Be Among the First to Try Stumble Upon’s New Features

Maybe you’ve heard the news of toolbarless stumbling and new designs of Stumble Upon. Now you can do more than just expecting! Look what I have on my SU profile:

click to enlarge

 

Instead of displaying the profile picture as usual, it is now placed on the right sidebar and you can now browse some categories without directly from any page you’re at through the links on the header.

Redesigns also take place when you view other member’s profile. Look at the picture below, stats are now displayed on the right sidebar and yes, you can browse categories from this page also!

click to enlarge

 

Next is the review page. Only a layout change here and fewer clicks are now to rate and review a site.

click to enlarge

Want one for yourself? Go to the Stumble Upon Beta Group and these features will be activated as sonn as you join the group. The feature is in beta, so you may want to remind yourself of the feature being unstable.

And for the toolbarless stumbling, stumble using this new toolbar which will allow you to stumble sites and rate them without the SU toolbar. But I wonder where does the thumb down go?

click to enlarge

Twitter Tools I’m In Love With And You Should Too

Since the first time I met Twitter, I’ve been experimenting with her tools to enable me access my account without having to open the browser . There were lots of tools I’ve put my hands on, but listing them all won’t benefit anyone. So here are the handy Twitter tools fits my shape very well:

Twhirl – a desktop client Twitter tool, powered by ADOBE AIR platform. You can read the list of features on the website, but here are why I personally like Twhirl:

• it’s a desktop application
• that allows multiple account login at a time
• and minimizes to the tray
• while showing tweet updates
• but allows to pause notifications also
• and empty the list of tweets
• sends tweets quite fast
• unfollow directly from Twhirl
• and let’s not forget fast auto updates

 

TheMattinator.com – there are a  lot of Twitter tools that allow sending tweets to multiple accounts but like Twhirl, you need to type and submit the tweets one by one on each account. This is what makes The Mattinator being superior to Twhirl. You only need to type your tweet once and woot! All your accounts are updated. So whenever I feel like spamming updating my 2 Twitter accounts, Mattinator it is…. But what about Ping.fm?

 

Ping.fm is able to update even more services than Mattinator does. Ping.fm takes care of your blogger and wordpress.com account, Facebook, Friendster and various microblogging platforms. Which for that reason, I prefer Mattinator if I only want to update my Twitter accounts. Of course I also use Ping.fm, but in a limited way.

Twitter Karma – you’ll definitely love this tool. Once logged in using your Twitter login, you’ll be presented your friends and followers like below

• what it says was, “Here are your friends. Friend A is following you, but you aren’t. B is following and you are following him and you’re a fan of C since he’s not following you”.  You can also view their latest updates time stamp to figure out whether they’re active users or not.
• What about the checkboxes? They’re for this one:

• Get the idea? You can check friends or followers and have them followed/unfollowed/blocked at once. A real time and bandwidth saver than having to browse through pages and click on each profile to follow/remove.

 

TweetLater is when you need to schedule future tweets. I’m aware that you can do the same thing with EasyTweets, but TweetLater has something EasyTweets doesn’t.

• TweetLater lets you to automatically send a warm welcoming (or cold and snarky) messages to new followers and auto follow them.

• To auto send welcome messages, you need to filter your email and send notifications from Twitter to TweetLater. It’s not that scary and everybody can do it by following their step by step manual.

The other tools I’m going to mention here are the ones I’ve just met with. I either new to them or haven’t spent a lot of time using them and I’d just like to spread the words out. Feel free to give them a try!

Dwigger – an interesting tool that enables voting and threaded conversations on Twitter tweets.

WhoShouldIFollow – looks at who’s following you that you’re not following back and has sliders for filtering by popularity and physical location – TopRankBlog.com

Twerpscan – if there are opportunistic marketers following everyone under the sun in the hopes those good souls will just automatically follow them back, this tool might help identify those whom you may want to block – TopRankBlog.com

Twittad – an advertising agent that targets Twitter users as publishers. You can charge a certain amount to have advertisers use your background to advertise their products. Price is likely based on how many followers you have got.

 

These tools are probably not the best, but they sure come in handy. Please aware that some of these tools are also widely opened to be used as a spamming devices. It is entirely up to the users (our) integrity to limit themselves from abusing services. I hope you (and your followers) enjoy their benefits!

PS: Here’s what every twitter related articles have..follow me!

My Entrecard Was Terminated…NOT!

This morning I red in one of my email subjects that my Entrecard account was deleted. I thought it was some kind of scammy emails going to ask for my EC login and password. But when I red the message, I found nothing asking for my login details and the only thing written was my profile has been deleted due to spamming other members. It’s an “uh-oh” the next second.

Realizing that it WAS from Entrecard themselves, I tried to remember what I’ve done that considered spamming. I found that a few days before, I sent emails to blogs under the “Music” category introducing my blog. However I was still in doubt that introductory messages are spam wih Entrecard.

So I went on reading the “Illegal Activities” on the rules and found that it was. It’s my bad for not checking with the rules before sending the messages but I was sure also that I had no intention to spam.

The next thing I did was sending a “reconsideration plea” to Entrecard support containing all the things above. I’m not copy-pasting my email here, but in the letter I admitted my blunder and gave an assurance that such thing will never happen again, …and also some “good deeds” I’ve collected during my EC membership (that is, never received a single warning from Entrecard since I signed up with them. Better than nothing ). And remember to keep the tone polite.

The response was out of expectation!

In addition Ben responded in 15 minutes, he also reinstated my account. Woo-hoo! Why I was so happy? Because I have 15,000 Entrecard credits available to sponsor some contests! Haha..!

Now if you’re planning to host a contest and looking for a sponsor, feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to have a mutual sponsorship .

PS: If you’re going to send messages promoting your blog, you can do it on the Entrecard forum instead. Look for “Post Critiques” and “Marketing” topic. It’s legal there!

Stumble Upon Updated – More Than 200 Friends You Can Have Now

Nearly a month ago, Stumble Upon announced that in the coming weeks, there will be a change in friend relationship in SU. The change allows you to befriend other people without having to subscribe to their stumbles (best friends doesn’t always have something in common, do they?), or just follow their content without having to “friend” them (granma said “Never talk to strangers” :p ). In short, here are the new relationship in Stumble Upon has to offer:

• add more than 200 Friends
• befriend another member without following their Stumbles
• subscribe to another member’s Stumbles without becoming their Friend
• members who’ve unsubscribed from StumbleUpon no longer appear as your Friend
• “Fans” will now be known as “Subscribers”
• Subscribers who are new StumbleUpon members appear at the top of your Subscribers list

Let’s take a look at my Stumble Upon account:

click to enlarge

You can see that now “Fans” are called “Subscribers” and new “Subscribers” are being shown at the top of the “Subscribers” list. The idea of renaming “Fans” to “Subscribers” may also increase the chance of more people “following” your stumbles since there are some people wouldn’t very comfortable of finding themselves “fan” someone they don’t know in personal whereas all they like are just their stumbles .

Below is a page of a stumbler I subscribed to. Notice that I can now make him a friend or just subscribed to his stumbles.

click to enlarge

There’s also an intersectioned circle measuring the similarity of both our interests. The above says “An unlikely duo”. Hmm… While another SU friend shows this similarity graph on the left.

And below is a profile of a SU user whom I’m not “related” yet with. I’m allowed to choose between subscribing to her favorites or, and also become her friend.

 

click to enlarge

I’m sure this update will have quite an impact on how people add one annother as friends. Maybe you’ll see your mutual friends number go down but on the other side, subscribers skyrocket. It would be wonderful if we can have both hit the skies though . By the way, you can add me here :p

PS: Have you been active on Stumble Upon? Do you already know that Stumble Upon is great for driving traffic? Caroline Middlebrook is an avid Stumble Upon user and she gives away 10 free lessons to make the most of your Stumble Upon profile…white hat way ! These are the important points you need to know and you can utilize with your Stumble Upon profile:

1. Introduction to Stumble Upon
2. Creating Content That Gets Stumbled
3. Getting More Thumbs up Votes
4. The Mechanics and Ethics of Stumble Upon
5. Pimp My (StumbleUpon) Profile!
6. The Basics of Networking on StumbleUpon
7. Good Etiquette and How to Handle Abuse
8. Traffic Boosting Tip #1
9. Traffic Boosting Tip #2
10. Trouble Shooting – Avoiding and Correcting Mistakes

The lessons are packed in a Traffic Rush package you can get for free. Head to the website and enter your name and email to start having those lessons sent to your mailbox!

---

Subscribe to HomeBiz Resource’s feed

Subscribe to categories and why subscribe

TwitterKeys! Smileys On Your Tweets!

Thanks to @bomega & @sandervdv, now we can add emoticons and symbols to our tweets. We can now type “I ♥ you” instead of “I love you”. And more actions like this one

“I’m going to ✈ to ☭ in the morning after I make a ☎ to make sure my ♂ is ✔ with it. ✌ for now and don’t forget to ✍ and lets have ♨ soon!”

Haha..!

Here is the complete list of TwitterKeys. Go to their post page to find out how to use them easily.

♥✈☺♬☑♠☎☻♫☒♤☤☹♪♀✩✉☠✔♂★✇♺✖♨❦☁✌♛
❁☪☂✏♝❀☭☃☛♞✿☮☼☚♘✾☯☾☝♖✽✝☄☟♟✺☥✂✍♕✵

Happy tweetkeying and remember to drop me a tweetkey!

Multi Account Twitter Client – EasyTweets.com

How many blogs do you have? If you maintain more than one blog, you probably want to create a different profile for each blog. And that includes a multi twitter acount for each audience. However, having a multi twitter account could mean too much hassle switching from one account to another.

If you’re planning to have a multi twitter account or you’re using them now, I’ll let you know of a multi account twitter client, EasyTweets.com. EasyTweets.com is still in beta, but it already pack some killer features:

• multi twitter account login
• schedule tweets to send
• using is.gd for URL shortener. That means you can write longer messages
• using GeoTrust SSL encryption at no cost to you
• you can see "Replies" tab, even if it is disabled on Twitter
• view the status of all of your Twitter accounts at a glance
• add RSS feeds, and have them auto posted to your Twitter account
• it’s free!

I’ve been using them for my 3 account in Twitter and it works quite good to me. The only downside I experience is the slower web response time. I’m not sure if it is due to my geographic location, but I’m agree that it’s a good alternative for you who don’t like installing desktop Twitter client like Twhirl.

Weekly Link Share on HomeBiz Resource

This is the first link love or weekly roundup or whatever people name it. I’m still figuring out for the best name for it but let’s just use that at the moment . Besides, it’s the content that matters, right?

• Using The Wordpress Discussion Filters – Fighting Comment Spam – Jeremy’s methods of reducing spam comments using Wordpress’ discussion filter system via moderation and blacklisting. You’ll see how powerful the feature is.

• Top 10 social media misconceptions – Noah Elkin compiles 10 social media misconceptions and corresponding implications for your search marketing campaign.

• 5 Must Have Firefox add-ons for Social Media Addicts – Uzair lists 5 Firefox add-ons which save him a lot of time and also enhanced his social media experience. If they work for him, at least one of them must be doing the same for you.

• Top 10 Javascript slideshows, carousels and sliders – 10 cross-platform, absolutely stunning slideshows, carousels and sliders, based on Mootools, JQuery, Yahoo! User Interface, and Script.aculo.us. Eye catching scripts to display your content.

• Quick SEO Tips – Can linking to other sites harm my Page Rank? – Mani Karthik adresses many bloggers worries about having a long blogroll’s impact on SEO.
• How To Get to the Front Page of Digg – 6 Ingredients of a Successful Digg Campaign – We’ve seen many tips to be on Digg’s front page. But reading another 7 (his last tip is Don’t become obsessed with Digg) from Darren won’t hurt. Not only he listed them, but clear explanation were also given. Worth the stumble…and Digg of course!
• A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images – Skellie explains the types of photos copyright in Flickr and a guide to find the photos to spice up your blog posts.

 

Get 10 free lessons to deliver a rush of traffic to your site using Stumble Upon!

Next Page »