Tag Archives ⇒ Facebook

Being Forgotten By Google

· Brandon Hann

This is not the kind of talk that any successful webmaster (or aspiring one) would ever want to entertain! Imagine one day, everything you’ve put into creating your place in the Internet world was simply forgotten by Google—ceased to exist, gone, goodbye, no more. However, it would seem that the desire to be forgotten is not that uncommon for regular people out there.

In Spain, there’s a court case against Google that is requesting they remove information on 90 people found within its indexes. Spain’s Data Privacy Agency is ordering that this information be removed after it received complaints about the content being old and now considered to be embarrassing if not libelous to the individuals involved. I’m not here to report the news, so if you want to read the full article go check out Yahoo’s ‘Right to be Forgotten’ article.

What I do want to talk about is just how much information there is out there in regards to your personal information. As for myself, I’ve always been very careful about what I put online and when I’m on Facebook, I’m very vigilant about staying on top of who’s posting comments and pictures involving me and removing items I don’t “approve” of.

Google yourself

As a test, I Googled my full name and I’m happy to report that where most people might find the top links to be some type of people-finding service and reverse phone-number lookups, I’ve managed to secure the top 10 results with various profile pages of mine and web projects I’ve created or worked on. The reason I’m happy about this is because I control every single one of those links. If one day, I don’t like that I posted my email address online, I can remove it and it will cease to exist from that link forever.

How do you fare when Googling your name? None of this may matter right now, but think about your future. Maybe one day you become famous or run for office and because of this wonderful Internet we have, practically all of your personal information is left to the world forever! We’ve all heard stories about people getting fired from their jobs because of unscrupulous Facebook posts and raunchy pictures. In fact, one of my favorite examples of this is the following:

Employee gets fired on Facebook

Becoming forgotten

According to the aforementioned case, one of the individuals involved is running a plastic surgery business and when his practice is searched, the top link shows you his site and relevant information, but the next one shows off a lawsuit that the surgeon was involved in back in 1991. His argument is that this information is detrimental to his business. I should say so! In fact, I’m kind of thinking that maybe people should know this information before getting involved in plastic surgery. On the other hand, is it right (or fair) to judge someone based on extremely old data?

It goes without saying that Google receives tons of removal requests like this from all over the world, but Google doesn’t remove a single one because they don’t want to jeopardize the integrity of their indexes.

So how does one become forgotten online? There is no complete solution to this dilemma because the Internet just keeps collecting data, day after day, after day. The only true way to control information on yourself is to control the source. If you can’t do that, then always remember this one simple rule: if you put it on the Internet, assume everyone in the world has seen it. And if they haven’t, it’s only a matter of time.

How To Hack The Facebook Image Bar

· Brandon Hann

Ok so you’re not really hacking anything, but I figured using that word would grab more attention! With that said, this trick is nothing more than an easy manipulation of a new feature in Facebook. First of all, you’ll need to upgrade your account to the new profile layout if you haven’t already done so. You can do this by going to: facebook.com/about/profile/. Login and you’ll see the option to switch.

The New Layout

Also on that page will be a complete description of what visual changes will be made to your profile, but the only one we’re interested in is the new “snapshot” feature. This is the very top section of your profile that tells people some basic information about yourself:

My Facebook Snapshot
My Facebook Snapshot

Above, you can see the highlighted area. You can see what I call the Facebook image bar. It’s a collection of the last 5 photos that someone tagged you in. It puts them in order from left to right, meaning that all newly tagged photos will show up on the left side and move their way down the line.

Hacking (Manipulating) The Image Bar

As you can also see by the screenshot, I have hacked my image bar to show ledfrog.com whenever anyone clicks on my profile. Naturally, I wanted to draw their attention to my site and I was not surprised to find out that people see those images before anything else on my profile! From a marketing standpoint, this is great news.

The process is generally easy, but if you’re using some intricate design work or you’d like to integrate your default profile pic into the mix as well, it can get a bit complicated. For basic instructions, follow these steps:

  1. Create an image that is 487 x 68px. (487px is counting the white spaces between each photo)
  2. Cut out the five images from your main image. Each of the five need to be 91 x 68px in size.
  3. Upload these five tiny images to your profile. It might be easier to create a separate photo album for them.
  4. Tag yourself in the photos one at a time. If your image needs to line up in a specific order, like mine, you’ll want to tag the last photo first and the first photo last. This way, they’ll show up in the correct order.

That’s it! When you’re done, go back to your main profile page and you’ll see your handy work.

Advanced Manipulation

Obviously there’s some small space between the tagged images, so your photos won’t line up perfectly (like mine), but if you’re dead set on getting the images cut with the spaces in the proper places, you’ll want to cut out the white space on your original image and then take what’s left and turn them into 5 separate images. Make note that the white space is exactly 8px wide.

I created a layered Adobe Photoshop® template that you can use to see where the cutouts will fall if you plan on using a full image to create all the tiny ones. Please note that this template was designed and sized from my own Facebook page. Yours may differ slightly in size and alignment. Use this template as a guide rather than a standard.

It’s super easy to use:

  1. Open the template in Adobe Photoshop®.
  2. Take the image you’d like to slice and dice and place it on a layer behind the cutout layer.
  3. Resize that image if necessary to fit into each of the 6 squares properly so it looks good.
  4. Cutout each image and save them separately.
  5. Upload all images to a new album (if preferred) on Facebook and make sure this album is visible to Everyone.
  6. Tag yourself in each of the smaller photos, but remember to tag the last photo in the lineup first!
  7. Take the 6th photo and make it your default picture and then you’re all set!

Here’s a sample of the template in use with a picture ready to be cutout:

Ledfrog.com Facebook Image Bar Template Sample
Ledfrog.com Facebook Image Bar Template Sample

Issues

As you may have already guessed, the number one issue with doing this modification is that anyone who tags you in photos will be able to destroy your work of art! However, it’s not hard to fix. Just hover your mouse over the image(s) that you want to remove and a little ‘X’ will appear in the corner–click on that and the image will be removed from the top bar, but it will retain your tag.

You can also have a little fun with this too! You can tag your friends in your images and your hacked image will appear on their pages as well! Be careful though…if you start putting up derogatory things on your friend’s pages, you may not have any friends left. Worse case scenario, you could be hearing from the Facebook team if people start logging complaints about you.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you run a website, you are more than welcome to repost some of my steps above as well as the template download, however, I must ask that you retain credit to me by posting a link back to this article and leaving my website information inside the template. Also, please don’t hotlink the template file from my server! Upload it to your server instead.

The Problem With Twitter

· Brandon Hann

I’m going to be starting a total cleanup of my site soon and part of this process included the re-evaluation of my social networking skills–or lack thereof. Generally, I use Facebook and Twitter to publish some of my blog posts from two different blog sites as well as links to other things on the Internet I like. So far, it’s worked pretty well. People are responding well to the Facebook links, but less from the Twitter links.

I think that’s simply because I don’t use Twitter all that much and it’s really more of an automated “side-feature” of my site–sort of like the overlooked black sheep in my collection of tools. The reason for this was because Twitter has become a polluted haven of spammers and junkie advertisers. It got to the point that my phone was going off every couple of minutes with push notifications about some random person I was following and how they just found the Holy Grail of ebooks to sell me.

Twitter as a promotional tool

Naturally when people are given a device that allows others to see what they do, they will take advantage and begin using it to plaster stupid information all over the place–many, many times per day! This is precisely what happened to me.

I’m all for using new and unique tools for self-promotion, but where do you draw the line? It’s almost like every spammer and blogger out there has a Twitter account and are using it to pollute the Internet with more useless information. I can always tell the spammers apart because they are always offering the same products for sale and they will post 100 messages a day to do it.

Twitter as a friend follower

What a novel idea! Use Twitter for what it was designed for!! The idea of having a tool that allows your close friends to send out an update about what they are currently doing or where they are was a unique concept only a year ago, but now even the social networks like MySpace and Facebook have adopted these features right into your profile page.

So where before, you had to actually call your friend to find out what they were up to, now all you have to do is log into your favorite site. It’s actually starting to get a little creepy!

But for those of us who aren’t spending this time telling everyone that we just got to the store and now we’re shopping and now we’re leaving and now we’re going home and now we’re watching tv……we’re using Twitter as a way to get our information out to the world–or at least to those few people that are actually following us.

What makes us different is that we feel that we’re offering a bit more value to the community. When Twitter offered the ability to search tweets, everything changed. Now you can post your tweet out in the world hoping that someone is looking for keywords that you used.

This process gives people who like what you have to say the choice of hearing more of what you have to say simply by following you.

When too much is too much

The point of this post was to tell you this story. In an effort to recruit new followers, I was duped into the idea that if you follow somebody else, they are more likely to follow you. Well, it worked, but then I ended up with over 300 spammers that I was following–minus a few legitimate users.

I’m moving right along until one day, Twitter stops me from following any more people. They actually sent me an emailing explaining how Twitter works and what it was intended for and although I can’t recite the entire email, I remember something like, it’s near impossible to follow the streams from over a hundred or so people.

It got me thinking and they were right. I logged into my Twitter account and realized there was no way I could possible read that many tweets! Shortly after, I noticed that I wasn’t even using Twitter anymore and all those people were tweeting to a brick wall.

I decided to change all that! I went back into my account and unfollowed everyone I didn’t know and I re-enabled push notifications so I can get the updates I needed from the people I wanted to hear from. Now, I won’t follow anyone just because they follow me unless I’m interested in what they have to say.

It’s just my little way of fighting the spammers. As a promise to anyone who follows me, you will not get spammed. At best, you will get some insight to my drab little life and important updates to my sites. At worst, you’ll get a daily blog post link.

After all that, if you actually want to follow me, please do so!

Web 2.0 – Hash Marks

· Brandon Hann

If you don’t know what a hash mark is, it’s the ‘#’ on your phone or SHIFT+3 on your keyboard. You may also call it a pound sign. Right about now, you might be asking what does this little symbol have to do with websites! I’m glad you asked because I’m here to tell you.

#?

This is a more advanced article regarding the usage of the hash symbol as a means to reduce duplicate content for the search engines. As mentioned much earlier, you never want to have duplicate content. This not only means copying content from other websites, but providing duplicate links from within your own site.

Let say for example you we interested in tracking ad results so you created three different ad links all pointing back to your site. Maybe the first ad was from Facebook, the second was from MySpace and the third was from Google AdWords. For tracking purposes, you would have setup three different URLs so you can see which ad generated the most traffic. These URLs might look something like this:

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

These links by themselves are not causing any problems, but when a search engine begins indexing your website, it’s going to find and index all 3 separately. The problem is that all of these links point to the same exact page. If the search engine views these 3 different links pointing to the same page, it’s very likely that your site could be penalized for duplicate content.

Another problem this creates is that it spreads any link juice you might have over all 3 links even though they are still pointing to the exact same page! You don’t want this!!

To solve this, you would replace the “?” with a “#” to make the URLs appear like this:

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Search engines will stop at the hash, thus making your 3 links appear only as 1! Confused yet?? I don’t pretend to be the expert on this matter and therefore, for further reading, check out this page all about URL referrers.

My two cents

I recommend that you decide up front how the links to your website will be organized. Besides the information on this page, there’s a whole slew of problems that can arise from improperly linked webpages. It’s important that once you have a link structure in place, you stick with it and don’t change it.

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Web 2.0 – Fan Pages

· Brandon Hann

Fan pages can be any general webpage that is created by yourself or someone else who’s a fan of your site/business, but it this case, we’re talking about Facebook fan pages. I was searching for a straight-up comparison between fan pages and group pages only expecting to find limited information, but I found a blog post over at Search Engine Journal that gave me what I was looking for.

What is a fan page?

Facebook has two options for promoting and networking people with your business, website or blog. You can create a group which is basically a discussion page while pages are like Facebook profiles, but for an entire company. Even if you’re just a one-person show, you might still want to create your own Facebook page. This way, you can still have your personal profile and not have to mix in your business.

The breakdown

This is the informational breakdown chart as found on Search Engine Journal:

Key Feature Facebook Page Facebook Group
“Ugly” URLs No Yes
Hosting a discussion Yes Yes
Discussion wall, and discussion forum Yes Yes
Extra applications added Yes No
Messaging to all members Yes (via updates) Yes (via PMs)
Visitor statistics Yes (“Page insights”) No
Video and photo public exchange Yes Yes
“Related” event creation and invitation Yes No
Promotion with social ads Yes No

My two cents

As I mentioned earlier, setting up a Facebook fan page creates the same functionality as a standard Facebook page, but with the added bonus of being separate from your personal profile. In my case, I decided that I’d operate two blogs–one for my self and one for my business venture. Since this site was automatically posting my new articles to my personal Facebook profile, I can now move them over to the fan page I created and have my personal blog post to my actual profile. Make sense?!

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Yet another URL shortening website!

· Brandon Hann

UPDATE (Oct 26, 2010) :: I disbanded my original URL shortening service and have created a new one with an even shorter URL! I’m leaving this page up for posterity, but I’ve changed the links where applicable. Also, I wrote about my new URL shortening service, so you may want to head on over there first!

This time, it’s mine!! After I got onto Twitter and Facebook, I starting noticing all these little weird looking links and came to realize they were just pointers to much longer links. URL shortening services have sprung up just about everywhere. The issue of really long links is more of a problem to Twitter users because you only have 140 characters to type your message, but they’re starting to gain traction for just about every use. Use my new URL shortener to shrink you long urls today!

You would want to/need to shorten a url when you don’t have much space to post one or you want to make it easier for someone to remember. Now, there are tons of sites out there that can shorten long links into something tiny, but I didn’t want to trust my links in the hands of some fly-by-night service. Instead, I opened my own service and now I’m offering the service to everyone.

xi.io URL shortener

What is it?

Take this link for example: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FKindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation%2Fdp%2FB0015T963C%3Fpf_rd%5Fm%3DATVPDKIKX0DER%26pf%5Frd%5Fs%3Dcenter-1%26pf%5Frd%5Fr%3D0Y2V14K8W4X1MTQ9XB9B%26pf%5Frd%5Ft%3D101%26pf%5Frd%5Fp%3D1253201642%26pf%5Frd%5Fi%3D507846&tag=ledfrog-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325. It’s a direct link to Amazon.com’s Kindle page. Now, imagine you’re on Twitter and you want to send that to your followers. It’s not going to happen.

Instead, you drop on by my new site and create a link that looks like this: http://xi.io/8m. Much nicer, wouldn’t you agree? In fact, this URL went from being 358 characters long down to only 15! That’s a difference of 343 characters!! You can use these links for any purpose and the best part is, you can also search for keyword text, so instead of getting a randomly generated number, you can get a text phrase (if available).

How is this site different?

It’s not so much different in features as it is in name. Other services such as goo.gl, bit.ly and u.nu all offer the same services, but as you can see, they all use International domain names.

Personally, I find two things wrong with this. The first reason is that the links are not universally recognized by a lot of Internet users. If fact, I’ve talked to some people that say they never click on links like that at all! This can provide low click-through ratios for your links.

The second reason is that these domain names are controlled by the countries who own the extension. This can, although probably not likely, lead to the domains becoming obsolete or even being taken back by the local government.

What can you do with a shortened URL?

The uses for this service are only limited to your creativity! Here are some ideas:

  • Use shorter links for Twitter posts
  • Cloak affiliate links
  • Mask a long URL for marketing materials
  • Use a shorter URL for your site to make it easier to tell your friends how to get there

This service is free and allows you to make an unlimited amount of links. Check it out by going to xi.io now!

Using Arkayne to bring focused traffic to your site

· Brandon Hann

I discovered a new, free service that you may have already noticed on my site, but didn’t even know where it was coming from. I’m talking about a new form of link building that actually makes sense. It’s called Arkayne and the two best things about it are: it’s free and it integrates with WordPress. Getting quality backlinks has never been easier!

I found them during my search for a plugin that would display related content on my blog posts to help link my site together because we all know how hard it is to keep our visitors on our site and if they don’t actually search for something, they may never see it! All I was looking for was a feature that allows me to write a blog post and have the plugin run around all my previous posts and display some links with related tags and/or keywords.

I can’t tell you how awesome this service is, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

[simple_video]

If you don’t have a few minutes to spare to finish the video, this is basically what it does. You have an account profile on their site that you use to promote your site plus your social networking account which include Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You then add some basic information about your site. Over on WordPress, you install the free plugin, insert your custom API code and let the magic begin!

In time, Arkayne will read through your entire site and essentially index your content on their site via links in your account. This makes you searchable to all Arkayne users. What will happen is people on the site will find your blog and if they deem it interesting and/or useful, they will click on Recommend and you basically have a “follower”. You, in turn, will also recommend blogs you find interesting and useful. This is a very useful tool for link building, which will get those coveted backlinks your site needs.

As time moves on, all of your posts will start to generate related links to other sites in the network and those sites who have recommended you will have your link show up on their posts. So just like other ranking sites, the more people that find your site useful, the more sites your links show up on.

Beyond that, you still get the feature I was originally looking for and that is this plugin will scour your site looking for related content that you’ve posted and place those links as well. You can even set how many links of each type are shown, from 1-5. You can see below that I currently have it set to show 3 of my links and 4 outside links.

The site appears to be running with a small amount of users so far (or least in the searches I did), but I have a lot of faith in this site due to it’s nature. Of course, only time will tell.

Join Arkayne Today!!

Bad name or are you just unique?

· Brandon Hann

Sometimes in the process of growing up, you get these feelings that you’ve seen it all. Of course this is impossible in the general sense, but every now and then something comes along the way and it makes you think that there could be nothing more that would top that last thing you just saw.

Well folks, for me, it just now happened…three minutes ago to be precise and here it is.

I received a notification that a girl I knew from elementary school added me on Facebook, so I logged in to view her profile and see what she’s been up to. I then noticed her note about having a daughter and get this: her name is Abcde.

…

Her name is: Abcde

A B C D E

Ab-suh-day?
Ah-bay-say-day-eh?
A-B-C-D-E?

According to her, it’s pronounced: Ab-sea-dee

Thinking this is either the most insane name I’ve ever seen or I had just discovered the most inventive, unique person I’ve ever known, I actually Googled this name and I found out that it actually exists in baby name books! I also found someone’s blog about the name and how they found it on a list of bad baby names. I just wanted to point out that I not only saw the list as well, but I may just be the only person who has actually found someone who named their kid this!

I wish I could post more information about this person and some pics, but that just wouldn’t be right!  😉 Anyway, here’s the blog I found: check it out here.