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Thursday 29 September 2011

How To Enable Facebook Timeline Right This Second

Enabling Timeline a bit early isn’t too difficult — but it’s not at all straight forward, either.
You see, Facebook is enabling Timeline early for open graph developers. You, too, can be an open graph developer — even if you’re just looking to dabble.

A few things to note:
- You probably don’t want to do this unless you’re actually a developer. Expect bugs.
- Only you will see your timeline at first (unless you decide otherwise), but it will automatically go public after a few days. My timeline was automatically hard-set to go public on September 29th.
- It seems that if you login into Facebook on another machine, Timeline gets disabled automatically on all of your machines. With that said, it seems you can get back to your timeline (but ONLY after following the steps below) by navigating to http://www.facebook.com/YOURUSERNAMEHERE?sk=timeline
- You’ll need to have a “verified” account for one of the steps, which means you need a credit card or phone number attached to the account.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Log into Facebook
2. Enable developer mode, if you haven’t already. To do this, type “developer” into the Facebook search box, click the first result (it should be an app made by Facebook with a few hundred thousand users), and add the app.

3. Jump into the developer app (if Facebook doesn’t put you there automatically, it should be in your left-hand tool bar)
4. Create a new app (don’t worry — you wont actually be submitting this for anyone else to see/use). Give your shiny new app any display name and namespace you see fit. Read through and agree to the Platform Privacy agreement. This is the step you need to be verified for.
5. Ensure you’re in your new app’s main settings screen. You should see your app’s name near the top of the page
6. Look for the “Open Graph” header, and click the “Get Started using open graph” link.
Create a test action for your app, like “read” a “book”, or “eat” a “sandwich”

7. This should drop you into an action type configuration page. Change a few of the default settings (I changed the past tense of “read” to “redd” — again, only you can see this unless you try and submit your application to the public directory), and click through all three pages of settings
8. Wait 2-3 minutes
9. Go back to your Facebook homescreen. An invite to try Timeline should be waiting at the top of the page
And you’re done! We’ve seen this work quite a few times now, so it should work without a hitch for just about anyone.
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7 Ways To Play Facebook’s New Social Feedback Loop

Facebook’s ticker, timeline, Open Graph and GraphRank create a feedback loop that drives social discovery, engagement, and targeting opportunities.
Here are seven suggestions on how to leverage these new features in marketing (by the way, in the graphic to the right, the word “flyouts” refers to pop-out window that opens when you click on an item in the ticker).

1. Get Onto the Graph

To participate in social story creation and promotion, you have to be part of the Open Graph.
These social stories show in the ticker each time a user performs an action in an application, and are then aggregated into the timeline.
When those actions form a social pattern, as identified by Facebook’s new GraphRank algorithm, they also gain more prominence in friends’ news feeds.

2. Go Beyond Pages

Marketers, especially brand marketers, have long relied on the fan page as their only real presence on Facebook.
It’s time to extend past this to create an experience that is truly social by design and conveys your brand identity.
Apps are more essential than ever to the latest Open Graph updates, as they are the centerpiece for story generation.
Without such an approach, you might find your messages are lost among all the real-time activity streaming from Open Graph apps into the ticker and news feed.

3. Focus On Experiences

By expanding beyond just the verb “like,” new opportunities open for marketers to bridge offline and online experiences.
Every offline experience and action that is inherently social can now be put online and be addressable.
Think about “driving a new car” or “sampling a new beer.”
Think about the verbs used when customers interact with your product, or owning your own verb (e.g., “Fedex a package”).
More important, however, is to integrate those actions and verbs into sharable and social experiences.

4. Analyze Your Audience

Dig deep into the patterns and trends of your customers and users.
Focus both on how they create stories and engage around your company as well as how their friends engage with those same stories.
Understanding what resonates, and what users ignore, is ultimately an essential step in managing your GraphRank.
A high GraphRank will build more relevance in friends-of-friends, and drive additional discovery via the news feed.

5. Use Sponsored Stories To Spread Brand Awareness

Stories that resonate best should be plucked out of the Ticker, in real-time, and sponsored to friends for greater impact via sponsored stories ads.
There is a wealth of new power to leverage in sponsoring “objects” you own (e.g. a baking brand can message out to anyone who has cooked lately via any app), as well as people who have “cooked,” “viewed,” or “eaten” their recipe.

6. Work GraphRank To Make Your Ads More Effective

Facebook is moving squarely into the field of intention-based advertising, by making explicit the specific types of connections users have to objects.
As such, coupling an understanding of what user stories drive engagement, with specific intentional verbs, is a powerful combination.
For instance, I can target in-market car buyers, as those who have test-driven lately.
While this intention based targeting may not have the same volume as a traditional campaign, when done correctly should yield higher engagement and pass-along rates.
Believe me, this is an area we’re digging very deep into, and we’ll have lots more to say and show here in the future!

7. Go Beyond The Click

Understand how your users behave once they are within your app, and not just how they got there initially.
At the most fundamental level, it is essential to understand the series of actions that drive engagement, and conversion.
By identifying patterns amongst your most avid users, finding their friends or others like them can be made possible by traversing the Graph.
Data that lives beyond the click is the key to unlocking value, and can be used to inform and drive more effective marketing both inside, and outside of, Facebook.
The marketing recommendations teased above take advantage of Facebook’s new social feedback loop, and are just the tip of the iceberg.
And in the words of Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, we’re most anxious about what you can do with this next generation of the Open Graph.
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Friday 23 September 2011

Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need To Know


As we predicted, Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the f8 conference in San Francisco Thursday introduced some of the most profound changes seen on Facebook since its inception. So many changes, in fact, that it can be hard to keep track. So here’s a handy-dandy guide.
1. You’re going to get a Timeline — a scrapbook of your life. In a complete overhaul of its ever-evolving profile page, Facebook is introducing Timeline. This is a stream of information about you — the photos you’ve posted, all your status updates, the apps you’ve used, even the places you’ve visited on a world map — that scrolls all the way back to your birth. It encourages you to post more stuff about your past, such as baby pictures, using Facebook as a scrapbook.
The further back in Timeline you go, the more Facebook will compress the information so that you’re only seeing the most interesting parts of your history. You can customize this by clicking on a star next to a status, say, or enlarging a picture.
Timeline is in beta now, and will be opt-in to start. In the long run, it will become the new default profile page.
2. You don’t have to just Like something — now you can [verb] any [noun]. Remember when all you could do to something on Facebook — a video, a comment, a product, a person — was Like it? Pretty soon that’s going to seem laughably antiquated. The social network has launched Facebook Gestures, which means that Facebook’s partners and developers can turn any verb into a button.
So you’ll start seeing the option to tell the world you’re Reading a particular book, for example, or Watching a given movie, or Listening to a certain tune. In turn, as many observers have pointed out, this is likely to lead to an explosion of oversharing — and far more information on your friends’ activities showing up in your news feed than you probably cared to know.
3. Facebook apps need only ask permission once to share stories on your behalf. Although not as big a deal as the Timeline, this tweak may be one of the more controversial. Previously, apps had to ask every time they shared information about you in your profile. Now, the first time you authorize the app, it will tell you what it’s going to share about you. If you’re cool with that, the app never has to ask you again.
But you don’t have to worry about this app stuff clogging your news feed, because …
4. All “lightweight” information is going to the Ticker. Status updates, photos from a wedding or a vacation, changes in relationship status: these are the kinds of things you want to see from your friends when you look at your news feed. Who killed whom in Mafia Wars? Who planted what in FarmVille? Not so much. So that kind of trivial detail has been banished to the Ticker, a real-time list of things your friends are posting now that scrolls down the side of your screen.
5. You can watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read news with your friends — all within Facebook. Starting today, thanks to a whole bunch of partnerships, there are a lot more things you can do without ever having to leave Facebook. You can watch a show on Hulu, listen to a song on Spotify, or check out a story on Yahoo News , via the Washington Post‘s Social Read app). The ticker will tell you what your friends are watching, listening to or reading, allowing you to share the experience with them by clicking on a link.
The upshot: a brand-new kind of media-based peer pressure. On stage, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings — a launch partner — revealed that he had only just decided to watch Breaking Bad because Facebook’s Ticker told him a colleague was watching it. Netflix’s own algorithm had been recommending the show to him for years, but that was never reason enough for Hastings.
6. Facebook has more users and more engagement than ever. We got two interesting nuggets of information out of Zuckerberg (and the Zuckerberg-impersonating Andy Samberg): Facebook has hit 800 million users, and most of them are active. The social network just saw a new record for the most visitors in one day: an eye-popping 500 million.
Indeed, the whole impression left by the event was that of a confident, fast-evolving company that is becoming ever more professional, and Zuckerberg’s stage show bore more than a little resemblance to an Apple keynote. It’s going to be interesting to see what Google+ can do to keep up.
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Friday 16 September 2011

3 Ways To Remove / Uninstall Nod32 Completely From Your PC

Method 1 : Doing the Usual Uninstall of Nod32

First of all try running the uninstall tool of nod32 with administrative privileges. For this right click Ese Uninstall tool from start menu and select Run as Administrator in Vista/ Windows 7. Else follow the below step.
  • Go to the Control Panel and select Add or Remove Programs and run the Nod32 uninstaller from there. For Windows 7 Users  type this in the Address Bar of Windows Explorer. Control PanelAll Control Panel ItemsPrograms and Features it will directly take you to the Add or Remove Programs area.
  • Right Click Eset Smart Security / Eset Antivirus and choose Change and choose Remove and continue with the uninstallation Process.
If This normal uninstall or removal of eset nod32 didnt work then try Method No. 2

Method 2 : Uninstalling Nod32 with the Nod32 Removal Tool

The removal tool for nod32 is made for situations where you cant uninstall the software by normal methods.
  • Download Eset Nod32 Removal Tool .
  • Right Click the Nod32 Removal Tool icon and choose Run as Administrator in Vista/ Windows 7. XP Users just need to run the tool.
  • Now Restart Your Computer for the changes to take effect. In most cases this method will uninstall nod32 from your system completely.
If Method 2 also fails for you then try the Last,  Method No. 3

Method 3: Manually Removing Nod32

You should try this method iff the above two method fails. (Here i assume you have installed your operating system in the C drive if not change the drive letter accordingly).
  1. Start Your Computer in Safe Mode.
  2. Type Regedit in the start Menu (Xp users press [win] + [R] and type regedit).
  3. Delete the Following keys one by one.
    • HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareESET
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareESET
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRunegui
  4. (For XP Users) browse to C:Windowsinf and delete the file INFCACHE.1 (Make sure Show Hidden Files andFolders option is enabled from the Folder Options)
  5. (For Vista and 7 Users) Browse to C:WindowsSystem32DriverStore and delete INFCACHE.1
  6. Now restart your computer.
  7. Next Remove the Following folders from your system.
      (For XP Users)
    • C:Program FilesESET
    • C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataESET
    • C:Documents and Settings%USER%Application DataESET
      (For Vista and 7 Users)
    • C:Program FilesESET
    • C:UsersAll UsersESET
    • C:UsersAll UsersApplication DataESET
    • C:ProgramDataESET
  8. Also delete any other eset folders if found. Just do a search for Eset in windows search and you can find any other folder if it is there.
Now, Eset Nod32 will be removed / uninstalled completely from your system.
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How Android works: The big picture

Summary: Some parts of Android will be familiar, such as the Linux Kernel, OpenGL, and the SQL database. Others may be completely foreign, such as Android’s idea of the application life cycle. You’ll need a good understanding of these key concepts in order to write well-behaved Android applications. Let’s start off by taking a look at the overall system architecture–the key layers and components that make up the Android stack. Excerpted from an upcoming book.


Some parts of Android will be familiar, such as the Linux Kernel, OpenGL, and the SQL database. Others may be completely foreign, such as Android’s idea of the application life cycle. You’ll need a good understanding of these key concepts in order to write well-behaved Android applications.




Let’s start off by taking a look at the overall system architecture–the key layers and components that make up the Android stack. The following diagram (courtesy of Google) shows the “20,000 foot” view of Android:
How Android works: The big picture
Starting at the bottom is the Linux Kernel. Android uses Linux for its device drivers, memory management, process management, and networking. However you will never be programming to this layer directly.
The next level up contains the Android native libraries. They are all written in C/C++ internally, but you’ll be calling them through Java interfaces. In this layer you can find the Surface Manager (for compositing windows), 2D and 3D graphics, Media codecs (MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, etc.), the SQL database (SQLite), and a native web browser engine (WebKit).
Next is the Android runtime, including the Dalvik Virtual Machine. Dalvik runs dex files, which are coverted at compile time from standard class and jar files. Dex files are more compact and efficient than class files, an important consideration for the limited memory and battery powered devices that Android targets.
The core Java libraries are also part of the Android runtime. They are written in Java, as is everything above this layer. Here, Android provides a substantial subset of the Java 5 Standard Edition packages, including Collections, I/O, and so forth.
The next level up is the Application Framework layer. Parts of this toolkit are provided by Google, and parts are extensions or services that you write. The most important component of the framework is the Activity Manager, which manages the life cycle of applications and a common “back-stack” for user navigation.
Finally, the top layer is the Applications layer. Most of your code will live here, along side built-in applications such as the Phone and Web Browser.
One of the unique and powerful qualities of Android is that all applications have a level playing field. What I mean is that the applications Google writes have to go through the same public API that you use. You can even tell Android to make your application replace the standard applications if you like.
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Wednesday 14 September 2011

Laptop magazine gives Lion the thumbs-up over Windows 7


This week, Laptop compared OS X Lion versus Windows 7 to determine which operating system was "better," both overall and in individual features. OS X Lion took Laptop's top overall score, mostly on the strength of Lion's better interface, Multi-Touch gestures, Spotlight, iLife, and Time Machine. Lion's parental controls also got the nod for being slightly broader in scope than those offered in Windows 7, and Lion was also hailed as a more secure OS than Windows -- not for the usual "security by obscurity" reasons that such studies usually like to hammer to death, but for real improvements in the more secure way Lion handles applications.
Windows 7 offered a better multitasking experience for Laptop's money; the magazine considered Mission Control a decent but "confusing" interface in Lion. Windows 7 also took the crown for a better gaming experience -- I don't think anyone will be surprised by that -- and the magazine also considered Internet Explorer a better native browser than Safari. I'll be honest, I hate Internet Explorer more than I'm comfortable describing fully in a "family-friendly" format; however, as long as I'm being honest I'll also say that aside from iTunes, Safari feels like the part of OS X that still needs the most work. Apple's added some gee-whiz features like Reader to its browser, but in terms of overall functionality (and stability) Safari doesn't feel like it's changed much in the past couple years. Unless you're counting the nasty new memory leakintroduced with Safari 5.1, that is, or the tab-reloading oddness that's causing issues.
The one portion of Laptop's rankings that I strongly disagree with is the magazine awarding Windows 7 higher marks for value than OS X Lion. The main reason I disagree with their analysis is that they don't actually compare Lion to Windows; instead, they compare Macs to PCs. While it's generally true that Mac hardware is more expensive than "equivalent" PC hardware, if you're going to make an apples-to-apples comparison you need to compare the operating systems themselves and not the hardware they run on. And as we've pointed out in the past, in terms of value for money OS X Lion blows all versions of Windows 7 away.
Naturally, since the magazine put Lion on top it's being roundly accused of a pro-Apple bias by Windows fans who can't seem to accept that Apple does indeed manage to do some things better than Microsoft. But with the sole exception of the "value" category, I'd say Laptop's comparison was fairly even-handed overall. I'll reluctantly admit that Windows is still better at some things than OS X, but just as Laptop claims, I maintain OS X Lion is the better choice overall.
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Tuesday 6 September 2011

Blogger’s fresh new look

As you may have heard, things are starting to look a little different across many Google products—and today, Blogger is the next product to get a makeover.

It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time.

Throughout the design process, we conducted user interviews to help identify how to make Blogger even easier and more enjoyable to use. We also watched users try our new interface and made many refinements based on their feedback.

A streamlined blogging experience
Whether you’re on a dashboard or settings page of blogger.com, you can always create or edit posts with just one click at the top of the screen. Additionally, the post editor has been expanded and simplified to give you a larger canvas for drafting and previewing your work.

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