Blogfreakz - Web Design and Web Development resources » Social Networks

Chit Chat for Facebook – An Honest Review

Daniel Offer — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:11:19 +0000

One of the biggest complaints about chat in social networking is that you have to be logged into the social network to use it. It can be a hindrance to productivity to keep the browser open and check back without being sucked back into Facebook for vast periods at a time. Sometimes, users would simply like to continue using the chat, much like AOL and Google Talk, without being logged in.

The solution?

One of the best solutions out there is a standalone or bundled chat program, depending on your needs. One of the Facebook messenger apps on the market is Chit Chat for Facebook.

Chit Chat for Facebook is a program that you can install on your Windows-based PC to allow you to still message on Facebook without staying logged in the main site. It works much like every other standalone client you may have already used, though it does also have some drawbacks.

The features themselves

Chit chat for Facebook is a no-frills piece of software that allows you to chat online without leaving your Facebook account open. Its functionality is exactly what you’d expect of a chat program, though in testing, I did find it slightly slow to respond sometimes.

Pros:

- Clutter free interface – It’s easy to see who is online, and who else is available to chat.

- The box that contains one chat contains all chats, i.e. you’re not spawning window after window to flick through separate chat sessions.

- The options are clear, giving you fine-grain control over important stuff like disabling emoticons and other options such as time stamping.

- The offline/online boxes are minimal, and the color scheme isn’t bad either – it’s noticeable without being too distracting and ‘in your face’.

Cons:

- Spyware – Before I even finished installing or logging in, I had to uninstall the spyware, then reinstall and run a system scan. The install process needs the end user to be aware of this, or they’ll install things they may not realize that they have, and in this case, slow down their system.

- It’s online/offline only – You can’t see whether other chatters are idle or not.

- Facebook seems to slow down slightly – This could be because your chat is logged in twice.

Overall, though, if you’re looking for an alternative Facebook chat system that won’t compromise productivity, this is a satisfactory solution.

Feature rating

Ease of installation – Given that you have to pay so much attention and know exactly what bit of the install agreement is for what, I’m rating it a 2.5. At least it gives you the opt out choice for these other pieces of software.

Features – This is advertised as a no bells-and-whistles project – so again, 4 stars – though there are some extra missing features that would make it a five-star item, such as idle status for friends.

Use – 5 stars. There was nothing difficult or uncomfortable about the use itself, and I really like that it auto-stacked chats into one box, allowing you to see who was talking to you without taking up valuable screen estate with multiple boxes.

Ease of Uninstall – No complaints: 5 stars. In addition to its ease of uninstallation, the software bundled with it is also very easy to remove and doesn’t affect the software in any way.

Overall 16.5/20

This is a solid contender for standalone chat on Facebook, and as long as you’re aware of what you’re installing, this is a great piece of software will allow you to chat without staying logged into Facebook, saving you precious time.

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Meebo Me! Instant Messaging Widget For WordPress

Keith@Blogfreakz — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:20:48 +0000

Interact with your blog readers in real time with meebo me, a widget that will place an IM window or chatbox in your website where you can chat with your visitors using your favorite IM networks like MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, AIM, jabber, etc. Creating and customizing the look of your Meebo Me widget is a cinch!

Click on the image above for Meebo Me FAQ’s.

All you need is your Meebo ID and you’re good to go! If you don’t have one yet just create one by signing up. You don’t need to have any solid background in HTML or JavaScript to be able to install it in your WordPress site.

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Automatically Tweet Your Blog Posts to Twitter With FeedBurner

Nancy — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:01:12 +0000

Looking for a simple way to automatically update twitter with your latest blog posts, so your blog readers can find the latest news and updates? Here it is…

Now, there are many websites and plugins that offer to automatically tweet your blog post when you update your blog, but today we’ll focus on Google Feedburner. Google Feedburner is very easy to use.

Here are the steps to configure Google Feedburner :

Sign in into your Google account with this through http://feedburner.google.com
Login with your account and then click on your website feed. (domain.feed)
Click “Publicize” tab like picture below :

Then select “Socialize” like picture below:

Select “Add a Twitter Account”, and modify the Post Content drop down menu and choose “Title and Body”
Uncheck “ Leave room for retweets”

And of course don’t forget to Click “ Activate” button

See the picture below :

Everything is done! Now you are ready to add, update and tweet your post in your blog automatically to your twitter whenever you update your blog with a post .

Note :
FeedBurner will shortening your URL something like example this : http://goo.gl/

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ThinkUp – Web Application To Monitor Your Social Network Activities

Mufti Ali — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 13:40:04 +0000

ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures your posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application.

You can also export your tweets at any time and open them as a spreadsheet in Excel for further analysis. Or just save them for recordkeeping.

Requirements: PHP, MySQL
Demo: http://expertlabs.aaas.org/thinkup01/index.php?u=whitehouse&n=twitter
License: GPL License

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Most Popular Ruby Based Open Source Social Networking Platform

Mufti Ali — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 00:04:14 +0000

Ruby on Rails is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language. It is intended to be Used with an Agile development methodology That Is Used by Web developers for rapid development.
There are lots of Websites That use it including popular ones like Twitter, github, Scribd and many more. If you are planning to build a social networking site using ruby on rails. You should to consider most popular social networking platform below, which was built using ruby on rails.

Diaspora

Diaspora is an open source social networking application in Ruby on Rails. It includes most of the features to be expected like friendships, status messages, photos, etc. Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy.They call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything.

Diapora considered to be a Facebook alternative by many sources. Today, Diaspora, a potential rival for Facebook, released its open source code, inviting designers and programmers to help shape the network. But his unique, one of the people who contributed to fund the development of diaspora is the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Insoshi

Insoshi is a social networking platform in Ruby on Rails. You can use Insoshi to make custom social networks; see the Insoshi demo site for an example. Features include activity feeds, profiles, photo sharing, comment walls, blogs, forums, user messaging, and an admin panel.It’s on GitHub, so you can fork it to your heart’s content, and it can act as a base for developing your own social Web application.

Insoshi was originally developed by Michael Hartl and Long Nguyen as part of the Y Combinator program, and is presently maintained by Evan Dorn and Logical Reality Design.

CommunityEngine

CommunityEngine is a free, open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Community Engine is a plugin that can add social networking features to existing Rails applications. Drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site.

Features

user profiles, blogs
private messaging
forums
events
plugin
photo uploading
clippings, static pages
commenting
friendship
activity feeds and localization.

LovdbyLess

LovdbyLess is a free and fully customizable social networking platform, built using Ruby on Rails. Built with Ruby On Rails, LovdByLess is feature rich and allows for social interaction on every level.It comes with many of the same features and functionalities of its loved-by-more counterparts, Myspace and Facebook.

Features

blogs with comment capabilities
photo galleries with captions
profile bio and information
the ability to follow a user or “friend” them
site search for friends
user-to-user messaging
profile comments
user dashboard (recent activity feed)
emailed activity
flickr integration
youtube integration

Lovd By Less has the edge by being MIT-licensed, making it easier to use in your own commercial applications.

EngineY

EngineY is a social network and CMS framework implemented in Ruby on Rails that is easy to customize and deploy as your own powerful and feature packed social media or CMS site. Empower users with their own blogs. Enhance collaboration with forums, groups and events. Let your users post Twitter-like status messages. Track all the activity on your site with a live activity stream.

Features

User profiles
Events
Blogs
Private Messages
Photos
Forums
Activity Stream

Tog

Tog is a non-intrusive, extensible open source platform that helps you to add social network features to your Ruby on Rails apps. Using these prepackaged and automated features should let you focus on the real key point about social networks: keep the conversation going with your members. If you’re just starting a social site or wants to polish your community with lovely social capabilities maybe you should give tog a try.

Features

profiles
open/private groups
abuse report
tag clouds
ratings
internal messaging
blogs
photos
CMS
news
Q&A

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jTweetsAnywhere – Simple jQuery Twitter Widget

Mufti Ali — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:32:46 +0000

jTweetsAnywhere is a jQuery Twitter Widget that simplifies the integration of Twitter services into your site.
With just a few lines of Javascript you can display tweets from users’ feeds and users’ lists, show results from a twitter searh, integrate a customizable TweetBox and let your visitors follow you directly from your site.

The authentication handle securely by twitter. It has Twitter’s @Anywhere features like Hovercards, Tweet Box, Follow Button, etc. If you want to use Twitter’s @Anywhere features, you must include Twitter’s anywhere.js inside your section. In order to start using @Anywhere, you have to register your site (application) and obtain an APIKey (also called Consumer Key) from Twitter. When registering, be sure to select “Read & Write” for the Default Access type.

Requirements: jQuery framewor, twitter API
Demo: http://thomasbillenstein.com/jTweetsAnywhere/
License: MIT license

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How to Create Social Stats Widget with jQuery,PHP and YQL

Mufti Ali — Mon, 24 May 2010 06:50:47 +0000

Tutorialzine has writen nice tutorial about how to create a simple widget, which combines the number of your RSS readers, twitter followers, and fans of facebook fan page, to give a rough estimate of social popularity.

They are using jQuery and the tipTip plugin, object-oriented PHP, and Yahoo’s YQL, while demonstrating a number of interesting web development techniques.

This is especially important here, as they are using Yahoo’s YQL for three very different tasks:

Fetch RSS subscriber count with FeedBurner’s awareness API
Use twitter’s API to get number of followers;
Use Facebook’s new Graph API (link) to get information about the number of fans of facebook fanpage.

Requirements: JQuery framework, tip tip plugin,PHP,YQL
Demo: http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/05/showing-facebook-twitter-rss-stats-jquery-yql/demo.html
License: License free

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Like it? Tweet it! – Tweeting Widget for Visitors to Your Blog

Mufti Ali — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:39:26 +0000

“Like it? Tweet it!” is a jQuery-powered JavaScript widget that enables visitors to your website or blog to write a tweet about the site directly in a box displayed in the corner of the website.

Like it? Tweet it! has tons of customization options which you can play with to make the widget totally blend in and become one with your site.The widget is based on Twitter’s new @anywhere API: signing in is seamless, and once it’s done, users are signed in on all Like it? Tweet it! boxes across the internet. One of the best things about installing Tweet it is: You don’t need any API key. You don’t download any files. The only thing you do is add some code to the section in your HTML.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://pongsocket.com/tweet-it/
License: Other License

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LiveTwitter – Twitter Search jQuery Plugin

Mufti Ali — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:10:01 +0000

LiveTwitter is a lightweight, live updating Twitter search jQuery plugin that allow us to search on twitter with paramater. We can also show tweets from a user’s timeline using this jQuery plugin. Showing profile image and username is toggleable, and disabled by default in user_time mode.

You might want to be careful with low refresh rates here to play nice with API rate limits. Changing the query or options is pretty easy, just call liveTwitter again with the new parameter.

Requirements: jQuery 1.x+
Demo: http://elektronaut.github.com/jquery.livetwitter/demo.html
License: MIT License

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OSQA – Open Source Q&A System

Mufti Ali — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:32:25 +0000

OSQA is an Open Source Q&A System written using Django. Users can ask and answer questions, comment and vote for the questions of others and their answers. Both questions and answers can be revised and improved. Questions can be tagged with the relevant keywords.

When a question or answer is upvoted, the user who posted them will gain some points, which are called “karma points”. These points serve as a rough measure of the community trust to him/her. Various moderation tasks are gradually assigned to the users based on those points.OSQA can be downloaded from the project’s GitHub repository at http://github.com/rickross/osqa. It is under GNU General Public License.

Demo: http://osqa.net/
License: License: GPL License