If you visit this site regularly, you know that I love to read and that I’m a fan of Goodreads. I’ve also found that a lot of people are searching for help on deciding what to read next.

Goodreads has added recommendations to their service, which is a great new feature that will help people locate new books to read.

In the blog post about personalized recommendations, Goodreads is saying that the new service is “the Netflix of book recommendations”. I can see what they mean but the way things have been going for Netflix latetly, I wouldn’t want to compare myself to them.

Anyway, the recommendations are based on the books that you’ve read and rated, books you’ve listed to read and books that you are currently reading and the recommendations are arranged by genre.

I located a couple of books that I was interested in reading, especially in the Fantasy section.

There are couple of ways that you can improve what is recommended to you.

1. Rate more books!!!
2. Select your favorite genres.
3. Categorize your books by creating shelves, such as History or Science Fiction.
4. If books are recommended that you have no interest in reading, click on the Not Interested link below the book.

Do you use Goodreads or are you interested in setting up an account? Do you think the recommendations are useful? If so, have you found any books that you would like to read? Me? I won’t live long enough to read all of the books in which I’m already interested. ;-)

photo credit: jm3

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

What to Read Next: Goodreads Recommendations Can Help

Honestly, I should have posted this at least a week ago as we are now 10 days into the World Cup. For some reason, even though I love soccer, I wasn’t that excited leading up to it. I’m not really sure why.

But now that’s here I want to watch every match. Of course, I don’t but I’m trying to see as many as I can. It’s going to be a long month ;-)

There are a number of great resources for following the World Cup matches on Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter

Twitter has been having some issues recently (my tweet count has decreased by over 11,000 tweets – while not a big deal I do hope they return) and the World Cup traffic is causing a lot of “fail whales”. While the World Cup is not such a big deal here in the US, it is around the world and a lot of people are watching and tweeting about it.

1. Following the hashtag #worldcup is a great way to keep up with all of the matches and latest information.
2. Tweetbeat has an excellent World Cup page. It has tweets, news headlines, a countdown to the next match, and teams and groupings. If you want to follow the tweets about a specific team you can filter by that. (Go Spain!!)
   
3. Twitter / World Cup 2010 – Twitter has a page set up for the World Cup too. It contains overall tweets and you can also filter by specific countries.
   

Facebook

Pages

1. World Cup 2010 – Soccer Jones – Good resource for all World Cup news.
2. World Cup on ESPN – ESPN is actually showing ALL of the matches in the US and has really gotten into the World Cup on their Facebook page. They have a list of matches, a Team Selector, where you can pick and follow your favorite teams, and Matches, Team Selector and Game Face. Game Face will allow you to paint the face on a photo or Facebook avatar and add you favorite team’s flag.
   
3. FourFourTwo – FourFourTwo is a soccer magazine from the UK and are good for following the World Cup on Facebook and soccer ALL the time.
4. Team and Player Fan Pages – you can search for fan pages for your favorite teams and players. Of course, I’ve added Spain and Iker Casillas ;-)

Applications

1. Goal Leaderboard – On the Leaderboard you can find out which teams have the most fans on Facebook and follow and support your team
   
2. Badges – Add the badge of your favorite team to your Facebook profile. right now I have one for Spain and another for Aston Villa.
   
3. Support the World Cup Charity – 1Goal – 1Goal is the World Cup charity. They want to provide education for 72 million children worldwide by 2015.
4. FIFA Superstars – This is a fantasy sports application in which you can create your own team and see how well they do based on how players do in the World Cup matches.

Unlike the World Series, the World Cup really does involve the entire world. Are you watching any of the matches? If so, who are you supporting?

photo credit: Axel Bührmann

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

Following the World Cup on Facebook and Twitter

There are a number of words I am tired of seeing used on Social Media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, and by reputable bloggers.

The words are either offensive, demeaning, or have been so overused they have lost their strength.

I’m sure people will disagree with me about some of them but that’s fine – debate and differences of opinion are always good.

1. Douchebag – do I even need to go into why this shouldn’t be used? It gained traction on twitter with the term “social media douchebag” to refer to someone who professes that he can get you millions of followers and help you earn lots of money. There is ever a website devoted to this. But the word is casually thrown around in a variety of contexts. It’s offensive and I find that I have less respect for those who use it so casually. If course, now people are going to find this article when searching on that word.
2. Retard or tard - I work with an organization that provides services for special needs adults. Most of them are mentally retarded, although even though that is the clinical term is is not the politically correct term to use. I think it is demeaning to these special individuals to have retard and tard thrown around to refer to someone who is acting like an idiot.
3. Fail – This isn’t an offensive term but has been played out. Especially when people are saying something like, “Apple named their new product iPad – name fail. I think a fail should be something a lot more serious like a structural failure if my roof caves in around me. Plus, the term has just been overused.
4. Killer – Will this product be the next that product killer. It’s been overused and I don’t like the violence implied by the language.

Any others that you would like add to this list? Let’s try to remove the overuse of these words and phrases in 2010.

photo credit: cmefish

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

4 Words to Stop Using on Facebook, Twitter and your Blog

Quite a few people subscribe to blogs via email as well as RSS – I have a number of them.

Call me slow on the uptake, but recently I noticed a couple of features for feedburner email that will allow for some minor customizations.

You can add a logo for your site and you can add the title of your article to the subject line and heading of the email.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Login to Feedburner. (Create an account first if you don’t already have one.)
2. Click on the name of your feed.
3. Switch to the Publicize Tab
   
4. Click on Email Subscriptions in the left side navigation.
5. Click on Email Branding on the submenu in the left side navigation
   

There are a number of things you can set to customize your feedburner email.

1. Email Subject/Title – if you add ${latestItemTitle} to the email subject line, the name of the article will be in the subject line and title of the email. If there is more than one post, you can click on the box that says Change Subject Line when email has 2 or more items, and you will get additional choices for customization. Before I added the title my subject line only had the name of this site.
2. Logo URL

– You can add the URL to a logo that exists on a server that Feedburner can access. The logo has to be in .jpg, .gif, and .png formats and shouldn’t be bigger than 200 by 200px.

3. Headline Font and Size – you have a choice of 5 fonts for the headline and can adjust the size.
4. Body Font and Size – you can set the font and the font size for the body text like you can for the headline.
5. Body Color – the color of the email background can be changed.
6. Item Headline/Body Link Color – the color for the all the links can be set to any color.

The bottom of the Email Branding screen will show you what you changes look like. Here is mine with the title of the post added to the headline and my logo.

Make sure you save all of your changes.

Now you have a slightly customized feedburner email.

photo credit: K a t e y

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Add Your Logo and Other Customizations to Your Feedburner Email

You can update your Facebook status and upload photos straight from your cell phone to Facebook.

I’m not a big fan of talking on the phone but since my cell is always with me, as it’s the only phone I have, I take a lot more photos with it than I do with my camera. Once you set up Facebook Mobile, you can send the photos straight to Facebook. And if something really exciting is going on or, as is frequently the case in my life, your kid says something really funny, you can update your Facebook status from anywhere that you can get a signal. (Not in Northern Vermont).

Everyone gets the same number to text to, FBOOK or 32665, but your mobile number needs to be tied to your account. Go to Facebook Mobile Account, select your carrier from the drop down menu, input your number, and then you are on your way. Unfortunately, if your carrier isn’t listed, then you won’t be able to use this service. Facebook doesn’t charge for it but you will be charged by your carrier based on your text messaging plan.

Facebook will send a confirmation text to your cellphone and then you can start using the service. I added FBOOK to my contacts and can easily send a text or photo message directly to Facebook.

Changing the settings is pretty easy (for once with Facebook). When logged into Facebook click on the Settings button to the right of your name to get to the Account page. You will know have a tab that says Mobile.

You can also adjust the settings to receive text messages, such as friend requests and other messages, TO your phone but I’m not even going to head down that path. I still receive emails for those and that’s plenty of updates for me.

I don’t use this service very often and am more likely to send my photos directly to Flickr, but it useful if you are dying to say something and are stuck on a train or something.

Do you use this? Do you even use text messaging? My guess is that the younger people will say, “well duh” while the older ones will say “cool, but I hate my cell phone”. ;-)

photo credit: lincolnblues

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Post Status Updates and Photos to Facebook Via Text Message

11/22/09 – Since the last Facebook update, this information is no longer accurate. Please view my updated article on this topic.

Last week when I wrote the article about removing a facebook application from your news stream, I wanted to re-add Mafia Wars, which I had previously removed. I wanted to add it back so I could go through the steps of removing it and take some screen shots.

Of course, as with many options in Facebook, wanting to re-add an application was easier than actually doing it because it was hard to find the setting. Facebook is not intuitive to use.

So, if you accidentally removed the wrong application or if you really miss the Mafia Wars status updates, here is how you can get the application back in your news stream.

1. Login and go to your Home page
2. Scroll down to the very bottom and find the link that says Edit Options
   
3. You will then get a pop-up listing the Pages and Applications that are hidden from your news stream. It defaults to Pages so you will want to click on the button that says Applications.
   
4. Click on the button that says Add to News Feed and then Close

It seems so simple but I though it would be the reverse of how I hid the application in the first place. And a button called Edit Options does not imply that you will be able to use to unhide applications and pages.

photo credit: _marmota

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Add a Facebook Application to Your News Stream that You Previously Removed

My most popular article based on page views is 4 Sites to Help You Decide What to Read Next. At the time I didn’t think much of the article but it got stumbled and each time someone reviews it on stumble the traffic spikes again. I guess a lot of people want to find books that are similar to ones that they really like.

Recently I came across BookArmy, which is a site for people who love books are reading. This site is more social than the ones in the earlier article in that the site connects you with other users who have similar interests.

About BookArmy

According to the help pages, BookArmy is very user based. Recommendations are based on how you’ve rated books on your lists and by member lists that are similar to your own. Books that are considered similar to others are based on users suggesting similar books. You can actually win prizes for adding similar books. This seems to depend on the accuracy of other users determining what is similar but is much more human that a formula deciding that for you.

After you sign up, you are taken to a screen to start adding books that you have read. It seems that you have to rate them in order to add them to your profile. My guess is that the ratings are what are used to match you with other users and other books.

Obviously, I can’t add every book that I’ve read so I started by putting in 8 of my favorite books.

After adding 9 books, I clicked on the Next button, which took me to a screen to update or complete my profile.

My Books

From the profile page there are quick links to your Wall and Alerts, as well as a useful Quick Add button to add more books. Clicking on the Quick Add button takes your to your Books Page. This is organized in three sections; Books Read, Currently Reading, and Next. Here is where you can add books that you are reading and you don’t have to rate them – there is a single Add button.

Interesting features on the books pages are ratings, find similar, recommend, buy (a link to Amazon), and chat. Most of these are self-explanatory so I am going to only take a look at Find Similar to see what the matches are like. I selected Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which I am currently reading. Most of the similar books listed are ones I haven’t read so I can’t really say whether they are similar or not. I thought other Stephenson books, such as Cryptonomicon would be listed because Stephenson is mostly similar to himself. But maybe the site figures that if you like a book by an author you have already looked into books by the same author.

When you look at the book page for a similar book, you can add it to your library, recommend, create group, or create an event.

Authors

According to BookArmy

We love writers. Discover which authors are the top rated this week, most popular this month, most talked about and most recommended authors as rated by real people (you). You can read your favourite author’s biography, peruse bibliographies and even become friends with any bookarmy author.

You can also search for authors from this page.

A full author page includes a photo, a brief blurb, books by the author and similar authors.

Other tabs

Other sections include Videos (authors and book lists), People, Groups, Forums and Events. Apparently anyone can create a Group or an Event about any topic. I haven’t looked into this much but it looks like it could be useful and fun.

On the right side of every page is a list of Recommendations, Top Books this Week, Most Read this Week and Top Authors.

All of the sections except for Recommendations have RSS feeds. My recommendations were empty – it seems that it takes the site a little while to generate this list for you. I also didn’t add that many books so that might be part of the problem too – although I think 9 should be enough to get started. Minimally, it could recommend books by the same authors.

Ending

This seems like a good site to find book recommendations, similar books to ones that you love, and readers with similar interests. There are also social features such as groups and events. The best recommendations come from creating a profile but it is possible to search books to find similar ones without actually creating an account.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

BookArmy: A social site for readers

Well, this can be filed in the “what took you so long” category, but flickr finally has a twitter account and has finally created the functionality for integrating flickr uploads with your twitter account.

The twitter account for flickr is brand new but hopefully it will be used to interact with others. Currently there are just a handful of tweets. And so far, flickr hasn’t followed anyone back. They don’t have to, of course, but that is generally the best way to interact with other users.

In order to get started you need to authorize twitter as a valid application in your flickr account. This is done by adding twitter as a blog page under your account settings.

1. Go to http://www.flickr.com/account/blogs/
2. Click on Add Another Blog
3. In the drop down list, select Twitter
   
4. Click on the big button that says “Go To Twitter To Authorize”
5. Click on Allow
6. Once you click on the Allow button, you will be redirected to flickr and given instructions on how to use the feature
7. Flickr provides users with an email address that allows them to post photos via a mobile device. I use this to send photos to flickr directly from my phone just like sending any text message. Once twitter is authorized you are given another email address that allows you to post the photo to flickr and send a tweet with a link to the same photo. What you place in the subject line of the email or photo text message, will be the name of the photo on flickr and the tweet sent to twitter.
8. You can also send a link to any photo on flickr by clicking the Blog This button and selecting twitter from the list, if you have more than just twitter listed.
   
9. If you don’t want to use the service, you can deauthorize the integration at any time

What do you think? Is this useful? I frequently send photos to flickr directly from my phone. Actually, I rarely use a camera to take photos – I always have my phone with me but I don’t always have my camera. Rarely though do I have the need to send a tweet of the photo at the same time. The Blog This button could be useful though, especially if a funny or unusual photo is located.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Integrate Twitter and Flickr

I want to give a shout-out to some awesome people that have been really supportive and who I am so glad that I’ve met.

These are all people that I only know virtually – I haven’t met a single one of them in real life. Maybe someday I will.

I can’t possibly include everyone so for now I’ve listed 10.

1. If it hadn’t been for Siel from green LA girl, I might not have started freelancing. She sent me a message about working on her site when I was still just thinking about it but hadn’t really started yet. Siel has a wonderful site full of green information for the LA area. She also gives away two freebies each week, so if you live in the US you should definitely head over there and check it out..
2. Rick, from helpmerick, has a great site with all sorts of computer related tips, recommendations and how-to’s. The information is geared toward beginners but is still really useful. I only met Rick recently but he has quickly become a great online friend and has been very supportive of my abilities and decisions.
3. Sommer runs Green & Clean Mom, which is an environmental site with a focus on green parenting. I’m not quite sure how our paths first crossed but Sommer was one of the first commentators on this site, has been incredibly supportive, finds work for me, and has even had conversations with me about more personal issues.
4. Vered is the author of MomGrind, a wonderful site about women’s issues, feminism and blogging. Like Sommer, Vered was one of the first commentators on this site. And she was frequently the only commentator. I frequently wonder if I would have kept plugging away if she hadn’t been reading my articles. I’m not quite sure how our paths first crossed but I am so glad that they did.
5. Stratos is a programmer and coding wiz. Who else but Stratos would help me with a script problem at 10pm on a Friday night? And since he lives in Greece, 10pm my time is 5 am his time! Stratos and I also share July 20th as a birthday :-)
6. Mike is the author of Anxiety, Panic and Health, which is a site about Anxiety and Mental Illness. Mike’s site is well researched and full of useful mental health information. Mike is also extremely supportive and writes the best comments. Apparently around the holidays small children mistake him for Santa Claus. ;-)
7. Betsy writes Passing Thru and like everyone else on this list is extremely supportive and encouraging. Betsy and I don’t agree on many things but still manage to have great conversations and respect each other. Recently she visited Philly, my city, and is working on a series of articles about her experiences there.
8. Jannie is a musician, a super funny woman, and one of the sweetest people that I know virtually. From time to time I do some work on her site – the first time she paid me via check so she had my address. When my Mom passed away she was the ONLY person, including friends, family and ex-inlaws, who sent a sympathy card. She figured out the chapter books my daughter would love (without even actually knowing her) from the ones her daughter is getting rid of and is mailing them to us. For a great read and even more laughs, visit her blog at Jannie Funster.
9. Julie Walraven of Design Resumes is a freelance resume writer, has been visiting this site since the beginning and allowed me to encourage her to begin blogging. She is kind, helpful and sympathetic. When my ex was laid off she even offered to help him get his resume together as he began looking for work. I turned her down on that offer but it demonstrates what a giving person she is.
10. Jeff Starr, of Perishable Press, is a designer and WordPress expert. I am awed by his design skills and learn so much from the articles he writes. When he added a link to my site from his, I was shocked and honored. Whenever Jeff comments on one of my articles I feel like I’ve done something right.

I know I haven’t included everyone but I wanted to give recognition to 10 people that have been with me throughout much of this ride, who have been supportive and who have helped boost my confidence. Check out their sites – maybe you will discover something that you like.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

… And Whiskers on Kittens

Please note: This information will soon be outdated by changes that Facebook will be making to boxes and the boxes tab. Please read my new article Upcoming Facebook Changes to Boxes and the Box Tab that Will Impact Your Custom Fan Pages.

My friend Rick Morgan and apparently many searchers finding this site have asked how you can link to your Facebook Fan page from your Facebook profile. And until Rick asked me about this it didn’t even occur to me to create such a link but, of course, it’s an excellent idea.

Well, the short answer is that Facebook DOES NOT provide a direct way of doing this. This does not mean, however, that it can’t be done. It will require the use of a particular application and a teeny bit of html.

How to Do It

1. Install the Custom Profile Box application.
2. Add your code. On mine I added my 125×125 site ad linked to my fan page, some text, and linked icons for other social networking sites where you can fine me.
   
3. Unfortunately, the name of the box can not be changed and is called ‘Custom Profile Box’. The Custom Profile Box also can’t go any higher on the left sidebar than right under your list of friends.
4. Ok, and I kind of lied. The Custom Profile Box has a visual or WYSIWYG editor so you don’t technically need to know html to use the application. I do, however, believe you will have better results if you use some html so you can check and edit your code.
5. So, I don’t know if anyone actually notices my Custom Profile Box but it has given me a way to link to my (Anti) Social Development fan page from my personal profile. Something that Facebook doesn’t give us a direct way of doing.
6. And the very attentive and very curious might wonder why not just use the fbml application that I mentioned in my earlier article about creating a custom fan page. Well, the fbml application is only for pages. It can’t be used on profiles.

photo credit: zak_greant

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Link to Your Facebook Fan Page from Your Profile Page