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Yahoo News Activity Automatically Shares News with Friends
Sep 23rd
Yahoo News Activity, which was announced Thursday at the Facebook f8 conference, enables Facebook users to effortlessly find news that is important to their friends. Yahoo News readers will now be able to automatically share what they read on Facebook as well as discover the news stories their friends are reading. When users see news through the eyes of a friend, they are more likely to trust the source and view the news as relevant.
To enable Yahoo News Activity, simply visit Yahoo News, login to Facebook, and click “Add to Timeline.” After this simple process is completed, the facebar will appear and allow users to easily access the same articles their friends are reading. The new facebar, which is a horizontal bar with pictures of Facebook friends, will appear at the top of Yahoo News. It allows Yahoo News readers to mouse over a friend’s picture and immediately see the same news stories that a friend is reading.
Using the built-in privacy settings and prompts, Yahoo News users will have full control regarding the activities that are shared on Facebook and Yahoo News Activity. Yahoo News readers can decide if they want to grant permission each time they read an article or they can grant permission one time and never again be bothered by prompts. In addition, users can delete activities that they do not want displayed in the facebar or on Facebook. Also, at any time, users can disable the “social option,” causing Yahoo News Activity to no longer share what they are reading.
A Yahoo spokesperson said the following about Yahoo News Activity:
“The deep integration with Facebook offers an immersive social experience on Yahoo News so people can discover and connect around the news and information they are enjoying on Yahoo! seamlessly through updates on Facebook.”
This new feature, which will simultaneously allow users to read newsworthy articles and interact with their friends, is yet another way that Facebook is putting a social spin on everyday activities.
[Sources Include: Yahoo, Market Watch, & Facebook]
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Yahoo News Activity Automatically Shares News with Friends
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How To Back Up Your Life Automatically with Ifttt
Sep 14th
After nine months of testing, a nifty tool called ifttt opened to the public last week. Don’t worry; I’ll save you the trouble. They tell me it’s pronounced “Ift.” Like “gift” with no G. Ifttt stands for “If this then that.” It’s a tool designed to “put the internet to work for you” by creating simple tasks using the Web’s great services using the format “if this then that.” It requires a simple yet fundamental kind of conditional thinking that can enable anyone to be programmer of sorts: “If I post a photo to Flickr, save it to my Dropbox.” You can make that happen with ifttt.
Well, great! The possibilities are endless! I want to automate everything! Where to begin? How about with some tasks that are important, not merely nifty? For instance, does posting your whole life into the cloudy ether ever make you worry about losing your data? Read on to learn how ifttt can back that stuff up for you automatically from behind the scenes.
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A Little Background
A “task” on ifttt follows the “If this then that” format. For creating tasks, ifttt has “channels” for many of the Web services we use. The “this” part of the task is called a “trigger,” and each of the channels has a set of triggers for the common things you do with that service, like “If I post a photo to Instagram.” The “that” part of a task is called an “action,” which each channel also lists for its service, like “then save it to my Dropbox.” When you create a task, you link a trigger in one channel to a task in another channel, and away you go: “If I post a photo to Instagram, then save it to my Dropbox.” Tasks check your services for new data every 15 minutes, but you can refresh them manually.
It’s a little trickier than writing a sentence, though. Each trigger and task must be defined by various “addins” that point to variables like your user name on the service, the title of a post, the caption of a photo, the URL, etc. We can show you how to set up the basic task, but you’ll have to figure out how to grab just the right data for you.
Fortunately, tasks can be saved as “recipes,” so they can be shared. Below is a guide to the kinds of tasks you can create for backing up your online life with some links to existing recipes for inspiration. Clicking any of the links will take you to the full ifttt page that explains that piece of the puzzle in detail.
How To Back Up Your Photos
Ifttt currently offers channels for three major photo services: Facebook, Flickr and Instagram. Each of these services works a little differently, but they can all be backed up to Dropbox using ifttt.
Here are the triggers for each service that can be used to save photos:
- Any new public photo
- New public photo tagged
- New public photos (for batch uploads)
- New public favorite
To back up your photos on ifttt, find the triggers above that suit you, then set up tasks for those triggers to engage the “Add file from URL” action in Dropbox. Just make sure your trigger uses the addon to get the photo’s URL, and you should be all set. Here are some example recipes:
Download Facebook Tagged Photo
by pavelbinar
Download any photos of me to dropbox
by liamegan
Save all Instagram photos to Dropbox
by tealtan
Faves to dropbox (for Flickr)
by hartsell
How To Back Up Your Tweets and Blog Posts
Ifttt has channels for Posterous, Tumblr, Twitter and WordPress, so it can be used to back up your posts from any of those services. You can save your posts as files in Dropbox, or you can save them as notes in Evernote. Here are the triggers you can use from these channels:
- Any new post
- New text post
- New photo post*
- New like
* Note: Tumblr has triggers for every single kind of media post. It would be crazy to link them all here. Instead, just go to the Tumblr channel page to find them.
You can save posts from any of these triggers as files in Dropbox by adding on their URL, or you can grab the the actual post as a note in Evernote. Here are some recipes for inspiration:
Archive your tweets on Evernote
by redwanhuq
Blog archive (for Tumblr)
by caffeinefusion
How To Automatically Save Articles to Read Later
Throughout the day, you might find articles that look interesting on Twitter or Google Reader but you don’t have time to read them. You can use ifttt to save those articles for later automatically just by liking or starring the Google Reader item or a tweet containing a link. You can even set up RSS triggers to feed any blog in the world straight into your read-later services. Here are the triggers:
- New feed item
- New feed item matches (for keyword or phrase triggers)
Ifttt has actions for both Instapaper and Read It Later, which means you can set up triggers to save articles to them automatically when you favorite them from Twitter, Google Reader or straight from RSS. If you don’t use either read-later service, you can save articles as text in Evernote. Here are some example recipes:
Google Reader Star to Instapaper
by btpayson
Send Google Reader Starred items to Read It Later
by m3r
Reader Star To Evernote
by nuochan
Link In “Favorite” Tweet Sent Directly To Instapaper
by jimmaiella
How To Back Up Your Check-Ins and Statuses
If you want to keep a diary of your check-ins and statuses for posterity, you can use triggers from Foursquare, Facebook or Twitter to save updates as Google Calendar events. Here are the triggers you’ll need:
Using these triggers, you can make these updates save automatically as events in Google Calendar. If you have your Google Calendar sync down to your computer, it’s a way of locally backing up your status updates and saving them like journal entries. Here are some recipes to get you started:
Dear Diary, a running log of where I am
by alexander
Save a timeline of facebook statuses to G Cal
by liamegan
Go Make Your Own!
Backing up your social life is just the beginning of what you can do with ifttt. For more inspiration, browse the recipe list. Here’s the full channel menu, so you can see what services are connected. Don’t see your favorite? Contact the ifttt team and tell them what you’d like to see.
Already chomping at the bit? Click right here to start making a task.
Have you created any cool ifttt recipes? Share them with us in the comments
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Facebook Automatically Changes User Settings For New Email Feature Test
Sep 13th
Facebook has announced a new test feature that will cut down on the frequency of emails that the platform sends to heavy users. Instead of getting email notifications for every new notification you receive on Facebook, the company will now send summary emails. This will significantly cut down on the email glut for users that are heavily engaged on Facebook.
The question is whether this type of feature is necessary. Those in the test group will have their notifications settings changed automatically. Users can change their settings back by updating their account settings. Yet, automatically changing users settings sets a dangerous precedent, one that many users will not take kindly to.
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Anybody that has been on Facebook for any extended period of time will probably already have changed their account settings to reflect what notification emails they do and do not want coming from the platform. For instance, I changed my settings long ago so that Facebook sends me no emails for any type of notification except for a weekly summary of a page that I set up for a side project. I would not be happy if Facebook changed those settings for me.
So far, Facebook’s announcement has nearly 31,000 “Likes” and 5800 comments. That is excessive, even by Facebook’s own profile page standards. Granted, any time that Facebook posts to its own profile it becomes a forum for users to complain about any tweak the platform has made over the last year or so (the new sidebar “ticker” as well as the new privacy controls are a favorite punching bags). One Facebook user said in the comments, “I don’t have a clue as to what all the ado is about.”
How many Facebook users still rely on email notifications? Anybody with a smartphone or a tablet with the Facebook application installed gets all their notifications pushed to them in real time, thus making email notifications redundant. That is actually where a summary email instead of individual notifications could be helpful. When users are on the go and a notification pops up, it is likely they register that it is there, maybe send a reply, and then put their phones back into their pockets. It is easy to forget the variety of notification a user receives when they come in short bursts.
What is the bigger story here? Is it that Facebook is automatically changing users’ account settings for a feature rollout? Or is it the actual feature where Facebook looks to fork away from individual email notifications to summary emails? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Home Page Automatically Changing Background Image On June 10th
Jun 9th
If you visit Google today, you may notice the home page is a bit different. About a week ago, Google began letting users to upload their own background images on Google.com, to help them customize the Google home page.
To drive more awareness to this feature and to inspire users to change their home page, [...]
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WordPress plugins to Automatically Watermark Your Images
Jun 9th
It’s been a while since I published my post on why and how you can watermark the images you publish on the web (this helps both for copyright protection and brand awareness).
One of my sites relies on images heavily and I decided to automate watermarking. So in this post I am sharing two WordPress plugins that automatically watermark the images you upload and publish.
Watermark Reloaded
Watermark Reloaded is going to be my favorite plugin when it comes to watermarking images in WordPress. It has plenty of options allowing to customize the watermark text and position:
- Specify the type of an image to apply the watermark to (thumbnail, medium, large, full size);
- Specify the watermark alignment and offset;
- Specify the watermark text;
- Specify the watermark text font size and color:
After that, the watermarked image is going to look like this:
Image Optimizer
While the above one is great if you want to watermark ALL images of the same type, this one can be used if you need to watermark selected / random images.
Image Optimizer: While you are not going to see all the listed features after you install this one, the watermarking ability is still there and working.
Just have the plugin installed and activated. Then go to “Settings” and provide the text you want to appear as a watermark:
After that (in the image uploading window) you will need to specify if you want the image and the thumbnail to be watermarked. The result looks like this:
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WordPress plugins to Automatically Watermark Your Images
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