Summer Guide For Teenagers, The Young, And The Young At Heart

Here below are suggestions for an active, healthy, and helpful summer holiday.

Beach summer days: This is for the active and sporty teenagers. What can be better than a long white beach + green coconut trees + yellow sunlight? Imagine you surfing the waves, or playing beach volleyball with your friends, or just leisurely lying on the beach – feeling the soft sand, comfortable as a bed, the wind from the sea gently caressing your skin and the sunlight shining down on you, warming you, …
Pros: Low price, relaxing, getting naturally tan, getting back in shape
Cons: Sunburn, possible dehydration and sunstroke

Mountain and forest adventure: Mountain climbing and forest picnic trips will purify your body and refresh your mind. The fresh air in the mountains will definitely improve your health. The stillness of the forest is the best environment for meditating, and bringing you closer to nature. It’s a great place for relaxing, or to have a free, wild summer of hiking and adventure in the great outdoors.
Pros: relaxing, inexpensive, healthy
Cons: Getting lost, not all mountains and forests are safe, being extra careful with the campfire, and watching out for wild animals

Earning money with a Part-time job: “What? I’ve been studying for the whole year. I need to rest,” you say? Calm down! If you don’t like it, just skip this one. But you know what? Studies show that a part-time job will help students to be more confident and to improve their time-management skills. Not only will it produce a paycheck, giving you more independence, it will also give you the chance to get some real-life experience (and professional training, in certain cases). So try to find a part-time job if you want a “productive” summer!
Pros: Earn real-life experience, pay your bills, and become more independent and self-confident
Cons: Loss of hangout time with friends, and you will have to stay committed to the job

Help a charity or do some volunteer work: Help the community and spend a useful summer. These kinds of job will bring you to real life experience, where you can come to know more kind and sincere people. You will find new friends, make new relationships, and gain respect from other people; not to mention that these activities will also help you contribute to your future career profile. Many employers tend to recruit people who have a big heart rather than those who are cold with a big brain.
Pros: kindness and happiness, making more good friends
Cons: focusing on others, rather than yourself

Sharing your happy times with your friends: Okay, so you are planning a good summer time for yourself. Don’t forget your friends. Update your activities on Twitter, or post a couple of images and videos made-by-you on Facebook. It’s fast, and easy, and keeps you close to your friends, however far you are from each other. Be sure to make your creations as sparkling and beautiful as the originals. To do that, enhance your work before sharing it with a couple of touches to the background music, the voice, or the sound of your videos. If you are not sure which tool can help you with that, take a look at the software list at http://www.cnet.com or, simply go to http://www.audio4fun.com, a website which focuses on audio and video editing software.

Have a Fun Summer!

Clark Miller

By http://www.articlesnatch.com

5 Free Tools to Spring Clean Your Twitter Account

Remember that Hubspot statistic that revealed that almost 56 percent of Twitter accounts are not following anyone? Or the one from  that stated that 10 percent of active Twitter users are responsible for 90 percent of all the tweets? If you have a Twitter account, the chances are good you’ve accumulated a sizeable number of deadbeat users.

Manually sifting through your followers to identify these users could take hours. That’s why several sites have sprung up to help you take back control of your Twitter account. These sites scan your followers and generate a list identifying which ones haven’t tweeted in a while so that you to remove them accordingly. Check out my top five picks for free sites that help you efficiently restore order to your account.

1. ManageTwitter.

With ManageTwitter you’re able to sort your Twitter contacts based on who’s inactive, who tweets more than five times a day and who tweet less than once a day. You can further subdivide these lists based on the date you began following someone, their username, number of followers or their time zone. ManageTwitter also features a mass select and deselect action for unfollowing users.

2. Tweepi.

Tweepi’s “Cleanup” tool gives you five options for organizing the people you follow on Twitter. You can sort according to which of your followers are most active, which are most influential, how frequently they retweet others, how often they engage in discussions (measured by their number of @replies), and their follower-to-following ratio. Tweepi also lets users weed out “linkless ramblings.” In this manner, you can select which users you want to follow back or unfollow entirely.

3. TweetSpinner.

TweetSpinner offers a wealth of functionality. Its Direct Message inbox tool finds and archives messages older than seven days and searches your inbox for spam (something I wish Twitter would implement on its site). TweetSpinner’s follower manager targets particular audiences you might be interested in following as well as followers you might wish to ditch. The service also offers a profile rotator and a tweet scheduler. Some of TweetSpinner’s features can be customized, though customization may require a paid membership. To use TweetSpinner, you need to register with the site and allow it to access your Twitter account.

4. Twerp Scan.

Twerp Scan helps you manage your followers and the contacts you’re following. Allow the site access to your Twitter account and it will generate a report detailing for each contact how many followers they have, how many people they’re following, their follower-to-following ratio, their number of tweets and the date of their last tweet. You can sort your contacts based on any of these characteristics, and by clicking a box, you can either mass follow, delete or block them.

5. UnTweeps.

UnTweeps is a basic tool that hooks into your Twitter account. It gives you three options: You can view the people you follow who haven’t updated their status in 30 days (or any time period you choose); you can generate a list of followers based their days of inactivity; and you can view the Twitter accounts that you have blocked. You can then unfollow certain accounts accordingly.

Kristin Burnham

http://www.pcworld.com

8 Must-Have Twitter and Facebook Add-Ons

By no means are Twitter and Facebook perfect: You might wish that Facebook made it more intuitive to hide FarmVille or certain status updates. Or, maybe you wish that Twitter would introduce a new feature like nested tweets. Good news: For many of these website tweaks or suggestions, there’s likely to be a script you can download to fit the bill.

Here are my top eight picks for Facebook and Twitter add-ons. Many of these solve common user gripes (such as not knowing to what site shortened URLs will bring you on Twitter). Some, like “Facebook Fixer,” enhance the site and allow you to customize it beyond standard options. Do note that most of these scripts require that you first download Greasemonkey, and not all are compatible with every browser, so be sure to check the requirements before you download a script.

1. Facebook Fixer.

This script lets you customize your Facebook account and offers many features that are enabled by default, but can be enabled or disabled independently. Some of these features include: larger profile and album pictures; homepage customization where you can hide independent sections such as pokes, suggestions and “connect with friends”; and calendar integration, which includes a link on each profile that synchs birthdays with Google Calendar, or the option to export a file with all your friends’ birthdays, which can be imported into sites such as Google Calendar, Yahoo, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook and more.

2. Facebook Purity.

The Facebook Purity script cleans up your homepage and removes all newsfeed items from third-party games such as Mafia Wars and FarmVille, and zaps announcements on who’s become friend with who, who’s attending a certain event, who joined a group and who became a fan of something. Optional items you can block include: comments on a status, photo, photo album or link; tags in a photo or photo album; and event postings.

3. Unfriend Finder.

Ever wonder if you’ve been dropped by a Facebook friend? Every time you log in, the script checks to see if someone is missing from your friend list. When the script detects someone is no longer your friend, you get a notification and a bubble counter in the Facebook toolbar. There are two types of “unfriends:” Either you removed them from your friend list or they removed you (but they’re still on Facebook), or they deactivated their account and are no longer on Facebook. If they reactivate their account, you’ll also be notified.

4. No Facebook Ads.

If you’re tired of the age-targeted ads Facebook runs, take advantage of this script. Downloading it will remove ads from your Facebook account-including flyer ads, network ads, bumper ads-leaving its appearance a lot cleaner.

5. TinyURL Decoder.

While URL shorteners do save space on Twitter, you’re often clicking at your own risk-phishing scams and spam-laden direct messages are becoming more and more common on the microblogging site. This script decodes the shortened URLs on Twitter’s website and displays the original URL, so you can decide whether or not to click.

6. Nested Twitter Replies.

Twitter’s website still only allows you to view @replies in a list, which can be confusing if you’re trying to follow a conversation. Applying this script automatically displays tweets in a nested conversation format, making it easier to follow.

7. @Troynt’s Twitter Script.

This Twitter script does it all. Among its many features: expansion of Links in tweets; inline inclusion of YouTube videos and Twitpic images; nested tweets; option to save, reply to or retweet a tweet when you hover over it; autocompletion of a username when you begin typing “@” in a tweet and much more.

8. Twitter Old Style RT Emulator.

If you hate Twitter’s retweet button and long for the old method, this script will convert all retweet symbols and user pictures into “RT @username.” Note that this script only works in Safari and Firefox.

By Kristin Burnham
http://www.pcworld.com

TweeterClubs Lets You Track And Share Twitter Conversations

While Twitter is an incredible platform for tapping into the conversations that are taking place on the web, the real-time stream can be crowded. It’s hard to keep track of back-and-forth communication between users or to keep track of subject-related Tweets based on hashtags. Recently launched TweeterClubs aims to create a real-time conversation around the Tweets that are broadcast to the web.

Once you log into the site with your Twitter account, you can enter the tweet on the TweetUp tab. Your tweet will appear in both the club and on Twitter automatically. TweeterClubs will only show the tweets that come from the club members and when you log in, you are automatically a member. At the moment, the site only shows one club, the “Tweetheart Club,” which includes the Tweets of the six women profiled in the controversial Vanity Fair article. But TweeterClubs’ founder Jeff Whitehead says the site is planning to open up so allow anyone to create their own clubs.

Those who are participating in clubs who Tweet with a club-specific hashtag can Tweet from any third party Twitter client, and their Tweets will be aggregated into their Tweeter Club. Users will be able to manage specific clubs by banning members, deleting messages and also seeing statistics on clubs, including the number of members and number tweets per day. Whitehead says that TweeterClubs will also offer an Android app and will open up its API for Twitter clients to incorporate its functionality into their own platforms.

Of course, users can also participate in conversations on Twitter by just adding a specific hashtag to Tweets and then searching for that hashtag. Other startups that help make sense of specific conversations on the web are TweetGrid, and TweetConvo and Bettween

Voice-Activated Internet: Text-Free Tweeting, Blogging & More

As some of our readers know, I was clumsy enough to hack off a chunk of my finger while making dinner a couple nights ago. This incident has severely curtailed my blogging activity, but it’s led to a fortunate inspiration, as well!

For those of you who are differently-abled – temporarily or otherwise – or for those of you who are simply too lazy to type, here are a handful of resources for hands-free Internet use, from blog posting to Twitter updates to straight-up voice-to-text transcription services. I hope you find these apps as useful as I have.

Jott

Jott is a transcription service that takes your speech and converts it to text. With tiered subscription plans that run a modest gamut of around $4 per month to $13 per month and a pay-as-you-go option that seems perfectly geared toward casual users, Jott is competitively priced for both a satisfied userbase and profitability.

The site allows users to set in 15- or 30-second snippets of audio to be converted into text. Jott also offers services for consumers (voicemail transcription) and the enterprise (a Salesforce integration), as well.

The company started in Seattle in 2006. Since then, they’ve integrated Twitter functions and a suite of mobile apps for various devices.

QuickTate

A similar service we found is QuickTate. This service allows users to leave audio messages for themselves via phone; the messages are then transcribed to text and delivered to the user via SMS or email, depending on one’s account settings. Text messages are also available on the web.

QuickTate also allows provides a voicemail transcription service and has a handy iPhone-optimized widget. It too offers tiered subscription plans, with a convenient free option for occasional users and monthly plans ranging from $3.50 to $30 a month for up to 200 transcribed messages.

We actually tested this one firsthand and found the vocie-to-text process both quick and extremely accurate – Google Voice transcription this was not. Each word was correctly spelled, and sentences were adequately punctuated.

TweetCall

TweetCall was another simple, free and accurate service we tested for posting updates to Twitter. There are many similar apps on the market, including TwitterFone (still in private beta after more than a year and a half since inception), but we appreciated the quick and easy nature of TweetCall.

Signing up for the service took no more than a minute, after which we were able to dial 1-877-TweetCall, enter an optional PIN and leave a message to be transcribed to a 140-character tweet.

The service worked just fine, and the text of the message was transcribed beautifully:

We were not too surprised to learn that TweetCall is, in fact, powered by QuickTate. We were curious enough to dig around to find out why each product had such quick and accurate transcriptions; we found both are affiliated with iDictate, a long-standing figure in the space that employs actual human beings to get voice messages into text formats.

It might not be the most technologically innovative or scalable solution, but these two apps certainly did everything we needed them to, and with a higher degree of accuracy than similar applications that rely on machine transcription of messages.

Audio Blogging on Tumblr

Lots of blogging software applications have tools for audio posts, but few are as simple as Tumblr’s. Tumblr has the distinct advantage of giving users a completely free offering, as well.

Early last year, Tumblr gave users the ability to post audio entries to their blogs. While this function doesn’t provide any text transcription, it does do the trick for most casual bloggers who might need to call one in on occasion.

We tested it out, and weren’t too disappointed. The sound was a little muffled, though, and it’s definitely not a feature that would be of any use to professional or enterprise bloggers.

Visual Voicemail

For an extensive and thorough look at voice-to-text voicemail transcription services, check out this post from Baratunde Thurston. I did not test voicemail transcription services because I, dear reader, make a point of not checking my voicemail, ever.

Although Google Voice and similar services’ audio message (mis)translations can be humorously wrong, they’re often helpful for getting the gist of a communiqué without having to reroute through the labyrinthine depths of one’s voicemail inbox.

Let me know your favorite voice-to-text apps in the comments – I’ll need them while I’m resting up and trying to regenerate my finger down in the basement of the ReadWriteLabs.

By Jolie O’Dell

http://www.readwriteweb.com

TweetDeck for iPhone Now Supports Lists and Geotagging

TweetDeck’s iPhone app just got a much-needed update. Version 1.3 brings a slew of new features that finally puts TweetDeck back on par with its competitors on the iPhone. The app now supports Twitter lists and Twitter’s new geotagging API. The app also offers optional support for Twitter’s new retweet style, and the TweetDeck team has made a number of smaller tweaks and fixes that make the app faster and more stable.

Lists

TweetDeck for iPhone keeps the app’s well-known column-style layout and still syncs any changes directly with the desktop app. It’s great to see that TweetDeck now supports lists. However, unlike other apps – like Tweetie 2 – TweetDeck for iPhone doesn’t allow you to create new lists or even add new users to an existing lists.

Location

In today’s announcement, the TweetDeck team puts a lot of emphasis on the new geolocation features in the app. You can now choose to geotag all of your tweets automatically or just add your location info to select tweets only.

The app can now also display a map with an overview of all geotagged tweets in any given column (including columns that display persistent searches). Just click ‘more’ in the bottom right corner and the option to see all the tweets on a map will appear. Given that very few people currently tag their tweets with location data, however, chances are that your map will look rather empty. Over time, though, as more apps start to support this feature, these maps will hopefully fill up with more tweets as well. For now, this is an interesting feature, though it is probably only useful for a small group of users.

Using Geotagged Tweets for Weather Reports

Once you have upgraded to TweetDeck 1.3, also have a look at our story about how the National Weather Service in the U.S. is using geotagged weather reports from Twitter users during severe weather events. You just have to add the hashtag #wxreport to your geotagged tweet if you want to help out.

By Frederic Lardinois

http://www.readwriteweb.com

FileSocial: A Community for Sharing Files on Twitter

We have profiled Twitter-based file sharing services in the past, but in some cases the shared files were read-only and the UI design left much to be desired, or the service merely redirected the user to a third-party file sharing service.

Spain-based Ideateca has conquered these drawbacks with FileSocial, a sleek multi-platform file sharing service for Twitter. After authenticating their Twitter account, users can upload any filetype up to 50MB, add a message of 110 characters or less, and FileSocial will post the tweet on Twitter with a link to the file.

The web interface shows users a stream of their files, which any user can download or comment on. Comments automatically get posted to Twitter as @ replies to the user who uploaded the file.

Aside from using the FileSocial web interface, Windows, Mac or Linux users can download a desktop application, built on Adobe AIR with drag-and-drop functionality, to upload files. Android users can also download the official FileSocial Android app, and while there is no official iPhone app, the third-party app tweet media allows uploading through FileSocial’s API.

The one major drawback of FileSocial is the inability to post files privately for confidential sharing. All files uploaded to the service show up in a public timeline of files, regardless of whether you choose to post the file to Twitter or not. The option to mark files as private or send the link as a direct message is a key feature that is lacking from FileSocial.

By Chris Cameron

http://www.readwriteweb.com

Blogging Vs. Microblogging: Twitter’s Global Growth Flattens, While WordPress’ Picks Up

Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as “paragraphs.”

Today, blogs are doing fine, while Twitter is struggling with flattening growth, at least to its Website Twitter.com (clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck have seen no slowdown). The weakness Twitter has been experiencing in the U.S. since last summer is now finally hitting its worldwide visitor growth as well.

In October, comScore estimates that Twitter had 58.3 million unique visitors worldwide, down from 58.4 million in September. Meanwhile, WordPress.com gained 10 million unique visitors to end the month at 151.8 million—this is after going pretty much nowhere since March, 2009.

Of course, I am using WordPress.com as a proxy for all blogging here (I could have just as easily used Blogger, which is actually bigger with 291.7 million visitors worldwide. And Blogger saw a similar holding pattern since March, with a huge sudden jump of 18.2 million visitors in October

So is blogging back, while microblogging is on the skids? A one-month spike in the popularity of blogs doesn’t tell you much of anything, but in any case it’s the wrong question. Blogging never really went away, and was in fact helped by Twitter, which is becoming the preferred feed reader for many people (thanks to services like Twitterfeed).

And don’t count out microblogging just yet. Twitter is finally rolling out improvements to its site such as Lists and the new Retweet button. Once geo-location features kick in, Twitter’s growth could come back with a vengeance.

By Erick Schonfeld

http://www.techcrunch.com

Too Lazy To Make Your Own Twitter List? Let Conversationlist Do It For You.

Did you get added to a bunch of Twitter lists today with the name “conversationlist”? If so, you’re not alone. No, it’s not a bug or a worm spreading through Twitter, it’s a new service that aims to create a Twitter list for you based on people you actually have conversations with on Twitter.

The idea is very simple: If you’ve @replied someone in the past day, Conversationlist will add them to your “conversationlist” Twitter list. But this person will only stay on that list as long as you keep talking to them. If the next day you don’t @reply them, they’re gone.

That in and of itself is kind of an interesting way to keep track of people that you find interesting enough to want to directly talk to at any given time. But it gets more interesting when others start following your Conversationlist, because it gives them a glimpse of the people you actually talk to on Twitter. And if you’re the type of person who wants to try out Twitter lists but doesn’t want to take the time to make one, this is a pretty simple way to create one that could actually be useful.

According to Conversationlist, there are only ever 25 people on the list they create for you at any given time. If you want to stop it from updating, simply delete the list on Twitter and Conversationlist will stop building it for you each day. To get it working, you only have to click one button on the Conversationlist site, authorize the service via OAuth, and you’re set. Super simple.

Twitter Expands Lists Beta Testing. A Great New Feature.

Twitter has rolled out its new Lists feature to a larger portion of its user base right now. The feature allows you to group users you follow together and then lets you share those for others to also follow.

Setting up a list is simple. Currently, the homepage features a Lists banner that allows you to start simply by clicking on the “Create a new list” button. Once you do this, an overlay appears and you just type in the list name (which Twitter then converts into a permalink along the lines of twitter.com/USERNAME/LISTNAME), and set the list to be public or private. This is obviously an important distinction as the public one, others will be able to see, while the private one will be for your eyes only.

On the right hand column of you Twitter.com homepage, you will see a new “lists” area under you bio. Clicking on this will take you to your list overview page where you can manage your own lists, as well as see other user’s public lists that you are a part of. Also, on user profile pages you will see that the users’ lists are now listed under the “Favorites” area in the right hand toolbar.

Clicking on any of these lists will take you to a stream of just the users followed by that list. Basically, this is a filter, if used the right way. This is something Twitter proper has long needed (though plenty of third party services like Brizzly have stepped in to offer it).

Unfortunately, adding people to your list is not as easy as it should be. The reason for this is that there is no user search functionality. Instead, you have to either go to your “following” page, or to that person’s profile to manually add them.

A number of third-party sites and services were granted early access to the Lists feature, and have been working with its API to integrate the functionality into their services.

Much has been made about Twitter’s Suggest User List (Disclosure: We’re on it) and how it wasn’t a fair method of user discovery. These lists will undoubtedly help alleviate a lot of that strain.

Update: Initially, I suggested this was a massive roll out, it is not. As project lead Nick Kallen says, it seems that just a lot of people I happen to know were added. My bad, sorry to excite everyone. The feature is very cool though.

Update 2: We’ve made a TechCrunch Team List if you want to follow that — which you should.

Update 3: Twitter also has a team list, which is following 108 people. That would seem to suggest that they may be over 100 employees already, which is more than they’ve stated recently. Actually, strike that, that list include non-employee contractors, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has just informed us.

By MG Siegler

http://www.techcrunch.com