11 Tumblr Tips for Power Users

Once you’ve mastered the basics of Tumblr, consider learning a few more tricks to make the blogging experience even easier.

From browsing the dashboard to editing and publishing, the tips listed above can be valuable to seasonedTumblr users like you — especially if you juggle more than one account.

Tumblr’s minimal design may seem pretty straightforward, but the site has a few hidden tricks up its sleeve. Some may have been hiding right under your fingertips this whole time.

1. Mass Editing

To quickly edit multiple posts at the same time, use the Mega-Editor.

The tool looks just like your archive, except you can select or delete multiple posts, and edit and add tags.

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2. Hot Keys

Certain keys help you browse through the Dashboard more quickly.

To move forward, press the "J" key. The "K" key moves you backward.

You can also like the current post by pressing the "L" key.

To reblog instantly, without leaving the dashboard or tagging, click the reblog button while pressing the "Alt" key. If you need to tag, press "Ctrl" instead.

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3. Posting Without Internet

Sounds impossible, but you can do a few things on Tumblr via SMS.

Once you've grabbed the personal Tumblr email from the settings page of your blog, send a blog post with tags, a photo, quote or any other feature. Tumblr will automatically detect it and send to your blog.

Or post audio (once you've configured) by calling 1-866-584-6757.

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4. Queued Posts

To rearrange queued posts, click the up and down arrows and drag to the right order.

You can also hover over the arrows and press the "Alt" key, then click. The post will automatically move to the top of your queue.

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5. Original Posts

There is a small fold at the top-right corner of every post on the dashboard. It's easy to miss because it only folds when you hover the mouse over it.

Leave the mouse hovering to see what time it was published, and click to view the original post on the user's blog. This is a valuable tip for anyone who has lost something in the dashboard.

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6. Quick Engagement

When you hover over a user's profile picture in the dashboard, a small "i" offers you different ways to engage.

Depending on what features the user has available, you can ask a question, send fan mail and unfollow or follow a person, without leaving the dashboard.

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7. What Your Friends Like

Want to know what posts your friends like? (This trick only works for public Tumblrs.)

Minus the brackets, use the following URL: http://www.tumblr.com/liked/by/[insert username].

You can also do the same with archives by typing http://[insert username].tumblr.com/archives.

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8. Personal Stats

If you manage more than one Tumblr, you don't need to switch back and forth to view followers, drafts, messages and queues.

Press the "Alt" key and click on the tab as a shortcut.

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9. Search

Not every Tumblr has the search bar available.

To get around it, type this URL: http://[insert username].tumblr.com/search/[search term].

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10. Let Followers Answer

When you end any post with a question mark, a box appears to the right that allows other users to answer.

Even if you're really excited or enraged and add a "?!," the box still appears.

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11. Short Codes

If you're not a fan of Bitly's new redesign, this tip might be useful.

On the edit screen, pull a short code from any published post when your Tumblr is synced to Twitter or Facebook.

What hidden tricks do you find useful on Tumblr? Share your master wisdom in the comments below.

Reference:  http://is.gd/DMu2T
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Are Teens Beginning to Prefer Twitter to Facebook?

Did your teenagers suddenly stop using their Facebook accounts? They may not be the only young adults who’ve lost interest in the largest social network on Earth, according to arecent report by The Los Angeles Times. 

There are many reasons why teens could start visiting Facebook less, including the fact that parents keep tabs on their kids on the social network. On sites like Twitter and Tumblr, they can use any pseudonym, and they don’t have to feel pressured to add people they don’t want to add, even if they know them in real life.

Groups of friends also find themselves having fun on Twitter trying to make hashtags trend. In fact, according to a recent Pew Internet survey, 31% of all internet users 18 to 24 years of age use Twitter, though we imagine some of them have inactive accounts.

With 900 million users, it’s unlikely that Facebook will be dethroned as the king of all social networks in the near future. But if teens truly are beginning to lose interest in it, the company has to find ways to keep things fresh in order to avoid becoming MySpace Wasteland 2.0.

Reference: http://is.gd/YJDgII

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Google+ Releasing ‘Hangouts on Air’ Feature to All Users

Google+ on Monday announced it would gradually roll out its “Hangouts on Air” feature to the masses over the coming weeks. The feature lets you broadcast live sessions for anyone to watch — just like Barack Obama did in January.

Hangouts on Air can be posted on your Google+ stream, YouTube channel or website by checking “Enable Hangouts on Air.” It also allows you to monitor the number of views, record the live session and share it.

The feature previously was available only to a small group of broadcasters starting in 2011. Google touts the creative Hangouts those people have produced such as live concerts from a living room, classes anyone can attend, town halls with politicians and roundtables about any topic, among other sessions.

“So if you have something to say — as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen — you can now go live in front of a global audience,” Google engineering director Chee Chew wrote in a blog post.

To learn more about Hangouts on Air, watch the videos above and below.

Reference:  http://is.gd/P1NIV0

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The Government Would Like You to Write a ‘Social Media Will’

By some estimates, nearly a half a million people with Facebook accounts passed away last year, leaving family and friends to navigate what to do with those pages. Leave the account open? Shut it down entirely? Convert it to an official Facebook memorial page? What would you want for your own Facebook profile? And forget Facebook, what do you want tobecome of your email account? 

If you want any say in such matters, you might want to consider creating a social-media will, as the US government is now recommending as part of its advice on estate planning. As per their blog:

If you have social media profiles set up online, you should create a statement of how you would like your online identity to be handled. Just like a traditional will helps your survivors handle your physical belongings, a social media will spells out how you want your online identity to be handled.

Like with a traditional will, you’ll need to appoint someone you trust as an online executor. This person will be responsible for closing your email addresses, social media profiles, and blogs after you are deceased.

Sounds good, but legally it’s tricky territory. As Naomi Cahn, a professor of law at George Washington University, explained to me, “Formal wills become public. So you need to be careful what you put in a will, because anyone in the world could have access to it.” Instead, you might want to consider establishing a trust or just an informal agreement with information about your passwords and how you would like your accounts to be handled.

A further complication is that people’s social-media and other online accounts are not static, nor are their passwords. Cahn says that the average person has 25 password-protected accounts and types about eight passwords a day. Most people will likely not be able to keep their “social-media wills” up to date on that many accounts.

Planning for the care of your online trail post-mortem presents different issues than planning for money and physical objects. In part this is because our legal regimes and social norms are less solidified in these areas, and, in part because they are actually different animals: A Facebook account can become a participatory memorial that many friends and family can return to over the years, in a way that’s not true of your physical belongings. But despite their differences — or, perhaps, because of them — they each require their own plans for after you go.

Reference:  http://is.gd/VmWwHq

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Google News Gets Deeper Ties to Google+

Google News has a new look, and it’s not just cosmetic. Besides adding larger thumbnail photos that dynamically expand when users click on topics, the news-aggregating service now has stronger ties to Google+.

In a blog post about the change, Google says “Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages.” The feature brings Google+ conversations from your circles, journalists and other “notables” right to the Google News homepage. It can also be turned off if you just want to see headlines.

Google News also now has buttons for users to get “realtime” coverage on a topic. If you’ve ever clicked through on a Google News topic in the past, you may have been frustrated by the seemingly random selection and organization of the stories presented.

“Realtime” presents the topic stories in a more organized way. Once you click on it, you’ll see news articles about the story at the top, listed more or less chronologically. Below that, in-depth articles, opinion pieces and “highly cited” posts are presented under their own headings.

Finally, every topic now gets a similar treatment on the main Google News page, with a top story, more headlines, in-depth/highly cited articles, and a large thumbnail. For topics other than the first one, however, the user must click a button to expand the topic to see anything other than the top story.

What do you think of Google News’s new look? Have your say in the comments.

Reference: http://is.gd/PG6aNf

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Facebook Adds Action Links to Timeline Apps

Facebook announced Wednesday it has added yet another way for friends to interact with your Timeline: “action links.”

Instead of just Liking a post about a recipe or product, say, you can now hit “Save this Recipe” or “Fave this Product” in Open Graph apps.

When a friend checks in on Foursquare and the checkin is added to their Timeline, you can remind yourself to visit that location by hitting “Save this Place.”

SEE ALSO: Put Your Live Event on Facebook, Get Paid with Evinar

“These customizable links provide another way for people to do something within your app when your Open Graph stories appear in news feed, timeline or ticker,” Facebook’s Alex Wyler wrote on the company’s developer blog.

Wyler noted that these app links tie one action to another — and developers can choose what they want that action to be. Facebook also added a page to walk developers through how to add action links to apps.

Will adding action links encourage more interaction on Timeline pages? What do you think the advantages are of adding this feature to Open Graph apps on Facebook? Let me know in the comments.

Reference: http://is.gd/TnFrRu

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Study Says Facebook Privacy Concerns Are on the Rise – Is It Accurate?

Consumer Report’s annual State of the Net study found that people are increasingly concerned with their privacy on Facebook. The report breaks down social privacy into a handful of categories: over-sharing by users, underuse of privacy controls, over-collection of data, over-sharing of data by apps and cyberbullying or harassment. 

2,002 online households were surveyed, including 1,340 Facebook users. Based on those numbers, Consumer Reports extrapolated its results upon the rest of Facebook’s 188 million North American users.

The study raises alarms about Facebook’s privacy practices — but does the author do enough to back up his or her claims?

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Over-Sharing

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4.8 million Facebook users have posted their plans for the day on the site, according to the report’s extrapolation. Consumer Reports suggests that’s a potential tip-off for thieves who can use that information to plan a robbery.

The report was unclear about how many of those 4.8 million users set their location sharing to “friends only,” which would drastically reduce the threat of theft. Jeff Fox, technology editor at Consumer Reports told that 10-15% of Facebook users set their sharing to “public,” rather than friends-only. That’s about 500,000 of those 4.8 million location-sharers.

Fox also pointed to a recent story of thieves who robbed a house using information shared on Facebook, but he couldn’t provide statistics indicating whether that’s a common occurrence or an isolated event.

Consumer Reports also said that Facebook users who publicly “like” a page about a disease, such as diabetes, may tip-off insurers who can then deny those users coverage. Fox was unable to cite statistics showing whether that actually happens, however.

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Underuse of Privacy Controls

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13 million users, says Consumer Reports, either haven’t set or don’t know about Facebook’s privacy tools. However, with 188 million users in the U.S. and Canada, that means more than 90% of users do change their privacy settings from the default.

Facebook has been responding to privacy concerns, albeit not to everyone’s satisfaction. It rolled out broad new privacy changes over the summer of last year.

Information about privacy settings is available on Facebook’s site. Users are expected to set their privacy protection to levels with which they feel comfortable and protected, but some privacy groups call for Facebook to deliver this information more directly and to make the default settings more secure.

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Over-Collection of Data

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Facebook “collects more data than you may imagine,” warns Consumer Reports, and that’s certainly true. The website keeps tabs on users’ activity both on and off the site, sometimes even if they’re not logged in. Facebook manages this via cookies that follow Internet users who visit sites that embed the ubiquitous “like” button on their pages — an ever-increasing number of websites.

Facebook has said that it uses this information to improve security, but privacy advocates warn that such information could potentially be sold to advertisers — which Facebook denies doing.

However, as Consumer Reports points out, Facebook is planning to release more of the data it stores about users, such as IP addresses and facial recognition patterns.

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Over-Collection of Data

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Consumer Reports‘ study argues that Facebook users often pay little attention to the permissions they give to third-party apps. All third-party apps on Facebook require users to “opt-in” by granting permission for an app to look at your news feed, update your status, and so on. It’s up to each individual user to pay attention to these permissions and decide if they should continue installing an app.

Some apps, warns the report, can look at users’ information even if they haven’t installed the app themselves. They do this, says Consumer Reports, by accessing information about users from their friends that have the app installed. Such a grab can be prevented through careful modification of privacy settings.

“Even if you have restricted your information to be seen by friends only, a friend who is using a Facebook app could allow your data to be transferred to a third party without your knowledge,” says the report.

Fox was unable to cite any examples of an app which performs this roundabout information grab.

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Cyberbullying and Harassment

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Consumer Reports says that “problems are on the rise” — 11% of households using Facebook had “trouble” last year, which ranges from a stranger using their login information to online harassment. The report highlights cyberbullying against children, claiming that 800,000 children under 13 had been “harassed or subjected to other forms of cyberbullying on Facebook.”

The report didn’t give exact definitions of “trouble,” “harassment” or “cyberbullying.” Such cases could range from commonplace teasing to more extreme and dangerous forms of social rejection, and it’s impossible to know these details from this study. Fox wasn’t able to clarify the definitions used in Consumer Reports’ survey.

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Facebook and Privacy

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Consumer Reports’ study shows that privacy is an ever-increasing concern as Facebook and other social media become a more central part of everyday life. However, careful observation of the report raises more questions than it answers. Some observers, including journalist and Internet commentator Jeff Jarvis, label the report as “fear-mongering” that’s harmful to the public’s understanding of social networks.

“My fear is that such fear-mongering will lead to more regulation and a less open and free net,” wrote Jarvis on his blog. “Consumer Reports is not fulfilling its mission to protect us with this campaign. It will hurt us.”

Reference: http://is.gd/jZLEcu

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