If you haven’t heard all the buzz about facebook the past couple weeks, listen up. Facebook just changed the way they handle privacy. There are no more regional networks. Unless you restrict specific things, they will be indexed by Google. In this post you can learn how to setup your facebook for max visibility while retaining a necessary amount of privacy.
The levels of limitation are: Friends, Friends of Friends, Friend lists, or Everyone.
I’ve organized my settings by section, which you can access by clicking on the links.
http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy§ion=profile
About me -> Education {Only Friends}
Photos and videos {Dudes}
Posts {only friends}
Dudes is a friend list excluding certain family members and people from work that I’d rather not see my pictures.
http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy§ion=contact
IM -> Current Address {Only Friends}
Website -> Add me as a friend {Everyone}
Send me a message {Only Friends}
http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy§ion=applications&field=friends_share
Status Updates, Online Presence, Website, Education and work, My birthday, My hometown {checked}
I allow anyone to search for me. But, if you want you can turn this off and be hidden. Lastly, to block people go here.
There are many benefits to using google voice as an a personal digital operator. First and foremost, screening calls. Your personal operator is going to ask everyone with a restricted number to state their name. If you want, this can happen to anyone that calls who isn’t one of your Google Contacts.
Your personal operator can also serve certain people to specific phones and present custom voicemail greetings. These voicemails will be transcribed and sent to your phone as a text message and emailed to you.
The history of your phone calls and voicemails will be archived at http://google.com/voice. Having GvoiceMail is handy. This personal operator is so good at handling calls that you can switch the phone you are using in the middle of a call. Say you walk home while on a business call: tell the person on the other end to hold, then you press press * and hang up, your home phone rings and you answer it. Sounds too good to be true.
Want in? One doesn’t ask for an invite to google voice, he signs up. I should also mention that this service is free and Google provides you with a free number.
Google is using speech recognition to index political videos on youtube. With a search, one can easily find what a politician has to say about a particular subject. http://labs.google.com/gaudi/
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After meticulously organizing my iTunes Music Library, I have found playlists to be extremely handy—static playlists as well as something relatively new, smart playlists. For those that are unfamiliar, smart playlists build their contents based on variables and are live updating. What this means is that you are going to have amazing playlists.
Let me show you how to import your favorite songs you haven’t heard in the last week, month, or how to aggregate your holiday music, tracks with missing tags and your most listened to tracks with the least number of skips.
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In the past, students enrolled in courses by filling out a form. I suppose the fax machine was the next step. But now students are filling up an online shopping cart, on websites, of their classes for next semester. Naturally, this is a highly stressful time, so the system should have a user centered design.
I have experienced two of these registration systems. I found the first system quite pleasant and intuitive; the second, not so much. Babson College has a superior course catalog/registration system to SUNY Purchase.
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Conversations on the Internet have a certain flavor to them that exceeds limitations of the normal world. The participants do not have to be in the same room, let alone the same country. It is because of this phenomenon that we have a fusing of cultures with the capability of pooling knowledge together. This seemingly infinite array of knowledge is indexed and searchable.
These participants can keep track of one another through social networking enabled websites, which informs one another of interests, relationships, microblogs, and blogs. Conversations here closely resemble informal social interactions, similar to a party atmosphere. This is a pleasant contrast to the focused, educated, and moderated conversations that are ever so quickly building the infinite data pool.
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Regarding the new the facebook layout, what do you not like about it? Is it too cluttered? How so? Do you really need to see everyone’s new facebook pic of the day? I feel that facebook deserves this update. Many complain about how disorganized the new layout is, that they can’t find anything.. well what are you trying to find? Is there a special group of friends that you want to track everything about? What are you looking for that you can’t find? Let me explain how facebook has changed and how to use friend lists.
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Most articles I come across are lost in a sea of advertisements and bad formatting. While advertising surely has its place, I feel that it is unfair to distract the user when they have committed 5 minutes out of their day to read what you have to say. Perhaps I am a glutton for simplicity, but I prefer being able to finish an article in one go, rather than having my eyes darting all over a page.
Luckily for people easily distracted like myself, some javascript genius has figured out how to automatically pull the article content out of a page and display it in a customizable, easy to read overlay, toggled by a bookmarklet.
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Currently, our power grid is operated by people. Mechanical switches. Telephones. Blackouts are unknown until someone calls it in. The sources of our power are centrally located, single locations providing power to vast territories. Having such serious power centrally located is extremely dangerous.
The recent major blackouts on the East Coast and Silicon Valley in the West Coast of the United States are examples of how this system is reaching its maximum capacity and is failing on us.
President Obama has called for an overhaul of our grid and a transition to an automated, widely distributed energy delivery system. In this system the electricity will flow both ways. Allow me to explain why this is important and how it works.
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Import your blog into facebook! This can be a great marketing tool.
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