While it is possible to read the messages on Twitter about a trending topic, it is not guaranteed that you will see any links in the messages that you are reading.

That’s where the web service ShowMeTrend comes into play. The service links the top 10 Twitter trends of a particular day to Google News articles about that particular topic.

The trending topics get updated regularly, and it appears as if the links from Google News are pulled more or less whenever they appear there. All news articles are linking directly to the site they have been published on. It is furthermore possible to open Google News’ listing of all related news, or to go back and forward one news entry on the ShowMeTrend website.

Selections can be made at the top to switch from the day’s worldwide trends to country specific and date/time specific trends. About ten countries can be selected, from Germany and the United States to the Netherlands, UK or Brazil. The service’s back catalog of Twitter trends begins in October 2011, which is an indicator that it is a relatively new service. Users can not only select the date but also the time of a day to get a listing of trending topics.

One of the issues that the developers need to fix is the lack of links for some topics. Some trends show a white listing and not a single news item. One of the options here would be to either improve the search algorithm or to use additional news sources besides Google News.

ShowMeTrend is an interesting service for researchers, marketing agencies and individual users. Have you tried the service? If so, what is your take on it?

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is conducting market research to determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application. The tool at a minimum should be able to meet the operational and analytical needs described in the attachment.

This is actually harder than it might appear.  On the face of it such a program would scour Twitter, Facebook and other websites for key words.  However disasters can never be predicted and, as such, determining the language people will use at the time is extremely difficult.  Even harder would be to determine where an event is taking place.

In theory such a program would also be able to highlight major crimes when people mention them online.  People have until February 7th to submit their ideas to the bureau.

In other Twitter news the company behind the hugely successful micro-blogging site has today announced that they have developed a way to selectively censor tweets on a country by country basis.  In it’s blog they said they could now “reactively withhold content from users in a specific country”.

It is curious as to why Twitter, a company that has always encouraged free speech, would make such a move.  Social networks were used extensively in the uprisings in Egypt and the middle-east last spring, and were widely hailed for helping protestors galvanise such huge crowds of support.

Having the ability to censor specific types of tweet in individual countries could potentially prevent this type of thing from ever occurring again.

As justification the company said “that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression” going on to cite France and Germany for banning pro-Nazi speech.

Anything that curtails freedom of speech online will not be welcomed by many people who believe the Internet simply should not be censored in any way, and it remains to be seen is there will be any negative impact on Twitter for enabling this feature.

• Find an appropriate host for the file. This can be self hosted web space or a file hosting service.
• Open the file browser, locate the file on your computer and select to upload it
• Grab the link to the file and paste it into the comment form at the exact location that you want it to appear.

This process becomes a thing of the past with Drag2Up for the Google Chrome browser. You specify an image, text and binary hosting services from the available selection. Once you have done that, you can use any web form on the Internet to upload files to those services. Even better, the extension pastes the link to the uploaded files directly in that web form.

This is for instance ideal for users who like to post images on Twitter or other sites. Open the extension settings with a click on the Wrench Icon > Tools > Extensions, and the selection of Options next to the Drag2Up listing in the extensions manager.

Just drag and drop the file hosts that you want to use to the appropriate sections on the right. Here is the current list of supported hosts:

• Images: Imgur, Imm.io, ImageShack, Snelhest, Flickr, Picasa, TwitrPix, Twitpic, Twitgoo, Img.ly, Posterous
• Text: Gist.Github, Pastebin.com, Mysticpaste
• Binary: Checmial Servers, DAFK Up, Minus, Hotfile, Dropbox, CloudApp, Box and Droplr

The selected hosts are then used as the default storage services when files are uploaded via the drag and drop operations. All you need to do from that moment on is to drag and drop files that you want to upload to forms on the selected web page. Let me give you an example on how this works on Twitter.

Visit the Twitter web page, and drag a file from your computer to the What’s Happening form there. You will notice that drop files here is displayed on every form on the page automatically.

The file is submitted to the selected file host, and the resulting link to the file posted directly in the Twitter form. This saves you quite a few steps.

You may want to disable the “enable marketing” option in the extension settings to avoid advertisement.

Google Chrome users can download the latest version of Drag2Up from the official Chrome Web Store.

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the US is getting ever more publicity with GoDaddy one of the high profile companies to suffer from supporting it as we wrote a couple of days ago.  In our previous article Martin summed up SOPA very effectively.

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force them to stop doing business with listed websites, all without legal process.

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted “immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement”.

Now a loose confederation of Internet giants are considering shutting down the entire websites for 24 hours and instead showing a messagew urging their visitors and customers to contact their representative in the US congress the day before the vote goes to the house there.

The coalition is made up of some very big names on the Internet including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal, AOL, Foursquare, IAC, LinkedIn, Mozilla, OpenDNS and Zynga.  If the plan goes ahead all these services could be taken offline for 24 hours.

In a report by CNet…

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

This wouldn’t be the first piece of anti-piracy legislation around the world to face stiff opposition.  France have already passed an Internet copyright law but the Digital Economy Act in the UK stalled in the face of arguments from major Internet Service Providers British Telecom and TalkTalk.

Many reports say that SOPA is still set to pass the US congress and that very few Americans have heard about it.  Shutting down services such as Facebook and Google, and replacing them with anti-SOPA messages for a day would certainly raise awareness, but a question mark remains over whether doing so only one day before the congress vote would be effective enough.

This is the first time ever that major websites have threatened to effectively go on strike to boycott something, and it is completely unprecedented.  It is unclear at this time whether the services would be taken down worldwide or just in the US and also how serious the coalition are about the boycott, which would inevitably lose them all a day’s trade.

Services are commonly targeted for IP addresses anyway and it wouldn’t be difficult for these companies to target messages to their US-based users.  With many millions of visitors every day in the US, companies such as Google and Facebook could achieve this on their own.  Imagine then how much more leverage they would have with Amazon, Yahoo! and others on board.  If this goes ahead it is still possible that other companies could follow suit, effectively crippling the Internet in the US for the day before the vote.

So what do you think of SOPA and your favourite websites being taken offline for a day?

So what do I mean by this and why?  Well times are still hard and for all those people struggling in their jobs, or struggling even to find work after being made redundant employers are increasingly searching Facebook and Twitter for clues as to the types of people that they are hiring or that are already working for them.  Couple this with the fact that Twitter is and has always been completely public, and that Facebook seems to find ever increasing ways to make everything you say and post publicly available, and you could find yourself going into the new year with a problem.

I’ve recently gone through my Facebook account and deleted all the photo libraries I put online this year from holidays and days out.  Let’s face it, each of these were only supposed to have been there for a few days, a couple of weeks at the most, so that my other friends could catch up with what had been going on but nobody would have looked at them since.  I’m extremely careful about what I put on Facebook, for instance I tend to avoid photos where I’ve had too much to drink (though the obligatory Saint Patrick’s day hat photo will always remain a notable exception!) but even so it’s wise to be cautious.

Facebook are currently rolling out their new Timeline feature that they dub “a new kind of profile”.

Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual.  The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here.  As you scroll down past your cover, you’ll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.

In short Facebook want everybody’s profile to be a complete history of their lives and do you really want all of this information available to everybody, and trust Facebook to keep it secret?  This is why I highly recommend not just removing old photos but modifying your status history as well.  Not that long ago Facebook offered a new feature that can be found in your Privacy settings called Limit the Audience for Past Posts.  Here you can control your privacy better for all the things you have said in the past, some of which you may not be completely proud of.  All of this is in the name of being constantly careful and vigilant about the company’s proclivity to make everything public as often as they can.

With Twitter it’s different because everything is already public.  Deleting old Tweets is a laborious process of removing them one at a time (I have almost 7,000 tweets in my account and don’t want to face that!) but some tools such as TwitWipe are available to plug the gap.  This and similar services will completely wipe your Twitter history, enabling you to start from scratch with a clean bill of health.  That means the next time someone does a search online for your Twitter handle and the word “drunk” nothing will appear in the results.

Personal privacy is something we’re giving up more and more as we get involved with social networks and companies that trade online, but it’s such an important thing to guard.  Making sure that my privacy is maintained online will certainly be one of my resolutions for 2012, will you make it one of yours?

When he left the company though he took all those followers with him and Phonedog asked if he’d keep tweeting about them, to which he said “Sure” and changed the name of his account to NoahKravitz.

All was well for eight months until Phonedog announced that the Twitter followers amounted to a “customer list” and announced they were suing, seeking damages of $2.50 a month for each follower for each month since Mr Kravitz had left the company.  In total the suit was for $340,000.

The suit is apparently in retaliation, according to the New York Times, for Mr Kravitz seeking 15% of Phonedog’s website advertising revenue because of his position as a “vested partner” tweeting about the company and its products.

Henry J. Cittone, a New York intellectual property lawyer told the New York Times…

“This will establish precedent in the online world, as it relates to ownership of social media accounts.  We’ve actually been waiting to see such a case as many of our clients are concerned about the ownership of social media accounts vis-á-vis their branding.”

Apparently the case could hinge on why the Twitter account was opened.

“If it was to communicate with PhoneDog’s customers or build up new customers or prospects, then the account was opened on behalf of PhoneDog, not Mr. Kravitz. An added complexity is that PhoneDog contends Mr. Kravitz was just a contractor in the related partnership/employment case, thus weakening their trade secrets case, unless they can show he was contracted to create the feed.”

It’s not uncommon for companies to hire bloggers to Tweet about their company and products with the New York Times citing  Samsung as an example.

If it transpires that Mr Kravitz did open the account specifically to blog about Phonedog then he could well lose the case but it will send interesting messages to both companies and members of the public who use Twitter to communicate about companies and their products.

It would also be interesting to see how the US legal system would value one individual Twitter follower in dollar terms.  It could be argued that if the standard online advertising rates apply equally to Twitter, which would seem logical, that $2.50 would mean each follower would have had to have clicked on of the company’s links 250 times each month.  This is unlikely and any financial penalty that may be issued against Mr Kravitz could be significantly reduced because of this.

What is your opinion of this?  I tweet and blog all the time about the websites and the publishers I write for and I’ve never once thought that one of those companies might consider my own followers their own property.  Do you blog or Tweet about your or another company?

TweetDeck made the list of Melanie’s Top 5 Twitter Add-ons and has been recently acquired by Twitter. Rumors surrounding the acquisition suggested that Twitter might have the intention to drop all versions of the application and integrate the development team into the in-house Twitter team.

Those rumors have now been refuted with the release of native TweetDeck clients for Windows and Mac operating systems. The Adobe Air client is no longer available on the official site, and it seems as if the developers have moved away from it completely.

The move has not been officially announced yet, while desktop clients are already offered on the official TweetDeck website.

Users can start connecting their Twitter and Facebook accounts once the software has been installed on their system. The three columns Home, Me and Inbox are displayed by default. If you have followed yesterday’s news about the upcoming Twitter relaunch you know that this is the new Twitter terminology and layout (only discover is missing).

A click on Add Column displays additional data streams that can be added to the TweetDeck interface. This includes lists, trends, tweets, favorites and search results. The program displays configuration options. If you want to add a search column, you are asked to enter either a hashtag or keyword.

A new option is the notification option. A click on a column’s settings button opens a menu with options to enable notification sounds or popups.

Not everything is golden though. Several features of the Adobe Air client went awol in the first desktop version. Different column sizes, color schemes or keyboard shortcuts are nowhere to be found in the native client versions of TweetDeck.

It is not clear if the features have been removed intentionally from the client, or removed because of time limitations to meet yesterday’s redesign deadline. (via Caschy)

The new Twitter web design has seen big changes. The homepage displays a left sidebar now with information about the Twitter user, follow suggestions and trends, and the main area that displays with the most recent tweets.

A new tab menu with four new tabs has been introduced that looks and behaves the same on all platforms that Twitter is available on.

The four new tabs Home, Connect, Discover and Me are explained on the Fly page, only this much:

• Home: Tweets from the people a user follows
• Connect: Displays conversation details, e.g. who followed you or retweeted a message.
• Discover: Personalized information based on the user’s location, followed users and world news.
• Me: The new profile section on Twitter.

A video has been created that demonstrates the capabilities of the new Twitter.

Not every Twitter users seems to be happy with the redesign. Especially the placement of direct messages under the Me tab makes it highly uncomfortable to reach. Even more concerning than this design decision are ads that have been spotted by users such as Abraham Vegh.

This particular ad appeared as an intermediary page on one of the mobile clients. I cannot really say if this is something that all users will see or if it is restricted to particular users, countries, platforms or other parameters.

If you are using the new Twitter mobile clients, have ads been displayed to you? Let us know more about if if they did. (via)

Update: Abraham who posted the original tweet has now posted a correction stating that it “*may* have not been a Twitter-imposed ad”.

Have you seen ads on the new mobile Twitter clients?

The majority of methods use JavaScript to trigger the functionality. The issue here is that external scripts increase the page loading time. If you load to many scripts, your website could be punished for this by the search engines by reducing the page’s position in the rankings. Depending on the number of social media buttons that you embed, you could be loading multiple external JavaScript files.

But JavaScript can also be used for tracking purposes. Visitors who load a web page with external JavaScript will always at least pop up in the external service’s access logs.

The only positive effect for the webmaster is that users can vote for their articles on the linked social networking sites. But this is also achievable without JavaScript. The benefit of that solution? Faster page loading times and guaranteed no user tracking.

The following solution has been created by Daniel Pataki. It is a solution for WordPress, if you use a different script or software you may need to modify the code accordingly.

The code consists of two parts. First CSS code that you need to add to your blog’s stylesheet, and then the code that displays the links to the social networking sites on the website.

CSS Code:

You need the following sprite image that contains all four icons. This speeds up the loading time as only one image needs to be loaded instead of four separate ones. Place it in the /img/ directory of your theme folder or alter the background:url code to place it somewhere else.

.social_icon {
background:url("img/sprite.png");
display:block;
width:33px;
float:left;
margin:0 3px 0 0;
height:32px;
opacity:0.8;
filter:alpha(opacity=80);
}
.social_icon:hover {
opacity:1;
filter:alpha(opacity=100)
}
.social_icon.twitter {
background-position:-33px 0;
}
.social_icon.googleplus {
background-position:-99px 0;
}
.social_icon.print {
background-position:-66px 0;
}

WordPress single.php code

You need to add the following code to WordPress’ single.php file.

<div class='social'>
<a href='http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?php the_permalink() ?>' class='social_icon facebook' rel="nofollow"></a>
<a href='https://twitter.com/share?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>' class='social_icon twitter' rel="nofollow"></a>
<a class='social_icon googleplus' href="https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="nofollow" ></a>
<a href='javascript:window.print()' class='social_icon print'></a>
<div style='clear:both'></div>
</div>

The functionality should be available immediately. Users who click on a social networking icon are taken to the selected site where they can post about the web page that they have originated from. The page url is automatically included in the post.

I hope this helps some of you out there who want to offer functional social networking buttons without the JavaScript.

Update: Have added rel=”nofollow” to all external links.

IsItOld takes a link and checks if that link has been posted on Twitter already. It is not a 100% giveaway if you have the intention to post the link on another site, but it could very well be an indicator.

All you need to do is to paste the link into the form on the IsItOld website. You can paste in any link regardless of the web page’s actual contents. This works for YouTube videos, images, plain websites and even applications.

The link scan on Twitter takes a few seconds tops. The service displays information about that link on the result’s page.

Ratings range from OK over Kinda OK to Dead. IsItOld displays the number of shares on Twitter and the time of the first share. In this example, the link was tweeted more than 3000 times in the last two years.

IsItOld cannot make decisions for you. At its core, it is nothing more than a script that checks a link’s popularity on Twitter. Twitter is however often a good indicator if something has already made the round or if it is brand new. This could be interesting for webmasters and writers who are not sure if they should cover a certain topic on their blog or website.

It is probably easier to ignore the “old” sayers on forums and social networking sites than using the IsItOld site regularly. You can run your own Is It Old checks here.

Once installed it displays an always visible module at the lower right side on the Twitter website. The userscripts filtering options are displayed by default. Available are Twitters own filters plus filters for replies, links and media tweets. A click on one of the filtering options displays only those messages on the Twitter page.

Tweetfilter furthermore supports the creation of custom filters, for instance by keyword, username or hashtags. The system is very flexible and can be disabled or inverted at any time with a single mouse click.

Customizations are the second core feature that Tweetfilter offers. Here it is possible to configure a variety of settings that change Twitter features and what users see when they open their personal Twitter timeline.

This includes basic customizations like hiding advertising or invite friend suggestions but also more advanced features like automatically hiding the top bar, displaying alerts or hiding promoted content on Twitter.

A total of six tabs are available to configure Twitter features and modules like the timeline, dashboard or filters.

• filter independently all retweets (including classic RT-format), media, replies, Tweets with links from timelines with tweets
• custom filters for keywords, full-word (exact) match, username, mentions, hashtags, real name, source (via) with live updated match count
• shortened link expansion
• highlight Tweets mentioning you
• customize timeline layout, add via information, new menu options
• customize dashboard and aspects of the twitter.com layout gaining more space and remove distractions
• show friend status in Tweets (who you follow, who follows you)
• sound and message notification on new mentions and/or direct messages

Twitter users who hang out on Twitter’s homepage most of the time can use the Tweetfilter userscript to improve the site’s functionality significantly. Especially the filtering options come in handy for users who receive a significant amount of messages every day.

Tweetfilter can be installed from the official userscript website. The script is compatible with Firefox 3.6+, Chrome 10+, Opera 11+, Safari 5+ and Internet Explorer 9+.

Firefox Share has been designed to give users a tool at hand to share links faster. The new Mozilla Labs add-on places an icon into the Firefox address bar upon installation.

This icon can be clicked to share the current website address.

The Mozilla Labs team has added three sharing options to this initial version of Firefox Share. Firefox users with the add-on installed can share a link on Twitter, Facebook or Google Mail.

Each service needs to be authorized first before they can be used to share links. A click on the sign in button opens a popup window where this is done.

The authorized service window displays the sharing options then on successive uses. Tabs that have been open before the initial authorization need to be reloaded before they can be shared.

The share overlay displays the user account and the web url in a form by default. It is possible to add text and even modify the web address before hitting the share button. Depending on the service, it is furthermore possible to change the message recipients (for instance from public to direct message on Twitter).

The announcement over at the Mozilla Labs website describes the add-on as a “descendant of F1″, Mozilla’s social add-on (you can read about Mozilla F1 here). Plans are to make it different from F1, for instance by adding many different providers to future versions of the extension.

Probably the best feature from a user perspective is that Firefox now communicates directly with the service providers and not through a Mozilla proxy. If you are a Firefox users you can download Firefox Share from the official Mozilla add-on repository. (via)

This falls in line with the finding that Facebook does not delete all cookies on a user system during sign out.

I reviewed several browser extensions and add-ons to deal with the privacy issue, Share Me Not for Firefox for instance is one of them.

Priv3 for Firefox uses a very similar concept to improve a user’s privacy on the Internet. The developers of the extension note that Priv3 “does not block third-party interactions completely”. It instead “selectively suppresses the inclusion of third-party web cookies” when the browser connects to the social networks.

Instead of blocking or removing the social scripts outright, it basically blocks their functionality until the user makes the decision to interact with them. With the add-on installed it is still possible to see the number of likes, Twitter messages or +1s a page has received.

When you start interacting with a social networking script on a site the extension starts to reload the session cookies to pass on the click to the social networking site so that the desired action can be completed (e.g. liking a page).

Priv3 in its current state supports the three top social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and Google+, as well as LinkedIn. The developers promise to add support for additional sites in future releases.

The extension works similar to Share Me Not which uses a similar technique to block privacy sensitive data to be transferred to one of the social networks. Firefox users can install Priv3 from the official Mozilla add-on repository.

ShareMeNot is a new Firefox add-on that protects web users from those social media buttons. The add-on basically disables the button functionality until the user decides to interact with it. The extension does this without completely removing the buttons from the web pages.

The Facebook Like, Twitter tweet or Google+ buttons are still displayed along with information like the number of likes the site has received by other users.

ShareMeNot blocks communication with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg and LinkedIn automatically on every web page the user visits after installing the add-on.

This is indicated by the add-on’s icon in the Firefox status bar which displays in red if elements are blocked from communicating with third party servers on the active web page.

Since the buttons are still displayed on the page, it is super easy to interact with them. A click on the button activates them. That’s actually all there is to it. It is alternatively possible to reload one or multiple buttons from the context menu of the add-on that is triggered with a click on the status bar.

You can furthermore disable the blocking of a specific service in the browser. This is done in the add-on’s preferences. The settings there contains a list of site exceptions where the trackers won’t be blocked on.

ShareMeNot is ideal for Firefox users who do not run add-ons like NoScript 24/7 on their browser. The solution itself is more elegant than previous solutions which simply removed the buttons and scripts from web pages, especially if those buttons are used from time to time by the user.

Firefox users can install ShareMeNot from the official Firefox add-on repository.

Bitdefender’s new tool Safego is a handy online tool for Twitter users who want to find out if they are following potentially dangerous users on Twitter.

You first need to authorize Bitdefender Safego via Twitter’s own authorization service, which means that you do not need to hand them out your username and passwords.

Once you did that you can sit back and relax a bit while Safego begins to scan all of your Twitter friends and their tweets. This can take quite a while depending on the number of friends on the social networking site. The online service uses Bitdefender’s anti-malware and anti-phishing engines to scan all urls posted by friends on Twitter.

All friends are sorted into the Safe and Suspicious groups on the Safego website. Please note that the online service does not do anything about “unsafe” or suspicious users on Twitters. It is still up to you to either unfollow them, warn them or do nothing about it.

Each friend listing links directly to that friend’s Twitter stream from where you can unfollow that user easily.

Bitdefender Safego will furthermore notify you via Twitter automatically when suspicious messages are posted by a friend. Options that are disabled by default are to scan your private messages, send you weekly reports and to automatically warn your friends if suspicious behavior was detected.

Last but not least it is possible to scan the public messages of any Twitter user, which can be a helpful thing to do before following that person.

Users who want to scan their Twitter account for safe and suspicious friends to add a little bit of extra security to it can do so right at the Bitdefender Safego website. (via)

One of the problems is that every site has its own website that you need to visit and log in to before you can use it. That’s a tedious process, especially if you are like me and sign out after each session.

The brand new Google Chrome extension Gooce+ promises to optimize the daily social networking workflow by integrating the streams of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn into the Google Plus interface.

Just install the extension in the Chrome browser, and you will notice that three new icons have been added to the top icon bar when you are on Google Plus. First the five standard Google icons from Home to Games, and then the three new icons for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

While it is not possible to mix news streams, users can click on one of the icons to sign in to their accounts to access their news streams right on Google+.

It is possible to read the latest posts, post status updates, comments, use the like and share functionality or view photos or videos right on the Google Plus site. Some links, like Facebook friend links, open up in a new tab in the browser on the social networking site directly.

Gooce+ demands quite a few permissions during first sign in. Some users might be uncomfortable with that which is understandable.

The developer has created a short video demonstrating the Chrome extension’s functionality.

Gooce+ can be a handy extension for Chrome users who use at least one of the social networking sites next to Google Plus. The core benefit of Gooce+ is that it can reduce the number of open tabs in the browser by up to three. That’s the best case scenario if you use all four social networking sites on a day to day basis.

Chrome users can download Gooce+ directly from the Google Chrome web store.

I just stumbled upon Twit Cleaner over at David Bradley’s blog on the Internet which analyses all the people that you follow on Twitter to sort out the garbage (their terminology).

The service uses OAuth for authorization so that you do not have to give them direct access to your Twitter account login. Your account is also automatically set to follow them, and they will follow you for reporting and support reasons. It is necessary to keep following them at least until the report has been generated. It is then up to you whether you want to unfollow them.

It took a few seconds to generate the report for my Twitter account, but that is probably due to the fact that I’m following less than 20 or so Twitter users. David mentioned that he had to wait about 20 minutes before all of the 2056 Twitter users he followed were scanned.

The program generates a nice summary in the end that sorts Twitter users into groups like “potentially dodgy behavior”, “no activity in over a month”, “all talk all the time” or “not so interesting”.

Below the summary is a list of all Twitter users that have been sorted into one of the groups. You can jump directly to a certain type of users.

The users are then displayed with their profile photo and name.

A click on the photo sends that user to the unfollow queue which is then processed in a natural manner.

It definitely pays to double-check the Twitter accounts that are identified by Twit Cleaner as “potentially garbage”. Depending on the number of users that you follow, this verification step may take some time.

Twit Cleaner’s approach is quite unique, and from what I can tell, works quite well. It does not really make sense to run the service if you only have a few dozens or so Twitter users that you follow, like I do. This changes once that counts reaches hundreds or thousands of users that you follow, as it is likely that at least some of them are not providing useful contents on Twitter.

The riots in London, which were at first triggered by the shooting of a 29 year old man by Police last Thursday in circumstances which have not yet become clear, quickly escalated with opportunistic thugs and criminals burning cars and buildings, destroying homes and businesses and robbing and looting.  In scenes seen last night in the capitol, one youth was seen robbing another of all his clothes in the street, while an injured and dazed individual was robbed of his possessions while he tried to regain his balance.  These riots last night spread to other parts of England including Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham where copycat looting, destruction and violence towards the police was again seen.

Blackberry made a statement last night saying that it would cooperate with the British Police and release all messages sent by these criminal gangs to the authorities.  This will take time however which is causing frustration on the streets of Britain.

Unlike Twitter, which was commonly and very effectively used in some Arab countries recently and which helped bring the people of Egypt onto the streets to overthrow their president, Blackberry messenger allows users to send secure and encrypted messages to other Blackberry users.  This means the messages cannot be intercepted in real time.  The Metropolitan Police in London said they believe that criminal gangs were using this to co-ordinate the riots and chaos across the city, and to inform each other of the next targets to hit.

Twitter has also been used by the youths responsible for a string of violent attacks against police and property, though these messages are open and have been tracked in real time by the authorities and the press.

Blackberry Messenger needs the Blackberry Internet Service to function, rather than using a normal unencrypted web connection.  It offers facilities including chat groups and dedicated discussions while also allowing users to share pictures, audio recordings and files.  Perhaps more importantly it allows maps to be shared.  The network is only accessible by Blackberry devices and cannot be seen by people on other devices or desktop computers.  Blackberrys have long been favourites in business because of the security and encryption they offer.

How the information share from RIM will happen is as yet unclear.  So far over 400 young people have been arrested in London and it is highly likely that those with Blackberry’s will have their mobile records released.  However there may be a wider claim made by the police for all mobile phones within certain cell areas during the times of the rioting.

So far there are no reports of any fatalities in the UK, though the eyes of the world will be on the country ahead of London hosting the Olympic games next summer.  There will be a reported 16,000 police from various forces around the UK on the streets of London tonight to try to bring the violence to an end.

UPDATE —–

In just the few minutes since this article was published, one man has been reported killed after being shot during the violence last night.  There are no further details as of this time.

Some users on the other hand face a dilemma now with the rise of Google Plus: Time. Most users have accounts on Facebook and Twitter, which they spend some time on. Some may have the time to add a third social networking site to that list, others like me do not have the time to maintain three networking sites.

What will those users do? Will they use cross-posting tools to post their messages on all three sites, will they ditch one of the sites, or will they reduce other activities to spend time on all three sites?

If you look at the media coverage, you might think that it is all about a showdown between Google Plus and Facebook, and that Twitter is just another bystander. But is that really true? If you look at Google Plus, you will notice that the service is offering most, if not all, of the features of Twitter. You can follow and be followed, post public messages or messages to one or multiple recipients. Plus, there are not any size limitations and additional features like hangouts available.

Facebook on the other hand has a lot to offer that Google Plus is not currently. Look at games and apps for instance, which is surely one of the main reasons for the social networking site’s success.

As a webmaster, I have to use all three services, because it affects my business. Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search services are putting more weight on social metrics than ever before, and that is going to increase in the future. If you are not part of it, your site or service will be old news eventually.

This leads back to the title: Are you using social networking sites currently? If so, do you have plans to change the sites that you are using? Will you include Google Plus in your networking activities?

Those in the latter group have found their numbers growing rapidly through the past several months. Revolutions in the Arab world have driven many people to use Twitter as a primary news outlet, reading about current events that they do not feel are adequately covered by mainstream media directly from the source.

Unfortunately, those using Twitter do not always receive as much content from their stories as they might like. While they get great tidbits of news from here and there, everything they receive is in punctuated messages of only a few measly characters. News requires details and rich analysis. For those who really want to know what is going on in their worlds, unless a link is present to a real news story, tweets paint an incomplete picture.

While in the past people may have been forced to be content with such incomplete information, today they simply do not have to be. Thanks to a new web-based service called NewsMix you can combine Twitter and social networking news feeds with full-blown news articles.

The program acts much on the premise of many other news aggregators. You choose topics that you would like to receive news on and NewsMix puts those on your page. This particular service, however, allows you to mix Twitter feeds into your mainstream news sites, combining the brief news blurbs direct from where the action is happening with professional commentary from news agencies.

You can visit the service’s page here where you can set up an account and link it straight to your Twitter account. Choose feeds that you would like to be included on your front page and then see it populate not only with content from major news producers but also from any Twitter feeds that you choose to include.

NewsMix considers your new page to be a unique magazine of content. Each account can be custom tailored to feature news stories and feeds that some other people might find interesting as well. In light of this, the service allows other users to subscribe to your main news page so that, if you put together an interesting array of news services, users can follow your news. You can even create PDF versions of your front page – one of the services most unique features.

There are a lot of different news aggregators out there, and finding piles of news content is not difficult. What is hard, however, is tracking down a service that compliments traditional news with the Twitter feeds that you actually want to hear about. NewsMix meshes these two worlds together, and news junkies who follow both streams of content will likely find the service to be a welcome hybridisation of news sources.