Using Flickr API means that some creative developers can build alternative Flickr search engines. In this post we have covered useful flickr search tools.

FlickrBabel: FlickrBabel is a mash-up of Flickr search and Google Translate. If you find a cool image but can’t understand the underlying text, FlickrBabel uses Google and translate to interpret the message. It also supports location-based searches.

Compfight: Compfight is a visual Flickr search tool that displays searched photos based on tags or text. Beyond showing you pictures that match your search, the other cool thing about compfight is that it makes it dead simple to search for creative commons pictures that you can use for your blog. It’s a simple and fast-loading interface for Flickr searches.

Picishare: If you’re just looking for a straight-up alternative to Flickr search, then PiciShare may be one to look at. It has all of the meat tag search, relevance, whether it’s “interesting”, and more. It also allows you to limit the number of photos that appear if you’re on a slow web connection.

Tag Galaxy:  Tag Galaxy is as a Flickr search engine. It represents Flickr tags as the solar system. The keyword you use is the sun, related keywords are planets, clicking on any shows you a planet full of pictures. It is, by far, the most dynamic way to search Flickr.

Flickrstorm: The Flickr search engine is smart, but it isn’t perfect when you’re looking for photos related to a topic? FlickrStorm comes to the rescue. FlickrStorm divides search into multiple columns and suggests search refinements with additional related keywords.

Jason Calacanis and others at Mahalo have launched a new feature called Mahalo Answers. Mahalo’s copy of Yahoo! Answers, Google Answers or ChaCha, lets you offer a price to ask specific questions of other Mahalo users.

Good Attempt by Mahalo, as they will be making money off it, When you ask a question, you put money into the system, and Mahalo keeps it like a bank. When you answer a question, you put knowledge into and you might not get paid. Only one answer gets paid, and then Mahalo keeps 25 percent of it. Which makes this nice money making scheme, Mahalo cuts a quarter out of every dollar being spent.

Upon receiving a satisfactory answer (assuming you get one) users can give their promised tip, choose to give nothing or give a little extra depending on how happy you get with the answer. But this is a good means to cash on the ever increasing traffic Mahalo gets.

The success projection of this service is unknown, this is not the first of its own kind, and why will one use this service when there are free alternatives like Yahoo! Answers.

Are you Social on internet yet? Hanging on social networking websites plainly do not make you socially active, following are a list of Social Media tools that you must try, and get used to them.

Flock Web Browser: Flock Browser is a free web browser built on the mozilla architecture . It’s aggregates social networks, social media, webmail and related tools within the browser interface. With these tools you can keep your friends and media with you while you browse and interaction with and between them is as simple as drag and drop. Flock has 23 services integrated, including Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Digg. Along with these service integrations, Flock’s built-in blog editor and photo uploader deliver a whole browsing experience that is unparalleled by conventional browsers.

Friend Feed: FriendFeed help’s combine all of your different social networks into a single feed. Make yourself easier to follow, or make it easier to follow others.

Yumeo: Yumeo is a social network that allows you to control many other social sites in one place.

Ping.Fm: Ping.fm is a simple service that cuts out the middle man when it comes to posting to your social services such as Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Pownce, Facebook, hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, LiveJournal and Blogger. Ping is focused on providing the easiest way possible for users to post to their social networks all at once.

EventBox:Eventbox ia an application created by Cosmic Machine which aims to provide one place from which to manage all your online social networking activity. It can ‘pack all your social networks in one box’. EventBox is a mac-only program that integrates the top 5-6 social networks into a single program.

Plaxo: Plaxo helps keep people connected by solving the common and frustrating problem of out-of-date contact information. Users and their contacts store their information on servers. When a user edits their own information, the changes appear in the address books of all those who listed the user in their own address books.

Second Brain: It’s Organize all of your content in one place, including bookmarks, files, etc.

Digg Toolbar: The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you’re not on the Digg site itself. With a notification window built into the toolbar, you’ll never miss a popular story or when friends Digg, submit, or comment on stories.

Website Cache View: Shows multiple cached versions of any website in case of the Digg effect.

Twitbin: TwitBin is a small Firefox Extension that allows you to receive and send tweets anywhere in your browser.

Twhirl: Twhirl is another desktop Twitter client. It adds the ability to cross-post tweets to other sites, post images to TwitPic, and search tweets.

Digg Alerter: is a great tool for Windows users that sits in the system tray and informs you about your most recent Digg submissions . You can see if your submission was popular or if it’s still “upcoming.”

Digg Notify: Digg Notify is a well buiilt desktop application that will display small notification when someone will digg your stories.

Digg Website Widgets: Web publishing tool to put your latest diggs right at your website view. Wordpress recommended .

Stumbleupon Website Buttons: These StumbleUponbuttons lets you add some creativity to your site, while getting users attention.

Wordpress Twitter Tools: This is a Wordpress plugin that will let you display the your twitters on your blog or web site.

Twitter Feed: TwitterFeed integrates your blog to your twitter account, takes your feed and publishes in twitter.

TwitThis: TwitThis is a integrated button you can use on any of your sites which posts your site on their account.

Twittelator Pro : Twitelator is a alternative for Iphone users, very recommended.

Twitter Berry: TwitterBerry is a mobile twitter client for all us Blackberry users. Fortunately, it works over the data network and so there is never a cost incurred for SMS.

A new report by Forrester Research has revealed that RSS is still far from going mainstream as only 11% of web users use RSS. It further adds that most of the web users don’t know the importance or usability of RSS or how it can help them stay informed. The findings concludes that users need to be educated if RSS has to reach the numbers where marketers could exploit it.

The worst thing about the study is that only 17% out of the rest 89% non-RSS users are interested in RSS or the possibility of using it in future.

I believe this is rather a very grim situation because I survive on RSS and spend like 5 hours (no kidding) a day on Google Reader. I believe if you are not using RSS, then you are losing both your time and information. RSS helps you stay informed with information that matters to you.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary and some people have also started to call it Really Simple Syndication these days. Let’s take an example, if you want to read the newspaper daily then you either go to the newspaper shop and buy it or you can ask the newspaper vendor to deliver it at your home daily. RSS is latter. You subscribe to the RSS feed which is equivalent to asking the newspaper vendor for getting the newspaper daily at your home. After that you get the daily news or the latest content on a particular site delivered to you.

What do you need to use RSS?

All you need is a RSS feed reader in order to use RSS. This RSS feed reader will act like your home where the newspaper is delivered. Some of the notable RSS feed readers are:

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• Feedly

I suggest you to use Google Reader because it is the best Feed reader in my experience and you shouldn’t have any doubt it if you are already using Google services.

How to start?

First of all you need to create an account on any RSS feed reader. I will use Google Reader as our RSS feed reader to tell you the simple steps on how to get feeds. Below is the screenshot of what your Google Reader Home page will look like.

You can click on the image and see the picture in full resolution.  Let me also tell you that not all websites support RSS but good ones does. The pages that support RSS will glow up RSS icon in the address bar if you are using Mozilla Firefox and I believe similar functionality is also available in the latest version of Internet Explorer. RSS icon looks like this .

As I said before, most websites support RSS and you can add the particular site in your RSS feed reader by two ways, first by just adding the URL of the website and the other way is to click on the RSS feed icon which you see on the website or on the address bar in your browser. You will be taken one option where you’ll have to select select which feed reader you use (Google Reader in our case) to read feeds.

That’s the job done. You are ready to read feeds now and you may categorize the feeds of different websites just to make it look less messy.

The motive of this post is to encourage users to adopt RSS because it will benefit you guys in ways more than one.

You might bump into something called “Atom” while doing this which is just an enhanced version of RSS. Do ping me or just leave a comment on the post if you want to know more on that.

If you own and manage a blog then it’s only wise to put a plugin which will let users to share the content on your website with others or to submit Digg or Stumbleupon. There are although many plugins which you can use to do so but there are very few which will impress you. We found some plugins which deserve your attention.

Sharethis is used on thousands of blogs andusers can share the particular content on scores of other social netoorks or share the story on their blogpost with this plugin. It supports maximum networks including those you haven’t even heard of.

Addthis is another similar sharing tool to share stories on web and also one of the main competitor in this niche after Sharethis. Addthis site claims that it is the leading bookmarking and sharing button and we have no doubt about it. Many top blogs use Addthis on their blog including TechCrunch. People prefer it for its no fuss button which holds enough juice to keep your bookmarking and sharing kicking.

Tell a friend is a new comer in this market and its claim to fame is the ability to share content with others on their IM’s like Gtalk, Yahoo messenger and AIM etc.YOu can not submit post on Mixx or Digg and it fails dearly in this. Guys behind this need to increase the offerings in order to make it more compelling but I believe it will turn out to be a nice plugin if you can’t write stupid stuff because it’s the stupid content only that ranks on Digg.

I recently signed up on Socialmedian which has been creating lot of news since its public beta launch earlier this year in July. The website has been termed from Digg for Web 2.0 to some network trying to make its space between twitter or Digg. I thought the best way to know would be to experience it and I have some views to share now.

Socialmedian is an idea which is being driven by some passionate people. The idea is to bring the people on web to submit the stories they find interesting or useful and have their own views about it. The idea is definitely not new because other bigger social networks like Digg and Stumbleupon have done and mastered this thing. Socialmedian has the benefit of not being the first who’s doing something like this as they can improve their offerings they feel other similar services are not doing. Anyway, first movers advantage is a myth.

Purpose

It’s important that a service on web or elsewhere should  define a purpose and address it. Socialmedian’s purpose is to connect people and let them share their views and opinions about stories they clip in or submit. It’s a social news network as they like to call it and they intend to create a niche of News 2.0.

First Impression

The first few things I realized when I signed up on Socialmedian are:

1. The layout is not as Web2.0′ish’ as some of you would like. The colors combination are similar to Facebook but somehow it manages to still differentiate.

2. I experienced few glitches in the layout like the drop down menu on News Networks was out of the navigation bar. Similar problems were seen on News Feed at Home page  as well. I later found that those problems were only visible on Firefox Ubuntu and not in Firefox Windows.

3. I found the use of “Get Help” link twice on the page as little useless. Just one link would have sufficed.

Why Socialmedian?

I pondered a lot about it and compared it against its similar or rather better peers. Socialmedian somewhat works like Friendfeed in a way that you can add some text or link but they have different visions. Friendfeed wants to aggregate your online activity at one place while Socialmedian wants to create a platform which can bring about a transition from the way we read and interact with news stories now.

The thing that Socialmedian wants to pursue is to attract more users who can submit stories or news which can be discussed in a community. Digg would be its closest competitor because it is on the same lines as well. The question then arises “Why would anyone join Socilamedian when he can do the same stuff on Digg?”I really don’t have any answer to this but I do feel that Digg is not the place when you seek real news and opinion. The only category on Digg worth your time is Technology, everything else is most of the times total rubbish.

Socialmedian has a good chance if it becomes a place for good news and views. It can do well if it becomes successful in converting the basic web users who prefer to go to CNN or NYTimes to get their daily feed of news into using Socialmedian for the same. Socialmedian should start to differentiate and make its web offering more compelling in order to attract more users. The present community on Socialmedian is doing pretty well and you get to see news stories which have some value.

Socialmedian derives its fuel from the web and its top users who submit in good stories so the impetus of the success relies a lot on the way users use it and what direction is being provided to it.  Most of the present users are on it for the sake of first mover advantage in the anticipation of its success which will belong to them as well.

What Socialmedian needs?

1. Direction. I would like Socialmedian adopting some direction because I am not yet convinced why would anyone come to it.
2. Competition. I don’t think Socialmedian has any real competitor like we had Reddit for Digg and Yahoo for Google. Sometimes your enemies do more benefit to you than you do to yourself.
3. More features. I don’t go to Socialmedian to read news or find some fun stuff. The only reason why I visit it is its community and the fact that you can’t send someone any direct message kinda plagues the interactivity and networking.

I think Socialmedian has just started its journey and we will see lot of improvements in the near future but what I really want is a clear reason for the visitors to come again. Youtube gave us that reason, Twitter converted users to use it over SMS, Stumbleupon helped us find good content on web. All of the successful websites have one thing common, that is a clear idea of the product/service in the mind of consumer and Socialmedian lacks that. If greatness is what they want to pursue then they have a long way to go but if they are looking to make a name then they have certainly made it.

Recently I have started to use three applications or rather just some nifty softwares which make my desktop look like a newsroom machine.

1. Snackr is a light application made on Adobe AIR platform which is also the reason why it is fast and glossy. Snackris a RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop.

2. The other thing I do use to make my desktop happening with news is Spectra. It is a widget by MSNBC which shows you news headlines in a dynamic spectrum. It is not an application but a browser based visual news reader which shoes you news with images if you so desire.

3. There is a screensaver by MSNBC called News Skimmer which displays news items whenever your system is idle.

New York Times has incorporated a social feature into its online version. The new feature is called TimesPeople and the registered NYTimes users can share slideshows, blog posts, reader comments, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants and hotels on this network.

You have the twitteresque Follower and Following thing here as well while  you an account of your activity is saved for you to see. You will see a tooolbar while reading stories on NYTimes which will keep you click away from accessing your profile page and activity.

 
Your favorite mini social networking destination has finally gained the power of being threaded. It’s been a long time since twitter users were demanding the threaded conversation structure in Twitter. It seems like the twitter freaks have finally got their bite with a new twitter tool. The new twitter tool, Tweader allows you to view the entire twitter conversations with multiple people (IDs) in a threaded look. Now you won’t have to go through all of the tweets to get a grasp of the conversation which used to be the case till now.

Tweader provides an input text box where you just have to enter a tweet’s ID & press Enter. Tweader automatically re-structures the whole conversation in a threaded format which is quite user friendly. Here’s the new threaded structure look that only Tweader imparts to Twitter.

Are you addicted to twitter yet? if yes you must be having atleast one of these, try them out all have their own significance and interface.

Twhirl - Twhirl is probably the most popular desktop client. It also supports TwitPic, TweetScan, FriendFeed and cross posting to Pownce and Jaiku.

Spaz - Desktop client for Mac, Windows and Linux

TweetDeck - Better organize your Twitter friends with a great built in group feature. TweetDeck uses the popular Twitter search engine Summize to do the heavy search lifting. Summize is the premiere search engine for Twitter and was recently purchased by Twitter for that very reason

Tweetr - This one will allows you to send files to other Tweeters. It also has a built in webcam feature.

Alert Thingy - Keeps you updated on FriendFeed and Twitter. Allows you to easy upload pictures to Flickr.

Twitteroo - Displays updates without pictures (for better or worse).

Witty - Open source client for Vista and XP

bTT - Non-Adobe AIR based desktop client.

Twitterlicious - Very minimalist desktop client and extremely easy.

Snitter - Amazing customizable desktop client for Mac and Windows.

Feedalizr - You can use this single client to post to FriendFeed, Twitter, Jaiku and Flickr with this desktop client.

Posty - This one has a support for several microblogging services