1. Twitter

Twitter is a micro blogging service that has been around for quite some time. Updates on Twitter, also called tweets are an answer to the question “What are you doing?” the word count for the posts are limited to 140 words. However, in a day, you can upload as many times as you want. There are no ads, and the service is free.

What makes Twitter and such micro-blogging tools cool is the incorporation of social networking features. You can configure Twitter to follow the updates of your friends as they follow your own updates. Not only friends, but you can follow the updates of virtually anybody as long as you know their e-mail ID and they don’t block you. Consider the applications of this feature – in a corporate environment, where several people are working as a team-such updates let all the team members know what is being done by whom.

Now that you know how Twitter can be used, here’s how to set it up. Go to www.twitter.com and sign up. You will receive a unique URL – http://www.twitter.com/abraworldwide/. Log in using your username and password and search e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL for your contacts. All those who are twitter members will show up in the list and you will be able to add them to your follow list. There is an option to invite other people by using their e-mail addresses. Once you have found the people who you like to follow and have added them, sit back and follow their updates. Privacy options include the feature to block a particular person from following your updates and to keep your posts out of public viewing. You can send private messages to others on your list by clicking on their names. Similarly, you can also get private messages from others.

Twitter can be tied in with IM and SMS facilities to provide great functionality. Go to Settings > Phone & IM and enter your IM screen name and phone number. In both cases you will be given a confirmation code. After following the instructions given, you can keep an eye out for updates from people on your list. In case of phones, you need to verify your number by messaging the code to a specified number. Once that is done you can post and receive tweets via your mobile.

One of Twitter’s greatest advantages is the proliferation of Twitter widgets. These widgets increase the available functionality, making it more user-friendly and following updates a lot less complicated. For an exhaustive list of such applications go to http://twitter.com/downloads and check out the wide variety of downloadable Twitter widgets made by third party developers.

You can choose from downloadable widgets for computers and mobiles, Firefox extensions and Google gadgets. Most of these let you tweet without logging in to the Twitter home page.

For twitter aficionados, also referred to as code jockeys, custom made Twitter widgets can be created by using the free Twitter API. If you love Twitter and Facebook, then there is an FB application for Twitter that brings the best of both together.

2. Pownce

Just launched out of private beta, Pownce is another micro-blogging tool that has been making waves for its easy functionality and feture rich interface. Inspired by Twitter, it adds more functionality to the micro-blogging phenomenon and lets you do more than just announcing what you are feeling or doing! Get a feel of it at www.pownce.com

After signing up, log in to various social networks and e-mail services to find friends and contacts that are already there on Pownce. Some of thes services are Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Flickr. You can do the usual job of sending out invites to friends.

The tagline of Pownce is “Send stuff to your friends”. Pownce lets you share messages, links, files and events with other people. Items can be shared publicly, privately or among groups. There are two-versions – free and pro. The free version lets you upload files of up to 10 MB and is ad-supported. The Pro version costs $20 a year and lets you share up to 100 MB. A download, available from http://pownce.com/download/ lets you do everything that can be done on the website. The software is cross platform and works on both Windows and Mac, with Linux support coming soon. However, to run this application you need to have Adobe Air installed on your system. The application has latency issues and it has been reported that even on faster machines with broadband connection, the Ajax interface is painfully slow.

Pownce is not very difference to Twitter. When trying to share files, sharing multiple files made the application go crazy. You have to zip the files and send the zipped archive as well. Like Twitter, Pownce also provides badges, a widget which can be put on any Website to display your updates. Nothing new or notable here. Pownce looks like a me-too service and attempts to be a micro-blogging tool. A file sharing utility with a messaging service, it’s literally the jack of all trades and master of none!

Blogging doesn’t really need any introduction, but since we always introduce the subject of our article, let us get this essential job out of the way.

A portmanteau of Web and log-blogs are simply personalized Web Sites that are as good as an online diary.

That was the intended definition. These days, however, collaborative blogs by corporate teams have sprouted all over the internet.

Since the content in a blog is determined by the user, there can be blogs on practically any subject under the sun. Blogs are a great way of expressing opinions unhindered by the fear of censorship or unwillingness of publishers. It’s free… it’s fast… and it’s easily accessible. All you need is an account with any of the myriad blogging services which are generally available for free. Customize your blog with templates, widgets, write content and create a community of readers. You can also upload pictures and video. Blogs are a great source of news and have been used effectively by political activists, writers, professionals and the like to get their message across. To know what the world is talking about, you need to be familiar with blogs.

1. Blogger (www.blogger.com)

Blogger, is one of the most widely known blog hosting websites. It used to be an independent site before being taken over by Google. Therefore, you can use your Google Account to create a blog – in a few minutes.

Navigate to www.blogger.com and sign in using your Google username and password. You will have to choose a name for your blog. When it comes to hosting, Blogger offers two options – either you can host the blog on the Blogger server, or on a dedicated server. The latter option become viable if your blog has garnered plenty of hits and is very popular. Blogs can be posted via FTP or SFTP (Secure FTP). Before doing that, however, you need to set up your blog.

Blogger has been out of beta since the beginning of last year, and there have been plenty of additions in terms of features. We have already seen how the new drag and drop interface works when you need to customize the blog and add newer features, but there is no harm in going over it again. Before this feature was launched, blogs had to be customized by going through the source code and modifying the HTML. This definitely doesn’t appeal to the average user, especially those without technical know-how. However, their new interface enables users to modify the look of their blog by simple mouse actions.
The various page elements that you can add to your blog include slideshows of photos, links, RSS feeds, video, HTML/JavaScript, polls and labels. Select as per your need, and continue refining your blog. You could also choose from among the many templates offered in the Blogger setup. Just go to Template > New Template and choose your pick. In case you don’t like the default templates, there are plenty of sites offering free Blogger templates. Some of these web sites are www.bloggertemplates.org, http://www.finalsense.com/services/blog.templates/ and http://pyzam.com/bloggertemplates for high quality templates.
Blogs can be posted in several newer languages including Hindi. There are absolutely no keyboard mappings to learn – you just have to type the equivalent phonetic script in English. We have tested the feature and while some of the more complicated words are not displayed in very accurate way, on the whole, this feature is pretty much intuitive. The Arabic and Persian script is also supported, with the alignment and flow of template elements looking like a mirror image of the normal ones where the direction of flow of language is from left to right. Besides this, a nifty “Auto Save” feature is enabled which keeps running in the background while you continue to type your post.

Another new feature that has been incorporated is the seamless integration between YouTube and Blogger and video uploading features. Videos can be uploaded locally simply with a mouse click. You could also share all your YouTube videos on your blog. As previously mentioned, photos from different photo sharing services like Flickr, Picassa and Photobucket can be displayed simply by using their feed. All your Blogger photos can be viewed in Picassa as well, with each post having its own album. You can also post via e-mail, or enable the settings such that whenever there is a new comment in response to yours in a blog post that would be mailed to you. Blogger is compatible with OpenID, therefore users can even comment on your posts using their OPenIDs instead of Google IDs, OpenIDs work on other blogging services such as Wordpress and Typepad as well, so users can utilize a customized ID for different services instead of signing up for multiple accounts.

Another neat feature that has been introduced is the use of custom domains. Blogger will host your site and the best aprt is that it won’t end with the usual .blogspot.com for free. However, you still have to buy the domain either from registrars or from Blogger. Any posts that you make will be automatically redirected to the new domain. For this, just go to Settings > Publishing tab in your Blogger to configure some simple options. The older BlogSpot address will be automatically forwarded to the new address.

2. WordPress (www.wordpress.org)

WordPress is a open source blog publishing system that can also be used to host blogs. It is free to use and is very suitable for someone who wants to host blogs in his/her domain. In case you don’t have a domain, you can sign up for your very own Wordpress blog.

Wordpress blogs are the ultimate in tweaking. With enough time on your hands and by being a tech-savvy, you can make your blog look as good as a professionally designed site. Wordpress blogs have plug ins-downloadable widgets that can be used to extend the usability and features of a barebones blog. Get the full list of plug ins from http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins. Some of the most popular downloadable ones are those that manage activities such as commenting, posting and statistics. Most of these plug-ins are free and developed by third-party developers.

Signing up is free and fast-select a name for your blog, user-name and password and you are all set to blog.

After signing up, choose your template and widgets that would add more zing to your blog. WordPress comes with about 50 default themes, while there are tons of free and gorgeous themes available on the Internet at http://themes.wordpress.net/page/1/, www.wpthemesfree.com and www.wpthemespot.com. In fact themes used in WordPress can also be used on other blogging services such as Blogger.

The WordPress dashboard provides a host of features for writing, organizing and publishing your blog. Apart from the standard online text editor, there are options for categorizing your posts, bookmarking and tagging them and also setting the privacy options which could keep the blog visible to either all or just limit them to private. You could also decide on who gets to post comments. An interesting feature of the WordPress blog is the integrated stat tool which is as good as a specialized third party tool such as Statcouter (Dashboard > Blog Stats). A spam blocker called Akismet, available as a plugin handles spam in the comments section by looking for certain keywords and sentence patterns. All your favourite blogs can be managed and also arranged in categories via Blogroll (Blogroll > Categories).

A new feature that has been implemented in Wordpress is integration with OpenID. You are automatically assigned an OpenID, depending on the name of the blog. This URL, can be used to log in to other sites that supports OpenID where you can comment. This virtually covers all the other blogging platforms. The storage space on Wordpress has been jacked up to an awesome 3 GB, which means that you can upload even more word documents, spreadsheets, presentations and pictures. In case you want more space for your data, you have to opt for the premium membership by paying in two denominations $50 per year for 15 GB and $90 per year for 25 GB.

3. Live Journal

Live Journal is a blogging platform that lays strong emphasis on social networking and community. Its basic features are available in the free version and should be quite sufficient for the vast majority of bloggers. However, those with specialized needs could choose the paid account which starts at $2 per month. There are two types of free accounts: Basic and Plus.

Live Journal blogs look a little bit like the profile page of a typical social networking site. Invite friends, create and join communities on subjects that you are passionate about. Enter details like name, birthday and education. You can use up to 15 pictures for your profile. Finding communities is easy-go to http://www.livejourmal.com/community/search.bml and enter the search parameters to find out communities. Likewise, friends can be arranged under different categories like family, local friends, online friends, school and work. You can add or delete categories, as well as reshuffle people between categories.

The scrapbook is the one stop shop when it comes to managing your pictures. Upload pictures, choose or create gallery styles, manage photos and tag them. It is modeled on the photo management applications of other social sites and the similarities are quite evident. There is a wizard for windows which can be run to upload pictures directly from Explorer.

Nevertheless, Live Journal scores in the myriad posting options. Apart from the plain vanilla WWYSIWYG text editor, you can download a client from http://www.livejournal.com/download/ so that you type your post even while you are disconnected. These posts then get uploaded as soon as you get hooked onto the Internet, similar to the Send/Receive function in Outlook! These clients can run on different operating systems, browsers, cell phones and PDAs. There are clients for Blogger too. regarding the methods for posting, you can also voice-post or blog from your mobile phone on Live Journal (limited to a specific number every month). There is a newly launched feature called LJ talk, an IM which uses the Jabber protocol. After adding username@livejournal.com to your friend list you can post from the IM clients supporting the Jabber protocol. If you choose mobile posting, you can perform all your tasks from a cell phone. Members with paid, permanent and Plus accounts can set up messaging from the web, where friends can send messages to your phone via LJ. You can learn more about using LJ via mobile phone from http://www.livejournal.com/manage/mobile.bml

You don’t have to spend a million dollars to web enable your business

Why business should use web technologies? That’s the same as asking why any business should do accounting, finance, marketing and operation management or any other major business function. Web Technologies are very vital components of successful businesses and organizations.

Virtually no business or organization, large or small, can compete without information technology(IT) when we say IT, Web is also an integral part of the IT; today we live in wired world and by the time many realize that, the world is moving towards wireless world.

Web 2.0, the current day scenario of the internet applications such as Social Networking, Wikis, Blogs, Content Sharing, Tagging and E-Commerce together comprise to form the second generation of the World Wide Web popularly know as Web 2.0

Fig 1.0-

So where do we accommodate the websites of businesses and professionals? That’s where the E-commerce comes in; E-commerce is changing the shape of competition, the speed of action, and the streamlining of interactions, products and payments from customers to companies and from companies to suppliers.

The categories of E-commerce can be found everywhere, from common man to president; we can witness the usage of Web based application making life a lot easier. The major categories and examples of E-Commerce are-

B2C- Business to Consumer e.g.-Dell Computers selling computers online to end users

B2B- Business to Business e.g. - Saint Gobain Glass selling to car manufactures

E- Government- e.g. - Corporation of Chennai providing birth certificate application online

C2C- Consumer to Consumer e.g. -ebay.com, a marketer place where one user sells to another user

Ever since business evolved, the typical structure has remained more or less the same, there is a seller looking for a buyer and a buyer looking for a seller, thus giving rise to a concept called market place where both buyer and seller can do transactions and complete the process of business cycle. Earlier we had Yards for farmers, then came multi storied commercial complexes, and now we have special economic zones for international level of market place transactions; E-commerce is not too different from the aforesaid marketplace concept, the only difference here in the absence of physical presence or personal one to one interaction, everything is virtual, and the common thing connecting them being the internet and the world wide web, a buyer in Chennai-India can buy a T-shirt sold by a company in Milano-Italy, everything happens virtually. The buyer visits the sellers website, browses and searches the goods needed, compares with other products available, reads on the comments by other who bought these goods and places and order and pays through his credit card, and the goods are home delivered through systemic logistic channel.

So the idea of shopping, be it a Rs. 500 T-Shirt or Rs. 50,000 laptop, you never have to take the trouble of finding something in the yellow pages or asking your neighbors about where to shop, and most importantly there is nothing like store timings, you never have to leave the comfort of home for buying something today- thank to E-commerce.

The seller, has virtually incurred not much of costs to reach the buyer, all that is needed to attract buyers are indeed simple, a well engineered and aesthetically designed website, with secure payment option and of course quality products at reasonable prices Is what makes a good e-commerce shopping site.

What can be sold online through e-commerce?

• Anything, well almost anything including-
• Products like cups, phones, fruits
• Services like graphic designs, web hosting
• Experiences like book a trip to Disney land
• Ideas like get Copywriting done online
• Events like tickets to live concerts
• Information like legal contract templates

And almost everything under the sun can be sold online, with the emergence of advanced and open source technologies, all you need to have for starting a web enable your business are to have credit card or a bank account with a nationalized bank, a good web service provider (like Abra Technologies) and invest as little as Rs. 25,000 for a completely customized e-commerce shopping site right here in Chennai- India.

5 Tips to Take Charge of Your Social Media Strategy

Got your Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, YouTube yet? What, you haven’t gotten any leads, ‘friends’, followers or subscribers? What’s going on here?

Let’s take a step back.

1. You Should Be Participating In Social Media

There are millions of conversations going on right now and some of those are about your company. Shouldn’t you be a part of those conversations? Social Media is about finding potential customers where they already exist, not shouting your message out to thousands just hoping that one of them cares. What you need to deliver is value to those existing spaces that your subscribers will enjoy and find use for.

2. You need a Plan

You Need a Plan If you haven’t started - now is the time to make a genuine plan. If you have started - it’s not too late to make one. Do you want Social Media to be a part of your customer service arsenal, sales team, an extension of your website? Where do you see your Social Media campaign in three years? If that is too much to swallow how about in one month? What changes do YOU need to do to achieve your goals?

Make goals and keep track of your progress regularly. Seth Godin points out that if you don’t have goals then you don’t have to worry about failing. The people in my life who I consider successful didn’t get there without a plan and goals to reach along the way. Your Social Media plan can’t be to join 20 sites, start a blog and just see what happens. I doubt by next year you will be saying ‘Oopsie look at that! I have the most successful blog in the country, 8,000 Twitter followers and can’t find the time to get back to these people who want my product or service’. As our neighbors in Downeast Maine say “You cahn’t get theyah from heeah”.

Research social media sites you are thinking will help your business, come up with your plan, take the steps to execute the plan, track your results and very importantly find ways to improve on that plan regularly.

3. Starting is Cheap and Easy – Maintaining It Is the Hard Part

Starting a blog is easy, joining Facebook is easy, signing up for Twitter is easy. Delivering consistent quality content and building those online relationships is the hard part and will take some effort on your part.

This takes time, so maybe it means going into work an hour earlier, using your lunch break or just blocking off a period of time to work on your online social relationships. We didn’t say this wasn’t going to take some effort! There is no magic pill you can swallow to be a social networking queen or king

You have to –I cannot say this enough–have to publish good content on your website and social networking profiles. You have to give people something to share with other people perhaps an interesting blog post, e-book, webinar, or discussion. Share your great website content on your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube profiles.

Social Media is consistently growing and changing. As time passes the salesy empty messages are going to be cast aside and left on the cutting room floor – don’t be left out with them.
4. Track Your Progress

Make your goals something you can measure: blog subscribers, numbers of comments on a post, number of followers, number of people attending your webinar, number of visitors to your company’s Facebook page. Social sites can be fun, they can spark great debates, conversations, product updates but you need a reference and small trackable goals so you will know that your efforts are working the way you planned (See #2).

5.Don’t Be Such a Prude

Loosen UpSocial Media is an amazing resource for creating brand loyalty with your clients. Your online profiles should be an extension of your company and your website but you have to loosen up a little. People are connecting with people on the internet. Be a human being not a faceless company. Put your picture on your profile. Don’t hide behind your logo. Participate in conversations, lend your opinion and expertise on a topic. Don’t set all your privacy settings to private. Social Media isn’t very social if you are hiding your content.

Still stumped? Don’t worry, you aren’t going to become an internet celebrity overnight. It takes some time. If you don’t know what to say, just listen. Start by reading your Twitter feed, reading discussions in your LinkedIn Groups and when you have something to say respond. Start there. As you get more comfortable you will find things to say. People want to hear it.