One of the advantage of strong networking in Twitter is the speed with which you receive information. If you have good contacts and friends in your city, you can ask questions and get information more quickly. Another aspect is the authenticity of information, after all a human mouth can be a lifesaver when Google fails.

Here are some really useful web tools which lets you find Twitter users from a specific location, know what they are doing and connect with them:

Advanced Twitter Search

The Advanced Twitter search is still one of the best ways to find Twitter users in any city or geographical location. Just type in the name of the city, state or country and Twitter search will show you the recent tweets coming from that location.

The neat thing about Advanced Twitter search is that you can customize the results and find Tweets that contain a specific keyword or hashtag. You can also define the time period of the tweets to be filtered, this is useful when you want to know the tweets that are coming from a specific city within a defined time interval.

For example: If you are looking for “Chinese restaurants” near Kolkata and want to know what Twitter users from Kolkata are saying about the word “restaurants”, perform this search and the results will be shown as under:

Find Tweetups in a city: The advanced Twitter search can also be used to find tweetups in a city. Search for the word “tweetup”, mention the name of the city and you are done. See example

There are many more parameters which you can customize – this includes defining the distance of the location, excluding or including specific words or phrases (this reduces spammy tweets), tweets from a particular profile, tweets containing links and more. The results are based on the profile bio’s of twitter users and thus it’s highly accurate.

LocalTweeps – Find Local Tweets

Localtweeps in another service which uses a hashtag to list Twitter users from a city. You can add your Twitter profile to the Localtweeps website by registering your city’s name and zip code. When you use the hashtag “#lt”, your tweet is made searchable in the Localtweeps directory.

Hence if you have anything important to share with other twitter users living in the same city, simply use #lt hashtag and wait for the reactions to flood in. I found the service very engaging, because you can easily follow twitter users from a specific city and join the conversation, ask questions and so on.

The site also has a long list of Top twitter users from Top cities, this feature may be used to know the trends and popular events of a specific geographic location.

Desktop App to Gather Location Based Tweets

Need a desktop application to keep an eye on location based Tweets? Enter Twitterlocal – a unique Twitter client built using Adobe AIR which helps you to track location based tweets from your desktop. All you have to do is enter the location and the radius you wish to track, the application will create a real time lifestream of tweets from the specific location.

Newer tweets are shown as they appear, you can click through a link or Twitter profile and start the conversation.

Nearby Tweets

This one is my favorite, because Nearby Tweets automatically determines which city you are from and then loads the recent tweets of users from the same city. You can use the map to change your location to any other part of the world, add your own keywords and perform a fresh search to know the recent updates about a particular subject.

The search interface is simple and clutter free and the results are shown really fast. Highly recommended.

Find Local Twitter Trends With Mapmash

Mapmash is another neat service which can be used to know the local twitter trends of any city. The idea is very simple yet unique – the app displays the currently popular twitter topics and hashtags that are revolving around a particular city. You can browse the world map in the Mapmash website and hover over a city to find the active topics and discussions. Clicking a hashtag loads the recent tweets in the sidebar.

More tips:

1. Twitter tools that save you time
2. Tools to Bulk unfollow Twitter followers

The Best Tools For Local Twitter Search – Find Tweets From a Specific Geographic Location originally published on Ampercent

The problem with Facebook apps is that they clutter your News feed to a great extent. Sure some of the apps are really interesting and useful, but not all of them are required all the time. Applications like RSS graffiti, networked blogs, and Food gifts will push frequent updates in your wall or news feed which is heavily distracting.

If you want to hide all the Facebook application invites, games, quizzes or delete them from your news feed – follow the simple steps mentioned below:

1. Log in to your Facebook account and click on Account > Privacy Settings

2. In the next page, you will see various settings for websites, games and other applications. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and select “Edit your Settings” under “Applications and Websites”

3. In the next page, you will see all the currently active applications you are using. Click “Turn off Platform Applications” and choose all the active Facebook applications you want to block

4. Next, click on “Turn off Platform” and bingo! All the Facebook applications are removed forever.

Now, you will neither get any update when any of your friends use a Facebook application nor you will be disturbed with any of the invites. Please note that if you are a developer of any Facebook application, you won’t be able to deactivate the “Facebook developer application”. This will not allow you to disable platform updates of Applications and websites on Facebook.

And disabling the platform applications will also disable the social plugins you are using (e.g Liking Facebook stories).

More tips:

1. How to make Facebook photo Albums private
2. How to delete a Facebook account which is impersonating you
3. Access Facebook When Blocked in Office, school or Workplace

How to Block All Facebook Applications From Your News Feed originally published on Ampercent

One of the solutions to this is disabling write access to USB ports so that the user is not able to write files to the USB disk. The person can view the files kept in his removable drive but can’t copy files to his USB drive.

Another solution to this problem is keeping your important data on a removable drive and never copying or moving it outside. But this is impossible if you have to work with a lot of documents or files having a large file size.

What if you could track the date and time when a USB device was used on the same computer? What if you can know the serial number and name of the USB drive used? Here is a freeware utility which might help.

USDView is a simple portable application for Windows which can be used to view all the USB devices connected to your system. You can also use the application to view all the USB drives connected to the system at an earlier date.

The application shows extended information e.g device name, description, type, serial number, date, time, product ID, vendor ID and more.

This can be very useful when you are sharing your computer with someone else and want to know whether he secretly used a USB drive on your system. The application can perform other useful tasks e.g – running a program when a USB drive in inserted in your computer, preventing autorun of programs from USB drives etc. You can also use USDview on a remote computer, as long as you login to that computer with admin user.

You can generate an HTML report of all the USB devices used in your system and keep the report safe for later use. So the next time you give your laptop to a friend and he says that he didn’t used any USB drive on your system, you can show him the reports.

Know When a Particular USB Drive Was Last Used On Your Computer originally published on Ampercent

The Slideshow extension for Google Chrome turns any webpage into a photo slideshow. The extension reads all the images from the webpage, fades out the entire screen and shows the thumbnails of the images at the bottom of the screen. Just click through each thumbnail and the image slideshow begins to roll

This is a great way to browse websites containing a lot of images, you can use it to browse photos at Flickr, Facebook and other image sharing websites. Another great thing about the extension is the quick sharing options – you can instantly share the image to your Twitter, Facebook or Google Buzz profiles using the in built sharing options.

We have earlier reviewed some nice slideshow apps – this include creating a slideshow with Facebook photo albums, turning tweets into a video slideshow and viewing a moving slideshow of RSS feeds. This extension would solve one of the major problems with Facebook photos – you do not have to click the deeper pages of a Facebook album containing a lot of images. Just open the album page and all the images will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Turn Any Photo Website into a Slideshow With Slideshow Extension For Chrome originally published on Ampercent

A report from Chitika reveals that when it comes to comparing the ad click behavior of users on search engines, Ask.com and Bing.com generates far more clicks than Google and Yahoo.

Chitika used the data from a sample of 15 million ad impressions across the Chitika network. According to Chitika:

The amount of Web traffic driven by Bing has been increasing steadily throughout 2010 – from 4.4% of traffic generated in April to 6.6% thus far in July – and that growth, combined with the higher per-user value, means that Bing should no longer be an afterthought for SEO gurus and webmasters.

Which Search Engine Generates the Maximum Ad Clicks ? originally published on Ampercent

Cinemadrape in awesome application for Windows which can be used to completely fade out selected areas of the screen. You can run the software and select an active Window to focus on, everything else is completely faded out as shown below:

This can be really useful when you are watching a movie, drawing something or writing articles. You can dim the background and move the visible area anywhere on the screen. There is a portable version of the application available at the authors website, so you can drop the app in your USB drive and use it on any computer.

We have earlier covered some tools for Distraction free writing and a WordPress plugin to customize your write post panel. Do check them out!

How to Fade Unwanted Screen Areas in Windows originally published on Ampercent

Download the utility from the OfficeDrop website and install it. Once done you will need to sign in with your Google Docs credentials. Now connect your scanner to your computer and put the documents (you wish to scan) in it. Now that the documents are scanned the app will put all the queued files into a PDF and then uploads it to any specific folder (that you choose) in Google Docs. You can edit the PDF prior to uploading it to the cloud server. You can also choose to upload the file to your Evernote or OfficeDrop online account.

The tool is compatible with Windows XP, Windows 7 and Vista operating systems.

Scan And Save Your Paper Documents In Google Docs originally published on Ampercent

If you are like me and have the habit of running the same programs or opening the same websites multiple times a day, here is a freeware utility which will be useful.

With StartmyDay, you can add a list of programs to open and run after Windows restarts. You can also define a list of URL’s in the application settings and the program will automatically load these websites after you log in to Windows.

The idea is neat, just define all the URL’s and wait for the app to load them one by one. No need to manually click through from the bookmarks toolbar.

The app can also run a playlist after windows startup – the supported players are Windows media player, Winamp and VLC media player. Other than running programs after Windows startup, you can also define a custom time of the day to run the same or a new series of programs. There is more – the application consists of an alarm clock which can be used with an automatic or manual mode.

Above all, the program is portable and hence you can use it on any computer from a USB stick.

Tip: How to quickly open recently closed programs and folders

Automate Common Windows Tasks With Start My Day originally published on Ampercent

Known as Image Resizer powertoy, the application adds a new entry to your Windows right click context menu. To resize multiple images, all you have to do is select all the images by holding the Ctrl key, right click and choose the option that suits best.

There are quite a few options to choose from – you can resize the images to fit in small, large or medium screens or mobile devices using the inbuilt presets. You can also define a custom width and height of the image, this will be handy if you want to resize images to a custom dimension.

The application can create copies of the resized images, thus the original image is never changed or distorted.

Fotosizer – Portable Tool to Batch Resize Images

Fotosizer is again a nice portable tool which lets you batch resize images with a single click. Just select all the images you want to resize, define the dimensions and it’s done. The added advantage of Fotosizer is that you can compress the size of Jpeg image files along with other image formats.

To use the application from your USB drive, copy Fotosizer.exe from the installed folder and drop it in your USB drive. Fotosizer also supports creating an image file name mask – you can automatically rename the resized images and put a custom date or timestamp to the file name.

One thing worth mentioning about Fotosizer is the ability to resize all the images within a custom folder. Say you want to resize hundreds of images to a specific dimension. Put them in a desired folder and add the folder in Fotosizer preferences. Now Run Fotosizer and the application will resize all the images one by one and create a copy in the same folder. You may also choose to overwrite the original images or choose another destination folder in your computer to save the resized images.

Resize Multiple Images Online using Picnik

There may be situations when you are working on another computer and need to resize multiple images without using any software. I would strongly recommend using Picasa web albums which now uses Picnik as the image editing program.

The first reason is that the original image remains in your Picasa web albums folder and you can later download a copy by simply logging in to your Picasa web account. Secondly, you can add so many more effects to your images and customize them the way you want. This includes adjusting the color, sharpness, rotating, cropping, fixing the red eye and so on.

Tip: How to resize PNG images online

Do you use any tool to resize multiple images at once? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

Best Tools to Batch Resize Images originally published on Ampercent

One of the problems I have with my email account is sorting attachments which have been sent long ago. Yes, there are quite a few Gmail search operators but if you need to automatically download Email attachments to a folder in your computer, Dropbox can help.

Send to Dropbox and Habilis are two popular web services which lets you send files and attachments to your Dropbox account. On Comparison, Send to Dropbox has more features like automatic archive unzipping, organizing folders and copying plain as well as HTML messages.

Following are the steps involved to email files to your Dropbox account:

First, go to Send to Dropbox and connect the service with your Dropbox account.

Send to Dropbox will give you a unique email address where you can forward the files you want to upload to your Dropbox account. Add this email address in your email contact list.

Now all you have to do is attach the images, documents or other files to a new email message and send it to this email address. The service will create a new folder named “Attachments” in your Dropbox account, which will get synched across all the computers where you have Dropbox desktop client installed. You can also download the attachments from the Dropbox web interface, if you want.

Tip: Link to a Dropbox folder with a Short URL

How to Send Files and Email Attachments to Your Dropbox Account originally published on Ampercent