How To: Setup Facebook Video Chat

Facebook video chat is released and available for all Facebook users as of now. But there are a few initial steps you need to do before you start video-calling your friends. Facebook video chat is powered by skype and it requires you to install an additional software before you can start.

This step by step guide  will let you video chat with your friends in minutes.

Setup Facebook Video Chat:

#1 Go to the Facebook Videocalling page.

#2. Click on Get Started Button.

#3. You need to install an additional program. You’ll be prompted to do so, when you receive a call or when you click on the video chat icon in the upper right corner of your chat box. Facebook Video Call Plug-in is just 482 KB, when you run the setup, it downloads some additional files.

#4. As a standard Skype call, no video opens until the receiver picks up the call.

#5. When they do so, you’ll be able to chat with them. If they didn’t reply, you can leave a video message for them. You get a option to add videos in your private messages and video messages share the same inbox as the text messages.

#6. The Facebook video chat functions like a light version of Skype.

Courtesy: Mashable

This video chat uses a good amount of CPU. So, if you are working on a slow system, there are chances for crashing.

Hope this guide helped you to reach your friends. Enjoy Facebook Video Chatting ! Ciao ! 

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Create Your Own Fake iPhone Conversations

Yeah, I hope you understood the theme behind this article right from the title. Faking something that did not really happen seems to be really fun to do. Capturing a screenshot of that and uploading to your favorite social networking sites seems to be much more cooler. The comments you get from your friends will be much, much cooler.

We cannot believe whatever we see in this internet. A quite few may be true while others could have been faked by someone. Let us head on to the article. ifaketext is actually an online site which will let you create your own fake conversations that looks the same as the conversations that you make in your iPhone.

How to create a fake conversation?

• Head on to ifaketext website.
• Enter the name of the person you are going to chat with in the “Enter a name” box
• Next select the carrier that you are using in your iPhone. It has got two options : Verizon, AT&T . Go for one
• In the next box, enter the conversation in the correct format as shown.
• Hit “Create your screenshot”

Now, here’s a conversation between me and Ganesh Babu (CEO @ Axleration) talking on the brand new iPhone 4S which he bought a few days back. ( Actually he didn’t buy one  ) I faked this with ifaketext. Have a look at this before heading to create your own fake conversation.

After getting your screenshot, you will have option to share it with your friends on social media sites. The options are available on the left side of the page. You can also email the screenshot to your friends or add a comment to that image in the facebook comments box available at the bottom of the page.

Have fun creating fake conversations. Enjoy.

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Post to Facebook With 5 Famous Gadgets That You Don’t Own

Gadgets. That’s what I am gonna speak about now. We guys all have a lot of gadgets. What’s the first thing you would probably do when you buy a brand new gadget? Perhaps snap a photo or two. Or just check out it’s new features. But in my case, I would upload a few pictures to Facebook or update my status with it.

Updating statuses with the newly bought gadget gives your Facebook buddies a strong impression that you own that particular gadget. As you can see in the screenshot below, Facebook shows the device name, with which the person updated the status, below the status. The below status was updated by a friend of mine using his mobile phone.

After a quite few looks at these kind of status updates by our friends, we feel a little jealous and wish that we too could update our statuses with such devices. But unfortunately not all of us own those gadgets. Now here in this post, as the title says, I bring a quite few links with which you can update your status without owning those precious gadgets.

• With Android : https://www.facebook.com/connect/prompt_feed.php?preview=true&api_key=00feea04186100ee4fdac07465190067
• With BlackBerry : https://www.facebook.com/connect/prompt_feed.php?preview=true&api_key=2254487659
• With Apple iPad : https://www.facebook.com/connect/prompt_feed.php?preview=true&api_key=350939045778
• With Apple iPod Touch : https://www.facebook.com/connect/prompt_feed.php?preview=true&api_key=4df3200f360533d57e0353bed01109d8
• With HTC Touch HD : https://www.facebook.com/connect/prompt_feed.php preview=true&api_key=31b32609bd82df5d460ef993d3511ec9

Well, did you try those? How did it go? Share your experiences with me and also drop forget to drop in comments below in the comments section. And by the way, don’t forget to share this trick with your Facebook buddies and other friends. That too would love to enjoy the fun. Don’t they?

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How to: Move Photos From Facebook to Google+

With Google’s release of Google+ just over a month ago, millions have migrated over to the new social media platform. However, most, if not all are reluctant to let go of their beloved Facebook due to losing content such as photos.

But there is a viable solution. If you want to keep all of those old high school snapshots and college pictures, installing an extension through your browser will allow you to keep the memories you want and get rid of those you can do without.

There are a few reasons to move your photos from Facebook to Google+. If you have adopted the new social platform, adding photos can create some life for your profile and give users something to see. If you have decided to leave Facebook for Google+, keeping those photos for your new profile is a must, especially if you want to keep those memories from homecomings, parties and college spring break trips fresh in your mind.

Google+ uses Picasa, a photo editing software made by Google that allows users to add, edit and share photos. Picasa lets you upload photos from your computer or phone through the Google+ app. The features through Picasa give users the option to edit everything using one tool: red-eye, lighting, geo-tags and more. Picasa has 1 gigabyte of space for users and automatically organizes all of your computers photos and name tags to identify others in your pictures, similar to Facebook. Google+ actually makes it easy to add new albums and upload your pictures, plus Picasa has plenty of features to fine-tune each photo through the social media site.

The first step to migrating your photos is making sure you are using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as your browser. Both provide extensions that make this a painless task. For Chrome, search for the Move Your Photos extension and install it. Then, click on the icon and log in to Facebook. You can select which photos you want to move to Google+, then just let “Move Your Photos” work its magic. Be sure not to log out of Facebook during the process. Once the albums are transferred, the pictures are private until you change the settings to allow specific Circles to view them. As a note, captions are not a part of the changeover with the “Move Your Photos” extension. Firefox uses a similar extension called Photo Importer, available for versions 2.0 through 5.0 for the browser. Choose the photos to move and then organize them and create album names for each one, as the album titles do not transfer over. Click ‘submit your albums’ and then log in to Google+ to complete the process. Of course, both of these extensions are free and do most of the work for you. Links provided at the bottom of the post.

Another option is a zip file. Facebook lets you download all of your photos to a zip file, which can be shifted to Google+. You can check out how to do it, here.

All three of these choices can help you add some color to your new profile on Google+ without losing all of the photos you have on Facebook for good.

Links

 

Move Your Photos Chrome Extension

 

Photo Importer Add-on for Firefox

 

Guide to Download your Facebook Photos

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How Torrents Work

How BitTorrent Works

BitTorrent is a protocol that enables fast downloading of large files using minimum Internet bandwidth. It costs nothing to use and includes no spyware or pop-up advertising.

Unlike other download methods, BitTorrent maximizes transfer speed by gathering pieces of the file you want and downloading these pieces simultaneously from people who already have them. This process makes popular and very large files, such as videos and television programs, download much faster than is possible with other protocols.

To know why BitTorrent downloading is different from the regular downloading i’ll have to explain how the traditional client-server downloading works:

You open a Web page and click a link to download a file to your computer.

The Web browser software on your computer (the client) tells the server (a central computer that holds the Web page and the file you want to download) to transfer a copy of the file to your computer.

The transfer is handled by a protocol (a set of rules), such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).

The transfer speed is affected by a number of variables, including the type of protocol, the amount of traffic on the server and the number of other computers that are downloading the file. If the file is both large and popular, the demands on the server are great, and the download will be slow.

But the BitTorrent follows a different method of sharing files known as Peer-Peer Sharing

Peer-to-peer file sharing is different from traditional file downloading. In peer-to-peer sharing, you use asoftware program (rather than your Web browser) to locate computers that have the file you want. Because these are ordinary computers like yours, as opposed to servers, they are called peers. The process works like this:

• You run peer-to-peer file-sharing software (for example, a Gnutella program) on your computer and send out a request for the file you want to download.
• To locate the file, the software queries other computers that are connected to the Internet and running the file-sharing software.
• When the software finds a computer that has the file you want on its hard drive, the download begins.
• Others using the file-sharing software can obtain files they want from your computer’s hard drive.

The file-transfer load is distributed between the computers exchanging files, but file searches and transfers from your computer to others can cause bottlenecks. Some people download files and immediately disconnect without allowing others to obtain files from their system, which is called leeching. This limits the number of computers the software can search for the requested file.

Unlike some other peer-to-peer downloading methods, BitTorrent is a protocol that offloads some of the file tracking work to a central server (called a tracker). Another difference is that it uses a principal called tit-for-tat. This means that in order to receive files, you have to give them. This solves the problem of leeching — one of developer Bram Cohen‘s primary goals. With BitTorrent, the more files you share with others, the faster your downloads are. Finally, to make better use of available Internet bandwidth (the pipeline for data transmission), BitTorrent downloads different pieces of the file you want simultaneously from multiple computers.

• You open a Web page and click on a link for the file you want.
• BitTorrent client software communicates with a tracker to find other computers running BitTorrent that have the complete file (seed computers) and those with a portion of the file (peers that are usually in the process of downloading the file).
• The tracker identifies the swarm, which is the connected computers that have all of or a portion of the file and are in the process of sending or receiving it.
• The tracker helps the client software trade pieces of the file you want with other computers in the swarm. Your computer receives multiple pieces of the file simultaneously.
• If you continue to run the BitTorrent client software after your download is complete, others can receive .torrent files from your computer; your future download rates improve because you are ranked higher in the “tit-for-tat” system.

Downloading pieces of the file at the same time helps solve a common problem with other peer-to-peer download methods: Peers upload at a much slower rate than they download. By downloading multiple pieces at the same time, the overall speed is greatly improved. The more computers involved in the swarm, the faster the file transfer occurs because there are more sources of each piece of the file. For this reason, BitTorrent is especially useful for large, popular files.

Hope this article helped all those people who use all their hard-disk space to download stuffs all day long (like me ^_^) to know how torrents work and how they get their movies to their computer before the movie hits the screens…

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How To: Download Torrents

Torrents are one of the most unavoidable phenomenon of the modern Internet. With Torrents, file sharing has been taken to a new level. Piracy reached newer heights after the evolution of torrents. This guide will help you to learn to download a torrent from the internet.

How to Download Torrents

1. You need to download a torrent program. Few famous torrent programs are, uTorrent, Vuze, BitTorrent, Delugeetc…

2. Download and install the torrent program.

3. Go to a Torrent site and search for the file you need to download. The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, ISOHunt etc.. are some of the torrent search engines.

4. Once you have found the file, download it. A .torrent file will be saved to your computer. All .torrent files will be of small size, they act as pointers and will be downloaded soon.

5. Open your Torrent program and open the .torrent file with it. The download of the main file will start.

6. You can do other works will downloading a torrent. Torrent Programs doesn’t require your frequent attention, they will download in the background.

But Torrent programs consume a lot of bandwidth, so your normal browsing speed maybe affected by this. Also if you are using limited data plans for Broadband, be careful while using torrents. Otherwise, you will be seriously shocked to see your monthly bills.

Torrents are mostly used to download pirated software, music, movies etc… Please understand that all these are made with great effort, so please don’t engage in piracy. Use Torrents in a productive way.

Hope this guide helped you, don’t forget to drop a comment below 

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Top 5 Torrent Search Engines

Torrent search engines helps you to search for torrents. They are more specific than ordinary search engines and they index only torrent files available in the net. There are Torrents for music, games, movies, applications etc… Torrents download faster and there are torrents for almost anything. Torrents are more secure to download.

The problem with torrents is that, a few torrents may be just pranks and may not actually contain what you were searching for. A few torrents may be of less quality and some even come with viruses. Some torrents won’t have enough seeders so that your download speed may be very slow.

To Overcome these problems you need to choose high quality torrents and Torrent search engines will  help you to choose the best one. You also need to have a torrent client like utorrent or bit-torrent to download your torrents. So download a torrent client before starting to download your torrents.

Here we will list the top 5 torrent search engines.

1. ThePirateBay (Alexa Rank – 89)

The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated TPB) is a Swedish website that hosts torrent files. It bills itself as “The world’s most resilient bittorrent site” and is ranked as the 89th most popular website in the world and 17th in Sweden by Alexa Internet since 2008. Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau) the website has been run as a separate organization since October 2004. The website used to be run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij who are known as anakata and TiAMO, respectively.

2. isoHunt (Alexa Rank – 214)

isoHunt is a BitTorrent Search engine with over 1.7 million torrents in its database and 20 million peers from indexed torrents

3. btjunkie (Alexa Rank – 253)

BTJunkie is an advanced BitTorrent search engine. It uses a web crawler (similar to Google) to search for torrent files from other torrent sites and store it in its database. It has nearly 4,000,000 active torrents and about 4,200 torrents added daily

4. Torrentz (Alexa Rank – 493)

Torrentz is a torrent meta-search engine based in Finland (run by an admin, who goes by the name Flippy) that indexes torrents from various major torrent sites like Mininova, BTJunkie, and The Pirate Bay. It offers compilations of various trackers per torrent that are not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so when a tracker is down, other trackers can do the work.

5. Demonoid (Alexa Rank – 701)

Demonoid‘s torrent tracker had an estimated 3 million peers in September 2007. The site had over 252,427 torrents indexed as of May 3, 2009 (torrents uploaded prior to August 4, 2005 were removed to free server resources).

Site Descriptions taken from Wikipedia. Alexa rank taken with the help of the Alexa plugin for Chrome.

Other Useful Links

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