With Facebook’s ever-changing layout, and the fact that other social sites are encroaching on its real-time update strangle-hold, it’s easy to forget that there are some pretty nifty tricks you can pull using your humble Facebook status.
We’ve pulled together 10 great how-to tips that will help you get the most out of your status update, from official features to apps, Easter eggs, jokes and more.
Perfect for newer Facebook  users, or anyone who is looking for a refresher, read on and let us know the ones you like in the comments below.

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1. HOW TO: Add a Dislike Option to Your Status Update

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“Like” buttons are everywhere on Facebook, and they’re everywhere on the web. But what if you want to update your status or share something that your friends can “dislike?” We know, your friends can choose to

Hello friends, I'm a facebook mafia war player.I play this game all time when I enter my facebook.But I'm a working as a software developer. For this reason I can not give my time in this game.One day one of my friend told me about "Mafia War Auto player" software.I installed it and it really works and helpful.So today I want to share it with my beloved mafia war friends who can not give more time in mafia war.It's very easy to install in ur browser.This software will help you to know which job is best for level up quickly and it will also help you for accepting your gift, publish ur job help post, declare war and help, collect your money etc.It will save your so much time for playing.

Note : If you want to use this software, you must be need Mozilla Firefox browser.

Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 1, apparently, in a move to tackle an incoming threat from Google Chrome, which seems to be climbing high in the browser market at Mozilla’s expense. However, the official release is anticipated only at the end of this year.
It was announced that the beta includes a dozen of major features and improvements. One of these is the browsing tabs that have been moved to the top (this may not be in the case of Mac though) to enable users to focus on the contents. For Windows 7 and Vista users, the menu bar at the top (in earlier versions) has been replaced with a single Firefox button that has the menus. Altogether, the UI is cleaner now.

Vicky's Zone’s regular readers are smarter than the average bear when it comes to software. You're familiar with the apps we review -- or brave enough to go try them out if you haven't. Your friends and family probably aren't quite as up to speed, and they should be. There are loads of excellent free programs out there that could be saving them time and preventing headaches -- if they only had the right tools!

Let's check out five programs that they should know about...

How much do you really know about viruses, spyware, scareware, trojans, and worms? Here's a helpful guide to understanding all the different types of malware.
The point of today's lesson, of course, is to help you teach your friends and family more about the different types of malware, and debunk a few of the common myths about viruses. Who knows, maybe you'll learn a thing or two as well.

What is Malware?

The word Malware is short for malicious software, and is a general term used to describe all of the viruses, worms, spyware, and pretty much anything that is specifically designed to cause harm to your PC or steal your information.

If you haven't just gone through a reformat, these are great applications and well worth installing. If you have, then hopefully this list will provide you with a solid base of programs to get you started with your fresh, new Windows install!



Web Browsers: Chromium, Firefox
They excel at different things, so I install both browsers by default. Chromium is great for all-purpose surfing, while I use Firefox and my favorite extensions to tackle my daily web-based work.

Windows only: Soluto bills itself as an "Anti-Frustration Software", and it's not hard to see why—it tracks all the applications in your system boot process, and tells you exactly which ones are slowing you down.
Once you've installed the software and rebooted your PC, Soluto springs into action, tracking every single process that runs during the boot process, and then allows you to easily drill down into the list of processes to see exact times for each one. To make it easier for the layman to understand what processes can be removed, the applications are grouped into "No-brainer" or "Potentially removable" groups.

Google started to show a special OneBox for the FIFA World Cup, the international football tournament that will start Friday in South Africa. If you search for "world cup", you can see a list of the teams and the upcoming matches.

The 2010 World Cup starts on June 11^th, and one of the best ways to keep up on the soccer will be to watching it streaming live. Here's where you can find the World Cup soccer matches streaming online:
Photo by CLF.

Live Streaming Sites

ESPN 3 is the online streaming version of the popular sports network in the U.S.A. Their upcoming live

There’s a new Chatroulette spinoff in town: meet ChatVille. It’s a Facebook app that combines the basic video chat elements of Chatroulette with the game mechanics, badges and leveling up of casual games like FarmVille.

Just like in Chatroulette, you have the opportunity to get paired up with a total stranger — but since the app can also take advantage of your Facebook social graph, you can also invite specific friends to chat with you as well. Plus, in chatting with either strangers or friends, you have the opportunity to earn badges for specific actions, like taking your first screenshot or getting a “compliment” from another user.

International callling is now made easy due to rapid development in Networking over the past years. Many Organizations regardless they are Small or Large have been offering these services. Due to raise in competition among these companies, now to survive some organizations are providing the free International calling services.

Calling is divided into 2 categories.

• PC-PC voice calls
• PC-Phone calls

PC-PC voice calls : Instant messaging services like Skype, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk already offer these kind of services. This PC-PC calling services doesn’t come under International Calling.

PC-Phone calls : International calling services comes under this category. Many Websites were offering this service for free of cost.
Instead of buying a plan for making the International calls which is really costly affair, we are having many alternatives now a days which are providing free International calls.

With all the privacy issues surrounding Facebook, many people are considering quitting the site altogether. If you're not ready to take it that far, here's how to avoid the privacy breaches without completely deleting your account and losing touch with your friends.

Should I Quit Facebook Altogether?

We've all had that one friend who deactivated his/her Facebook and was never seen again, because no one could establish contact. As if the telephone, email, and IM were never invented, many people are at a loss as

Windows: Free utility Identity Finder scans your hard drive looking for sensitive information, like credit card numbers and passwords.

Identity Finder searches your Windows user folder, including files and browser data, for possible credit card numbers or passwords, and then lets you know so you can do something about it. The program also has a

Facebook just announced a tool that notifies you by e-mail or SMS text message when someone logs into your Facebook profile from an unknown computer.
The idea is to help you recognize when a hacker has broken into your account so you can respond quickly by either changing your password (if that’s still possible) or contacting Facebook.
Once you enable the notifications, you’ll be required to identify each computer you use to log in when you first use it and choose whether or not it’s a private or public machine. You’ll be able to see a history of registrations from machines potentially used by hackers, and of course those hackers will be forced to type something into the identification field to get in, so you should be able to tell whether it was just a login that you forgot or not.

Here’s a quick guide to turning this feature on and using it.

At the end of the match Hogg gave that ball to Sachin for his autograph.
Sachin put his sign with one beautiful sentence,

                                                                 "IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN." –



Till today Hogg could not take his wicket for the second time.

What if you could learn powerful insights into a person just by seeing his or her face? For 2,500 years, the science of Mien Shiang (pronounced myen-shung), or Chinese face reading, has given anyone who studies its form this incredible ability.

I set up a couple of pages on Facebook – our Vicky’s Zone (PLEASE JOIN!)  group – and wanted to invite all my friends, but it would have taken an eternity because for some strange reason Facebook doesn’t allow you to “select all” friends when sending an invite. I mean, they’ll let you do it… but only if you click one at a time! Uugh.
Well anyway I went on a little search and found that you could cheat the system by inserting a little javascript to make it happen! Here is how to do it:

If you’ve noticed close enough, you’ll see that with every operating system recently launched comes a set of great nature wallpapers. This has raised a fact – nature wallpaper is favored by most people. Be it a coke/pepsi fan, apple fanboy or a Microsoft supporter, I trust that you can’t resist beautiful nature wallpaper on your computer desktop. That we think, is the power of nature on technology point of view. In this article, we’d like to showcase you a list of 100+ Absolutely Beautiful Nature Wallpapers to decorate your desktop.

Did you know that if Facebook was a country, it would now be the third largest country in the world? It passed the U.S. earlier this year and is now eclipsed only by China and India in terms of raw population. That mind-boggling statistic — along with a few dozen more — are showcased in the video below, demonstrating social media’s explosive growth in recent years.

The video, produced by Socialnomics author Erik Qualman, is a follow-up piece to his original social media stats video from last summer. While some of the stats are similar to last year’s version, others are updated with new figures and some appear for the first time. Information about the sources for all the statistics are available on Qualman’s blog. A few of the highlights include:

• More than half of the world’s population is under 30.
• Facebook tops Google  for weekly U.S. Internet  traffic. 

IF you have got bored with sending tweets and messages to your twitter friends then try out Twit2Tel.com. Twit2tel is an awesome online service which allows you to make free calls to your twitter friends. You can call or leave voice messages that too without exchanging your phone numbers.

What do you need?

• An active twitter account
• Signup (Free) on Twit2tel.com

Self-proclaimed social media scientist Dan Zarrella has already applied linguistic methodologies to psychologically profile Twitter users. Now he’s using the same technology and approach to break down Facebook sharing behaviors.

Zarrella uses the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) methods to arrive at the conclusion that, “Articles … that include sexual references in their titles are shared on Facebook far more than the average story.”

Zarrella has been actively capturing 12,000 links from news sites and blogs since February of this year for analysis.

 

Note: This isn't intended as a guide to hacking *other people's* weak passwords. Instead, the aim is to help you better understand the security of your own passwords and how to bolster that security.

If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it?
Let's see… here is my top 10 list. I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I'll probably get into all of them.

1. Your partner, child, or pet's name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they're always making you use a number, aren't they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. "password"
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner's or your child's.
7. "god"
8. "letmein"
9. "money"
10. "love" 

 

Twitter started as a micro blogging network but it has now transitioned into a full fledged social network. The more internet savvy or geeks boast of their presence on twitter while there are people who use it over sms. The essence of any social network is the freedom of its users to customize their profiles. Twitter does offer some backgrounds which you can use on your profile and you can also use image as your twitter background after uploading. Some people might like a custom twitter background which can resonate more with their personality and some websites were offering it as a paid service. If you want a cheap or a free alternative to get a free custom twitter background then you might like to check out the following services.

 

 

Free Twitter Designer is a free web service to create custom Twitter backgrounds. You can start creating using a theme which you can later embellish with any text, image, colors you want on your twitter profile. The user-interface of the twitter designer is superb and drawing its comparison with ancient myspace background generators reveals two extremes of design.

There are other services which do offer the ability to customize twitter desktop backgrounds but nothing was close to Free Twitter Designer in my experience. I’d still give you some options which you can try.

MyTweetSpace reminds you of those myspace template editors that we have now started to loathe. I would suggest you try it out if you are not happy with the Free twitter designer.

Twitter Backgrounds

There are some good web services which offer free twitter backgrounds. I have tried some of them to personalize my twitter page.

Twitter Image is a fine resource for free twitter backgrounds. The designs in their gallery are categorized in different categories like Abstract, Food, Holidays, Nature etc.

 

Twitter Patterns is another equally good resource for twitter backgrounds. It offers some free abstract design patterns which you can flaunt on your twitter profile.

If you are still not satisfied with the quality of twitter backgrounds on the web services mentioned above then you can probably try creating one using Gimp or Photoshop with the help of online tutorials.

Do share your comments and the twitter background editors that you think we should have covered.

Google has released a tool which is still a beta product but very interesting and might be useful for people trying to dig into Twitter. What is does is allows you to search for interesting people on Twitter if you enter the Twitter ID of someone you are following and find interesting. This tool is called Follow Finder.

How does Follow Finder work?

 

You Tube has turned five years old. It all started on 23rd April 2005 when the first You Tube video was loaded. It was a innocuous video upload called ‘Me at the Zoo’. The website URL was registered in January 2005 but development started over the months and first video uploaded was on 23rd April of the same year. The official launch of You Tube was in October 2005.

When you first buy a new computer, it runs very smooth and fast. But later on we notice that it has become slow and freezes. Let me share my  personal experience . One month ago, my PC was working all fine. After that I had to install many new software for some reason. Then, I realized that Windows startup took way too much time. So I decided to search what may be the cause.

Why does it actually happen?

It’s because of the temporary files and garbage registry values added to the system through various ways like installing new software, adding and deleting files from hard disk, downloading items from internet.
So here, I am sharing 6 basic steps to get your PC running faster and smoother.

#1. Remove unwanted software

• Go to control panel.
• Then add/remove programs.
• Now uninstall the software which you don’t need.

Control Panel in start menu

As the number of your Facebook friends and apps you (and them) are using increases, your Facebook news feed and wall can turn into one big mess. It’s nice to communicate with your friends, but if you can’t find useful posts amidst all those silly apps, or your real friends amongst all the unknown people you’ve befriended, it’s time to clean up your Facebook profile.
Facebook offers extensive options for fine tuning what individual applications and people can see or do on your Facebook profile, but if you haven’t been following all the changes (and Facebook likes to change often), you might feel lost in all the options. We’re offering a rundown of the most efficient ways to make more sense of your Facebook experience.

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Hide Them From the Feed!

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The simplest way to control what shows up in your News Feed is to click “Hide” on an item you don’t want to see. Facebook will ask you whether you want to hide that person or page, once you confirm it, you won’t see anything from them again.

DIY site Instructables highlights an inexpensive method for breathing new life into those old, scratched CDs you're still clinging to. Their solution: a dab of Vaseline or any type of petroleum jelly.

A soft cloth or disc cleaner, petroleum jelly, and some ancient scratched CDs are all that is required for this project. Using the disc cleaner/cloth, apply the jelly to the CD. After applying it in a thorough manner, the excess grease needs to be removed. Take a cotton ball, swab it with some rubbing alcohol and start cleaning it off. The idea is that the petroleum jelly will fill in the scratches on the CD, making it—hopefully—readable.

Then again, you've got no shortage of methods for fixing those old CDs—we've also heardbananas and toothpaste will do the trick—so let us know what methods have worked best for your old CDs in the comments below.

Remove Scratches from a CD/DVD with Vaseline [Instructables]

When you want to share a file with a friend but don't want to hassle with email attachment limits or running a home server, very little beats a fast online file sharing service. Here's a look at five of your best options.

Photo by WebWizzard.


Running a home server is a nifty way to share files, but it's not for everyone; it puts the burden of maintenance, uptime, and speed on your shoulders. In fact, How-To Geek recently walked through how to easily share large files and media with friends by running a dead simple home server using Opera Unite, and while it's a great solution, online file sharing services are perfect when you want to let someone else handle the logistics.

Drop.io (Web-based, Basic: Free, Premium: From $19/Month)

WordPress fans, it’s here: the first beta of WordPress 3.0 has been released.

In a late-night announcement Jane Wells, the UX lead at Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com), laid out some of the many new features that are featured in version 3.0 beta of the popular blogging software. The first thing she points out is a new custom menus system, which she makes clear “is not quite finished.”

The big announcement of this release though is the merger of WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user), a fork of WordPress that allows multiple blogs to be operated from one installation. In WordPress 3.0, these two are fully merged, although you should probably read the instructions before taking this feature out for a test drive.

There are millions of websites out there. Many of them are unique, either in small ways or in large ones. But the individual impact of any particular site on the overall Internet is generally negligible, if there’s any impact at all.

Not so with the fifteen sites here. These sites changed the Internet, mostly for good, in substantial ways. Included here is everything from Geocities (which could probably be blamed entirely, either directly or indirectly, for every ugly web design “trend” that’s ever been) to Wikipedia (which has made information almost universally accessible) to Google (which has changed or influenced virtually everything online).

 

1. Wikipedia

Changed the way we find information. Before Wikipedia, most online encyclopedias were either sorely lacking in information, or required you to have a paid subscription to access their content. Wikipedia changed

Gojiyo – Godrej brings second life networking site to India.Godrej wants to kickin the next level of Social Networking from India , you might know ibibo, Myspace, LinkedIn, PerfSpot, BigAdda and Fropper or some of the top Social Networking site in india , Orkut is one of the top in this and now we have Godrej which want to reap in through Social Networking .

Gojiyo –

A new planet where time travel was a possibility,
teleportation a reality & flying a daily activity?
What if there was more evolved human life in a distant galaxy?
What if that world was now open to all?
Get ready to believe in a new world. Your life will change.

Many of us love the game of cricket and love Orkut. IPL matches are already being shown live on You Tube. Now could Orkut be far behind?

Now you can join the new Official IPL community on Orkut.

Official IPL community on Orkut

• It has videos from YouTube and quite handy to catch up on the action everyday as the videos are posted everyday.
• It also has a preview and poll of the next matches that are scheduled for the day.
• The forum seems to be quite active and its forum discussing the first match had a incredible 200 plus discussions.

So if you want to discuss and follow IPL with other Cricket lovers join the Official IPL community on Orkut and have a blast.

HTML5

HTML5 is basically the talk of the town right now, assuming your town is populated exclusively by web developers and Apple apologists. It's magic! It's going to save the internet! It's going to kill Flash! Etc. But really, it's more subtle than that: It's the next version of the entire language that underlies the web—HTML—and it supports a lot of interesting features, which will make websites behave more like apps. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have pretty much left Microsoft in the dust in terms for HTML5 support. Until now! Here are the HTML5 features Microsoft says IE9 will support:

• h.264 video: When people talk about HTML5 killing Flash, this is what they're talking about. Some video sites, like YouTube and Vimeo, have been experimenting with video playback that doesn't require a plugin to play. h.264 is the format standard the big sites have chosen to go with, and now Internet Explorer will support it.

• Embedded Audio: Just as the video tag allows for video to be embedded directly into a page without a plugin, the audio tag allows audio files to be embedded straight into the page. IE9 supports MP3/AAC codecs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics: Scalable vector graphics allow for the creation of certain types of graphics that scale perfectly—because they're drawn as vectors, not plain images. It can also allow for rudimentary, Flash-style animations.

• CSS3: CSS is essentially what the web is formatted with, and Internet Explorer's various CSS compatibilities have been maddening since, well, forever. IE9 supports more standards-based CSS3—including Selectors, Namespaces, Color, Values, Backgrounds and Borders and fonts—and should support more before launch. They're finally trying, is the point.

 

The New JavaScript Engine

Modern web apps are loaded with JavaScript, to the point that new browsers are practically measured by how fast they can render it. (A faster JavaScript engine means sites like Gmail, Facebook and even Gizmodo don't just load faster, but run more quickly.) Here's how Microsoft says IE9 measures up right now:

Keep in mind that this is a WebKit-designed test, and that IE9 isn't ready for release yet—Microsoft says they'll still improve the rendering speed. And really, while IE9 might not outpace the fastest browsers out there, it's at least close. And hilariously faster than IE8. In the onstage demo, IE9 didn't do terribly well on the Acid3 test, either, scoring a mediocre 55/100, which they vowed to improve. But again, they're at least trying, and when you've got the market share (and history of ignoring standards) that Microsoft does, this is, again, worth a lot.

2D Acceleration

Internet Explorer nine adds DirectX video acceleration for SVG graphics and even text rendering, which will make some SVG graphics and CSS3 rendering faster, but also applies to text rendering, which makes the entire browsing process a bit smoother.

HTML5 video rendering is much, much smoother than in Chrome (demonstrated onstage), simply because of Direct2D video rendering—Microsoft was able to demonstrate two 720p HD videos playing smoothly in the same browser window, while Chrome choked on just one. Getting this acceleration doesn't require any extra code on the website's part, though developers won't be able to depend on this kind of video acceleration in their webpages, since it's unique to IE9 and Windows, for now. More than allowing for absurd demos like this, what this means is that any video played back via the video tag in IE9 will simply use less CPU power than it would in another browser, which is an objective improvement. (Note: This won't be available on Windows XP.)

Additionally, some Javascript rendering can also be offloaded to the GPU, which, again, helps speed along rendering and responsiveness for complicated web apps.

A lot of what Microsoft is doing here could be accurately described as catchup. And aside from the 2D acceleration features, there's really not much new here, as far as your average browser is concerned. But Internet Explorer adoption is inevitable, and for Microsoft to embrace modern web standards—at least more than they have in the past—will have a measurable, positive effect on the internet, and the people who browse it. (From work, which I'm fairly sure is the only place where the computer-literate people use IE anyway.)

A Clean Break

It's hinted on Microsoft's IE9 site that some of the features of IE9 won't be compatible with XP, and some commenters have told me the prerelease version doesn't run on the aging OS. The truth, as confirmed by Mary Jo Foley, is more severe: IE9 will not support Windows XP.
A clean break at some point is inevitable, but this isn't going to go over too well with the millions of XP loyalists still out there.

The Preview

You can actually try it now, though some of the features—most conspiciously HTML5 video—aren't yet there, and the interface is still pretty barebones. (There's no proper address bar, for example, but just a "go to" popup window. This is a developers' test tool, really.) The download's available here.

If you are a FarmVille addict on Facebook then this is a must read post for all you guys. Every player who loves to play Farville must be eager to grow his/her experience (XP) and level rapidly but it’s quite difficult when you crosses 20th level as the XP gap increases more and more after that to reach to next level. All you need is to select good crop while planting seeds on your farm. Let me tell you which and how crops can help you in increasing your XP and hence level. Just read ther three tips given below to play FarmVille efficiently.

1.More planting area = More XP:

It’s always better to keep your plantation area as large as possible cuz that’s the main source of your XP. Collect some coins and buy 22X22 (largest) plantation area as soon as possible and try to give more area to plantation rather than decoration which you can do anytime once you reach a higher level. Also more plantation area will help you to earn more and more points. See the farm below which is having a total plantation area of around 450 blocks.

 

2. More Coin = More XP:

Try planting those crop which gives more coin while harvesting. You can collect those coins and buy something from them from the market which will increase your XP as well. Suppose you collected 150000 coins, you can buy a Farmhouse from them which will give you 1500 XP in return. The crops which gives more coins while harvesting with respect to their original cost are Strawberries, Eggplant, Wheat, Grapes e.t.c.

3. More time you spent = More XP you gain:

If you have lots of spare time to spent on FarmVille then try planting seeds of those crops which harvests in 4-6 hours and gives you an XP of at least one. That will help you to increase your XP in every 4-6 hours and again you can plow after that which will give you an XP of one again per plowing. Crops like this are Strawberries and Blueberries e.t.c.


So try using these FarmVille tips and don’t forget to tell us your FarmVille level.

Mafia War is another game developed by Zynga and is second to only Farmville. Its a game about being a Don in the Mafia world and win all fight we attend. To be a powerful in Mafia war, we first need to recruit others but how?

• The first step in Mafia War is to recruit a massive number of players instantly by joining mafia wars group. To do so just search “mafia wars” on Facebook search at right hand corner.

• Second buy bulk properties at once. If you buy one at a time, you need to pay more. Try to do some calculation. You also need care while buying weapons. Try to buy weapons from limited edition loots which seems often cheap and good. E.g. Bullet Proof Vest instead of Body Armor which requires an upkeep of $400.

• Max all the job tiers to unlock the bonus items and deposit your money so that you will safe from get stolen.

• Too many mafia friends in your friend list? Create a friend list and collate all the mafia friends into that list. It would be neater that way and you can’t help your mafia friends when they request for help out in game, unless they’re in your friend list.

• Join the mafia mailing list to receive limited time items, rewards, updates, offers!

• Collect all the collectible so that you can unlock hidden stats point from the Collection and Vaults section.

• And finally enjoy the game and give a time to work around.

A few other interesting data points from the study include:

- 12% of respondents check/use Facebook every couple of hours
- 62% of individuals over the age of 25 see electronic communications during a meeting, meal, sex or bathroom act as unwanted interruptions
- 23% of iPhone owners primarily get their morning news from Twitter and Facebook

While we can’t verify that the data is representative of the entire population, most of these stats — which might be surprising on first look — should be expected. Now that smartphones with apps are ubiquitous, it’s quite logical that these devices would accompany their owners even in the most private or intimate of scenarios.