Google Maps are more than what an average web surfer thinks about it. It's not just about scanning geographical terrain, but goes beyond that. Some of the labs features for Google maps makes it a very useful tool and gives you several unique options that you may have never used before. Much of these features are in labs state but works very well. I'm compiling the best 5 Google Maps labs features that I found quite useful while scanning my favorite maps.
Distance Measurement: It is one of the most useful labs feature for city travelers. Once activated, you can easily calculate distance between two places on a map in your preferred distance metric. If you have travel multiple locations on a single route, it can calculate distance between two points in a route as well as the over all distance from the starting point till the end point. It's one of my favorite labs feature.
Short URL: This feature can be very handy for social media enthusiasts and mobile users. When this feature is turned on, you can obtain a shortened url for your Google map to share easily over different social media services. There's no need to separately used any 3rd party url shortening service for your map access link. Just activate this feature and get instant shortened urls to share and distribute it among your network.
Show Me Here: Yet another useful labs feature for explorers. This features adds a 'Show Me Here!' button to the context menu. Whenever you point a location and click it, you are instantly zoomed in on that location with relevant details. There's no need to scroll, drag and adjust to zoom accurately at any location. Just point and click and there you are. It's a time saver feature, particularly if you're scanning too many locations.
Rotatable Maps: Are you tired off scanning the classic map alignment with north direction always on top. As the name suggests, this feature lets you rotate your maps in any direction giving you more flexibility in scanning. Make sure you're not confused about directions while using this feature. Rotatable maps feature is ideal for architects and civil engineers who regularly use similar feature for their work.
LatLng Marker: This is one of the most useful labs features. Latlng Marker adds a mini-marker to the location you point with latitude and longitude data. These mini-markers are persistent until your delete them explicitly. Even when you drag, rotate or shift your map, these mini-markers retain their position. This feature is ideal for explorers, trackers and mountaineers. I'd like to get this feature out of labs as soon as possible.
What other Google Maps features you find exciting and interesting? Do you use these labs features?
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
5 Features To Enrich Google Map Experience
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
25+ Facebook Applications For Bloggers And Social Media Enthusiasts
If you,re an avid facebook user, probably you're already aware of facebook applications. These extensions/plugins play a major role in enriching your facebook experience. There are thousands of such applications that can cater the need of almost every facebook user. Here are some handpicked facebook applications that can help bloggers and social media enthusiasts to make most out of facebook.
NetworkedBlogs - It is one of the largest communities of bloggers. NetworkedBlogs app brings your blog on facebook either on your profile or a page. People can share, vote, discuss or become a fan of your blog.
Social RSS - It's an excellent feed reader app with enough flexibility and customization options. You can import virtually every standard RSS and ATOM feed format.
Fan Appz - A great social media marketing tool for your facebook fan page. Fan Appz is designed to create an engaging community around your fan page. You can integrate polls, quizzes, gifts and promotions for
Memorable Web Addresses for Profile Page or Group - The name says it all. Wanna easy-to-remember url for your facebook profile. This app gives you several options to choose and build your own memorable web address for your facebook profile.
Social Tweet - One of the best twitter applications that lets you tweet directly from facebook. This application simultaneously post your tweet on facebook as well as your twitter account. You have the option to display your tweet either on your wall or any other custom tab. You can even control which tweet should be posted on your facebook profile.
Grader.com - This nice application grades your facebook profile by analyzing your network strength and level of activity. You can compare and analyze your grading data with your friends grades to find out the vital factors that may help you in achieving higher grade (better facebooking). This application also shows demographic data from various countries.
Eventbrite - If you're hosting an event and want to gather people from facebook community, this application can do it for you with ease. With paid version you get the flexibility of branding your event promotion, integrated ticket selling with more customization options. Ideal for small businesses for promoting their important events on facebook.
SlideShare - The name says it all. It's the best application to share your presentations and documents with facebook community. All major file formats are supported giving you the flexibility to create your presentation in your favorite application. Creative people can also use it to host a webinar by integrating YouTube videos and audio stream.
Professional Profile: Business Networking - It is often called 'LinkedIn - Lite'. This application lets you organize your professional information in a separate custom tab. If you're a blogger, you already know the power of tagging. With this application, you can easily tag your contacts, segregating them into groups for easy access and interaction.
LinkedIn - One of the best applications to tightly integrate your facebook and LinkedIn accounts. This application lets you display your LinkedIn public profile on a separate custom tab. Ideal for job seekers, freelancers and social media enthusiasts.
Twits - A very handy application allowing you to manage multiple twitter accounts via facebook. It not just update your facebook and twitter accounts, but also lets you manage direct messages, replies and scheduling of tweets. You can retweet and unfollow tweeps through this application.
Slates - I've found this application accidentally and I must say it's truly amazing. Slates lets you create web pages within facebook that can be used for almost anything. You can create a blog post, article, resume, sales page or just bout anything you can imagine. If used cleverly, this application has great potential to turn your facebook account into a vibrant marketing hub.
RatePoint - Yet another useful application for social media marketers. RatePoint lets you create email newsletters, surveys, reviews and testimonials. It also links your twitter accont with facebook to share your surveys and newsletters with your twitter network.
SurveyGizmo - As the name suggests, this application can be used to create surveys, polls and quizzes on facebook. The customization options are quite flexible giving your enough freedom to create fairly complex quizzes and polls. A must for bloggers and marketers with large fan base.
SocialToo - This handy application lets you manage/update your twitter account as well as any facebook page linked with your account directly from a centralized location. You can also create vanity urls for facebook pages through this application. SocialToo also provide statistics to track all activity on vanity urls.
YouTube Video Box - This is an excellent application to integrate and share YouTube videos on facebook. You can either share your favorite videos directly from your profile tab or through your facebook page. You can also view trending YouTube videos in your friends network all in a single click. You can also pull videos from any YouTube channel with public access.
YouTube Box - Here's one more application for publishing and sharing YouTube videos through your facebook profile or page. You can maintain an inventory of your favorite videos with custom display settings for different tabs. Interestingly, position of videos posted through this application remains intact even if your wall/tab is updated frequently.
My Flickr - Do you use flickr for your photo sharing needs? This application tightly integrates your flickr account with facebook. You can share your flickr albums or selective pictures based on recent photos, tags, photosets, favorites, groups, interests, date range, flickr privacy and through various sorting options. Your facebook network can comment on your shared photos without leaving facebook.
Youtube Videos - Yet another application for sharing YouTube videos with facebook friends. Apart from regular sharing features, this application has the ability to auto-synchronize your shared YouTube channels. You have the option of either synchronizing entire account or selective channels.
Big Profile Pictures - This handy application lets you show large pictures directly on your profile. You can upload unlimited photos and can selectively display them on your profile. You can also add custom captions to the photos. If you love to regularly change your profile photos, this application is must for you.
Picasa Tab - As the name implies, this application integrates your Picasa Web album as a separate tab on your facebook profile. You can arrange them in groups and can hide your private photos. It's a very useful application if you're using Google's Picasa service as your online photo management service.
My Photobucket - This one is for Photobucket users allowing you to share your public albums with your facebook network. Like other photo sharing applications, you can share and comment on your friends public albums. You can even obtain direct links to photographs without leaving facebook.
Youtube Channels - It is one of the best applications to bring your YouTube channel to facebook with all the loaded features. People can watch, comment, subscribe and can become fan of your YouTube channel. Ideal for internet marketers using YouTube for promoting their cause.
Friends on Twitter (fb140) - This handy application is must for all twitter addicts. Once activated, this application lets you find tweeps in your friends network and vice versa. People can search your twitter account and can follow you without leaving facebook. Highly recommended, if you have a large friends network and want to grow your twitter following overnight.
Advanced Wall - As the name suggests, this excellent application adds some more spice to a typical facebook wall. You can add it as a separate tab or as a box. Loaded with tons of options, you can add almost anything to this wall with impressive access control mechanism.
Super Slideshows - MagShow - A very cool application allowing you to pimp your photo stream on facebook. You create create customized slide show, zoom show that includes custom themes, skins, maps and music. You can even set access permissions at granular level to control who can view your slide shows.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
10 Firefox Add-ons For Social Media Enthusiasts
Browser extensions are used by almost every internet user. They have the power to enrich the browsing experience giving much needed features within the browser. Active social media users are known to be active in multiple accounts at a given time. Sometimes, it becomes very difficult to effectively manage multiple social media services from within the browser. In this situation, Firefox add-ons come handy making things easy for an avid social media user. Check out these hand-picked add-ons made specially for social media enthusiasts.
2. Shareaholic - As the name suggests, this hugely popular add-on lets you share and post interesting web content to 100+ social media services. A must for every social media enthusiast.
3. Echofon - This is one of my favorite add-ons. Echofon is a twitter client right inside your browser. Multiple accounts are supported with all twitter management via decent interface. If you're a busy tweep, this add-on is just for you.
4. Yoono - Although its just an add-on, you can say its a complete application. A powerhouse combining all popular social networks and messaging services in one box. The interface is gorgeous and compact. One of the best in this list.
5. Read It Later - Yet another add-on that's so essential for every social media user. It lets you saves web pages with one click to read later. Even if you are offline, you can access saved web pages saved earlier through this add-on.
6. AddThis - Quite similar to shareaholic, this add-on lets you share and bookmark web pages. You can share, post, blog or email to your network through various social media services.
7. WiseStamp - I'm sure you already know this handy add-on. This excellent extension lets you create rich HTML email signatures for popular email services. A very handy tool for almost every internet user.
8. Feedly - This add-on brings in a fantastic feed-reader with magazine like interface. It can synced with Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube and Amazon. You can import feeds from all popular feed reading services.
9. Delicious Bookmarks - This add-on tightly integrates the leading bookmarking service with your browser. You can submit, vote, sync and access your bookmarks through this handy extension. Very useful for internet marketers and social media professionals.
10. ChatZilla - This extension provides a robust and flexible Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client. It also lets you transfer files across your channels. You can easily customize the look 'n' feel of this IRC client through JavaScript plugins and CSS styling.
I've not included StumbleUpon and Google Toolbar in this list because they are so popular that needs no introduction.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Chromed Bird: Twitter Extension For Google Chrome Browser
Google Chrome support for extensions has opened door for countless new add-ons that can be integrated with this browser. Twitter integration is one of the much demanded options that makes any browser a complete social media hub. Chromed Bird is once such twitter extension that tightly integrates your twitter account with Google Chrome. It's light, fast and easy to use.
URL shortening support is integrated within the extension. You can reply, retweet and delete your tweets with ease. This extension also support caching of tweets to preserve your account's API limit. URL previewing is also supported to help prevent visiting any malicious site.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Soocial: Update Your Blackberry, Outlook, GMail and Mac Address Book In One Go
There are several contact management services available on web. Some are commercial solutions and others are free to use. Every such application offers different features. Generally, we want to sync all our contacts regardless of the service or hardware device we are using. Here comes the role of a service that provides us the facility of syncing all contacts on multiple platforms from a centralized location.
Soocial is one such service that helps you manage your contacts with ease from a single location. You just have to update, edit and delete your contacts in your soocial account and all your connected accounts will be updated with new data automatically. Social supports following platforms and hardware devices.
1. Microsoft Outlook
2. BlackBerry (Coming soon)
3. GMail
4. Highrise
5. Mac Address Book
6. Your Mobile Device
Soocial provides a neat and easy-to-use web interface for complete contact management. It automatically backups your contact database and provides one-click restores. For developers, soocial also provides OAuth based API access for connecting your account with different 3rd party platforms or hardware devices. It's free to use and provides some great features at no cost.
Monday, May 4, 2009
5 Best Permanent File Erasers And Shredders
Normally, a deleted file is only removed from the directory entry of the file system and still can be easily recovered back from a file recovery software. If you want to completely wipe out any trace of a file, a file shredder or permanent file deleter can do the trick. It completely overwrites junk characters on the space occupied by the original file and makes it unrecoverable.
Permanent Eraser - It is one of the best file erasing utilities for Mac OS X. This excellent software not just deleted files from hard drives, but also permanently erases the files from CD/DVD.
File Shredder - It is a powerful file deleting software for Windows platform. It is a freeware and very light on system resources. File shredder fills the file space with random binary junk making completely unrecoverable.
AbsoluteShield File Shredder - Yet another powerful and free file eraser for Windows. It erasing process is lightning fast and is ideal for permanently deleting files in bulk.
Heidi Eraser - This file shredder is available for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server and DOS. It is completely free and very light on system resources. This software is published under GNU General Public License and source code can be modified under license terms.
Easy Shred File Shredder - This is one of my favorite file shredding software. It has drag and drop support and shell integration. Simple right-click on a file and delete it forever. It is free and works on all major Windows OS.
Friday, April 10, 2009
WordPress Plugin Development: A Guide For Beginners
If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, most probably you are already familiar with plugins. These excellent add-ons help you extend the features of Wordpress giving you complete control on blog customization and enhancements. There are thousands of plugins available today supported by countless developers from around the globe who are developing these WordPress plugins for the ever-growing user base of this widely used blogging platform. Recently, Vladimir Prelovac has released his book entitled 'WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide', available from Packt Publishing which provides detailed step-by-step guide to create WordPress Plugins.
What immediately caught my attention about this book is the detailed step-by-step development process of 6 popular WordPress plugins, instead of giving bits and pieces in each chapter. Following are these 6 plugins.
1. Digg This - Adds Digg button to your posts.
2. Live Blogroll - Hovering mouse on blog links pops up recent posts from that blog.
3. WP Wall - No reload required to display the comments in sidebar.
4. Snazzy Archives - Archives presentation in a unique way.
5. Insights - Access your flickr images and articles directly in post editor.
6. Post Types - Pre-define post templates for quick insertion of photos and links.
Since each plugin mentioned above is made from scratch in each chapter, you get extensive code examples to properly understand the plugin-API. Because some of these plugins require dynamic content generation via WordPress database, you also learn the use AJAX and jQuery to achieve the same in a more optimized manner to speed up the execution. You also get to learn accessing third party APIs of Digg, flickr and many more.
Integration of TinyMCE plugin, WordPress hooks, forms submission through AJAX and Creating pop ups with CSS are some of the techniques you will learn during each plugin development process. A seperate section is dedicated for AJAX, so that developers who are not familiar with the technology can get a good hand on it before going ahead with the actual implementation of AJAX in the plugin.
All the development tools required to create a WordPress plugin are free. The book has a separate section in the beginning tabulating all the tools required for plugin development, where to get it and what is their use. The author of this book is an expert WordPress developer and has stressed on optimization and security of each WordPress plugin. You will also get to know the security issues and optimization techniques that are must for a successful WordPress plugin.Who should read this book?
Whether you are a hard-core web developer or a hobbyist, if you have working knowledge of PHP, HTML and Wordpress, and if you want to develop your own WordPress plugin, this book is an excellent choice for you. 
Book: WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide
Paperback: 278 pages [191mm x 235mm]
Publisher: Packt Publishing (Released: February, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN: 1847193595
ISBN-13: 978-1-847193-59-9
Also available as an e-book from Packt Publishing
Saturday, March 28, 2009
10 Useful Facebook Tools and Add-Ons
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking site with over 2 million members from every corner of the globe. There are countless 3rd party add-ons, widgets and plugins to enhance and enrich your Facebook experience. Here are some useful applications and extensions to spice up your Facebook account.
1. Facebook Toolbar - A very popular Firefox add-on that tightly integrates your Facebook account with your web browser. You can do search, upload and download photos, messages directly from this toolbar.
2. FriendMobilizer - This excellent application provides access to Facebook from wide range of smartphones and PDA's.
3. Facebook Desktop Client - A handy desktop application keeps you connected with Facebook and provides all updates, alerts right on your desktop.
4. LiveUpload - An excellent plugin for Windows that integrates with Windows Live Gallery facilitating direct uploads of photographs from Windows Live Gallery Beta to your Facebook account.
5. OutSync - A unique application that updates and syncs your Microsoft Outlook contacts photographs with that in your Facebook account.
6. Wordpress Fotobook - Want to keep all your Facebook photo albums on a single Wordpress page? Then use this handy Wordpress plugin to seamlessly import all your albums in your Facebook account.
7. Friendbar - A Facebook toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can update your status, send scraps, share videos and web pages and can get alerts through this toolbar.
8. Wordbook - This Wordpress plugin integrates your Facebook account with your Wordpress blog and vice-versa.
9. Netvibes Widget - One of the popular widgets that lets you see your Facebook profile and friends from your personalized Netvibes home page.
10. Google Notifications Gadget - Integrates Facebook alerts into your Google Desktop application. Supports fluid resizing sidebar with internationalization support.
Monday, March 16, 2009
10 Best Free And Open Source CMS For Web Developers
Web development has seen many changes in last decade. Some of the technologies has completely revolutionized this process. Prominent among them is use of content management systems (CMS). These systems provides a core-engine on which a site runs giving easy-to-use interface for web administrators. No coding from scratch is required. Just install it and your site is up in few minutes. Here are some of the best content management systems.
SilverStripe: This is one of the most flexible and easy-to-use content management system for editing the web sites. It's free and open source CMS that can be extended easily with plenty of add-ons like Sapphire Framework. SilverStripe is supported by plenty of modules, themes and widgets to give your site the desired look and feel.
Drupal: Yet another excellent free and open source content management system. Drupal is well known for its stability and large support community. You can find tons of themes, widgets and add-ons for this web development framework. Drupal also supports powerful user management system that includes authentication from various services like Jabber, Blogger, Live Journal and many more.
Joomla: Award winning open source and free content management system with easy-to-use interface. Like Drupal, this CMS also has a large support community. Joomla is well known for its extensions that add sophisticated features to an existing core-engine. Some large organizations of the world use Joomla as their CMS.
Frog CMS: This free and open source content management system is one of my favorites. Light weight, clean interface and very flexible. Frog CMS is based on Radiant CMS that worked on Ruby on Rails. This CMS requires PHP5, MySQL or SQLite3 for its working. A must try for every budding web developer.
Plone: A sophisticated multi-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris) content management system with tons of features. Ideal for power users who want to make large dynamic web site. Plone comes with clustering capability and intelligent caching proxy integration. It also supports hardened role-based security model.
CushyCMS: No installation is required to use this innovative content management system. You just have to create an account for integrating your existing web site with CushyCMS system. Once the integration is done, you can directly edit the site code from within its user friendly interface. The integration process just takes a minute by supplying your FTP details for site connectivity. You can assign different roles (designer, content editor) to your web development team for restrictive access to your CushyCMS account.
Mambo: A flexible, free and open source CMS with large support community. Mambo is available for multiple platforms (Linux, Windows IIS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD). You can find tons of plugins and add-ons for this excellent content management system. Mambo is known for its stability and powers millions of sites. You can download additional language packs to add support for multiple languages.
Typo3: An ideal content management system for large scale distributed systems involving intranets. Offers tons of add-ons from its rich Typo3 extension repository. If you are working on a multi-location dynamic web portal with a large development team, this CMS is your best bet. Typo3 has a strong support community that provides quick answers to new users. 
dotCMS: A light weight and extremely flexible content management system. dotCMS supports content versioning and rollback in case something goes wrong. This powerful CMS also supports AJAX Photo Galleries,RSS Feeds, Streaming MP3 Player, Social Networking, Video Player / Galleries, Google Maps Integration, Online Form Creator / Handler and much more.
modx: This CMS is also one of my favorites because of its excellent interface that makes even a newbie developer feel at home. modx CMS has full support of Web 2.0 Ajax technology. modx has perhaps the best rich text editors for easy and fast web site coding. You can also switch to strict XHTML 1.0 coding format to meet the quality standards required by your project.
There are dozens of free content management systems available on Internet. The list presented here is picked randomly and in no way represent the popularity of any content management system.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
AdSweep: Ad Blocking Plugin For Opera And Google Chrome
Firefox users use AdBlock Plus to filter out advertisements from web pages. What about Opera and Chrome users? An excellent ad-blocker plugin/add-on has been developed that works smoothly both on Opera and Google Chrome.
AdSweep is an equivalent of AdBlock Plus for Opera and Chrome users. Although, it has been developed for Opera, you can easily use it for Google Chrome too.
Installation On Opera
1. Extract the javascript file from Zip archive after download and save it in a directory.
2. Go to 'Tools -> Preferences...'.
3. Select 'Advanced' tab and select 'Content' menu item.
4. Click 'Javascript Options button and select the Adsweep .js file through file browsing dialogue box. Click 'OK'.
Installation On Google Chrome
1. Extract the AdSweep.js from Zip archive and rename it to AdSweep.user.js.
2. Place this file in Chrome's user script directory.
3. Right click Chrome's shortcut and select 'Properties' option.
4. Select 'Shortcut' tab and append --enable-user-scripts to the string in 'Target' field.
5. Make sure there is space between the old string and your appended string. Click 'OK' and save.
