This would be relatively easy if URL shorteners does not exist. But the fact is not so. Links shared on Twitter are largely short URLs, bit.ly being the top gun, followed by god knows how many other providers that provides similar service.

Even Tweetmeme won’t do the trick, you can only track tweets that have your blog’s domain name in it with it.

BackTweets

BackTweets is able to track tweets with link to a specific domain name (all blogpost/pages within the domain name), whether they are masked by short URLs or not. Just simply enter your blog’s domain name and Backtweets will return you with a list of tweets that links to your blog.

Click to continue →

Boiling eggs is definitely not the funnest thing to do. Either end up with an overcooked egg if you walk away, or be bored to death if you watch your egg.

Egg Watchers decides to end the egg watching game. Let it know how you like your perfect egg done and it will estimate the time needed to boil it—and show you a YouTube video (randomly) of almost equal length as the boiling time.

The time the video ends is the time where you can enjoy your egg.

Click to continue →

(Gmail+Firefox/Chrome) Do you receive emails from strangers very often? If yes, it would probably be a lovely to have this Firefox add-on/Chrome extension installed— Rapportive.

This is what Rapportive do — kick out the sidebar advertisement from Gmail and replace it with information about the sender of the email you are reading. Here’s what it will display:

• Photo pulled from Gravatar
• Job, position or employment information pulled from LinkedIn
• Social media accounts that match the email address, courtesy of Rapleaf
• If a Twitter account is present, it will display the 3 latest tweets

It’s even possible to add personal notes under the contact profile.

If you are curious on how your profile is displayed to other Rapportive users, you can view it by going to “Sent Mail”, click on any of your sent mail, and lastly, simply hover on your name:

The Dark Side

Remember that embarrassing MySpace profile you created years ago? Or that Bebo and Friendster profile? No? They don’t belong to you?

Problem 1: You have created several accounts on different social networking sites in the pass, with all the embarrassing photos, information about you written years ago that no longer hold any truth today, and those bling blings you have pasted all over your profile.

And you have totally forgot about it! Guess what? If your email recipient have Rapportive installed, he will be able to discover all these history of yours!

Not cool, definitely not.

Problem 2: Inaccurate information. In my case, Rapportive is grabbing my outdated LinkedIn employment information. It is not reflecting the modification I have made some time back. Besides, it’s also linking to my very old Flickr account that I no longer use.

Heck, my email address is not even linked to that old account anymore. But somehow they are still able to dig it out and completely ignore my new account (which is linked to my email address).

Rapportive is well aware of this problem:

If you see data which is inaccurate, abusive or otherwise objectionable, we want you to be able to correct it. Soon you will be able to edit information directly from within Rapportive, but while we are working on this, please send us corrections by email and we will deal with them promptly.

I have sent them an email, and Martin (co-founder) rectified my information on a Sunday!

Problem 3: Google is not gonna like this. They invested so much time perfecting Gmail, giving out so much space, and you are removing their only source of income to over all these cost?

But this is more of a Google problem than ours. They are not any less evil after all

If you landed on this article looking for a way to trace who had just view your Facebook profile or picture, you probably had already try some of the applications and groups on Facebook claiming that they are able to do just exactly so.

Some of them requires you to invite 10 friends or post about the app on your wall before the data will be revealed to you, something like those stupid chain e-mails.

Chances are, none of them work. Some “apps” are even as silly as—requiring you to place a link on your profile, and all it tracks is the clicks on that particular link, which is meaningless. Guess how many out of all your friends that visit your profile will bother to click on that silly looking link?

Facebook does not allow the tracking of Facebook profile views data. Any applications built to provide such information will be taken care of, before it can ever track anything meaningful for your curious mind:

Can I see who’s viewed my profile? There’s a group or application claiming I can find out who has been viewing my profile.
Facebook does not allow users to track profile views or see statistics on how often a particular piece of content has been viewed and by whom without your consent.

If an Application claims to provide this functionality, you can report an application for abuse by going to the application’s About page and clicking “Report Application” at the bottom of the page, or by clicking “Report” at the bottom of any canvas page within the application.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=14357

There is only two ways out. Either the app will not work the way it should, or when it does, Facebook will take it down. Now stop sending inviting your friends to such applications and/or groups already, unless all you want to achieve is to let your friends know that your Facebook profile is dying for attention.

As Amit puts it, the only time an active Twitter user don’t tweet is when they are sleeping. Going with this logic, you can easily deduce the time a Twitter user going to bed, by analyzing the period of time where their Twitter profile activity is at the lowest.

Even if he is not tweeting much, but as time goes (and his tweets number builds up), the data provided would still be sufficient to give some insight on his sleeping time.

SleepingTime.org uses this logic to reveal the sleeping time of any Twitter user at your choice. Simply enter their username (or yours) and SleepingTime will display the results, like this:

For some reason it’s just not showing my Twitter avatar, but that does not matter because the estimated sleeping and waking time is exactly the time I usually sleep (okay, forget about the few minutes snooze).

Check it out, and if your estimated sleeping time is not at all accurate, you can let Amit know so that he can fine tune his algorithm.

McAfee is giving away a free 6 months subscription for their antivirus, VirusScan Plus. It protects PCs from viruses, spyware, and includes a firewall to protect against hacker attacks.

There is no information on how long the offer will last, so it is best to download it right away while it’s still available.

How to download:

1. Go to this promotional page

2. Click on the download button

3. Enter your details to create a new account

4. Download the antivirus and use it for free for the next 6 months.