Teens in Tech - Social Media

Earlier today Facebook quietly pushed out a redesigned photo viewer tool. Instead of taking the user to a different page to view photos, the new photo viewer is a pop-out overlay that covers whatever you were viewing. Once you finish viewing the page, you can pick up using Facebook right where you stopped.

This pop out includes the photo on one side and a sidebar with description, comments, and likes on the other. Read to learn more about the new Facebook photo viewer!

This is a great follow up to a recent Facebook related blog post, and now that Timeline is public its true potential is shining. What’s so great about it? That big, beautiful, cover photo is fantastic for marketing. I realize it’s only on your personal profile, but in that previous post you agreed that your personal Facebook profile is as powerful, if not more powerful than a fan page.

What’s so awesome about it? It’s a huge (851 x 315 pixels) advertisement for whatever you want. Mine, for example, is my personal blog. It’s non-intrusive, fits into the Facebook color scheme and is big, bold and traffic driving. When you use the personal marketing / networking methods I talked about in my previous post and you add some SVAPs (Silicon Valley Awesome Person) as friends they’ll immediately see a link to your website, blog, or whatever and you have yet another chance to impress them.

Facebook has done it again, but on a more drastic scale. The popular social networking website redesigned its user profiles, creating look known as “Timeline”. While the change hasn’t been universally implemented, anyone can enable Timeline. We’ve decided to take a look at the new Timeline and offer you with a guide on how to make the best of it.

Interface Changes

Some users have mistakenly said this was an interface only update. In some respects, this is true, but in reality it’s more than the interface that was changed with Facebook Timeline. Read to learn more about Facebook Timeline.

Okay, I lied. You’ve heard of this social media marketing website, and you might have even read a lot about how to use it to market your startup for little or no money. There’s tons of tactics that may or may not work, but there’s one you’re completely overlooking. The secret website I’m talking about is Facebook, but before you stop reading consider that you might be missing the most fundamental part of social media marketing. What part is that? The social part. Not the faux million-member-page social part, but the truly social part.

After getting an idea of the content your YouTube channel will provide, as well as after choosing a name, you should then move toward signup. Signing up for a YouTube channel is relatively easy, a process identical to signing up for any social networking website. However, if you plan on optimizing your YouTube channel for the future, there are a couple of points to consider.

In the first post we discussed getting setup on YouTube. At this point you should have a name, a channel and some idea of what you will post on YouTube. Now you need the right equipment to bet your voice heard. Read to learn more about the what equipment you need to start on YouTube.

There are many websites that we use everyday, Twitter is a good example of one of them. On Twitter, we find ourselves sharing the smallest and largest accomplishments in our lives. From passing an exam to finding an onion ring in a bag of fries, all kinds of events are shared online. However, have you ever dreamed of a website that focused more on the blogging aspect of micro-blogging? The solution is 280daily.

If you’re like me you might have two Facebook Accounts. One for your personal life and one for your Web life. It often gets annoying switching back and forth between them, because I have to re-enter in password, navigate to log-in pages, etc. Today, Facebook has made the process of having two pages or accounts easier with their new switch accounts feature. Under your avatar and name in the top left, you can click switch accounts. Switch accounts will load up the pages and accounts that you’re associated with. Along with the account switching feature, Facebook has updated Pages, to better match current profiles. This definitely makes for better navigation. We haven’t received the features, but luckily The Next Web has.

After several months in private beta, OneExtraLap, a social quizzing site created by 15-year-old Stephen Ou is finally launching to the public. The site just ran a 2-day public preview for those who requested an invite before August 6th. In such a short time, the service has already received lots of attention and positive feedback.

At it’s core, OneExtraLap is simple—you create and take quizzes to test your knowledge in a variety of topics much like services such as QuizRocket. What makes OneExtraLap different, however, is its clever integration of social features and it’s simple user interface.

A new browser extension from Kosmix, a service that provides information based on interests has just been released. Once downloaded to your browser—either Safari, Chrome or Firefox—the Tweetbeat Firsthand extension scans the current page for people, companies or anything mentioned that might be of interest.

Tweetbeat Firsthand then displays a small Twitter icon which, once moused-over, opens a popup similar to a Twitter hover card with recent tweets from the corresponding user. While this may seem rather basic, it’s actually quite useful. Being able to easily see firsthand information (hence the name) about topics mentioned in an article gives the reader a broader perspective.

Finding who to follow on Twitter can be very difficult. Sure, you are already following all of your friends, but why not expand who you’re following to people you don’t know? With Twitter’s new tool called “Suggestions For You,” you can now find a new list of people to follow. Twitter just announced this new tool a few moments ago on their blog.