How to Find Friends From Gmail Contact List Who are on Facebook and Vice Versa

When a new user signs up for Facebook, he is prompted to use the friend finder that allows the user to find the friends who are on his email contact list. Facebook’s Friend Finder is integrated with the major email services like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc and makes it easier to add your friends to your Facebook profile. But last December, Google made some slight changes in its Terms of Service saying that any service that accesses Google’s Contacts API (that supports OAuth) will need to offer reciprocity. As Facebook doesn’t allow that, you won’t be able to directly import the contacts to Facebook by direct communication with Gmail. But you can export your Gmail contacts and then import them to Facebook. You can also pull contacts from Facebook to Gmail with Yahoo as the intermediate between them.

Facebook had added a direct link to export all Gmail contacts but now that has been removed. So you’ll need to export the contacts using Gmail’s interface. To do this, click on “Contacts” on the left hand menu of Gmail. From the More Actions dropdown, select “Export Contacts”. Choose the Contact group that you want to export or just export your whole contact list in Outlook CSV format. Download it and headover to Facebook friend finder. Click on “Other Tools” and then on “Upload Contact File”. Now upload the contact file downloaded from Gmail and you’re done.

Now you can also add friends from Facebook to your Gmail contacts. Well Facebook doesn’t allow direct integration with Gmail services. So, you’ll have to take the help of Yahoo account. For this purpose, login to your Yahoo account and click on “Contacts” from the menu. Now you’ll see all your contacts in a list. Next go to Tools>Import or access it directly from the link below “Popular Tools”. Now select Facebook and provide your Facebook credentials. Don’t worry, the authorization process is safe and secured. Confirm for Importing email addresses and in a few moments, all your Facebook contacts can be found in your Yahoo contacts. Next step is to export this as a CSV file which you can do from Tools> Export. Download the CSV file to your hard disk. Now, head over to Gmail again and import this file from the same place where you exported your contacts. A few seconds later, all the contact information of your Facebook friends will land to your Gmail contacts.

With this little workaround, you can find friends from Gmail contact list who are on Facebook and vice versa.

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Guest post made by Bishal Adhikari from Tech Tips

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xFruits: A Review

[A guest post by Bishal Adhikari from Tech Tips and Tricks]

RSS Feeds are a great way to get regularly updated on the latest news on your favorite blogs. But there are people who don’t know much about RSS feeds or about subscribing to them but could be used to reading PDFs(ebooks). So, if you don’t want to lose such readers, xFruits is a great tool to get PDFs out of your feeds.

You can have readers directly read the PDF version of your feeds. xFruits has a handful of useful tools to get more out of your RSS feeds. Using the RSS-to-PDF tool, you can easily convert your RSS feed to PDF format. Or if you like, you can add a download PDF button to every post on your blog so that readers directly download the PDF from any post they come across. Isn’t that cool?

Most of the popular blogs have their content available for the mobile users and have a fully optimized mobile version of their sites. But everyone may not have the resources to run a mobile version of their websites. xFruits comes in handy for this purpose as well. xFruits lets you make a very simple HTML version of your blog with its RSS-to-Mobile tool. Add your feed URL to the RSS-to-Mobile tool, add relevant tags, click publish and you’re done. After this, the feed gets published via a URL on your xFruit profile which displays all of the latest post titles from your feed in the left navigation bar. The content on the other hand is displayed in the main panel.

The site generated by xFruits isn’t cool at looks and is extremely simple. But it opens and loads fast and is perfect for opening with mobile browsers like Opera or Firefox’s Fennec for mobile. Besides this it also sends your new data feed to other syndication services like Technorati and MyYahoo.

xFruits is a great tool to use your RSS feed in multiple ways. Go ahead and give it a try.

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Twitter Widgets in Image Format

[A guest post by Bishal Adhikary from Tech Tips and Tricks]

Twitter has become a way of life for the tech savvy that are into Web 2.0 and blogging. A Twitter widget with the latest updates is indispensable for blogs these days. Generally, the Twitter widgets embedded on blogs are Flash based or generated via Javascript. There are many tools that help you create a Twitter widget. You can also create a custom Twitter widget using Google Spreadsheets. But do you know that you can also show your twitter updates on blogs as images? The best thing about images is that they can be used anywhere—forums, blogs, MySpace etc.

Tweetsnap [Tweetsnap.com]: When you open up tweetsnap, you will see a simple page with a field to enter your twitter username. After you enter your name and hit the Find button, you'll see your most recent tweet on a nice bluish Twitter widget that is in image format (png). Below it, you'll find snippets of code to copy and paste on your site. Just copy what's desirable for you and use it on your blog, forum etc.

TwitterSticker [Twittersticker.com]: This one lets you choose from a couple of images. Select one among the four different types of images. Now go ahead and enter your twitter username and customize the font, rotation, text wrap, etc. One great option about TwitterSticker is that you can set an angle for your text so that it appears diagonally on the badge.

SayTweet [Saytweet.com]: It first asks you to upload one of your images. You can also add a group photo of you and your friends. This amazing tool lets you add your Twitter update on this image in speech bubbles. The unique feature of this is that you can add multiple Twitter usernames and show tweets from everyone. I think it's the coolest way to display tweets.

So play around with these tools and get a pretty twitter badge to put in your site, forums, or anywhere else. You can also embellish your twitter page by creating a custom Twitter background.

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Microsoft Vine: A New Contestant in Social Warfare

Tuesday, Microsoft announced its new social tool, MS Vine. It's private beta now, and you need an invitation to start on it. You can request one from the Vine home page. With pretty much everything to connect social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Vine will be a new social tool.

With Facebook on the top of social networks and even Google having its not-so-popular-in-the-US social network, Orkut, it was high time for MS to start one.

Vine can help you get alerts about your family, friends, and places you care about through a dashboard with a map-studded architecture. Vine, as envisaged by MS, is to keep people connected at the time of crises. This is why Vine connects you to about 20,000 news and public safety sources, which will update you about everything you care about.

Vine also works closely with Facebook and Twitter, sending status updates of your friends and family. In order to know more about Vine, check out the TechCrunch story.

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Is Your Twitter Account Affected Too?

We've addressed the most recent variant of the Mikeyy worm. Still, we suggest that you avoid viewing the profiles of users posting uncharacteristic or otherwise suspicious tweets.

This appeared as one of the recent Twitter statuses. Michael 'Mikeyy' Mooney, a Brooklyn teen created the worm called Mikeyy which affected Twitter two days ago. Afterwards, Mooney also got lucky with a spot-job from ExqSoft, which probably was looking for astute hackers.

The Mikeyy worm is primarily intended to send out unnecessary tweets from hijacked Twitter user accounts. The Oprah Winfrey account (@Oprah), CNN breaking news account (@Cnnbrk), and the Ellen DeGeneres Show account (@TheEllenShow) are only some of the celebrity Twitter accounts hijacked by Mikeyy.

Protect Your Twitter Account

I had shared my recent experience in which my Twitter and Facebook accounts were hacked by the wine guy or his compatriots. It is always wise to stay safe with your accounts, no matter how less often you use them. Here are some tips.

1. Remove your browser cookies and turn off JavaScript before doing the following.

2. Reset your passwords and use the most-difficult-to-guess ones.

3. Don't share your password with any unrecognized Twitter tools or online services.

4. Don't share your passwords.

Conclusion

If you have any experience with any account hijacking, like mine, please write about it in the comments. Also, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feed.

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Turning Firefox Into Internet Explorer

There are quite a few online applications that still need the slower Internet Explorer browser to work better. In games such as Facebook Mob Wars, IE is the preferred browser for bounty hunting. But how can you, as a Firefox (Fx) lover, use these applications? I am definitely not going to crank up the old IE and wait to get it to do things. There is a better way for that. You can turn your Mozilla Firefox into Internet Explorer.

With a tiny add-on, you can make Firefox tabs turn into Internet Explorer tabs. The add on is the IE tab add-on available from Mozilla Add-on site. Simply click the button 'Add to Firefox' to start installation, and restart the browser once installed.

Once installed, you can convert any tab you open on Firefox into an Internet Explorer tab, which works on the IE rendering engine. You just need to right-click the title of the newly opened tab, and click the option, 'Switch Rendering Engine'. All your IE settings will be available on this tab. Any application that works only on IE can now be made to work inside Firefox.

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Taking Control of Your Blog: Some Social Interaction Tips

Blogging doesn't involve writing and publishing a new post in your niche alone. It's far more than that. In essence, a blogger is a social person, with strong and valuable views in his topic. He has to update himself daily of whatever is happening in the niche, and post opinions. Also, the blogger has to have tight relationships with the readers and users. Let's see some of the social interaction tips for bloggers.

1. Create About Me Page With Credentials

Your readers, after looking at first few of your articles, want to know who wrote them. So, it is very convenient to display your personal information, with credentials. If you are blogging on behalf of a group or organization, you can make the blog more authentic this way.

2. Read and Embed News Aggregators

A blogger keeps current on the topic news. Also, most bloggers will find it beneficial to show the niche news on the blog itself as a widget. You can do this by showing most dugg posts, Google News widget, or any social widget that concentrates on his niche.

3. Read, Moderate, and Reply to Comments

Keep a strict comment policy, and reply to any comment that requires a reply. The readers of your blog should evolve a belief that you are there to help them.

4. Read and Interact With Reader Blogs

Though on becoming more and more popular it may be almost impossible for you to do this, try your best to visit a reader's blog on similar topic occasionally and imparting valuable suggestions through comments. If possible, even consider guest-posting in them.

5. Acquire Suggestions and Make Changes

It's very important that you ask suggestions to your readers. Improve your blog according to these suggestions. You can be more user-friendly in this through polls, surveys, etc., besides just comments.

6. Social Media Interaction

You should ideally place icons to your social media profiles in your blog. This will help you acquire more friends and build a better network. Remember, however, not to place links to inactive profiles (something I have yet to do).

7. Contribute Globally As Well As Locally

Most bloggers have top publications (online and offline) in their niche. There are publications with a more global reach as well as a local reach. It is very important for you to contribute well to these publications, after becoming quite an authority in the niche with your blog.

Conclusion

Those and many different strategies can be used to develop your blog. If you have more suggestions for better social growth of the blog, please share them through the comments.

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Former Convicts as Friends in Facebook: Jail Officer Loses Job

The Telegraph reported this story today: After investigating the misconduct of a jail officer in Leicester jail, the residential landing officer, Nathan Singh was relieved of the position for befriending thirteen former convicts through Facebook.

Nathan was suspected of giving cell phones and other items to inmates, but the investigation failed to prove it, though it got evidence of Nathan's Facebook contacts.

His friends have been jailed for various crimes from murder, fraud, theft, to drug offences.

Nathan explained that most of these friends were known to him over many years, either from school or football team. He also defended him saying that he accepted the friend requests from people without looking at their profiles.

The operation, codenamed Operation Earlgrey to pin down Nathan was initiated five months after he joined the prison service in January 2008.

This story is an indication of how important the social networking and bookmarking sites are becoming in the real world. From now on, your discreet use of Facebook, Twitter, and others is highly recommended.

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