Chrome: Twitter is a great source for news, articles, and a good way to stay in touch with friends, but if your friends are obsessed with some annoying celebrity that you have no desire to read about, Purge Twitter Trends is a Chrome extension that strips specific celebrity trending topics from your feed so you can read in peace without being forced to unfollow them. More »

 

Web/Chrome/Android/iOS: Springpad is a free service that allows you to save places, notes, itemsand more to your account for future reference. The service just got a lot more social with today's update: now you can connect Springpad to your Facebook account to automatically show you items that your friends like, places they visit, and more in case you want to save them to your account. More »

 

Chrome: If you're still looking for a way to easily make your posts on Facebook appear on Twitter or Google+, Publish Sync is a Chrome extension that gives you the flexibility to post the same thing to one or all of your other social networks at the same time. More »

 

The internet is wonderful, but it's also a landfill for many annoying things.

Last week Twitter released a new update to their iOS based app where they introduced a new floating bar in the app to display trending topics (read ads) to users.

This new update created an outrage in the tech sphere and even on Twitter itself. Much of the problem with this new bar lay in the fact that it overlapped tweets. This dedicated site http://dickbar.org/ explains what really happened and how this sparked an issue and the new hashtag #Dickbar.

If you aren’t an iPhone user, you might have been spared these recent changes, but if you want to know what this looked like you can try out an extension for Google Chrome which brings the #Dickbar to the web interface. Interested? Go ahead and download it from here.

I find myself pondering about global economics, technology, innovation and where we might end up in the next 50 years. In this fast paced globe change is perpetual and I find it fascinating, and eve though I’m no economist but perhaps these books will help stimulate my mind to a better understanding of things to come in the near future?

You can find these all on Amazon, download them to your PC or read them on your Kindle device:

You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier

Crisis Economics, by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm

The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen

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VIDEO: In 50 years the earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity. The video entitled “HOME” captures your attention within the first 5 seconds:

The majority of blogs and a lot of websites display social media widgets on their pages. They display Facebook likes, Facebook users, Twitter tweets, Disqus comments and a lot more. Depending on the site, it can add a lot to the loading time of the website.

WidgetBlock offers a way out, at least for users of the Google Chrome web browser. The Google Chrome extension basically blocks the majority of social media widgets on all Internet websites the user opens in the browser.

It removes the widgets from the page so that they are not displayed anymore on the page, or at least replaced with a non functioning place holder.

Here is a screenshot of a Techcrunch article without the extension installed:

And here is the same article with the extension installed and enabled:

And finally how it looks in the Firefox web browser with NoScript enabled:

As you see, there is not much of a difference in page design. WidgetBlock comes with an option page to enable individual widgets, which is obviously helpful if they are regularly used by the Chrome user.

The options page lists several dozen Web 2.0 and statistics sites and services that are blocked by the extension. Among them services that are not shown on the page like Google Analytics or Scorecardresearch.

Chrome users who encounter a lot of those social media and stat tracking widgets and scripts may want to install WidgetBlock in their browser to make the pages that embed the widgets load faster and less obtrusive (via).

Social media has wriggled its way into almost every corner of everyday life for most people. Businesses are seeing a huge benefit in certain platforms. One highly useful way to communicate and keep everyone up-to-date is the micro-blogging platform.

Twitter, Tumblr, Friendfeed and others use this method to display updates. It is fast, fluid and searchable; all of which are essential in today’s fast pace business environment. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have your own inter-company Twitter? Present.ly gives you just that! /> id="more-23305">

Two Versions

There are 2 versions, an enterprise version to download and run on your own server. This option is more geared for larger companies.

For smaller groups, there is a free hosted version. It is all web-based and can be accessed from either a computer or a mobile device such as a Blackberry or Android. This is the one we will be talking about.

A few days back, we discussed some useful Google Chrome extensions that help you stay focused and be more efficient. If you are a social media addict and find it difficult to manage your social media profiles from the desktop or from the web, here are some Google Chrome extensions that might help.

All these extensions work from Google Chrome and you can manage your Twitter account, Facebook profile, shorten URL’s, Digg blog posts, watch YouTube videos and do many more interesting things.

Facebook has been frought by privacy concerns within the past month.  Some people have deactivated their accounts, or tuned up their skills to keep their profiles more private and restricted.   However this post isn’t about privacy, or how to delete your account.

Personally i feel that you should use the platform (or any platform for that matter) and tools to your advantage instead of worrying about issues that you can’t really control.  What you CAN control is:

@Facebook and the F8 Conference is causing a stir on the internet the past few days since opening it’s developers and users up to new tools and the open social graph.  These are tools by which Facebook can keep a track on it’s users; ever more so than before.  The clash of the titans is just beginning and it’s very exciting to keep abreast of what’s happening.

While i admire Facebook, especially Mark  Zuckerberg and his company’s insightful strategy to socialize the web outside of facebook there is more that’s at stake to the upper echolon of these companies.  That’s control and dominance over the world wide web.  It’s data that everyone is after, data, data, DATA.  Data in it’s raw form means nothing, it’s what the engineers do with that data is imporant.   The Rumpus has a great interview with a former employee at Facebook; and these aren’t just your average folks, they are total geniuses.