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How to Not Spam Your Facebook Friends Who Don’t Speak Your Native ‎Language

Eyal Sela — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:21:43 +0000

People who have friends on Facebook from different countries encounter a problem – in what language should they write their status messages? If they use their native language, their friends from other countries will not understand anything. On the other hand, if they only write in English, for example, then it might be difficult for some of their friends to understand it.

Here is the solution for multilingual Facebook friends:

Create a friends list of all the people who doesn’t speak your native language, and filter out the message that they can’t understand.

Let’s see how to do this.

[For the sake of this post I will use Hebrew as a native language, and English for friends from other countries].

Create a list of people who doesn’t speak your language

To create a list of friends do the followings:

Click ‘Friends‘ on the left sidebar.
Click the ‘Create a List‘ button (it is right on the right hand side of the ‘Friends’ title at the top of the page – see image below).
Create a list of friends on Facebook
You should now see a pop-up window titled ‘Create New List‘. Give the list a name (for example: ‘doesn’t speak Hebrew’) and add all of your friends who doesn’t speak your native language to that list.
Click ‘Create List‘ once you are finished.

*Note that from now on, whenever you friend someone who doesn’t speak your native language you have to add him to the list*

Filter out messages not in English

Now, all you need to do when you want to write a status message in your native language, is tell Facebook not to show it to the people who can’t read it. Follow these steps to do it:

Write the a status message as usual.
Click the the lock icon on the left side of the ‘Share’ button, and click ‘Custom‘ (see image below).

Click the the lock icon on its left hand side of the ‘Share’ button

In the pop-up window that opens, under ‘Hide this from‘, type the name of the list of people who doesn’t speak your native language.
under ‘Hide this from’, type the name of the list of people who doesn’t speak your native language
Click ‘save settings‘ and once the pop up window closes, click the ‘Share‘ button.

That is it. Only people in the list you specified will not see this status message. The rest of your friends will.

Make these your default settings

If you wish to make these your default settings (that is, that by default People in this group will not see your messages, unless you specify otherwise) – go back to step three in the previous section and check ‘Make this my default setting’ at the bottom of the window. *note that these settings will apply to all the status messages you have ever written, not only to new ones!*

I suggest following the last section in Amit Agarwal’s post How to Cross-Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings to make sure the new settings works correctly.

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How to Not Spam Your Facebook Friends Who Don’t Speak Your Native ‎Language

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Join ProductiveWise Facebook Fan Page

Eyal Sela — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:47:54 +0000

I’v opened a Fan Page for ProductiveWise on Facebook. You’re invited to join it.

ProductiveWise on Facebook

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Join ProductiveWise Facebook Fan Page

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The ‘Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs’ Search Engine

Eyal Sela — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:19:18 +0000

I often find that Google isn’t quite tuned in to my search needs. Although I would rather that it only searched sites I know and trust, I often get results from sites that don’t look trustworthy or aren’t of high quality.

That is why I’ve created a custom search engine that only searches the best technology sites – The ‘Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs’ Search Engine.

Try it out

What’s in a custom search engine?

A Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a Google service that lets you create a search engine that only return results from sites you’ve predefined (create your custom search engine here). In the ‘Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs’ Search Engine I’ve added the following sites: Gigaom; Lifehacker; Readwriteweb; Mashable; Labnol.org; Makeuseof; Downloadsquad; and some other sites.

How to use it

You can use the custom search engine in one of the following ways: – You can drag the Top-Notch Search Engine into your Favorites and use it whenever you need it. – Or Add it as a gadget to your iGoogle. – Or embed it in your website using the following code:

<mce:script mce_src=”http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.google.com/cse/api/015720876466678303127/cse/rfvhyaxh8tk/gadget&synd=open&w=320&h=75&title=top+notch+technology+and+media+blogs&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&output=js”></mce:script>

If you think I should add other websites to the search engine, please write them down in the comments below.

Post from: ProductiveWise

The ‘Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs’ Search Engine

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Video – How to Find the Right People For a Job With Linkedin

Eyal Sela — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:45:08 +0000

Linkedin can be a great tool to find the right people for a job, a project or for one time help. In fact, it is that good that sometimes you get too many results and can’t see the forest for the trees. In this post I’m going to explain how to use Linkedin’s advanced search features in order to find people for specific tasks.

Let’s assume you’re looking for a PHP developer for your company. Here’s how you can use linked in to find people to hire:

In the search box type in PHP and hit search. The results will display people who mentioned the word PHP in their profile (note that people who are in your network show up first).
Refine the results by selecting or typing-in a location in the Location box on the left. Now, you will only see people from that location.
To further refine the results, in the groups box choose a group such as “Job networking” (of course you will have to be a member of that group in order to see it). That way you will get back people who are searching for a Job.

I made a video that illustrates how to do that, see it below:

Post from: ProductiveWise

Video – How to Find the Right People For a Job With Linkedin

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Tip For Heavy Chrome Users – Drag a Website’s Address to Save It in Your ‎Bookmarks

Eyal Sela — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:34:10 +0000

Heavy Chrome users might find it a bit difficult to manage all their bookmarks, because there is no easy way to place a new sites in a specific folder. Here is a little tip that will help you manage your bookmarks:

You can save a bookmark simply by dragging it to a folder.

I’ve created a 30 seconds video that explains how to do that. check it out below.

(If you got this post through e-mail or RSS and you can see the video, try watching it in the original post.)

Post from: ProductiveWise

Tip For Heavy Chrome Users – Drag a Website’s Address to Save It in Your ‎Bookmarks

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How to Send (Almost) Anyone on Linkedin a Message

Eyal Sela — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:33:22 +0000

Sometimes, finding the right person on Linkedin is not enough. The reason is that only paying users with premium account can send messages to people outside their network (That is, if you are not already connected to someone, you can’t message him).

Now, if it happens to you often, probably the best solution is to pay to upgrade your account. But if you don’t think it will pay off, here is a little built-in hack that can help you overcome this limitation.

The solution

In short – to send almost anyone on linkedin a message, simply join a group he or she is a member of.

Explanation

When you join a group on Linkedin, by default the members of the group can send you messages. Although you can turn this option off (see image below) people usually don’t tend to change default settings. Therefore, usually you will be able to send message to all the other members of the group.

But how will I find what group he is on?

Simply scroll down to the end of the profile of the person you’re interested in. There, under ‘Groups and Associations’ there is a list of the groups this person is a member of.

And then what?

First, you need to submit a request to joint the group. Once you’ve been accepted, you will notice that the link ’send inMail’ at the top of that person’s profile has changed to ’send message’.

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How to Send (Almost) Anyone on Linkedin a Message

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Roundup – Gmail, Google Reader, and other Google Tips and Practices

Eyal Sela — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:31:10 +0000

Over the past year I’ve written several posts about different Google applications. These include Google search, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Maps, and more. In case you’ve missed some, here is your chance to catch up with some great Goolge practices and tips (note that some of them where published on MakeUseOf.com):

Google Reader

Gmail

Google labs

Google all around

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Roundup – Gmail, Google Reader, and other Google Tips and Practices

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Web Apps & Software for Distributed Teams

Eyal Sela — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:13:53 +0000

I’ve recently explained on MakeUseOf.com how to use Google Maps as a tool for distributed teams. In this post I am going to review other tools that support and improve the work of distributed teams. The tools will help you improve the way you share files, communicate, and work collaboratively with people not near you.

File sharing

One of the basic needs of a distributed team is the ability to share files. For ad-hoc teams, who do not work together on a regular basis, Drop.io is a great solution. Drop.io is a private sharing and collaboration web app. It lets you instantly create a mini site, called ‘a drop’, into which you can upload any type of file. You can annotate the file with comments or sections of text and use the chat feature for synchronized work sessions.

Teams who do work together on a regular basis should use Dropbox for file sharing. Dropbox is a software (yes, the kind you download) that creates a synchronization folder on your computer. The folder syncs any file in it with the Dropbox server (making the file always available online) and with a similar folder in your team members’ computers. This allows you to share files just like you would do if you were sitting in the same office and using the same server – in shared folders.

For a more cloud-based collaboration, use Google sites. Setting up a Google site is easy, and it can serve as an assistive tool for projects management and knowledge sharing.

Communication

Try as you might, you will never be able to avoid the need for synchronized work with team members (i.e. meetings). For that task, probably the best solution is Skype, the free voice and video calls software.

If not all the team members use Skype, you can use Tinychat for audio or video meetings. Just enter Tinychat, launch a session and send others the link. All the participants can immediately broadcast from their webcam or microphone, without any downloading. Each session also have a chat room.

To see an example of such sessions just pick one of the public chat rooms currently running in ‘Rooms‘.

Screen sharing

Alongside your call, you can use various tools to make it more productive. ShowDocument is a screen sharing tool that enables co-browsing on document and websites. Create within a single click an environment where you can show others a document, a webpage, or a YouTube video. People with whom you share the session will see your scrolling, mouse pointing and drawing.

For a bit more stable and rich screen sharing you can download Mikogo. Mikogo is an online meeting, web conferencing & remote support tool. It lets you share your screen with up to 10 participants in simultaneously.

Text editing

For instant simulations text editing you can use EtherPad. It is a plain text editor with a very high response time for instant writing tasks.

Alternatively, you can just use Google Docs (which requires all the participants to log in).

Scheduling

Finally, don’t forget to schedule the meeting with an online meeting scheduler, such as When Is Good or Doodle.

If you liked this post you might also want to read 6 Web Apps to Instantly Capture, Share, Display and Meet

image by oldcockatoo

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Web Apps & Software for Distributed Teams

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Become a Google Search Ninja with Advanced Operators

Eyal Sela — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:25:46 +0000

Do you ever feel that if you could only tell Google a bit more about what you’re trying to find, the search results would be much better? Well, as you probably know, Google has some advanced search operators that help to refine search queries. You can use them to better focus your queries by specifying things like which sites to search, use placeholders, search for exact matches, and more. Here is a quick guide to Google’s advanced search operators.

Starting with advancead operators

Double quotation marks (” “) for exact much: When you enclose a phrase in quotation marks, Google returns only pages that contain that exact phrase. The results have to contain all the words and in the exact same order as you wrote them. Search for “The first Twitter user”, for example, and you’ll only get back pages that contain exactly that phrase. This advanced search feature is one of the most useful in my opinion.

Asterisk (*) is a placeholder for one or more words: adding * replaces any number of words in your query. Example: let’s say you want to find articles that teach Google search practices, like this one. You could use the following query for that task:

“how to Search * with Google”

The quotation marks will make sure that you’ll get back pages with that sentence in them. But since there’s Asterisk in the query, you’ll find different versions of it. So, you might get back this sentence: How to Search Faces with Google, this one: How to SearchEffectively with google, or any other variation that matches the query. See the results in the image below or try the query yourself.

(site:) limits the search to specific domain(s): when you encounter a website that does not have a search box, you can use this operator to search it. Simply addsite:www.example.com to the query, where www.example.com is the site’s URL. This will tell Google to search only pages within www.example.com. Example: to search information about libraries in Harvard University we can use this query (note that there is a space between the address and the word ‘libraries’, which is the term we want to find):

site:http://www.harvard.edu/ libraries

Try this query yourself. You can also use site: to search across websites under the same top level domain (such as .gov or .edu). Example: you can find really interesting information about how government related bodies in the US use twitter, with this query:

site:.gov twitter

The results will include webpages under the .gov domain that related to twitter in some way. See the results in the image below or try the query yourself.

The plus sign (+) disables synonyms: Google automatically searches for synonyms and similar words to those in your query. To limit this, add + right before the word(s) you which to keep the same (no space between the + and the word).

Use the or sign (|) for either one of several possibilities: you can make your searches much more effective and efficient by using the | sign (find it on the same key as the Backslash sign- \). What it tells Google is to search either one of the words attached to it. (Note that you can use OR , with capital letters, instead of using the | sign.) Example: you can combine the following four different queries:

“the Facebook guide”

“the youtube ‎guide”

“the linkedin guide”

“The gmail guide”

Into a single query:

‎“the Facebook|youtube|LinkedIn|gmail guide”‎

See the results in the image below or try the query yourself.

Do you have other search tips? Share them with us in the comments!

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Become a Google Search Ninja with Advanced Operators

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Search Twitter with Google – It’s Great!‎

Eyal Sela — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:47:46 +0000

If you’ve ever tried Twitter’s search, you’ve probably found that it’s not very good. Indeed, Other Twitter search alternatives exist, such as Trendistic, Tweefind, Tweetzi, and Twazzup. But wouldn’t you rather just use Google for the task?

To search Twitter with Google, all you need to do is add to the search query a limitation that tells it to search only within Twitter (and not the whole web). To do that, simply add the following string to the query:

site:http://twitter.com

So, for example, to find mentions of this blog, we’ll add the word ‘productivewise’ to the query, as shown below (notice that there is a space between the search term, productivewise, and the sit URL) :

site:http://twitter.com/ productivewise

The results are displayed in the image below.

Click this link to search Google with the above query (opens in a new window).

Search within a specific twitter user tweets

You can also search only within certain user’s tweets by using the link to that user’s profile (and not to Twitter as a whole). So, to search within my profile, you would use this query:

site:http://twitter.com/Eyalsela

Click this link to search Google with the above query (opens in a new window).

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Search Twitter with Google – It’s Great!‎

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