Instagram allows us to vicariously live through others, experiencing their moments with them. It's an enormously popular application and has already garnered 100 million users, but it has only been made available for download on Android and Apple devices.
If you have a lot of friends on Facebook, chances are that every day is at least one of their birthdays. If you took the time to individually post a message every time, you'd spend ALL of your time on Facebook, but you don't want to be a bad friend either. Let's face it, some people take this stuff personally.
If you want to know the most up-to-date news on a trending topic, Twitter can be a great place to look since people generally tweet about things as they happen. It used to be easy to find Twitter results in Google Search, but after their deal expired last year, tweets are no longer included in search results.
Google recently changed the way we search online, and from what I can tell, I'm not the only person online just a little bit irritated with the new design.
Facebook has always been notoriously difficult to customize. Personally, I think this is an improvement over MySpace's totally open platform (some people should not use code), but users should still have the option to change a few things if they want.
There's really nothing safe about transmitting sensitive information electronically, but even if it gets there safely without being seen by prying eyes, there's no guarantee what happens to it once it reaches its destination. And let's face it, there are some things that you just don't want floating out there forever. So what can you do?
In today's world of social media, there's really only two powerhouses—Facebook and Twitter. And those of you with Twitter accounts know the power of a Tweet. Getting more followers means reaching more people, but the vast majority of Tweeters are following only a handful of Twitterers themselves. Do you ever wonder why them? What's so special about these selected followed users? Is it worth it to follow them, too?
Election day is less than two weeks away and the political rhetoric is at an all time high. From the constant political commercials to the endless cable news coverage, it's hard to escape the noise. And nothing is worse than your social media sanctuaries being invaded by some clown's personal political insights.
Have a super secret spy communication you'd like to send out, but don't have the funds to hire your own trusted operatives to deliver the message? Then stick to what you're used to—email it.
Link shorteners like TinyURL and Bitly are great for Twitter (or anytime you're limited on space), but they're also great for hackers. It's easy to hide a malicious link in an innocent-looking shortened URL, which increases the chances that people will click on it.
Having all of your stuff in the cloud is super convenient if you want to access it on multiple devices, or if you want a backup in case it gets lost or wiped. The biggest downside with services like Dropbox, though, is security. With everything sitting there in one place, the last thing you want is for someone to break in.
When you're at work or in class, there's nothing more annoying than sites that automatically play media. One minute you're happily distracting yourself, and the next, you're scrambling to hit pause while everyone stares at you. Not to mention now your boss knows you're slacking off.
The convenience of storing things on the cloud can definitely make life easier, but if you're storing sensitive files, it could be a total disaster if anyone hacked your account. Some encryption services can be expensive, but if you just need it for personal use, there are some really great ones that don't cost anything. Here are three programs that let you encrypt your cloud storage for free.
As if you needed another reason to lock down your Facebook profile, the company's sketchy new partnership with data mining firm Datalogix is geared towards giving advertisers more information on what you're doing—even when you're not online. It's just not enough that they can target ads based on your preferences, now they want to know how those ads are influencing your buying habits in the real world.
In college, I enjoyed eating, sleeping and making my roommate's life a living hell. My most satisfying prank involved 500 red cups stapled together, filled with water, and strewn across his bedroom floor. He was not happy. To clean up, he had to unstaple each cup, carry it to the bathroom, and dump the water. He was furious, but I was okay with sacrificing our friendship in exchange for a fantastic story that I'll probably tell my grandkids one day.
Browser extensions help us do all sorts of things, and there's one for just about everything, but like anything else, they can be easy to get carried away with. If you use a lot of add-ons, your browser is probably running some of them in the background on sites that don't actually use them for anything. You can disable them, but it's a pain to change your settings all the time, which is where Extension Automation comes in.
This handy video tutorial presents instructions for getting an Internet browser on your Xbox 360 game console without any mods. All you'll need to follow along is to configure Xbox Media Center, or XMBC, to use the computer you use to surf the Internet. Get a web browser on your Xbox with this how-to!
There have been plenty of headlines recently about fake followers in both politics and entertainment. Everyone gets hit by a spam account here and there, but when a large percentage of someone's followers are fake, it can look pretty bad, especially with influential people being accused of buying their followers to look more popular.
Creative Commons is awesome—really. If an image, video, or audio file is tagged with a CC license, that means you can use it as long as you give appropriate credit to the owner. For bloggers with no money for pricey stock media, it's a godsend. When you license your own media under CC, you can choose how you want it to be used by others and whether or not it can be used commercially.
Facebook recently added some features to its Messages, Chat and Groups that a lot of people have found to be somewhat sketchy. Facebook's "read receipts" tell people exactly who has viewed posts and messages, so you can no longer get away with the old, trusted excuse of "What message?"
Cropping images can be a huge pain if you have a bunch to do at once. Even if you have Photoshop or a similar program, the process of opening each individual photo and cropping them one at a time can take forever. A free web-app called Cropp.me makes that task a lot easier by auto-cropping your photos to whatever size you choose.
Considering how easy and convenient Photoshop has become, even for the average computer user, it's nearly impossible to tell whether a photo is authentic, or if it's had some "improvements."
Want the convenience of a throwaway email address without all the hassle? How about anonymous text messaging so you can get to know someone before giving them your real information? Gliph has you covered.
Too many accounts, too little time. If this sounds like the story of your life, you're not alone. That's where If This, Then That (IFTTT) comes in. It's a site that lets you automate tasks in 50 different channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Craigslist, WordPress, YouTube, and even your own phone and email accounts.
Whether you're making a poster, drawing a logo or designing a website, the font you use can make a huge difference in any visual design, and the ones available in most word processors can get pretty boring. There are thousands of sites online where you can download free fonts, and even a few that let you design your own. Here are some of the best.
When you really think about it, registering for any website is a little scary. Not only do they now have your name, email address, and a username/password combination you might've used elsewhere, but certain sites and services ask for quite a bit more private information. From phone numbers to addresses to birth dates and more, that company now has all of your information stored.
Tethering your Android phone basically turns it into a mobile hotspot, allowing you to funnel a 3G or 4G internet connection from your phone into your PC or laptop via USB. As you might expect, phone carriers brought the hammer down in an effort to stop users from getting around the fees they charge to normally allow you to do this.
We all have that friend. You know, the one who can't resist posting pictures on Facebook of every single thing their newborn does. Babies are cute and all, but new parents don't seem to get that not everyone wants to see a play-by-play of every moment of their child's existence. For the rest of us, Unbaby.me is here to help.
With all the excitement over the Mars rover landing this weekend, you might also want to know that Google has gotten their cameras into the Kennedy Space Center for their largest collection of Street View imagery to date. In total, the explorable facility totals 6,000 panoramic views.
Dropbox announced Tuesday that a recent security breach compromised a list that included the email addresses of certain Dropbox users. To avoid future complications, the service announced that it would be implementing two-factor authentication, and even more useful, a security page that lets you monitor all activity on your account.
In an effort to help posters see the various ways that people discover their posts, Q&A site, Quora has decided to make who views each post, public, along with information on how each viewer came to see the question (ex: through an email, a followed tag, or other public stream).
If you have trouble deciding on just one cover photo for your Facebook profile, this new app is perfect for you. It's called InstaCover and it lets you create your own cover out of Instagram photos. They can be your own photos or you can choose from all of the public photos by other Instagram users. All you need is a Facebook account.
We all know the dangers of logging on to our personal accounts on public networks, but we pretty much all do it anyway—especially when it comes to Facebook. But the next time you're in a public place and can't wait to check out your Facebook news feed, use this simple trick to make sure that no one gets a hold of your password.
Most of us have what seems to be a never-ending list of articles that we want to read... someday. A new web app called SoundGecko can help you get started on that list by converting your articles with text-to-speech technology so you can listen to them instead.
It's summer, which means vacations, barbeques, and, most importantly, no school. But that doesn't mean you can't learn something while you lounge by the pool. Schools and organizations all over the country are offering online courses taught by real professors—for free.
There's a strange grey area for "guerrilla filmmaking" on YouTube. Generally, someone shooting a video needs to get permission from the people in it to show their faces. But on YouTube, that "rule" is more of a suggestion (and sometimes not even that).
Tired of seeing all of those ads in your browser? The flashing ones make for a terrible browsing experience, and those rollover ones are just downright annoying. If you don't want to be bothered by them again, you've got a few choices, depending on what web browser you're using.
In a recent arbitrage tip, we showed you the secret to making money fast by buying and selling the same thing over and over again on eBay. But there's one thing you need to know about the buying part—get the lowest price possible! This article aims to show you some of the best methods to making sure you're paying the lowest prices on eBay, so you're the best arbitrageur out there, with your profits higher than ever!
If you're trying to hack someone's wifi, a useful bit of software you may want to try is called Wireshark. Wireshark is a wifi packet sniffer, which is an essential step in actually breaking into someone's wireless system. Of course, this is illegal, so make sure you're only doing it to test a network's security, or for your own educational purposes. Check out the video, follow the steps and see how secure network is. Hack, hack, hack!
Back in the eighties, I used to hate television commercials, but I eventually got used to them. Had to, in order to enjoy my favorite shows. Then, the increasing number of billboard ads annoyed me in the nineties. They followed me everywhere I went—no escape—persuading me to buy the newest whatever. It seemed like Big Brotherism—like They Live. But, I got used to it. When I finally entered the digital age and became a web addict, I was peeved at the constant sight of online ads everywhere I...
Given that megastar internet search engine Google became its own verb a few years ago, we've all come to acknowledge that the wide and ever-expanding engine is becoming more powerful than ever before. You can take a look at your own house from outer space via Google Earth, you can look at famous paintings - down to the very last grizzly brushstroke - via Google Art Project, and you can look at what's hot and what's not in Spain - or anywhere in the world - with Google Trends.
WPA-secured wireless networks, or WiFI Protected Access, is a form of internet security that secures your wireless LAN from being accessed by unauthorized users. Safer than WEP, or wireless equivalent privacy, WPA still has weaknesses that are prone to cracking - IF, that is, you know what you're doing.
"Connect via Facebook" — these words are coated on over a million websites nowadays, but Facebook Connect poses a risk of leaking personally identifiable information to those third parties. If you're not convinced Facebook Connect is safe, then turn off the flow of personal data to those websites!
Want to know someone's private website password? It's the biggest wanted hack: passwords, but how do you do it? Well, this tutorial shows you how to hack any password on any site with JavaScript. But this works best on public computers because multiple people log on to them, which means a better chance at unintentionally stored passwords. It helps to know a little bit about JavaScript before attempting this password hack.
This video tutorial will teach you a simple hack that will allow you to hide a secret message in any digital picture. Who knew a picture could actually be worth a thousand words? Real words, embedded within! For detailed, step-by-step instructions on recreating this hack yourself, take a look. Keep your messages on the Internet secret with this how-to.
Watch this how-to video and learn some tricks and hacks that you can do with Google. Google has a pretty good sense of humor, so there are a lot of hidden programs to play around with. Watch this video tutorial and learn how to hack, play tricks, and find Easter Eggs on Google.
