Keep in touch with your social networks with FriendFeed.

The internet has gone social and there is an abundance of social networks. To keep track of what is happening around your social circle online you have to invariably subscribe to feeds from your friends. Soon another hot site pops up and you’ve signed up and before you know it you are drowning in a deluge of feeds. This is the niche that FriendFeed is a targeting with its service that aggregates feeds across social networks, bookmarking sites and content networks and delivers them in a concise manner.

There are several services similar to FriendFeed (Plaxo Pulse, Spokeo) but to its credit the site is the brainchild of ex-Googlers. Also, now, there is a desktop application available that adds more interactivity to the updates.

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We can now search with ease!

How do you search for one particular file from a few different file hosting servers? By scouring forums after forums just to get one decent download link? Or by googling with the Google Search String?

In this article, I will introduce you to some good sites used to search for files from file hosting servers like Rapidshare and MegaUpload, since these are the two of the more popular ones. These sites are gaining popularity now because we know how annoying it is to sign up to different forums just to get some download links.

There are better and faster ways to get the files that you needed off the humongous World Wide Web. And no, there’s no need to go hunting for these files. These sites will simply return the direct download link to us, making our download life simply easier!

Let’s start with the first one:

No. 1: MegaDownload

This site is my favourite to use. Its interface is simple and user-friendly (like Google) and they have two tick boxes for you to choose from where you would want your results to come from. It’s very fast, and it will also return a lot of results, depending on what you typed in. But don’t you worry; they’re usually what you’re looking for.

Just type in what you need and do remember to include the file type to get a more concise result. When the result is returned, you can scan through the list to find one that you like. And to download, you can click on the green download image although I prefer to copy the link (in orange) and paste in the address bar of a new window. It saves me a few clicks.

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Get a FREE “Photoshop” Today!!!

No one can resist the temptation of having something for free. Whether it is free food, or stationeries, or a free-testing drink, as long as it is a freebie, people will line up in long queues to get it. Well, at least the good news about free software is that you don’t have to be in a long line just to get your hands on some good stuff.

I love testing out new software. I never like trial versions, because they expire within a time limit and if they don’t, there will be some kind of limitation also. So, I’m always on a look out on freeware, scouring the Internet for some free programs that can make my life easier, more interesting and yet they cost nothing.

One of the more useful freeware programs that I found on the net is the GIMP program. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. If you like to manipulate digital photographs like photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring, you’d love this small yet powerful program. Did I tell you it’s FREE?!

I am not very skilled at photo editing, but once in a while, I do like to ‘flip’ through my ‘stack’ of digital photographs in my hard drive, selecting photographs that I can ‘improve’ or just add some special effects onto it, and then show it to the world. I know there’s this everyone’s favorite program called Adobe Photoshop, but the program is just too big and took up a lot of my valuable CPU’s memory. Not to mention the expensive price that you need to pay to get a licensed version. And to actually buy some software that I’ll just use once in a blue moon? I’d think not.

Back to GIMP. GIMP is a rather small but yet a smart program for its size. Only roughly around 16MB in size, it offers almost the same functionality as any professional image editing tools that you’d need to empty your pockets for. Built with worldwide users in mind, it not only works on many types of operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, and Sun OpenSolaris), it also comes in many different languages. And the best thing about GIMP is that it is open source, so it will be free (forever!) and it is also much more customizable when compared to the Photoshop.

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I know it’s late as the latest edition of the most popular IT fair in Malaysia was concluded last week. But, I would still like to talk about this PC Fair which was held at KL Convention Center, because I know you want to see what latest gadgets you can find there.

Oh no, you actually want to see sexy PC fair babes more than gadgets?! Haha

Be patient, let’s check out some cheap offers from the fair. Look at the Sony Walkman offer. RM399 a piece, since when can you buy a Sony Walkman for such a cheap price? Consider this for its industry renowned sound quality, don’t buy those made-in-Malaysia or China MP3 players although they might cost less than half of this price.

Toshiba flash memory should be pretty good as well. The price of their flash memory, or pen drives have really dropped damn lot from last year. Now, 1GB costs only RM19, while a never-heard-before 8GB costs RM94 only! Last year, 1GB costed how much?

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Google recently announced via its product blogs that they have begun an effort to index the “invisible” web. The details point to perhaps a big step in the technology for indexing online content. The announcement refers to detection of online forms and filling them with suitable data so as to generate pages that could be indexed.

An excerpt from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a

element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made.

The Invisible Web refers to the part of the Internet which is unavailable for indexing to the search bots or crawlers in the normal course of indexing.

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