Twitter May Know Your Friends

A social(read Facebook and Google plus) or a professional(read LinkedIn and ApnaCircle / Viadeo) site will always want you to grow your network for your and their benefit. So you see these sites suggesting friends to connect with. More commonly known as 'People you may know' or 'Members you may know'. So while these are more of the widgets kind that sit on some right, left nav bar, Twitter has decided to offer you suggestions right in to your inbox.

Twitter already has a 'Who to Follow' widget that shows up on the left nav bar and now they announced they would be delivering suggestions about People you may know though an email. The updates would come to you on a weekly basis. The announcement came via a blog post on Twitter blog.

While the 'Who to Follow' has evolved over the time and also contains options that are promoted, Twitter says the suggestions in the 'People you may know' email would be based on signals. So if majority of your contacts already follow certain person, its very likely that you may know that person and would want to follow him/her as well; and thus the suggestion.

You may at anytime however change your preference about this email in your email settings on Twitter account. Do you think the suggestions in email are a good way?

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Apple, Google, Maps and Steve Jobs

We don't worry about what these two big shots are up to, but hey we sure are interested! Launch of iPhone5 has settled now, broke quite a few records; promised quite a lot; disappointed some part of the market. Still made it easy with the Wall Street gain. Makes us think everything is as easy and perfect as it used to. Really ?

With Steve Jobs around there were expectations of innovation and perfection; things that changed Apple from what it was after he rejoined the company 14yrs back. Steve, iPod, iPhone and iPad changed the way Apple was seen prior to them. 
The first iPhone to launch without Steve is the new iPhone5 with iOS6. Did it disappoint the market? Well not really, in fact the sales, prebookings and the happy face of Wall Street for Apple has the story written all over. Everyone is happy. If you are not we would love to listen to your side. What we think may go wrong are a subtle things and missing innovation? if iPhone' newest version is to go by!

With the new version of iOS, Apple decided to bid goodbye to Google Maps. Good decision? We think otherwise. Not because we are a Google fan but with the response and few complaints that we see on web about the people using the Apple made Maps, you could always think they made the decision a bit too early. And no, despite the rumors, Google hasn't provided Apple with a native app for maps on iOS devices. Users of Apple new maps app have reported a bugging web, with mistakes that could frustrate and inconsistency & omissions that would let users think more than once before using possibly the best service a smartphone has for the people on move. What prompted the decision to drop Google maps in-spite of the app being very useful on the previous generation of iPhone(s) and use something that isn't as perfect a product as you expect Apple to put forward; we don't know!!

Google loving it? Sure they would be, considering the size of the horns they are locked with. But what we also know is that they both do think about the users as well. It wont be a surprise to find out they both working on an app that would ultimately fit the best way possible in to one of the perfect smartphone we have seen in the market, an iPhone!! But before that lets hear your views on how you think Apple is doing post Steve.

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Google Buys Nik In War Of Photo Uploads

The news about Facebook acquiring Instagram went berserk in April earlier this year (the deal by the way got closed earlier this month) and then Facebook went ahead with a redesign of photos page on the site. If anything, the steps were clear enough on the dominance the social network giant has as far as the photo upload preference is concerned. The site gets around 300 photo uploads per day, much more than any other website. With these news and stats, its pretty much obvious for the next closest social network, and the best competitor Facebook would have seen, to get a bit serious on the competition.

On Monday, via a post on his Google Plus stream, Vic Gundotra announced one of the best acquisition that Google would have made for Google plus considering the catch up that the search giant' social network is trying to play up with. Nik Software is a 17yr old San Diego based company with offices in Germany as well. But Google' acquisition of Nik has more to it that meets the eye. Why, read on...

Based outside the Silicon valley bubble, Nik has around 9Mn users with a very big following from the professional photographers base. The more interesting part of the acquisition would be Nik's very famous and known product called Snapseed, which is a mobile app currently available only for the iOS devices. The app is used for photo editing & sharing and last year was named the iPad app of the year. Not as popular as Facebook owned Instagram but like other Nik' products, Snapseed is very famous and preferred in between the professional photographers. Shouldn't be much time now for it to come on Android as well.

Google already boasts of quite a sophisticated tools for its social network and with this acquisition, we are sure the main focus would be on the mobile platform apart from the web version usage. Google has on the other hand stayed quite both on the 'Hows' and 'How Much' of the deal. The plans and execution of the deal would sooner or later surface and so will the future of Snapseed on iOS devices. Just wait and watch!!

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LinkedIn Enhances Career Pages

After an upgrade to the company pages on LinkedIn, which are still rolling out to all the company pages on the site(till end of year), the company has now started looking at their Career pages. The news about the new updates to the Career tool was announced on company' talent blog by Thomas Sexton. "As with many LinkedIn products, our goal is to make both our members and talent acquisition customers more successful. When candidates are more engaged, more connected with companies, and better able to find their dream jobs, everybody wins. This means designing a page that’s simple and laser-focused on capturing candidates’ attention as soon as they hit the page", Sexton wrote on the blog post.

Here is how the page looks:

As per Sexton, the brand new design f the Career pages will help people using them to:

Inspire Candidates: You would be able to show off your the uniqueness of your brand through the much more common banner image, more recognized as the cover photo of a page. Plus you can also add a punchy tagline.
Highlight What Matters Most: The company thinks that the main aspects people care about in a company detail involve the personalized jobs, people who they may know in that company and thus the new design keeps these main elements in the center.
Bring Your Story To Life: The page design has space for content modules that allows you to post feature videos, your employees or other' testimonials etc

Migrate your Career Page anytime over the next couple of months. To achieve the migration navigate to your Career Page click Admin tools, and choose the Upgrade to new version. Then its just the following of the migration guide and that should be all.

See also, LinkedIn New Company Pages.

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LinkedIn Company Pages Gets A MakeOver

LinkedIn has made a major update to their company pages, suggesting that the company is now trying to make a balance for both the individual and the business users. The upgrade was announced on LinkedIn official blog around 10 days back and it is expected that more people should start seeing the changes now after an initial roll-out on a few of the companies like Philips, Citi and Dell.

Social media experts are also of the opinion that its the time business should move on to the platform and start using the company page feature if they already haven't done so. LinkedIn,
apparently, it seems haven't been paying much attention to the feature in the past. Unlike their number one rival Viadeo (ApnaCircle in India) who already launched the feature (in beta yet) a few months back and seems like taking it seriously with all the advertisements that we see. But now that the company has started paying attention and seems to have long term plans for it, going by what Mike G wrote on the announcement in LinkedIn' blog post, it will be a good feature to capitalize on for the businesses that run in the B2B space.

Also see, ApnaCircle Launches Company Pages!

The updates are not great but certainly make the pages design fall in place for a better and useful navigation and making sure that the user gets the required information which should interest them once they start following a particular company page on LinkedIn. As you see the cover photo stands out like it does on the Facebook Timeline as well. Besides this stand out feature the companies will be able to display their logo right at the top besides their names. Otherwise the company news and updates takes all the importance as they should.

The updates may take some time rolling out to all companies. This is confirmed from the blog post as well as Mike says; "We are just getting warmed up and look forward to sharing more news as we continue to improve Company Pages and roll out the experience to all companies later this year." But while it may take some time for the new updates to reach the companies, it is advisable for them to start paying attention to the new changes and get themselves familiarized. Here are our tips on what may be the minimal you need to focus on; for a start:

Cover Pic: as it was the case when Facebook made the introduction to this design, designers in the company will need to pay special attention to this cover photo. This is the first thing a user may notice on landing on the page. So make sure its what reflects your brand and your identity. So far it seems the dimensions are: 646 x 220 pixels.
Metrics: They have changes and businesses will have the ability to look at the metrics on their company' status updates. After 24 hrs of a status update, you could look at the information like impressions of the post, its clicks and so on(shares and engagement percentage).
Target Audience: For the posts and status updates from your company pages, admins will now have the option to choose their target audience. So if you have some news that you want only to be able to share with the employees, go ahead and do it!
Facebook Like Link Sharing: Need to share a link? Just paste the link in the status update box, wait for the preview and ten feel free to remove the link and include introductory text. You will also have the option to remove the featured image on the update.
Products and Services: They get a nice own space in the right bar, making sure that your users get the details in a very easy manner. Make sure you have the details filled in.

This by no means is an exhaustible list of what you may need to pay attention to, but should be a start. We wait on your comments on how the pages match up to your expectations in case you now have the new changes available to you!

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Should You Buy iPhone5?

The wait was finally over a couple days back when the iPhone5 (the first iPhone after Steve Jobs)was formally launched at the Apple event on 12th of this month. Butterflies finally settled down and people started caring about the other routine work they are normally busy with when they are not listening to the launch events. This all happens, Yes! Irrespective of the part of the world you are in. The story is same. People go crazy and that's understandable. Apple has been able to surprise everyone all over the world, all the time. Was this the case this time? Read on...

As is usual whenever Apple is to launch a new iPhone, there are rumors on the new features and more interesting, as is the case with the smartphone giant (arguably the 'tag'), the 'whats new' or 'innovation' that they may bring with the new product. Surprisingly it seems Apple failed in its usual doing this time around. Don't trust us. We do love the company and what they are doing with each of the new products and innovations they bring to the market and the users, but its also true that we never found so many results about why the new iPhone disappoints. People are complaining on the miss of anything new. It has surprised the majority that the rumors already captured what was "official" announced at the launch event. And while iPhone5 may end up being the fastest product in terms of sales and that you may already be finding a out of stock sign (or rather preorder-ing) on the sites selling the phone and Apple may have been out of initial inventory in the record time; the question many have in their minds is if at all should you buy iPhone5?

We give you a preview of the features that you need to know in order tot decide if you should go for the new iPhone5. Here they are:

The Thinner, the Better: Size Does Matter
Yes it does, always. Size does matter and that's why we all keep arguing if Samsung is right to be giving its new phones the size that they have, especially when it becomes increasingly difficult as far as the single hand operation/usage is concerned. Apple finally thought about the 4inch screen size which means another row of icons, making it a 5 row screen space apart from the default row that you see. Still sporting the Retina display making it that much more clear with a 1136 x 640 resolution. And with 7.6 mm thickness, 112gm. weight; there is a slight improvement here with respect to stuffing more in less space and still making it lighter.

New OS: iOS6
Boasting of more than 200 updates and improvements over its predecessor iOS5, apple unveils the new iOS6. The new OS has some features that were pending for some while, like Facebook integration. The services (with Twitter in previous version) are now well integrated into this iPhone. Just login once to your Facebook account and you will have instant access to Facebook in apps, browser and even Siri. Possibility to post to Facebook from anywhere within the phone, and in fact your events and birthdays also sync up with your calendar. So this was a big improvement for Apple users.
Siri gets smart and can now launch apps and could also Tweet for you.
Maps come to iPhone as a replacement of Google Maps and have a turn by turn voice navigation guided by Siri. As compared to Google Maps, however Apple will have some catch up to do.
Do Not Disturb mode will let your phone receive the messages without a screen light up or making that usual noise.
Like Facebook and Twitter, iCloud too is now well built in and integrated in to the phone.
iSight the new rear camera is termed to be with a new lens and receiving some light enhancements but we expected the camera to be more than just 8MP. The word is that the comparison would heat up once you have Nokia Lumia 920 out in the market.
AirPlay lets you stream content to your HDTV and with the use of AirPlay mirroring what you do on your iPhone can be monitored on HDTV too.

Hardware Changes/Upgrades
New Processor, the A6 quad core processor is twice as fast as its predecessor A5 chip. But isn't it true that the quad-core processors chips have found their way to a host of Android-based devices already?
With 3 microphones at the front, back and bottom, the new earplugs called the EarPods are here to make your listening experience better. They have the ability to be clear even in loud atmosphere due to the design they sport. And we are sure Apple will (or already have) file for a patent for this new hardware accessory.
Lightning Connector is a 9 in connector as opposed to 30 pin on older phones and is dubbed to be faster, and with $29USD (price of the converter to use this one with 30 pin adapter) will be compatible with earlier versions of iPhone. This new connector can be plugged both ways, the normal and reversible.

The phone has been currently launched in Canada, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore only. It will be coming to India and 21 other countries a week later (next weekend).

As an Apple fan disappointment still remains on why Near Field Communication (NFC) was left out and why there is no wireless charging option in the phone. This is despite the fact that the close competitors like the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the Nokia Lumia 920 both have these features. LTE Long-Term Evolution) service is also not new! Bottom line is that although with the new OS there are some nice little features that came out, the innovative features that are so characteristic of the team at Apple, were no where to be seen. iPhone 4S users may be in dilemma right now, but if you are an Apple fan; there is no stopping you from iPhone5. For others, you know the options!!

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Google Drive Updated For Android & iOS

Google has been pretty serious on the updates it currently is providing our on the smartphone apps. We saw the new standalone YouTube app for iOS devices carry more or less the same features as on the Android version of the app. With these updates, Google is making sure its not leaving out the large section of users which are on the iOS platform and side by side making sure to keep itself in the run as far as the Apple vs Google war for dominance is concerned. The recent updates to Google drive app for iOS suggests the same and supports our thoughts here.

Google announced on its official blog a couple of days earlier about the updates the app would be receiving both on the Android as well as iOS platforms. While the update brings new and cool features on the Android smartphones, thus trying its best to make the app more favorable in competition to other cloud based services (read Dropbox and SkyDrive etc), on the iOS the search giant is pretty much focused to provide the Apple users with the same features as their Android counterparts.

Let's start with the updates for the Apple users. The new updates brings to the Drive app on iOS, the features to edit Google doc, just as the Android users could already with the previous version. The cloud feature could now be experienced on iPhone on iPad as users will now be able to create a new document, edit an existing doc or format text just as they do on their computers. Besides, just like the Macs (read computers), they will be able to see the changes done by their fellows on the same doc, instantly. The other features on the iOS devices include:

• view Google presentations on iPhone or iPad
• see speaker notes and toggle to full screen mode
• ability to swipe between slides
• creating new folders
• moving files in to folders and upload files including photos and videos

As far as the updates on the Android devices (smartphones and tablets)is concerned, the above detailed features are all in there. Apart from these android users will also be able to:

• add comments
• reply to existing comments and 
• view tables in your Google documents

There are a few things that are in pipeline, like native editing and real time collaboration for Google spreadsheets. And here is the video for you to enjoy:

 
We don't know how long and how far the Google vs Apple will go, however with the last 2 updates its pretty sure that Google is making sure not to leave the Apple users behind in the smartphone experience. Which is obviously a sign of healthy competition and good news for the users, no matter which side you are on!!

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