Oh not again, According to the reports getting since morning, The most popular micro-blogging website Twitter has been blocked across the nation. A lot of status updates confirmed the news that it was not a technical error but it has been forcefully blocked. However, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has denied the blockage issue and stated any users experiencing difficulties should contact their ISP’s.

A constitutional petition preventing PTA from blocking website have been placed at High Court of Sindh at Karachi, challenging the arbitrary and random acts of PTA blocking/censoring various websites across the country. 

According to the latest statistics from Twitter, there are about 140,000,000 active users and over 340,000,000 Tweets posted each day! That means that when it comes to advertising your blog on Twitter, you need to stand out. One way to do this is to personalize your Twitter homepage. Here are a few ways to do that:

The Essentials: Link, Bio, and Picture

First, it’s absolutely essential that you do the basics of personalizing your Twitter homepage. Make sure your page links to your blog’s main page. You may not get a ton of traffic to your blog through this particular link, and the nofollow designation means it won’t help you with Google rankings either. However, it does keep your brand consistent, and it might draw you a new reader here and there.
Of course, you also need to change your bio and your picture to something that is personal to you and your blog. Your picture should either be of yourself or of something related to your blog so that people will know what you’re blogging about. A custom-designed logo as your picture is a great, professional-looking option!

Change Your Background

Changing the background on your Twitter homepage to something more personal isn’t quite as important as creating a custom header if you want a professional-looking blog, but it’s still an important way that you can personalize your homepage. There are several options for personalizing your homepage through a new background.

One option is to upload a photo of yourself or a photo you’ve taken, but you can also use desktop backgrounds meant for PCs. The problem with these is that users with a lower screen resolution may not be able to see the whole background. At the very least, you’ll want to consider how the background will look if a user’s view of it is truncated.

One final option is specialized Twitter backgrounds from the web. If you want a really sleek design, consider hiring a designer to make you a custom background specially tailored to Twitter requirements. A background that is like your blog header in style and colors can be a particularly good option.

Change the Theme

If you’re changing your Twitter background, then change your theme to go along with it. The theme will change the colors of different boxes and pieces of text on your Twitter homepage. It’s possible with some programming knowledge to create a custom theme, but it may be simpler to just pick out a theme that will work with your Twitter background colors.

Make the Sidebar Transparent

If your Twitter homepage background has some really neat images that you want your followers to be able to see, you can actually make the sidebar on your homepage transparent so that they can see the full background image behind it. This is a great way to customize your homepage if you’re linking up your Twitter background with the images found on your blog.
You can make your sidebar transparent by going through the settings menu and changing the color of the sidebar. If you are going to make your sidebar transparent, you’ll definitely want to make sure you can read the words over your background image. This works best when a background image isn’t overly busy, and when the text on the sidebar is highly contrasted with the background image.

Should You Hire a Pro?

As with your actual blog, when it comes to Twitter, design is less important than content, but it’s still important. If you’re a professional blogger or are really serious about your blog, chances are likely that you’ve at least toyed with the idea of hiring a professional to create buttons and a header for your blog. If you already have a professional design for your blog, you might want to carry that over into Twitter, since it can help solidify your brand and make all your online content more coherent.

Whether or not you hire a professional, you should still most definitely make sure that you’ve got the essentials of your Twitter homepage customized, and you should consider matching the theme with your blog. These things make you look more polished and can only help you when it comes to connecting with your readers through Twitter. Don’t forget to follow iTechGiz on Twitter.

Ashyia Hill is a social media advocate at CreditDonkey.  Small business owners can visit her team’s blog to compare credit cards by reading their reviews and deals.  While you certainly don’t have to hire a professional to take care of customizing your Twitter homepage, if it’s something you think will serve your bottom line, you can look at credit card deals to cover some of the cost of getting a professionally designed Twitter background or theme. A business credit card can have some good benefits for your business and can help you kickstart something like a great Twitter feed by giving you a little more flexibility in your business-related spending.

Google+ pages were announced in November last year and after the announcement we found many top blogs and websites owner parking their google+ pages. It would always attract users who land on your page and see a google plus badges on your site, this helps your readers to engage them on other social networking websites so that they could be in-touch with your news apart from your main website.

Google have now rolled out the google plus badges integration to the public (previous it was only for developers), and now you can choose your badge for your website. However you can configure the badge that fits your theme design and which works better on darker sites.

You can choose google plus badges with three styles mainly Icon, Small bage & Standard badge.

You can get create google+ badges for your own website/blog, if you are still wondering weather to add these badges you might read this before preceding ahead.

We recently looked at top sites using the badge and found that, on average, the badge accounted for an additional 38% of followers. When you add the badge visitors to your website can discover your Google+ page and connect in a variety of ways: they can follow your Google+ page, +1 your site, share your site with their circles, see which of their friends have +1’d your site, and click through to visit your Google+ page.

You might like to create a custom google plus profile banner.

You have all these old photos on Facebook that no one ever sees. Why? Because they fall off the wall and out of your life. Sure, they’re accessible, but really, who’s going to look back for that tiny grey button? But what if that changed? What if the important moments of your life that you’ve catalogued and carefully labeled on Facebook could be shown as one, big timeline?

That’s what Facebook’s new ‘Timeline’ application is set to do. Reformatting the old Facebook profile pages with this new version, the company’s goal is to reflect your life in its pages.

"We wanted to design a place that feels like your home," Zuckerberg said, "Where you tell your story online is really personal. You invest a lot of time in it and you curate it. You link to it and you tell all your friends to find you there. So we wanted to make Timeline a place you’re proud to call your home. So Timeline is a completely new aesthetic from Facebook … so you can express who you really are."

Or, more concisely: "Timeline is the story of your life," Zuckerberg said.

Instead of showing just the last five minutes of your life, or even the last fifteen minutes, Timeline’s goal is to show your whole life, from birth to now, on one page. How do they plan on doing that? Well, part of it is your input. You pick the photos that are important and chose to enlarge them, mark them, or delete negative comments. Too much work? Don’t worry; Facebook will do most of it for you automatically. Key moments, chosen by a robot, will highlight the years of your past.

Why would they create Timeline? They’re thinking a step ahead. Google+ is looking to encroach on their territory, and was doing a fairly good job of it until now. The Timeline application revolutionizes the way social media look and feels, turning your life into art rather than a chart. Who wouldn’t want their Facebook page to feel more like a reflection of themselves? It also paves the way for the future, which is a bit scary.

The future of Timeline is this- report your life, from birth until now. Your baby pictures, your first steps, your first kiss, all recorded and catalogued and kept for posterity in one convenient, attractive program. It’s ‘This is Your Life’ for the new millennium. Best of all, you control it. So your life is more than just a pile of paperwork; it’s a reflection of not just what it is, but what you want it to be; what is important to you, your family, and your social network.

You might be interested in giving your profile the new Timeline feature, then visit my previous post where i have a tutorial explaining how to enable timeline on your profile.

Genealogy will never be the same.

This is a guest post from Laura Backes, she enjoys writing about all kinds of subjects and also topics related to internet service providers in my area.  You can reach her at: laurabackes8 [at] gmail.com.

We are proud to announce that a Pakistani based software and application development software house has recently unveiled it’s very own URL shortening service through a website called http://addr.pk As the hype for social networking sites have been created we are now more towards sharing featured, popular and our daily happenings to these websites and here this tool becomes handy.

And when it comes to sharing great over the social media, surely it will be a link to some video, image, object or a software may equate. But most sites do not allows you sharing long links among everyone when you are vitality to tweet about de facto approximately  140 characters and you have to go towards selective words.

Exactly, these are the situations where a URL shortening services serve the purpose, unintentionally, and we are using them for a quite long time without even noticing it.

There are some individuals geeks who are using their own URL shortener scripts but they are not shared publicly. Addr.pk is considered to be Pakistan’s first proper URL shortening service which has been launched recently.

Here is an example of Addr.pk URL shortening service which shortens URL is this format http://addr.pk/a4c7, do give it a try a share among your circle.

Social Analytics As Platform For New Models Of Business Intelligence is a guest post written by Tim Moylan who is a President, SAP Southeast Asia.

There are over 500 million uses of Facebook in the world today, spending 700 billion minutes per month to check on their families and friends, upload photos or videos, or simply post their thoughts. In many cases, these thoughts could be in the form of comments on certain products or services, or what they felt about their experiences with these products.

Such information could be useful, if not not downright invaluable for companies trying to touch base with their intended markets. As the Internet gave marketers an opportunity to reach out to a crowd of potential consumers, so did it also give them an opportunity to know more about their customers’ experiences. The Internet, essentially, is one of the best platforms for business analytics as it gave many companies immediate response from people, a platform that has so far been effective in interacting with  customers and potential clients.

Advent of social networks

The advent of social networks and blogs clearly is a step forward towards customer interaction. User generated content (UGC) through social networks made it possible to monitor movements of people’s behavior. People who had no personal websites were now able to create their own blogs without the need for technical know-how or even paying for a site.

Content management systems (CMS) such as Blogger, Blogspot, Multiply, and WordPress helped launched millions of personal websites that were constantly updated by their owners, in addition to the comments generated by these blogs’ visitors. These new platforms for social network interaction is already a goldmine for many companies, something that IDC would call “socialytics,” an amalgamation of the words “social” and “analytics.”

Potential of social analytics

Social analytics pose a huge opportunity for companies offering services to large base of consumers. The discussions among people within a group can give companies, particularly their sales and marketing team, glimpses of customer experiences that may be useful for their future products, or even upcoming campaigns.

Information that comes straight from consumers is highly valuable but when it is already within a mode of discussion by several people, companies and their marketers will be able to fully understand the full effect of a product or service to consumers. This is because consumers themselves are doing their own product review and sharing this to others within their networks. Social network platforms enable people to analyze the potential of a product or service among themselves.

Often, people within a network tend to make their own preferences and judgments as they feel that they are privileged to do so. The more people talk about products and services, the better the analysis.

Turning data into useful information

For the most part, data from social networks is unstructured. Many marketers have to sift through multitudes of existing data. This does not even include data that is still coming, which adds to the challenge of mixing historic data with real-time data into information that companies can use for their business intelligence strategies.

Techniques are continuously being formed into analyzing and managing unstructured data from social networks. As dynamic as it seems, there are already some standard set of tools that can be utilized to help marketers monitor social network chatter. SAP, for instance, has developed a new class of analytics tools embedded into its Unified Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Information Management (EIM) Solutions. Once a system like this that monitors and manage oncoming traffic is put in place, the company only has to analyze information that is useful to them.

Of course, the dynamics of relationships within a social networks change and as such, new tools will be developed to better engage these communities of people using social networks.

Behavior and business intelligence 

Behavioral patterns are best viewed when consumers are able to share their experiences within their community. This is already a direct application of sociological dynamics that may be just as invaluable to marketers as much as the comments for existing products. People tend to provide additional information about what they seek from certain products or services which provides companies a glimpse of what they would eventually create.

In a business intelligence scenario, these types of information are just initially assumed, citing past buying behaviors of their targeted markets. The added inputs from consumers within a social network allow companies to narrow down what their next strategies will be. The more useful data is found, the better the product could perform in the future. As these companies peak into the dynamics of relationships among people within a social network, they’ll have more knowledge than they’ll ever get from just basic efforts in business intelligence.

Earn money with Facebook? Sounds strange, isn’t it? The recent week Facebook launched a new campaign which helps the user gaining rewards with some financial incentive as the watch adverts on Facebook.

The latest campaign mainly targets gaming adverts, as when you could start playing you would have a chance to watch advert an get yourself paid, once the users views the complete advert Facebook will then reward him with Facebook Credits which further can be utilized to purchase goods on Facebook Deals or buy game coins to unlock more levels.

Hey don’t assume that you could build up an empire with this credits, lol definitely not as Facebook just pays one Facebook credit per complete view. This one credit is equivalent around 10 cents.

Have a look among some developers who have just signed up for Facebook paid advert campaign are Zynga, Digital Chocolate, CrowdStar and few others. Facebook is also in talk with Sharethrough, Epic Media, SocialVibe and Supersonic Ads as they could serve the ads on targeted locations whereas TrialPay will be the analytics provider.

via Mashable

Are you interested in growing your Twitter followers, or Facebook fans or even your no.of views on Youtube videos? Let me introduce you with a powerful, free automated Twitter tool called Twiends.

I just came across with twiends which was recommended by one of my friend Sheikh Abdul Basit, and now it has been a week since i am using this tool. The tool is quite simple to use where you can interact with hundred and thousands of genuine followers waiting to follow you. The process is also simple where you to to twiend to others profile in order to increase your point (credits/seeds). The more seeds you have the more is the chance that others could follow you.

Setting Up Twiends

You can either create your account on twiends or use your existing twitter account to login. After signing-in to twiends, navigate your browser to Settings link which you can find on top right corner. Add your Facebook profile so that you could further link your fan page/blog page with twiends. Similarly you can add your Twitter and YouTube accounts from the tabs.

As the tool is free to use but there is always a premium option where you can buy seeds. If you want to buy seeds in order others to follow you you can visit this link.

You also have to adjust no.of seeds you wish to give to your followers. At initial stage i recommend you to give 2 seeds to your Twitter followers, and 3 seeds for your Facebook likes. You can even set more or less, depends on you. Well the process is quite simple and i have personally tried Twiends, inspired with the tool so here the review goes.

Tip: For eg if you are targeting only Facebook likes then do’not add your Twitter or YouTube account as this process will purely promote likes for your facebook fan page only. Similarly use this process for other accounts too.

Visit Twiends & start increasing your profiles followers.