Facebook Allows Users to Promote their Personal Posts

Facebook has seen decent success with promoted posts or Ads. It was a great way for Facebook Page owners to get their brands better visibility and to reach a bigger audience.
Facebook now allows you to promote personal posts.

Quick Tips on Promoting personal posts

• When you update your Facebook account with a post, an option to promote it shows up.
• Just note that the promotion option is available only for 6 hours after the post was originally posted.
• The payment options are Paypal, Credit Cards, Mobile phones, Western Union Quickpay.

• A promoted post shows up as a “Sponsored Story” to friends. The way Facebook ensures it gets enough publicity is by bumping it up in your friend’s news feed.

The Pricing Model for promoted posts

The price set for promoted posts seems to vary between regions. As this post in Knowledge Hub suggests that the price might vary on the geographic location the user promoting the post is from.
That seems a markedly different approach from other advertising platforms which charge based on the geographic location and size of the targeted audience.
I am not sure how popular this service will be, as I think usually people do not like promoting their personal posts.
What are your views on promoting you personal posts on Facebook? Do drop in your comments.

Get Lowest Price of a Book in India with Android App – LowPrice

I love reading books and end up buying many from online stores. I often use MySmartPrice – a price comparison website to look up lowest price of a particular book. But today, a lot of my online browsing takes place on a mobile phone and so I have started using LowPrice Android App which helps you get the lowest price of a book in India.

LowPrice’s Android App Features

• The app allows users to search for books by its name, author’s name and publisher’s name.
• The app works usually great with any barcode scanner app (except Google Googles because of API issues).
• The app also prompts users to install a default barcode scanner app if your phone does not have one.
• Using the barcode scanners, users can scan the book details at a library and get its cheapest price online.
• There is also an option to select books into a wish list.

The online book stores the prices are compared to are Flipkart, Infibeam, HomeShop18 and more. If you are ordering a lot of books online, then this app is a very handy one.
Give it a try and drop in your comments.
Link: LowPrice Lowest book price (Android)

Opinsy–A Social Network for Opinions [Beta]

There are many new social media websites which try and get users to share photos, posts and videos. Opinions and polls are also socially very relevant but none of the major social media giants have been able to do get much traction here.
Opinsy.com is a website which is about taking part in discussions and opinions. It allows users to create an opinion and let users vote on it.

Opinsy Features

• The idea behind Opinsy is very simple. As a user you get to vote on “Agree” or “Disagree”.
• Additionally users can also add comments to a particular opinion they have voted on.
• To complete the circle, users are allowed to add their own opinions on the website and get people voting on them.
• Users can also follow each other to keep track of their opinions and vote on them. Most importantly it also has a dashboard where you can review all your activity on the website.

Opinsy is a good example of combining the opinions with social. The new website is still in beta and users can sign up by invitation only.
Do try out Opinsy and drop in your comments.
Link: Opinsy

Use Indian Languages like Hindi, Marathi and Tamil with Gmail

Today, Gmail has expanded the number of languages it supports. The list is over 100 languages. It has also allowed virtual keyboards for using non-latin languages.
Languages written in different scripts like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Gujrati are very popular in India. Gmail allows users to switch with a single click.

How it works:

• Just look up Gmail settings and find Language section under General tab. There users can select “Enable input tools”.
• A popup allows users to select through hundreds of languages. Select the languages and save settings.

• On your Gmail layout, you will see a new button for changing the input tools settings.
• This works not just for composing emails but also while chatting with your friends via Gmail.

Gmail will become more accessible to people who want to use languages which have different scripts compared to English and still use the normal keyboard available on most keyboards.

You can also use these languages on your browser with Google Chrome Extension for language Input Tools.
Source: Gmail Blog

Track Status of Indian Trains with Online Mapping App – RailRadar

Yesterday at a media event, Indian Railways showed off a web application called RailRadar. The web application allows users to track the status of 6500 trains across India on a map. The RailRadar map shows train routes in a blue or red colours. The colours indicate if the train is delayed or  keeping time.

Click on the arrow symbol anywhere on the map, displays information about the name of the train and its number, the last updated station and also the next halt, along with if the train is on time or delayed.
Interestingly, the mapping information is taken from Google and not the government owned Bhuvan project by ISRO.
The website that hosts the application is TrainEnquiry.com and unfortunately it does not yet have a mobile app but it does work on most mobile phone browsers. But an app is critical as the real users of this web application will be mobile phones users who are on the go.
Try out RailRadar and drop in your views and comments.
Link: RailRadar

GoDaddy Auctioning 42 single and double character .ORG Domain Names

GoDaddy the popular domain registration and hosting portal will be auctioning several unique .ORG domain names. The unique part of these domain names are that they are either single or double characters.
So for example domain names like A.org or ZQ.org are up for sale. It seems as the demand for such unique domain names is very high, GoDaddy is taking the auction route.
You can look up the entire list of single and double character .ORG domain names available at this link.
Unique domain names with single or two characters are in great demand because they are extremely easy to remember. A good example of this is Twitter’s short URL domain being t.co

Expect even more unique Domain names in the future

With ICANN allowing more top-level domain names in any script a mad rush was seen by the world’s biggest technology companies like Google bid for 101 top-level domain names.
Many of these unique top-level domain names will see the option of more unique domain names becoming available to the general public.
Some internet experts do think that having too many options will actually force large companies to unnecessarily spend millions on buying unique domain names.
Link: GoDaddy PR

Send Free SMS Directly from your Gmail Chat

Gmail has introduced a new feature that allows users to send free SMS directly from the Gmail chat window. As I logged into my account today, I saw a pop-up alerting me to the new feature.

How Gmail’s Free SMS works:

• Previously we could send SMS to other users from our contact list. This feature allows users to send an SMS to just about anyone as long as your know their mobile number.
• If you saw the message like above, you can simply type in a number in your chat box as seen in the image below.

• Then you need to add the number into your contact list. Make sure you select the country correctly.

• Type in your text message and send it. It will deduct 1 point from your SMS Credit. The SMS credit is back in increased by 5 if the person who gets your SMS replies. The maximum credit you can accrue is 50. It is basically a safeguard against spammers.
• In India, I can see that the supported networks are Aircel, IDEA,Loop Mobile, MTS, Reliance, Tata DoCoMo, Tata indicom, Vodafone.

Might be some early issues with it but I could not send an SMS to any Reliance phone number at all.
You can see the entire list of supported mobile operators here.