Dropbox Allows Easy Public Sharing

So, what's new in this and why is this on our site? Lets start by the latter. We are covering this news as Dropbox updated the Android app as well and we use (both web and app version) the service a whole lot than we initially thought we would. As for what's new in Dropbox providing a share feature; well we agree Dropbox seems to have always had the share feature but there is a subtle upgrade to this feature that we just loved the moment we noticed it!

Previously you were allowed to share folders with people who were already using Dropbox and thus you could just provide them with the shared folder with permissions either to only read or make changes as and when they required. Now you could share a folder, a file or an image just like it was a public item; and to anyone you wish to share it with!
That's essentially making it public!!
What's more that this shared item, because of the way its been shared, can only be read by the person it has been shared with. So, she essentially can't change anything in the folder being shared. And it works like we always wanted things to, without you required to make any update to the Dropbox that you may be using on your personal computer. Here are a few screen captures from our system.

Its as easy as this, just right click on the folder or file you want to share and from the Dropbox submenu choose Get Link. The moment you choose this option you will, in your browser, see a public view of the shared folder or file. Copy the URL from the browser and you are ready to share it with whosoever you may want to!!

And don't worry, they provided a nice way to remove the sharing if and ever you wanted to do it. Just go to your Dropbox site home page and click on the Links icon no the left vertical bar. You will see a page similar to this where you may click on Remove to do the obvious!

Easy as you would like!!

And the same updates are available on the Dropbox' Android app as well. Just the similar features as you see in the screen captures from our Android device:

Don't ask us what if you see some copyright material in the publicly shared folder. The guys at Dropbox already took care of it ;). While viewing the shared item, you will see a small copyright flag at the bottom right corner, clicking on which should take you to this page where you should be able to report any infringement.

Enjoy the new feature and Happy Crunching!!

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Facebook Android App Updated

If you haven't yet updated your Android device to the new version of the Facebook app or aren't aware of the availability of the new version, here is a quick FYI for you. The new version of the app is #1.9 and here is the link to play store where you can download the app. And, yes just a little more, here is the change log for you:

- Improved performance and various bug fixes
- More messaging features like creating group messages and adding friends to existing group conversations
- Shortcuts to share photos and messages right from your home screen

With the quick injection above, now just sit for the details on the updates :). The new update comes with couple more icons to sit in your device's app drawer. Just like you see in the image here: Facebook app now has camera and messenger shortcuts for quick photo and message sharing. This update to the social media app tries to bring more of the web UI features to the mobile version. So for example in the messenger app, you will now have the option to start a group conversation. And also the features that were on the separate Facebook messenger app like seeing when your friends are online or on their mobile devices. The contact sorting app is more interesting and useful now with the basis of sorting now is the people you interact with most. 

With the new camera app icon, there will be some confusion if you already had the separate app previously installed. It's because this new update doesn't update the camera app icon (nor does it removes the old app), rather it puts another app and its icon in your app drawer. This may lead to confusion as quite a few users have complained about.
The good thing is that you now can either take snaps from this app or use the snaps from your camera gallery to share them with your network. You may also see what your contacts are uploading.

The actual app now has a share text box right from the app's main UI window. The camera button at the top does the same work as the new app icon introduced. More simpler to share the posts and your snaps with your contacts.. Although the message quote icon at the right top of the first screen capture above is sort of useless, you click on it and the focus comes to the posts text box. The second capture in the screen above shows that you also have a few more options now with the updated app.

Our Views
Try the new app and you will see it getting a few new features that users are used to on the web version of Facebook. So far in the 3 days the reaction in the users have been mixed as you may see in the comments/ratings in play store for the app. There have been some crashes issues as well, but more so on the confusion of the old and new camera app in the app drawer. A minor issue with the size being taken with these new updates. We did notice a little issue with the time it was taking to log out of the app. During the 1hr after the update on a couple of our devices, it was taking 2 to 3 min for the app to log us out. A restart did fix the issue however. Try and let us know what you feel about the new updates.
Finally we will leave you with the screen capture below to show you that the new Facebook update have the confirmation pop up button reversed, like it is now around the whole of the ICS. Here is an article confirming the reversal. 

 

Update 05/052012: As of version 1.9.2 the extra icons were removed from the app drawer. Wonder what FB has in mind there!

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Affiliate Ads For Blogger

The picture above explains pretty much what is there about this topic. But there is one bad news apart from the main topic's good news that you see here. We will go first with the good news details and then briefly discuss (rather mention) the bad news right before we end the post!
Through your Adsense account you can now make money by promoting relevant products in your post. Once your blog readers see those ads and go on to buy the advertised product you in turn, as the owner of the blog displaying the Ads, will get the commissioned income in return.
The set up is pretty spoon fed for you. You will need to have an Adsense account for your blog. Don't have one? Click here to get started mate!!
Ok, so with your Adsense account already in place, start writing a new post (when you are ready of course). You will see the  Advertise Products widget/gadget in the Post Settings panel but, only if you blog matches available Ad categories. All you need to do then is select your Ad from the gadget and done. You and your readers will see the Ad (Affiliate Ad) once you publish the post. All you need to do now is wait till some of your readers like the product that you are advertising and buy it. You will be paid however through your Adsense account and you will not have to run the Adsense Ads for making profit through this feature :).
Google however, puts a disclaimer that mere signing up for an Adsense account doesn't guarantee that you will qualify for the use of the feature.

This is what the announcement said (for more details click here):
When you post about a brand or product from a featured advertiser, the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogged widget will help you to display an affiliate ad in your blog, which can be a text link, a product image, or a banner. You may earn commissions when someone clicks on your ads and makes a purchase on the advertiser’s site, going beyond “payment per click” to “payment per action” and extending the influential relationship you have with your audience. 

The bad news is that Google has opened this feature only for the US blogs. Any blogs based out of other countries will not get to see the feature when they draft a new post. At least as of now. Hopefully Google will be opening this up internationally soon. After all Adsense is famous outside of US too. Google listening ??

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When Facebook Added Microformats

Late last year Facebook very quietly added support of microformats to its data download feature. In case you are not aware of the data download, Facebook allows you to (in real essence) backup your all data from the social network, including your photos, any urls that you may have shared, all your wall posts and comments etc etc...
Previously the exported data was just a zip file bundled with all the data from your profile. Making it nothing more than a simple backup since all you could do was keep it safe. What use was that we do not know ;). This, as obvious, was useless for app developers (and for an otherwise user) since you couldn't import the data to any other app or program. For those who are not aware of the tiny info (and link) that sits in your account settings here is the path: Account-->Account Settings (General Account Settings)-->Download a copy of your Facebook data-->Start Archive

Once you start the process your archived data will be ready to be downloaded. Now just wait for a mail from Facebook and once you get it click on the link in the mail and you will have all your data with you. Facebook already warns that the contact details of your network will only contain the contact names, unless the contact himself/herself has allowed Facebook (in the settings) to use their email addresses in which case the contact data will have the mail Ids as well.

[Image Credit: One of our regular reader Deepak Arora!]
Coming back to the microformats, with their use Facebook has provided a format that is more consistent with the rest of the web and opened gates for app developers to be able to use Facebook user data outside of the site itself and its APIs. But that comes with a warning issued to developers for they are to only use the data after a user downloads its social data and submits the archived data for usage, rather than accessing any user's data through any app interface, trying to do so will have Facebook disable the app itself!
Facebook seems to be using the hAtom(wall posts and comments, including permalinks and published dates), hMedia(all your videos and audios including all the titles and comments) and hCard(profile and contact data, only names like we said earlier) microformats. Follow the links to read more about them but for now the info provided here in brackets should give you a fare idea on what data the formats provide you.
Good idea on part of Facebook to be using the microformats since all other major services like Twitter and Blogger were already using it when Facebook started on this. Making it more consistent haan Mark!!

Deepak Arora

Post Credit

Works with ApnaCircle.com and lives in Faridabad, India. Deepak is a very regular and interactive reader of our posts. Loves to get involved and share ideas. Currently is on a lookout for a nice Android Phone in the market. Suggest him some if you know of some good Android smartphones in the market, preferably those that are upgradeable to Android ICS(ver. 4.0.x)
Connect with him either on ApnaCircle for his professional life or add him to your circle on Google plus.

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Facebook Timeline Profile Pic Size Increased

Some time back there was news doing the rounds when Facebook made its photo viewer pretty much the same as the one that users were used to on Google plus. And then while it was just like yesterday that we detailed on the cosmetic changes that Google made to its social network, we were still thinking of why Google chose to put that size for the profile pic and quite a contrast for the cover photo. Well, it seems we will have to pause that thought for a while since Facebook gave us some food for thought here. Just days after the search engine giant's social media product got (as we said earlier) a whole bunch of cosmetic changes. 
On details, unless you are a brand page on Facebook; your profile pic that occupies the bottom left corner of your Facebook Timeline cover photo (in fact dropping a little below it) has grown without you (in all possibilities) noticing anything weird. This happened a few days back. The profile pic which measured 130 x 125 pixels just ta few days ago has been given a size of 166 x 160 pixels. Enough of a noticeable increase but we are sure it went pretty much unnoticed. Have a look at the two screen shots from one of our reader's Facebook Timeline...

See the changes? Yes, the profile pic got bigger. And we love the way Facebook rolls out these small, subtle yet interesting updates to the platform suggesting a coincidence on the updates that its biggest challenger made a few days back :)
The pics that we are talking about is still the preview sort of your main profile pic that you can see once you click on this pic that has been a part of your Timeline cover. The change has been made only on your Timeline and not anywhere else.

However, people like us who have a brand page on the social media platform were ignored for no reason it seems. The brand pages Timeline pic were left unchanged and are still the same size as they were before this change.

Our Views

Facebook does have a habit of making small changes every now and then to be discovered suddenly by their users. Which is not that bad considering it to be a much of a over burden to be providing an announcement every now and then for the small updates being made. But in this case we think the option of announcement made sense. Especially since the concept of Timeline and the cover photo had quite a few out there getting their designers cap on and creating all those wonderful symmetric covers and in process cutting out the profile pic from the it. Not that this size change will undo all that effort but it will surely put quite a few of the cover photos look out of symmetry.

This problem/issue that we stated above may be the reason of why brand pages were left n the first place. Putting a brand cover out of symmetry would have more of an impact than a standalone personal profile.

Did you notice any profile's Timeline cover going out of symmetry because of this change in size? Or any of your friend going nuts over this update from the social media giant? Let us know in the comments and till then Keep Crunching!!


Update 4/19/2012:
It seems Facebook has plans for the brand page profile pic as well. We received this announcement from Facebook for our blog page with them. As you see clearly, the date has been set t April 26, exactly a week from now. So all you who have pages there on the network, gear up and get a nice bigger picture for your brand pages. The size will be 160 x 160 pixels and will sit at 23 pixels from the left and 210 pixels from the top of the Page.

Hemant S.

Post Credit

A Software Engineer belonging to Rajasthan, India and currently put up in another lovely city of India, Pune.
Hemant works with one of the leading software companies in India, Tata Consultancy Services. And he is yet another of our readers who is a proud owner of an Android Phone!! Connect with him on Facebook for his day to day life!

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Facebook Email And Timeline Address To Merge

Hopefully by now you all have your user ids chosen in your Facebook settings. Facebook has announced that it will soon start updating the different user addresses on site to make them more consistent. Which simply means that the address which is so much part of your timeline URL and the one that people send mail to you on Facebook will be the same after this change is rolled out, which should be soon. The announcement came last week from the company itself.
This move is obviously to push more its long forgotten email service that (when started) was tipped to be more than doing the rounds. Don't think the email and messaging service have turned out the way the social media giant expected it to and thus the move.
Facebook has already started to push notifications to users who haven't specified the email addresses through the choosing of the Facebook user id and in process are still not using user-friendly timeline URLs. The notification as per Facebook will look something like this:

For those users who already have specified the Ids, the process and work behind the scenes remains not-bothering. For a background on the services, you may remember that Facebook in 2009 started allowing users to choose a custom name thus making it simpler for you and your friends/family to remember your URLs easily. Then later in 2010, they launched the messaging services (in competition to already famous Gmail, Yahoo etc) in its effort to let users send messages to their contacts from outside of the Facebook domain. The move of unifying the Ids may well be to remind the users that there are services that Facebook provides that you may have already forgotten about!!
And oh by the way, if you haven’t already chosen an address/Id for yourself then just click here and its all yours to choose. Happy Crunching!!

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Google Plus Gets New Look

In its attempt to be on top of the social media with its so much in news product; Google Plus; Google rolled out a new look to it last week. The move was slow to start and in a 2 day span virtually everybody was rolled over to the new look. Towards a simpler, more beautiful Google is how guys at Google put it, who now claims that the new look has been rolled over to around 170 million users. Seems the platform is being used by quite a few out there. Here is the introduction to the new improved platform.


New Look
Here is how the new look is:

You will notice a new ribbon floating on the left of the screen and a lot of white space (just below You Might Like) on your right. We will discuss about them both in detail. But for now this is how the new Google Plus stream looks like.


The Ribbon
You now see a ribbon on the left side of your screen, with all the options that previously sat on the top bar of the page.
As you see on the image on the left here the options are now nicely aligned in a vertical way for you to use. Jumping from one to the other just makes you feel like a no refresh kind of a thing and that you just jumped layers. The best part of this ribbon is that Google now allows you to reorder the options in that ribbon to your choice. Just drag your important or most used ones on the top of the ribbon; the rest go down the order automatically.
The ribbon as a whole stays intact with only the center part of the page rolling as you scroll down the page, looking a steady look. There is an option of adding more like the pages that you have from the More option available at the end of the ribbon. The new thing to notice on this ribbon is that the Hangouts now have a new home. Separate from the others, something you will love if you are a regular user of the feature.
Similarly the Explore feature now provides you the options like the Trending on Google Plus and What's Hot feature plus suggestions on whom to follow. You may also do a video chat with a maximum of 9 users at once. Watch out for the slider available at the enter of this page that lets you choose how much of What's Hot news to show on your stream (or Home Page).


Cover Photo To New Profile Look
We saw cover photos being a hit with the FB timeline and now on same lines it seems Google Plus has the same feature, although with some subtle changes as we discuss next, but here is the look for you...

The one that you see on our profile is the default cover provided by Google plus. A little smaller than the one you are accustomed to on FB timeline. You may choose the photo for a size of 940 by 180px. The other option is to have the look like you had previously with your multiple photos chosen as the display. This is how you choose either of the options:

The option at the top Choose a template is where you toggle both the looks!


Your Circles
This is how your Circles page look like now.

Don't forget to see the Actions menu in the pic above. You may increase or decrease your circles size. Although we find it a bit useless and think it rather should have been a size already chosen by the app.


Mini Profiles
We now also have a mini profile look for the users to look in to. Here is how it looks like:

Ripple View
Now see the how the news/share/post is floating down the stream with what Google now calls is the Ripple View:

From a post, just drop the arrow on the top right to see the last option on the drop menu that comes up. Click on the option to go to a Ripples page where the system tells you who all has shared/re shared the post and some more statistics as you go down the page. Enjoy the new stats page:) 


The much discussed: White Space
The content seems to have moved to the left of the screen, leaving out a lot of white space on the right side of the page. Since the new look there have been a lot of criticism on why the space have been left out. If you wanna follow the debate yet, the trending is with #useofwhitespace or #usesofwhitespace. Here are a few ones that we captured for you:

Our Views
The new look is more cleaner than the one we were used to previously. The Ribbon and Ripple effect are cool as well. The #useofwhitespace is a problem for now and Google yet hasn't come with any explanations on what it may be left out for. Not that anybody expects Google to say any word though!! Speculations are doing the rounds with all sorts of news from using that space for some kind of Ads to what not. As we said, keep a track of all that with #useofwhitespace or #usesofwhitespace. 
We will wait to see as the new look shapes up and what Google comes up with but for now it seems like the space may well be left out for the chat windows that you may have open and they will not (unlike previous look) interfere your stream view. Enjoy the chatting with the stream very well visible without any overlap of these two.
The changes are not yet there for the tablets and smartphones, they may be next in line though. And by the way if you think you lost your saved searches, don't forget to look at the More options at the top of your Home page; you have them all grouped there!
Let us know how you like the new look and what you think are the best uses of the white space out there. Happy Crunching till then!!

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