some knowledge of web design but the extension makes it easy for anyone to change the fonts, colours and layout of different page elements.

8 - Edit web pages and photos using Picnik

The Chrome extension for the Google-owed online image editor Picnik (www.picnik.com) lets you capture and edit photos and pages you come accross while browsing the web. Just click the toolbar button and either choose 'Send the visible page to Picnik' or select a specific image. The copied content will open and rotate it, adjust the colours and exposure, and apply a range of effects before saving and sharing the result.

9 - Add Google +1 to all web pages

Google's new +1 feature, which lets you share web content with your friends and contacts, has already been added to thousands of sites. But there are still plenty that don't yet offer a +1 option, which is where this add-on comes in. The awkwardly named '+1 Button - Plus One Button' add-on lets you add your stamp of approval to any web page with single click. You can also see at a glance how many other people have shared the same content.

10. Access Picasa Web Albums from Chrome

Picasa Extension is a simple but very useful Chrome add-on that gives you instant access to Google's photo-sharing service Picasa Web ALbums. Click the Picasa logo on your browser's toolbar to view thumbnail images of all your albums, then simply click one to open it. You can also read comments that have been posted on your photos.

About Roy Paran, the author
or more known as Apps Master (@iluvroy) on twitter is your average friend but with an extra-large social media addiction. His love for social media started in September 2008 when he joined twitter and sent out his first tweet from the web. Besides twittering Roy is also a part time internet marketer, editor and a blogger. Offline, Roy is competitive by Nature, Positive Minded and believes that the word “impossible” doesn’t exist and the word “impossible” simply means “Im Possible”

10 of the Most Coolest Features in Google+ (The Plus Project)

Google quoted "Sharing is a huge part of the web, a part that we think could be a lot simpler. That’s why we’ve been working on adding a few new things to Google: to make connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world. We hope you like what we’ve cooked up so far. And stay tuned, because there’s more to come."

Get a tour on Google+ Project, or get invites once it's ready to the public.

Here's our Top 10 of the Most Coolest Features in Google+ (Plus) Project to be launch soon. (See more Google Services: 10 of Google's Most Useful Internet Tools) and make most out of Google.(See 10 Google Tricks which Usually Neglected)

1 - Circles. Nested Circles. People Want Inception. A circle within a circle.

You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.

2 - Sparks. The ability to change the picture when sharing a link.

Remember when your Grandpa used to cut articles out of the paper and send them to you? That was nice. That’s kind of what Sparks does: looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share. Grandpa would approve.

3 - Better Streams control. The ability to hide a circle from the main timeline. Right now 90 % of the posts comes from 10 -20 people.

4 - A video Page. Right now you can see all of your images, but you can not see a history of the videos that you posted

5 - Better notification handling. Right now when you click and see that 3 people commented on a post, you will see only the last comment. It would be useful to see from your last comment.

6 - Merge google accounts. Some people have one google account and others that are using for apps development.

7 - The ability to find people based on location.

8 - Integration with google docs. So people can share a question easy , share a documnet with your family, etc.

9 - Iphone App . I see a lot of talking of people considering to buy Android phones just that they can use Google Plus.

10 - API for External Development.

What do you think of this Top 10 list? Is there something else that needs to be add? Or to remove some features that does not deserve to be there...

Not yet launch? Google hopes to do with Google+, so they’re taking it slow.

“It’s not about one particular project, it’s about Google getting better. We know this is going to take us a considerable amount of time. But we want to make Google better by connecting you with your relationships and interests,” Gundotra reiterates. He declined to state how big the team within Google currently working on the project is, but says that it’s a “decent sized team”.

“Today’s web is about people. To organize the world’s data, you have to understand people,” Gundotra concludes, noting that newly crowned CEO Larry Page has been heavily involved in this project from the get-go.

As it is unveiled to the world, Google+ sounds and looks great. But we’ve seen that before from Google. Now what comes is the hard part.

• Reference/Source: The-google-plus.blogspot.com [July 2, 2011]
About

Google



When you visit www.google.com or one of more than 180 other Google domains, you can find information in many different languages, check stock quotes and sports scores, find news headlines and look up the address of your local post office or grocery store. You can also find images, videos, maps, patents and much more. With universal search technology, you may see all of these items combined in one result page for your query, and services such as personalized search help you find even more information tailored to your interests. We’re also working to digitize some of the world’s information that until recently hasn’t been online, like books. Search is how Google began, and it’s still at the heart of what we do today. We devote more engineering time to search than to any other product, because search can always get better and faster at helping you find what you want, when you want it, where you want it.

"Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

10 of the Most Common SEO Mistakes Usually Neglected

No, these aren’t “myths” disguised as “common mistakes.” I’ve already beaten the SEO myths theme to death. What follows are 10 of the Most Common SEO Mistakes Usually Neglected. Some of these things catch even the best of us…

1 - Targetting the wrong keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2 - Ignoring the Title tag

Leaving the "title" tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your "title" tag shows in the search results as your page title.

3 - A Flash website without a html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

4 - JavaScript Menus

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

5 - Lack of consistency and maintenance

Our friend Rob from Blackwood Productions often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

6 - Concentrating too much on meta tags

A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this.

7 - Using only Images for Headings

Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items.

8 - Ignoring URLs

Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

9 - Backlink spamming

It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks.

10 - Lack of keywords in the content

Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

• Reference/Source:Webconfs.com

10 of the World's Best Bloggers

I quoted "Bloggers.com is dedicates site for Blog Authors. Blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is Web site with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
Bloggers.com categorizes and highlights Blog Authors' profiles by their interest and contribution - for example some Bloggers publish commentary or news on a particular subject; others maintain blog for personal online diaries. In this site we encourage Bloggers to tell about themselves, share own pictures, share their blog links. We encourage authors of any type of blogs including Textual, art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting), which are part of a wider network of social media. They can also discuss on Micro-blogging sites, another type of blogging, one which consists of blogs with very short posts."

According to Bloggers.com as of 6/21/2011, here's the top10 list of World's Best Bloggers. (Note: please see Bloggers.com for more info about this list. Thank you.)

1 - Odliam [ United States | Arts & Culture]
http://untony.blogspot.com

Born? Yes!
* Basic School smooth and uneventful.
* BS and MS in Electronics.
* I have journeyed up and down this our exquisite and hapless planet.
* Now, I relax getting language balanced, that is, in translations, edition and proofreading, even if only to keep the Martini stirred not shaken.

2 - Tropical Mum [Australia | Personal]
http://www.tropicalmum.blogspot.com

A Canadian-born naturalised Australian, I live in paradise with my husband and two boys. I work part-time as a virtual assistant and study part-time for a technology degree. Our family enjoys the ultimate lifestyle but on a budget. We struggle to pay the bills, but can enjoy a day at the beach watching the kids play in the waves; we count our lucky stars everyday. Follow me as I share a glimpse into what it is like to live in the tropical far north of Queensland. Sometimes I am humorous, and other times, well I'm not.

3 - Sarah [ United States | Technology]
http://templatefaerie.blogspot.com

I love everything having to do with blogging: writing, template design, connecting with other bloggers.

My blog, Template Faerie, is a way for me to share my passion for blogging and help other bloggers at the same time. I discuss how to create and maintain an attractive, unique, and successful blog.

4 - Horses And Heels [United States | Life & Lifestyle]
http://www.horsesandheels.com

My blog Horses & Heels is a trendy blog for men & women interested in fashion, shopping, horses, & cooking. I blog about all of my favorite things, I have an unhealthy obsession with cowboy boots & bb simon.

5 - Jill Wellington [United States | Life & Lifestyle]
http://busymomrecipes1.blogspot.com

I'm a journalist/author who raised two kids while reporting television news and writing books. My insanely zany life with hubby and two small children was cracking me up...mentally and mirthfully.

That's when I started writing a newspaper column called "This is Life?". I never had to pay for therapy. I spilled the entire mess into 500 words every week and they paid ME to release my insanity to the public.

I had to stop when my daughter grew old enough to NOT want her hilarious happenings in the newspaper. Ever since, the hilarity has been building up like a simmering volcano until I discovered blogging!

Once again, it's time for public therapy. This blog forces me to look for the funny side of our human reality and ask myself
"This is Life?"

6 - Balqis [Malaysia | Life & Lifestyle]
http://lilstarrz09.blogspot.com

I'm a simple person who loves reading, writing, music and nature. I started blogging since August 2009 after getting an encouragement from a friend. Topics in my blog are on general matters and everyone is welcome to visit my site and give comments/responses on whatever I write.

I'm quite new to blogsphere cos my blog is one year old this August 2010. I have a positive outlook in life though having to face many life's challenges all this while. Everyone's going through the ups and downs of it. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that there's always a blessing in disguise and I'm counting my blessings.

A little introduction about myself, I'm married with 2 children. I hail from "The Land Of The Hornbills", Sarawak, Malaysia and residing in a very fast developing town, Bintulu, which is my country's economic hub for its huge Liquefied Natural Gas plants, Shell Middle Distillate Synthesis and ASEAN Bintulu Fertilizer plants and deep sea port of world class. It's a beautiful town with its well organized landscapes and I just love being here and enjoy the peaceful life. The communities here are diverse and we are living harmoniously in spite of our different backgrounds. I'll write more about this in my blog.

Come and visit my blog and be my friends. Looking forward to seeing you guys around! Have a nice day!

7 - Evelyn [United States | Green]
http://evelynparham.com

I am vegan, blogger and passionate about inspiring others to make healthy lifestyle changes. I enjoy reading, writing, singing, and making videos.

8 - Reut Rashook [Israel | Green]
http://www.greenparenthood.com

Hi everyone, I am working from home Mom. Please feel free to check out my blog Greenparenthood.com which focuses on natural green parenting, healthy lifestyle, natural food, green tips and ecologic products. Would love to hear from you!

9 - Kira Permunian [Philippines | Technology]
http://lsgeekster.blogspot.com
http://www.kirapermunian.co.cc

Simple Midnight Blogger from the Philippines . Visit my SEO and Social Media Stuff at LS Geekster Online .

10 - AnaLuiza [Brazil | Arts & Culture]
http://hellaheaven-ana.blogspot.com

've started this blog to share the good things people create in arts, science, leisure, ideas, no matter where or when. A dash of humor, a drop of beauty and lots of creativity

Tips from Bloggers.com on how to be their Featured Blogger!

We want to promote Blog profiles who has provided detail information, active and maintaining a Good Blog. To become a candidate of Featured Blogger you must.

a. Complete your user profile. We encourage well written text that describe your interest. Too short profiles means lack of seriousness. User profile must not contain any URL or Email. Go to User Dashboard > Edit Profile for updating your profile.

b. User must change default Avatar and complete other fields in Account. Avatar with real pictures will get better chance.

c. Blog information should be correct and Submitter must Own the Blog. In case we find it suspicious we may ask to show proof of ownership.

d. Any profile or site solely for internet marketing or affiliated marketing will get less chance to be the featured Blogger.

• Reference/Source: Bloggers.com

10 of Web's Most Popular Social Networks

In the past few years, Facebook has surpassed MySpace as the most popular social network and Twitter has become so popular that news anchors read tweets while on the air. And while the surge in popularity for social networking centered around social networks designed for schools, it is being increasingly used by adults, with only one out of every ten Twitter uses being under the age of 18.

For the last couple of years, Compete.com has published a list of the top twenty-five social networks. Since Compete didn't publish the list this year, I thought it would be fun to see how the social networks are doing.

However, to change things up, I'm using unique visitors as the key demographic rather than total monthly visits. This gives a slightly different perspective, with social networks like LinkedIn that people may not visit on a daily basis looking a little better side-by-side with Facebook, which people might visit several times a day.

Here's The complete top 10 list of popular social networks:

Facebook with 133,623,529 unique visits.

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other better. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the website.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over, but based on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site's terms.

MySpace with 50,615,444 unique visits.

Myspace,stylized My____ and previously MySpace, is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, News Corp. Digital Media, owned by News Corporation.
Myspace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, a position that it held throughout 2007 until 2008.[9] In April 2008, according to comScore, Myspace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, based on monthly unique visitors.

Twitter with 23,573,178 unique visits.

Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page.
The website is based in San Francisco, California. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas; and Boston, Massachusetts. Twitter, Inc. was originally incorporated in California, but as of 2011 is incorporated in the jurisdiction of Delaware.
Twitter was produced in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July. Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.

Linkedin with 15,475,890 unique visits.

LinkedIn (pronounced /ˌlɪŋkt.ˈɪn/) is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 22 March 2011, LinkedIn reports more than 100 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Quantcast reports Linkedin has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally.


Classmates with 14,613,381 unique visits.

Classmates.com is a social network service created in 1995 by Randy Conrads who founded Classmates Online, Inc.
The social media website was originally designed to assist members in finding friends and acquaintances from kindergarten, primary school, high school, college, work and the United States military. In 2010, CEO Mark Goldston described the transition of the website "to increasingly focus on nostalgic content" such as "high school yearbooks, movie trailers, music tracks, and photographic images. To this end, and to appeal more to older users, the website name was changed to Memory Lane, which included a website redesign.

MyLife with 8,736,352 unique visits.

MyLife (formerly Reunion.com) is a social network service founded in 2002 by Jeffrey Tinsley after meeting his wife at their high school reunion. The company began with the acquisition of highschoolalumni.com and PlanetAlumni.com. The website claims to help members find and keep in touch with friends, relatives and lost loves.
In its own press release, Reunion.com claims to be the 6th top social networking site as of August 2007 with 28 million members, growing by nearly 1 million new members each month, mostly in the United States and Canada. Quantcast estimates Mylife has 4.2 million monthly unique U.S. visits.

Ning with 6,120,667 unique visits.

Ning is an online platform for people to create their own social networks, launched in October 2005. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. Ning is Andreessen's third company (after Netscape and Opsware). The word "Ning" is Chinese for "peace" (simplified Chinese: 宁; traditional Chinese: 寧; pinyin: níng), as explained by Gina Bianchini on the company blog. Quantcast estimates Ning has 7.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors.

LiveJournal with 3,834,155 unique visits.

LiveJournal (LJ) is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community. LiveJournal's blogging features include those found in similar blogging sites (multiple authors, commenting, calendars, and polls). However, LiveJournal differentiates itself from other blogging sites by its WELL-like features of a self-contained community and some social networking features similar to other social networking sites.

Tagged with 3,800,325 unique visits.

Tagged is a social networking site based in San Francisco, California, United States, founded in 2004. The website suggests new people for members to meet based on shared interests. It also allows members to browse people, play games, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged has 100 million registered members. Quantcast reports Tagged has 6.2 million monthly unique U.S. visits and 20.4 million globally. Tagged's first acquisition was the popular social and instant messaging client Digsby, which has 3 million registered users.

Last.fm with 3,473,978 unique visits.

Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed over 40 million active users based in more than 190 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m ($280m USD).
Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the songs the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user's computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("scrobbled") either via the music player itself (Rdio, Spotify, Amarok) or via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user's profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.

Perhaps the two biggest surprises were Facebook's nearly doubling their monthly visitors in the last year and Twitter quadrupling their monthly visitors. Twitter also tripled their monthly visits, which makes it easy to crown them as the fastest growing social network.
Also of interest is MySpace's 13% decrease. It might not be surprising to note that MySpace is losing traffic to Facebook, but MySpace recently acquired Imeem, which was previously ranked 10th on the most popular social networks list. When you add the two together, MySpace shrunk by around 20% over the last year.

• Reference/Source: About.com
• Reference/Source: Wikipedia.org

10 Things you must not do on the Internet/Web when Drunk

Coming home drunk and then go online can bring you lots of fun, but also lots of problems second day. Yeah... too much alcohol in our system has bad consequences. When I first read this article from Nuffy.net. I can't stop reading it when I realized I'm reposting it on our top 10 collection. So here it is.... our top 10 list of things you should avoid doing on Internet if you are drunk.

1 - Respond to anything work-related

No matter how capable you think you are, just don’t do it. Any mistake will be instantly explained by the 4am reply time. Besides, alcohol breeds carelessness, and ending an email to an attractive co-worker with a pun on how she’s good at “every job there is” with a winky-face is definitely not a good idea.

2 - Chat with family members

Just because your weird step-uncle Dale just got off work from the recycling plant does not mean that it’s the perfect time to organize that trip to insect museum he’s always been bugging you about. This will come back to haunt you in the form of a doorbell ring at 6am the following Sunday.

3 - Change your password

Of all the things to forget about the previous night, the fact that your email’s new password is “burgerkingroxxx” is one of the most costly.

4 - Use your credit card

No, don’t order that Viking helmet off of eBay that would be perfect for that Kegger on Thursday and no, you don’t need to sign up to three more porno sites.

5 - Describe your level of intoxication in a status update

Look, everybody out that saw how drunk you are. Everyone online going to see how drunk you were when you’re tagged the next morning in a sequence of photos illustrating your attempt to chug a mixture of vodka and apple sauce. Nobody needs to be reminded via an intentionally misspelled status update.

6 - Email an ex

It’s like texting, except you can fit a hell of a lot more in. While a text message limits you to a simple “want 2 see u” an email can easily turn into a seemingly appropriate compliment that “ur way better at kissing than ur sister.”

7 - Forward a funny email

People haven’t done this since 2001, and no matter how much you believe you won’t get kissed for two years if you don’t pass it along, please try and refrain.

8 - Film a YouTube response video

I don’t know what sorts of assholes are making all of these YouTube response videos, but I’m assuming most of them must be plastered, so everyone cut it out: nobody cares.

9 - Download p*rn Movies

I know it’s hard to find the Kim Kardashian sextape but just pay for it when you’re sober if you’re so desperate, because you’re going to get a bunch of Trojans if you drunkenly download anything p0rn-related. They invented streaming for a reason.

10 - Read the news

This isn’t a good time to catch up on the latest on the Obama administration, and you’re going to forget all of it anyway. You may as well just turn on some Dave Chapelle stand-up and enjoy yourself while you’re still conscious.

HUMOR Me...

A man walks into a bar and orders one shot. Then he looks into his shirt pocket and orders another shot. After he finishes, he looks into his shirt pocket again and orders another shot.
The bartender is curious and askes him "every time you order a shot, you look in your shirt pocket. Why?"
The man replies, "I have a picture of my wife in my pocket and when she starts to look good, I go home."

• Reference/Source: Nuffy.net

10 Reasons: Why You Should Stop Using Facebook?

Facebook privacy policies keep going down the drain. That’s enough reason for many to abandon it. Hey "Facebook Guys", no offense about me writing this list and I'm just voicing my opinion.

I just come to realized the time when I was reading from this article of interestings.net that there is enough reason for me to quit and stop Facebooking.

The author from interestings.net quoted"
After some reflection, I’ve decided to delete my account on Facebook. I’d like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I’d like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I’m not missing anything. In any event, here’s my “Top Ten” reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account."

Here are the 10 list why you should stop using facebook:

10. Facebook’s Terms Of Service are completely one-sided

Let’s start with the basics. Facebook’s Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don’t keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook’s interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you’ll see, there’s no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.

9. Facebook’s CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior

From the very beginning of Facebook’s existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg’s ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world’s largest social network. They’re particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy

Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook’s privacy changes last January: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: “… the default is now social.” Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that …

At the same time that they’re telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It’s also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).

6. Facebook is a bully

When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook’s privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the “default is now social.” So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you’re actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don’t want their membership to know how much data is really available. It’s one thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.

5. Even your private data is shared with applications

At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you’re not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data – all of it – must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.

4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted

Even if we weren’t talking about ethical issues here, I can’t trust Facebook’s technical competence to make sure my data isn’t hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their “Like” button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users’ profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don’t care too much about your privacy or don’t really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account

It’s one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you’ve had enough, it’s pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you’ve used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you’re given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you’re deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you’re back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it’s really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by “buried” I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they’ve “deleted” their account.

2. Facebook doesn’t (really) support the Open Web

The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It’s bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It’s bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It’s bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it “open,” when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can’t use this feature unless you’re on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.

1. The Facebook application itself ****s

Between the farms and the mafia wars and the “top news” (which always guesses wrong – is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I’m single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don’t bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can’t even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let’s not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn’t the most usable thing in the world, at least they’ve tried to stay focused and aren’t trying to be everything to everyone.

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren’t. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn’t mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed – have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook’s revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn’t the only game in town. I don’t like their application nor how they do business and so I’ve made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Well that's an interesting thought from interestings.net's author, right? What can you say about it? Feel free to leave comments. Thanks!

• Reference/Source: interestings.net [May 5th, 2010]

10 Nations/Countries Where Facebook Rocks and Rules

I first read the news here at AzraelsMerryland and he explained that “Philippines has the highest penetration of Facebook in the world at 93.9%. Penetration means the total number of Facebook users vs the total number of Internet users in the Philippines.”

The main source of the news came here at 247wallst.com and they showed here the Top 10 nations where Facebook rules the net, and they gave a nice stats based on data provided by comScore, Inside Facebook, New Media Trend Watch, and ZDNet and announced that the Philippines is the number 1 users of Facebook.

Here's the complete list:

10. Venezuela

Facebook: 86.2%
Twitter: 21.0%
LinkedIn: 3.2%
Internet Use: 37.7%

Venezuela has the third highest rate of Twitter use among Internet users. According to research firm comScore, 21% of Venezuela’s Internet users have Twitter accounts. The only countries with higher percentages are Indonesia and Brazil. America, by comparison, has a usage rate of 12%, the eleventh highest. Social media also plays a large role in Venezuelan politics. Hugo Chavez, the country’s president, has 1.5 million Twitter followers. He is the second-most followed political figure, behind only Barack Obama.

9. Colombia

Facebook: 86.9%
Twitter: 14.6%
LinkedIn: 3.3%
Internet Use: 48.7%

More than 86% of Colombians visited a social networking site in September, with Facebook leading the category. Visitors averaged 4.6 hours on the site during the month. Nearly 7 out of 10 Colombians visited a photo sharing site in September 2010 led by Facebook.com. Colombia is the fastest-growing Internet market in Latin America, growing 31% in the past year to reach 11.8 million unique visitors in September 2010, according to comScore. Facebook is by far the most popular social networking site in the country, with visitors having spent an average of 4.6 hours on the site during one month, of a total 20.4 hours spent online.

8. Peru

Facebook: 87.2%
Twitter: 12.5%
LinkedIn: 4.6%
Internet Use: 27%

Although a large portion of Peru’s Internet users are involved with social networking websites, it has a relatively small minority of people who use the Internet at all. As of January 2011, only 27% of Peruvians were online, one of the lowest rates among the Latin American countries. Peru also had the second slowest growth among Latin American countries of Internet users in 2010, according to Inside Facebook. The only country to have slower growth was Brazil.

7. Indonesia

Facebook: 87.5%
Twitter: 22.0%
LinkedIn: 1.3%
Internet Use: 12.3%

Social network penetration in Indonesia is the third greatest in Southeast Asia as of the beginning of 2011, at 90% of those people online. According to comScore, the country’s high adoption rates are due “almost exclusively” to Facebook. In January 2011, 22% of Indonesian Internet users visited Twitter, the fourth-greatest share among all countries. Indonesia, however, has the smallest percentage of Internet users among the countries on this list — 12.3%.

6. Malaysia

Facebook: 88.4%
Twitter: 10.8%
LinkedIn: 2.9%
Internet Use: 64.6%

Malaysia has the second-highest social network penetration in Southeast Asia, with 91%. One of the most increasingly popular social-networking activities in the country is photo-sharing on sites such as Facebook. From 2009 to 2010, the popularity of online photo-sharing increased by 57% in Malaysia. This is the second greatest percentage among Southeast Asian countries.

5. Argentina

Facebook: 89.2%
Twitter: 18.0%
LinkedIn: 6.4%
Internet Use: 64.4%

Facebook has become extremely popular in Argentina recently. As of May 2011, Argentina’s penetration rate was 89.2%. 27.8% of minutes spent online in Argentina are spent on social networks, making the category the second most popular online destination. The first is portals.

4. Chile

Facebook: 90.2%
Twitter: 14.3%
LinkedIn: 5.9%
Internet Use: 50%

Chile has among the highest rates of Internet use among Latin American countries, with 50% of Chileans online. According to comScore, 28.5% of all minutes spent online in Chile are spent on social networking sites, up 8.9 percentage points from the previous year. This makes it the most popular activity online based on “minutes used.”

3.Turkey

Facebook: 90.9%
Twitter: 16.6%
LinkedIn: 3.4%
Internet Use: 45%

Turkey has the highest Facebook penetration among all the Eurasian countries, with a rate of 90.9%. The second highest is the UK, with 81.7%. Internet users in Turkey also spend the third greatest amount of time on social networking sites among all nations, behind only Russia and Israel. The average Turkish social network visitor spends 7.6 hours a month on social networking sites.

2. Israel

Facebook: 91.0%
Twitter: 5.0%
LinkedIn: 6.4%
Internet Use: 71.6%

Israel has the highest rate of Internet use among the countries on this list, with 71.6% of the country’s population being “plugged in.” It is also very involved with Facebook. Besides having the second highest rate of Facebook usage among Internet users, Israelis spend the second most amount of time on social networking sites, behind only Russia. Israel’s social network users spend an average of 9.2 hours on social network sites a month.

1. Philippines

Facebook: 93.9%
Twitter: 16.1%
LinkedIn: 1.9%
Internet Use: 29.7%

Social network penetration is incredibly high in the Philippines, reaching 95%. Facebook is the country’s most popular website, more so than Google, and has a penetration rate of 93.9%. The Philippines is also the eighth most popular country for Twitter use on a global scale, with a penetration rate of 16.1%. The popularity of photo sharing has increased by 46% in the country in one year, largely due to Facebook. Social networking is so popular among Filipinos, the country has been nicknamed “The Social Networking Capital of the World.”

• Reference/Source: 247wallst.com by Charles Stockdale and Douglas A. McIntyre [Posted: May 9, 2011 at 5:20 am]
• Reference/Source: AzraelsMerryland[MAY 16, 2011]

10 of 25 Sites We Can't Live Without

From Amazon and Google to Craigslist and Wikipedia, here are the sites that we keep bookmarked year after year according to time.com of 2007.

BBC.co.uk

BBC Online is the brand name and home for the BBC's UK online service. It is a large network of websites including such high profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on-demand video and radio services co-branded BBC iPlayer, the pre-school site Cbeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize. The BBC has had an online presence supporting its TV and radio programmes and web-only initiatives since 1994 but did not launch officially until December 1997, following government approval to fund it by TV licence fee revenue as a service in its own right. Throughout its short history, the online plans of the BBC have been subject to various public consultations and government reviews illustrating concerns from commercial rivals that its large presence and public funding distorts the UK market.
The website has gone through several branding changes since it was launched. Originally named BBC Online, it was then rebranded as BBCi (which itself was the brand name for interactive TV services) before being named bbc.co.uk. It was then branded BBC Online again in 2008. The Web-based service of the BBC is one of the world's largest and most visited websites (thirty-ninth most visited according to Alexa in April 2011). As of 2007, it contained over two million pages.
On 26 February 2010 The Times claimed that Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, proposed that the BBC's web output should be cut by 50%, with online staff numbers and budgets reduced by 25% in a bid to scale back BBC operations and allow commercial rivals more room. On 2 March 2010, the BBC reported that it will cut its website spending by 25% and close BBC 6 Music and Asian Network. On 24 January 2011, the confirmed cuts of 25% were announced leaving a £34 million shortfall. This resulted in the closure of several sites such as BBC Switch, BBC Blast, 6-0-6 and h2g2.

Citysearch.com

Citysearch is an online city guide that provides information about businesses in the categories of dining, entertainment, retail, travel, and professional services in cities throughout the United States. Visitors to each of Citysearch's local city guides will find contact information, maps, driving directions, editorial, and user reviews for the businesses listed. Citysearch is headquartered in West Hollywood, California and is an owned and operated web site of CityGrid Media, which is an operating business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI).

Craigslist.org

Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.

Del.icio.us

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, then sold to Chad Hurley and Steve Chen on April 27, 2011. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

Digg.com

Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems. The website traffic ranked 135th by Alexa.com as of March 16, 2011. Quantcast estimates Digg's monthly U.S. unique visits at 8.5 million.

Ebay.com

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) is an American Internet (Consumer-to-consumer) company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. Founded in 1995, eBay is one of the notable success stories of the dot-com bubble; it is now a multi-billion dollar business with operations localized in over thirty countries. eBay expanded from its original "set-time" auction format to include "Buy It Now" standard shopping; shopping by UPC, ISBN, or other kind of SKU (via Half.com); online classified advertisements (via Kijiji or eBay Classifieds); online event ticket trading (via StubHub); online money transfers (via PayPal) and other services.

ESPN.com

ESPN.com is the official website of ESPN and a division of ESPN Inc. Since launching in 1995 as ESPNet.SportsZone.com, the website has developed numerous sections including: Page 2, SportsNation, ESPN 3.com, ESPN Motion, My ESPN, ESPN Sports Travel, ESPN Video Games, ESPN Insider, ESPN.com's Fanboard, ESPN Fantasy Sports, ESPNU.com, and ESPN Search. ESPN.com also has partnerships with MLB.tv, NBA.com, WNBA.com, NHL.com, Baseball America, Golf Digest, Scouts Inc., Jayski.com, USGA.org, Sherdog.com and Masters.org.
It also has sections devoted to certain sports including: the NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA, NASCAR, IRL, College, Golf and Soccer. Each section contains pages devoted to: scores, teams, schedules, standings, players, transactions, news wires, injures and columnists pages.
ESPN.com's primary competitors are FoxSports.com, CBSSports.com, NBCSports.com, SI.com and SportingNews.com.
Some notable ESPN.com columnists are John Buccigross, Chris Mortensen, John Clayton, Adam Schefter, Andy Katz, Bill Simmons, Len Pasquarelli, Jayson Stark, Buster Olney, Gene Wojciechowski, Scoop Jackson, Pat Forde, Jim Caple, and Michael Smith.

Facebook.com

Facebook (stylized facebook) is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace. Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in October 2010 According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account.

FactCheck.org

FactCheck.org is a non-partisan, nonprofit website that describes itself as a "'consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics." It is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.
Most of its content consists of rebuttals to what it considers inaccurate, misleading, or false claims by politicians. FactCheck has also targeted misleading claims from various partisan groups.
Besides maintaining a website, FactCheck.org distributes audio stories by podcast and iTunes Radio.

Flickr.com

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. In September 2010, it reported that it was hosting more than 5 billion images. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iPhone, BlackBerry and for Windows Phone 7, but not for other mobile devices. Several third party apps offer alternatives such as flickr hd for the iPad.

Check out the other 11-25 website you can't live without at time.com. Thanks for reading!

• Reference/Source: time.com
• Reference/Source: Wikipedia

The Top Ten Job Search Engines for Job Seekers

Job search engine is that type of website which deals employments or careers. Many job search engines allow jobs providers to post the jobs on their websites. Users can find there all types of job and apply for them. They don’t need to pay any registration fee because jobs search engines earn from their employers & ad networks. Here are some popular job search engines.

1. Naukri.com (India) - Naukri.com is a Indian job search engine. It’s very popular in India. It was launched in 1997 by Sanjeev Bikhchandani .

2. Bixee.com (India) – Bixee.com is job search engine for only Indian job seekers. It was launched in 2005 by Ruban Phukan and Rajesh. In 2006 it was acquired by ibibo.com .

3. Monster.com (Usa & India)- Monster.com was launched in 1999 with their slogan “Your calling is calling”. It is a popular job portal in USA and India. The monster board was founded by Jeff Taylor.

4. Yahoo hotjobs ( World wide ) – Yahoo hotjobs ( www.hotjobs.com ) is an online job search engines. It was founded by Richard Johnson in 1996. It was acquired by Monster Worldwide and merged into monster.com .

5. Craiglist.org (World wide ) – It is the most popular classified site on the internet. It was founded by Craig Newmark in 1996. It is a well know classified website for job search. It’s network of online communities, forums, job classified, free online classified advertisement such as housing, personal, sale for etc.

6. Careerbuilder.com (USA) – Careerbuilder is a popular job search engine in USA. It was launched in 1995. It was created by Rob McGovern. It provides online career search services.

7. Linkup.com (USA) – Linkup is the another great job search engine in USA. It has solid applicant tracking system so that they can prevent duplicate listing & fraudulent. It was launched in 1995 .

8. Indeed.com (USA) – Indeed.com is a metasearch engine for job listing where job seekers can find their suitable job from thousands of job listing websites. It was launched in 2004 by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan.

9. Timesjobs.com (India ) – Timesjobs was lanched in 2004 by Times Business Solutions Limited (TBSL). It’s another great job search engine for India job seekers.

10. Shine.com (India ) – Shine.com was launched in 2008 by HT Media. It’s another great option for India job seekers after naukri.com and timesjobs.com . It has a unique service to create resume for job vacancy.

• Reference/Source: way2workfromhome.blogspot.com

Top 10 Social Media Blogs: The 2011 Winners!

Social media is a big subject. If you’re looking for some reliable places to go for the best tips and social media tactics, look no further!

Our second-annual contest generated more than 300 nominations. Our panel of social media experts carefully reviewed the nominees and finalists, analyzing the quality of their content, the frequency of posts and reader involvement (among other things).

The following are the winners of Social Media Examiner’s Top 10 Social Media Blogs for 2011.

If you’re looking to master all that social media has to offer, these rich blogs need to be at the top of your reading list.

1. Brian Solis: The grand master of social media, Brian is one of the web’s leading social media evangelists and his blog is required reading for businesses.

TopRank: This popular blog, the brainchild of Lee Odden, provides exceptional social media advice and should be one of your daily destinations.

Convince & Convert: Jay Baer’s Convince & Convert provides outstanding content for businesses seeking to embrace social media. This is the second year Jay has made our list.

Six Pixels of Separation: Mitch Joel offers consistent and thought-provoking content delivered with personality.

Social Media Explorer: This blog, from Jason Falls, provides excellent perspective on the current state of social media and should be a regular stop for serious social media marketers. This is the second year Jason has made our list.

Brand Builder: For businesses looking to dive deep into social media discussion, check out Olivier Blanchard’s rich insights. This is the second year Olivier has made our list.

Spin Sucks: Gini Dietrich’s blog takes a look at social media from a PR perspective. Check her site out!

Danny Brown: Danny Brown’s blog examines the human side of social media with rich content and insights.

The Anti-Social Media: For something completely unique, check out Jay Dolan’s satirical blog on the state of social media.

BrandSavant: This unique blog from Tom Webster combines a great intellect with with common sense, giving it an edge.

Congratulations to the winners. Be sure to check out these amazing blogs!

• Reference/Source: socialmediaexaminer.com By Michael Stelzner

Top 10 Sources for Funny Facebook Status Messages

Source: http://www.brighthub.com | Ever wanted to just say something on your Facebook page? Something funny for your status message that will make your friends and family chuckle? Check out this BH article for funny Facebook status messages.

Do you have a Facebook page, but never know what to say on it? Do you log in and see that all your friends have these funny messages that they post and then wonder, how can I be that funny or witty with my status? Well, there's no need to fear. Below are listed a few websites where you can get inspiration for those funny Facebook status messages.

The below sites are not just for Facebook; they can be used for other social networking sites as well, like Twitter and My Space. Here are spots 1-10.

1. Facebook Status.org - A great website for geting witty and funny Facebook statuses, as well as funny videos that you can post for your friends to see.
2. Funny Facebook Status - Containing a huge collection of one sentence status messages which follow your name when your friends see the update, such as 'Bright Hub is training to be a ninja'.
3. Failbook - From the site that brought you LOL Cats, Failbook collects a number of humorous status messages that others have posted on their Facebook. This is a site you should check before posting things you probably shouldn't.
4. Facebook Status blog - A blog site that contains witty status messages that you can use. Looks to be updated every other month.
5. 50 Funny Facebook Ideas - A listing of 50 funny Facebook status messages
6. 101 Facebook Statuses - Presented by Geeker's Magazine, these are 101 funny status messages.
7. Bloody Cabbagatory - A funny site in its own right, BC has a couple of pages with some worthy status messages
8. Reface Me - Has several different funny and weird status messages that they do for their Status Saturdays.
9. What the Facebook - Much like Failbook, this has a listing of those FB status messages that make you go hmmmm.
10. Web Informer - A general listing of all of the sites in which you can get funny Facebook status messages

Whether or not you use some of these within your Facebook profile, you will at least get a good laugh or a bit of amazement with how people go about using their Facebook.