gio’s WeBlog

Isn’t it amazing how easy for us to meet new friends these days? The Internet technology makes it all possible with the emergence of social websites and online dating sites. Most of these services are free to join. These services even provide free blog hosting services so you can start blogging right away.

One such site is Friendsation.com, a free online dating site. Joining is absolutely free. The site also has a special feature which enables you to have a live free chat with other members currently online. Friendsation is more than just a social networking website it’s an interactive free service to meet new friends online.

Are you interested to find out the latest trends and fashion? HerFabLife is a new social community of women sharing the latest fashion styles, the newest restaurant, bar, spa, salon, retail store openings, any upcoming events, and many more. Members of HerFabLife can contribute and vote for any content they like or dislike regarding the latest fashion. HerFabLife-Your one-stop lifestyle guide to all things fabulous!

I’ve seen a lot of social networking websites but I think I’ve never seen anything like HerFabLife that caters mainly for women focusing on the latest fashion. This site will surely be a hit for women who love to talk about the latest trends and fashion.

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Is there a venue online for genuine ranting, complaining or just venting your spleen, that will actually be read & taken notice of? Well the answer is yes. Suckered.us is a new service offering a completely free user generated complaint service. What’s even better is that users can rate, or vote, each complaint to the top of the ratings & have it read literally by milllions of fellow malcontents! - The current top spot is proudly held by the Decider Guy. It should get a good ranking on the “Googler”.

It’s free, fun, & at times serious. There’s a complaint about GlaxoSmithKline Paxil scandal which hit world headlines in recent times & really deserves more exposure. Then there’s rather humourous swipes at celebrities, social networks, (yahoo & myspace included).

I particularly enjoyed myspace.really.suckered.us, read & weep!
What is apparent is that suckered.us is using the recent fad for TLD extentions, (go.in etc., etc.), as wordplay but without the crassness of some of the urls around & with a genuinely useful & important social function. Whats even more interesting is the use of user created sub domains - something.suckered.us wherby each topic is searchable by keyword.
Of course, off-topic forums have provided this role for quite a while but once you’ve started your thread you can usually kiss it goodbye as it gets flushed down the datahole! Few are going to read it & its rare that important threads keep their ’stickiness’.

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I learned about Thoof.com a month ago and have been using it as a social bookmarker to organize the web pages I come across when I surf the net. Websites or stories I submit with thoof can be easily retrieved and modified too. What I like about thoof is that it allows personalized news, videos, websites, and other pages on the net to your individual taste. Isn’t that great? You can even hide a story that you don’t like or contribute to the improvements of a particular story by changing the description or adding / modifying tags. Tags are keywords that describe a certain story for search purpose and easy retrieval. Tags are what makes the Internet organized and relevant.

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The internet is a vast collection of information and sometimes it can be very overwhelming to find only the things you need. Isn’t great if we have a way to organize these information that we find on the internet for easy retrieval at later times? Well I just found a pretty nice site called Thoof which makes it easy to organize or create personalized news, articles, websites, photographs, videos, and other interesting links you find on the web.

Thoof is a social bookmarking site which focuses more on personalizing each information to suit each reader’s interests. When you signup with Thoof you will have your own personalized page where you can add or submit stories. You can add tags and send stories to your friends too. Stories that you submitted can also be edited for improvements. You can hide stories as well as remove them from your page if you don’t like them.

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The press loves a food fight, good vs. evil, Microsoft vs. Netscape (Netscape? Remember them?), Microsoft vs. Linux, Microsoft vs. Google. Okay, enough already. The one I’ll talk about today is LinkedIn vs. Facebook.

For those of you that have been living under a rock and use neither, LinkedIn is a social networking site where people can post their online resumes and search for jobs or business connections. I have been a member for several years and have several hundred people whom I have met over my career. I have used LinkedIn for doing research on companies and finding sources to interview for stories or leads to new story ideas, as well as a place where I can collect references for previous work that I have done for my consulting clients. It is also a great place to keep track of people when they change jobs, or about to. (The recent CMP layoffs were presaged by a flurry of connect requests, for example.)

Facebook is a social networking site that formerly was the exclusive domain of college students, and seems like the successor for MySpace when kids want something more grown-up. Its scope has been expanded twice recently: first to allow members from the general population to join, and most recently with a series of REST interfaces that developers could build applications on. It is one of the quickest growing sites around – according to the WSJ, they have added three million users since this latest development. I was one of them and joined a few weeks ago and now have 100 or so “friends.” One of my motivations for joining was to communicate with my daughter, who used the site to do research and figure out where she wanted to go to college this fall by joining several groups and messaging people that eventually formed a group of entering freshman in her particular dorm.

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MySpace is on online social networking website that has literally taken the world by storm. If you surf the internet, listen to the radio, or watch television there is most likely that you have heard of MySpace before. In no time at all, MySpace has blossomed to become one of the most popular online websites, in the entire world.

The first step in joining is to register for an account and this can be done in a matter of minutes. Registration will grant you access to not only create your own MySpace page, but provide many of the other features on the site. MySpace is completely free to use.

Once you register a MySpace account, you can start building your own profile page. Although this is optional, it is the best way to get in contact with others and make new friends. To make the search for friends and groups easier, MySpace has a fairly large collection of profile templates. These templates not only have an impact on the background of your profile page, but the text fonts as well. You can also create your own, especially if you have basic knowledge of HTML.

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MySpace is an online social community where users can share photos, journals and interests with an extensive network of friends with similar interests. The MySpace mission statement describes the MySpace network as being for everyone including:

* Friends who want to talk Online
* Single people who want to meet other Singles
* Matchmakers who want to connect their friends with other friends
* Families who want to keep in touch–map your Family Tree
* Business people and co-workers interested in networking
* Classmates and study partners
* Anyone looking for long lost friends!

From this statement it should be clear that MySpace offers an excellent place for online networking. This article will look at how to find the people you want to network with on MySpace and will discuss whether or not your networking should be done online.

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Collactive.com hits the nail on the head as soon as you view the website: It’s good to be popular! In the word of web 2.0, so many companies are changing the way they market to the readers, and gain exposure. You no longer are able to force-feed the users with your content and expect them to keep reading, but now you need to gain the users action and input.

This is exactly what the All Points Bulletin (APB) does at Collactive.com. Also, with Collactive Web Assistant, you no longer have to remember 100 usernames and passwords, as it does it for you. Registering on the sites you check out is simple (1 – 2 clicks) and it will remember that information for you for future visits. Collactive.com has really put the user experience in the forefront of their products, and really makes surfing the web in this web 2.0 environment so much easier.

There are some tremendous advantages for all online businesses when it comes to social networking websites. First and foremost of course is the fact that you can get free advertising for your business. Every business owner knows that it can often mean a lot of advertising expense and most often all this expense is misdirected because the advertising is not always targeted to the right people. Though social networking is not the solution to this problem it can help in making things easier. Not only does social networking work for individual business to consumer relationships but it can also be very effective in business to business communication.

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Have you ever had the experience of something popping up for you several times in a short period of time? That happened to me last week with MySpace.

First my nephew, a professional rapper (he is playalytical for those of you into rapping), was telling us over dinner how well his business is going and that he has over 30,000 “friends” on MySpace. Which meant absolutely nothing to me. To put things in comparison for us his girlfriend told us she has 20 friends. All of us “old folks” told him we had never been to MySpace.

MySpace came up again the next day. One of the blogs I subscribe to announced a teleclass on using MySpace as a marketing tool and was going to talk about how to promote your book there. I took note of that because I had never heard of using MySpace for marketing before and thought about how MySpace (which I had still never visited) wouldn’t apply to my business.

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Myspace is now ranking as one of the top websites on the Internet. In social networking, it is right at the top in the world. What is that which makes myspace so successful? I believe that the ways in which users can play with their profile is one of the reasons. A user can express his/her individuality on the profile in many different ways and it would not surprise me if shortly a competition is held for the best profile. Here are some lovely ideas to add to your profile.

Crazy Text Flash Banners

In this, you are given four variables. Flash banner size, text color, background color and background effect. You can select your own for these four. One can create very imaginative and creative banners with different text message and use it on the profile. The banner can also be used as a comment for friends. Try them.

Cool Clocks Generator

You can design a lovely clock with this. Select your own color, the size and the text design. Get the code and paste the clock in your profile. The moving hands look lovely and you can change your clock color everyday to add fun. This brings more variation to your profile.

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If you ever tried using the Twitter widget and inserted the flash badge code to your blog or site, you might have noticed that it isnt XHTML valid. It actually produces a lot of invalid code errors. Well I just found a way to make it XHMTL valid.

The original flash code looks like this:

<div style="width:176px;text-align:center"><embed src="http://twitter.com/flash/twitter_badge.swf" flashvars="color1=16711935&type=user&id=1988601" quality="high" width="176" height="176" name="twitter_badge" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="always" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /><br><a style="font-size: 10px; color: #FF00FF; text-decoration: none" href="http://twitter.com/giotwitter">follow giotwitter at http://twitter.com</a></div>

One of the main reasons why this code wont validate as a XHTML is because of the <embed> tag. I’ve seen many websites use the <embed> to include flash animations or applications. Problem is, the <embed> tag was actually never part of any standardized version of HTML or XHTML, and using it produces invalid markup errors.

What I did was I tweaked the code and came up with this.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://twitter.com/flash/twitter_badge.swf" width="176" height="176">
<param name="movie" value="http://twitter.com/flash/twitter_badge.swf" />
<param name="flashvars" value="color1=6736896&amp;type=user&amp;id=1988601" />
</object>

Its a lot simpler than the orginal code. Clean, valid XHTML.

I came across to this site called Twitter.com. It’s another social networking site like MyBlogLog which enables users to interact through a special widget inserted to each user’s blog or site. Twitter

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

So what are you doing?