Three options to optimize communication via web

The web communication area is without a doubt, one of the most powerful of all areas; that has advanced lot in short time, thanks to the technology advances and the complex convergence that characterizes the Internet. We can say that there are many ways to communicate as platforms, but only few of them provide accurate solutions. Here are three of the most popular and used: ooVoo, TweetDeck and Windows Live Messenger 2011.

ooVoo is an application that was thought for VoIP clients, being its main competitor Skype. One of the main advantages that ooVoo has is the possibility of having video conference for up to 6 simultaneous users. It also offers the possibility of creating chat channels between ooVoo users and add them to a website. What´s more, with ooVoo you can record and send video messages up to 5 MB. One disadvantage we might find is regarding audio and video quality which depends on the Internet connection the user has, although this is surprisingly good.

To sump up, ooVoo has a nice interface design in 3D format that together with its technical functionality, offers an intuitive user-friendly platform to the user.

On the other hand, TweetDeck, is an application that allows the integration of social networks such as: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Buzz and MySpace, among others. Its creation answered the aim of Twitter users that wanted to read and post tweets in a personalized interface, and even split the screen into as many columns as categories they want. Another feature that stands out in TweetDeck is to shorten the URLs from its interface, with just one click on the link (very useful when tweeting only 140 characters.)

Even thought TweetDeck and ooVoo are two applications for online communications that successfully meet the expectations of their users, without a doubt, Windows Live Messenger 2011, the new version of the popular Microsoft´s messaging client, is the most popular one and stands out for its new functionality. Among them we can find the possibility that users of the new Windows Live Messenger 2011 can synchronize their accounts with social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

In addition to this, another improvement they have made regarding its interface is that the conversations are no longer in different windows but now the main window includes them, assigning an individual tab for each one. This gives a better control of the conversation organizing them. Another feature we cannot left mentioning is that they added something new to the new format of Windows Live Messenger 2011, the file transfer has come out on top in this new development, as well as the ability to post status updates in different social networks from the same interface.

As we saw before, the options are many and good, but your choice will depend on which is the primary concern you have when communicating over the web, there you will have to choose between: ooVoo, TweetDeck or Windows Live Messenger 2011

TweetDeck and Twitter news for those who enjoy it in real time

TweetDeck is without a doubt one of the most used and best Twitter clients. A platform where you can see users ‘timeline’, ‘terms’, ‘lists’ and much more in the same window. But the news is that, after being tested for a long time, Twitter finally released the API User Streams so that all customers and applications like TweetDeck can function without restrictions.

From this release made by Twitter, TweetDeck users will be particularly benefited on the tweets display in real time. To do this go to ‘Enable real-time Twitter Streaming’ from “Settings”> ‘Twitter’.

This extension goes along with news that brings the latest update of TweetDeck. Among some of the most interesting we can mention the column of ‘mentions’ in which we can see which of our fans have marked some of our tweets as favorites.

The same happen in ‘followers’ column, from which it is possible to see when someone is included in a new list.
Twitter and TweetDeck are both updated, one releasing an API User Streams and the other taking advantage of this, but both with the clear aim to remain being the most chosen and offering user satisfaction.

How to add services to Trillian Astra, the ultimate multinetwork client

The new version of the best-known multinetwork messaging client brings new functions and support for extra platforms, and most important, a clear intention of simplifying its use. Let’s see how to add services like Twitter, Facebook, Windows Messenger MSN, etc. to our Trillian Astra.

Those who are taking their first steps in Trillian Astra will be aided by the excellent settings assistant by means of which they can add their accounts to combine the profiles of the several social networks in one single program. Or, if you have already used Trillian Astra and you want to add an account, like for instance your Facebook profile, this is what you need to do.

From Trillian Astra’s main interface you must access the option ‘Trillian’>> ‘Manage connections’ in the menu bar on the top. There you will see all the accounts associated to Trillian Astra up to now, but you can also add new connection using the button on the right bottom corner of the window. Another window will appear where you must indicate the service you want to add, such as Facebook in this case. Then fill in the fields ‘User name’, ‘E-mail address’ and ‘Password’ and click on ‘Connect’.

This is all you need to do to add a new service to Trillian Astra. In this way, you’ll be able to access it together with other services, like Twitter, Google Talk, ICQ, Windows Messenger MSN, all of them together in the same window.

Now Twitter suggests accounts that should follow

Every day, we find out about new features that the most popular social networks add to their functions. The latest one is Twitter’s user suggestion tool, like Facebook’s one.

Just like the social network that recently reached 500 million users did, Twitter now suggests users based on the people our followers follow. Thanks to this tool we can now find more users with whom we share interests, which is the basis over which this microblogging network works.

The new function, which is not available for all the users yet, can be accessed in Twitter’s “Search people” section. There, we will find a tab with the suggestions. One point against this tool is probably the fact that it cannot be deleted. The suggestions will be offered no matter what.

So, now we will not only find other users’ suggestions like the ones offered in Twitter with the #FF. The system itself will take care of providing possible account to start following. It will be a matter of how this functionality develops with time and how it is received by the users.

Facebook and Twitter speed up the sending of data with BitTorrent

Nowadays, when many people have forgotten about its wonderful advantages and others have become part of the ill-intentioned discredit trend led by those who fight piracy, P2P technology gains predominance among leading companies worldwide. Facebook and Twitter are some of the companies that, using BitTorrent in particular, revived peer-to-peer in favor of their processes and achieved an increase of up to 750% in the file exchange speed between their servers.

Twitter’s engineers, led by Larry Gadea, are concentrated in Murder Project and have made huge time savings in data transfer rate between servers by means of torrent technology. According to Gadea, since they started using BitTorrent, exchange processes that used to take 40 minutes now take only “12 seconds”. This is a very important achievement, especially if we consider that in a company everything is measured according to its profitability.

But not only Twitter has revived P2P, which is known worldwide for the popularity that programs like µTorrent, Azureus, BitComet or BitTorrent itself achieved. Facebook also supports this business trend towards speeding up information exchange between servers. Systems engineer Tom Cook, the specialist spokesman of the company that has grown the most lately, stated that the company has been able to afford real problems with web servers since Facebook started using BitTorrent technology to transfer code to them.

Thanks to the new use given to this technology, which is far from that controversial use criticized by legislators and opponents of piracy, two giants have demystified any kind of campaign against torrents and BitTorrent technology, and have cleared the way for many more companies to choose this system. In addition, this may be a breath of fresh air that can make programs like µTorrent, Azureus, BitComet, BitTorrent, etc. be valued again, since they have lost popularity to new download managers such as JDownloader or VDownloader, among others.

Cooperative and commercial, P2P technology comes back to the competition, this time with the help of BitTorrent, and does battle with its main virtue: its ability to speed up the data transfer rate exponentially between servers (or PCs, in the case of using it at home) so as to save time and money, of course.

“Pay with a Tweet”, the new payment method that’s becoming popular in the Web

Yes, you read that right. It is more and more common to find websites that offer services or products for a tweet in your personal Twitter page. The reason is that the publicity impact of reaching all the followers of that Twitter user can sometimes be more powerful than a payment. Especially if we consider how popular this microblogging service and its most widely used add-ons and applications (TweetDeck, VoxOx, Emesene, Blu, MadTwitter, byTAGG and Twhirl) have become.

This strategy is backed up by one of the strongest and most popular tools of direct marketing: the famous ‘word-of-mouth marketing’. Statistics show that often the opinion of a friend or forum member is taken into account more than the advertisement in itself. So those website that choose to ‘charge’ one tweet for a product know the impact it will make on that user’s followers, especially if the user is popular, when they see those ‘140-character recommendation post about certain product’.

Web 2.0 experience indicates that this marketing fashion is effective and is, usually, spread like a virus in the Web. Twetter.com has become more user-friendly, especially because of the applications developed for this microblogging client (TweetDeck, VoxOx, Emesene, Blu, MadTwitter, byTAGG and Twhirl), and the users will surely find this kind of ‘tweets’ absolutely natural.

Given the exponential increase in the number of users who enjoy this service and the new applications that are constantly released, it was to be expected that the market would make the most of Twitter’s potential to its advantage. What’s surprising about this is that there is no money transaction, you only allow the company offering a product or service to advertise it in a tweet in your page in order to introduce it to all your ‘followers’.

This original way of interpreting the ‘collaborative’ characteristic, highly praised by young professionals who want to offer their services, is extremely popular nowadays in social networks and appears now as a new payment method: ‘pay with a tweet’. The most important thing is that, beyond its being effective or not as an advertising tool, the one who benefits most with it is the Twitter user.

MadTwitter, the most widely used client of the microblogging in fashion: Twitter

Twitter is the most popular and widely used microblogging in the world and is attracting more and more fans and users every day. But more important is the fact that more and more add-ons and applications are proliferating to make the most of it. One of the applications with a good reputation is MadTwitter, a client that enables you to access your Twitter account directly from the PC’s desktop.

First you must configure the view mode in order to follow up all your Twitter activities with MadTwitter, apart from stating your user name and password.

To do so, fill in the fields ‘User’ and ‘Password’ and configure the following fields according to your needs (‘Check twits’, ‘Notification on new twits’, etc.). It is also possible to select the application’s default language unfolding the option ‘Language’.

Once you finish with the main settings, MadTwitter will run automatically and log in to show the latest twits in your account.

In the bottom of the screen there is a field for you to publish your own Twits. By clicking on the image of any of your followers or anyone’s twit you can access his/her account directly.

As you see, MadTwitter was specially developed by combining simplicity and usefulness in a small application so that we don’t have to open a browser, which can save us from getting into trouble, for example at the office.

Connecting to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace with TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an application through which we’ll be able to interact with several social networks at the same time, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. To do it, once we access, we need to go to the icon that is located on the top right corner with a tool, which is the one to let us access the configurations. On the emerging window, we click on the right panel on “Accounts”, and then on the menu that opens “Add New Account”. Once we load all of them and connect, we are ready to see them simultaneously.

On that same configuration window, we can also define the appearance of the program, like colors and format of the notifications among other things. To do it we move through the different eyelashes.

Once we are on the main screen to update our status from TweetDeck, we’ll click on the yellow button located on the top left margin opening up a field where we’ll introduce the text to publish. On the right side on top of that field, we’ll find buttons that will let us include pictures on the post. To select from which accounts we want to publish, we indicate them checking their names on the top left part of the field being able to do it from all the ones we have registered at the same time.

On the main window we’ll see that we have a series of columns or panels, with the logo to the right of the service to which they belong. By clicking on the logo, we close the column. To open a new panel we need to click on the button with the “+” sign, located next to the button “Compose Update”. On the window that opens, we’ll indicate what we want to be displayed on it and from which account. As regards Facebook, to filter the contacts that we are only interested in, we click on “Create New Group”, determining right there those from which want to see the news.

An easy way to find what we want to see on a panel is by making a quick filter according to a keyword, being able to do it with a series of buttons on the lower part of each panel. On the field that opens we write the name, date or source and the filter is activated.

To perform tasks like answering a post or writing on somebody’s wall, we put the mouse on the contact’s image, and we’ll see that a series of options will appear according to the service it belongs to. Like that, very easily, we’ll be able to interact with our contacts with a single click.

To disconnect from the different opened accounts, we need to click on the button located on the top right margin of the main window, what will make TweetDeck to close as well.

ICQ 7: now it’s possible to integrate different social networks

After being the first massive program of instant messaging 13 years ago, ICQ disappeared from the spotlight. As a matter of fact, it didn’t disappear, it just lost market to other programs of the same kind as Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.

Trying to gain prominence again, we find ICQ 7. The program counts with an updated and modern interface. As soon as we enter we find a series of eyelashes from where we can add contacts and do searches, see status updates and send SMS, apart from having on the top part a field to update our status.

This new version of the program not only lets us chat through its own protocol, but also integrates with different social networks like Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, being able to update our status directly from ICQ 7 and simultaneously.

To be able to synchronize with other 2.0 webs, after we registered and got our user on ICQ 7, in the event we didn’t have one before, we go to “Set up your feeds” and on the eyelash “My box” from which we’ll be redirected to a webpage in which we’ll need to enter our username and password. We’ll be able to see our contacts’ updates directly from the ICQ 7 window.

Furthermore, it counts with the traditional contact search that will allow us to locate contacts on the area we want, and start a conversation from the window of the program. ICQ 7 chat window looks very similar to the one of the last Windows Live Messenger versions. It has incorporated buttons for emoticons, to send files, change fonts and more. Moreover, we can also add an image as avatar apart from being able to see our contacts’.

Another remarkable improvement is the incorporation of the possibility to send SMS messaged from the same window of the program in a quick and simple way within a few clicks, being able to store the numbers of our contacts to easily access them again.

This way, ICQ 7, turning into a multiprotocol client, looks for the integration with other social networks, recover territory. If it’s true that there are other applications that perform the same task like Digsby, Pidgin or Miranda IM to name a few, it’s worth it trying the news of this old contender.

As it became known recently among off-the-record versions, the new Windows Live Messenger version will try to integrate itself with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. What’s truth is that there are already other instant messenger clients like Digsby, Pidgin or ICQ 7 that perform this integration, although in different ways.
ICQ 7, the new version of the messenger that reigned during the end of the 90s and beginning of this century, incorporates apart from an updated and attractive interface, a support from which it’s possible to access to the notifications from Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Twitter y YouTube. Apart from being able to carry on conversations through its own protocol, from the ICQ 7 window you can update the status of the social networks, in simultaneous or individually, as also upload photos. However, it doesn’t have any feature for the user to chat with his contacts, friends or followers from its own windows, and in some cases, this can be a little small to view the content of some of the social networks.

Who lets us do this is Digsby, which, as opposed to the previous one, doesn’t have its own protocol. Despite this, this program is a messenger client that has support for many protocols like Msn, Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, MySpace IM, Jabber and even ICQ.

Moreover, it lets us easily see the updates for the status, notifications and other publications from our contacts on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter. We can also see from its window the inbox from email services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL/IM Mail and from POP e IMAP accounts. Digsby becomes a very good option integrating a great amount of options on its window.

An application that started developing long time ago as a multiprotocol is Pidgin. It has support for a great number of instant messenger protocols like MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, AIM and IRC, to name the most popular ones. Apart from that, using an add-on you can also incorporate Facebook and publish on Twitter. Furthermore, it counts with many options to administer our contacts and conversations, with automatic messages, and other unusual options like the “psychic mode”, which is known as one of the bests on that aspect.

Without a doubt, the tendency that comes developing for years of integrating the 2.0 Webs with the instant messengers it’s going to be a highlight in a few months. We can follow this trend by using any of these programs, it can be Digsby, if what interest us the most is to have access to all the services on a single window, Pidgin, if we want to have probably the best messenger client as regards options without losing sight of the integration possibilities with other 2.0 webs, or it can be ICQ 7, if we go for an updated and attractive interface.