I have been using Facebook Comments Box on this blogs for over a week now to test out and increase interaction on the site. For starters, I did like the amount of interaction from Facebook users. However, there are quite a few problems with Facebook Comments when it comes to moderation.

First off, the website where you can moderate Facebook comments (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/comments/) is down most of the time (or whenever I try to access it). It gets frustrating because it is the only way you can see new comments and trash spam or hide comments from users.

On the other hand, Facebook comments moderation in itself does not work most of the time and administrators have problems when marking a comment as spam or banning a user.

Overall, I feel that Facebook comments do provide a lot of ease for their users to quickly comment on a website. However, there is a lot of work to be done when it comes to administrating those comments. I will continue working with Facebook comments for some more time and see if there is any improvement with it before I decide to remove it for good.

What has been your experience while using Facebook comments? Have you had problems with moderating comments and administrating them? I am looking for some alternatives so please feel to suggest them (No Disqus Please).

Last year, Facebook introduced a new feature on the social networking site called "Live Ticker" which displayed a live activity stream of your Facebook friends. Facebook Ticker was hated by a lot of users and also led to a few Facebook scams including the one where users were duped into believing that they could stop posts from showing in Facebook Ticker.

In the past, we wrote about different ways to hide the Facebook Live Ticker. However, Facebook now allows users to hide the Live Ticker easily with the recent changes they have made.

If you are looking to hide the Facebook Ticker in your Facebook feed, you can now simply click the UP arrow key on the Ticker to hide the Facebook Ticker from view. Once that is done, you will no longer see the Ticker on your feed. If you want to see the Live Ticker again, you just have to click on the down arrow key and it will show up again.

Also Read:

• Boost Your Small Business on Facebook
• Express Your Life with Timeline Movie Maker
• Access Facebook on Any Mobile Without GPRS or Internet Connection

However, one must note that hiding the Ticker will only hide it from view. There is no way to stop your posts from showing up on all your friends profile so don’t forget to stay away from Facebook scams which tell you that you can stop your posts from showing up in the Live Ticker.

Facebook has a had a huge week with them going public with their $5 Billion IPO. However, it looks like they are facing problems with their infrastructure with the "Facebook Activity Feed" for websites showing an "invalid action type" error all across the web.

Website owners who have been using the "Activity Feed" social plugin from Facebook might notice that the feed is no longer showing up and instead an error box with the message "Invalid action type" has taken it’s place. This problem is occurring on all websites and seems to be a big problem on Facebook’s side.

The error is also apparent on Facebook’s Social Plugin code generator for all websites as seen in the screenshot above. Facebook has faced several problems in the past where the site has gone down for hours due to database problems and DNS issues among other things. However, this look like the first time that their social plugins have had issues.

If you are a webmaster who uses the Facebook Activity Feed on your website, you might see the above error. However, having the widget in question on your site does not affect loading time. We have contacted Facebook to check why this problem is occurring and will update the post when we get a response.

Tonight is probably the biggest day in American sports calendar with Super Bowl 46 being played between the New York Giants and New England Patriots at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The game is definitely big, however, there is some good news for fans as well who won’t be able to sit glued to television sets at their home or in a bar.

For the first time ever, NBC will be streaming Super Bowl XLVI live online, thus, allowing fans to catch live play by play action on the comfort of their computer or mobile phones.

Super Bowl XLVI (2012) will be available to Verizon mobile users an on NBCSports.com on the web. Users will be able to watch the entire game as well as the famous Super Bowl Commercials live online.

This is definitely a great move by NFL and NBC since lot of people might be on the move and might not be able to catch up on the action. So don’t fret if you are not have a TV, and dive into the biggest game in American sports today online or on your mobile phone.

We have been seeing a lot of Facebook Scams these days, however, it looks like Twitter is also being attacked by users with a lot of scam messages. Unlike Facebook most of the Twitter scam messages spread through direct messages and are usually phishing attacks.

A new direct message scam is spreading on Twitter right now with a direct message:

You seen what this person is saying about you? [link] terrible things..

The above message comes from someone you might know and follow on Twitter and looks pretty real. If  you click on the URL accompanied in the message, you will be taken to a webpage which is designed to look like Twitter and asked you enter your username and password.

Please DO NOT enter you username and password since the scammers will then gain access to your account username and password. If you do enter your username and password into the phishing page, the scammers will then redirect you to Twitter and ask permission to install an app which will then send out the rogue message as a direct message to all your followers and continue spreading the phishing attack.

Most modern browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox will detect the URL as a phishing website so you might be better off upgrading to a secure browser.

To avoid phishing attacks, always look at the URL to see whether you are entering your password on the site itself and not some masked URL which is made to look like the original site. Additionally, you should also periodically check the apps you have given access to in your Twitter account and remove unwanted apps. Learn how to remove apps or revoke app permissions in Twitter.

Dropbox is no doubt one of the most popular file synching software for PCs and mobile phones alike. To start out, Dropbox gives users 2GB of free space (and an additional 250MB) and then allows users to earn additional space by referring friends. However, you can earn 5GB of free space by downloading the beta version of Dropbox.

Users who download the beta version of Dropbox and help the developers fix the bugs will get up-to 5GB of space for uploading photos and videos from their mobile phone, camera or SD card. You will receive 500MB of space when you first import your photos or videos to Dropbox and continue earning additional 500MB of data for every 500MB of photos or videos you upload to the cloud.

Also Read:

• A Guide to Using Symbolic Links With Dropbox
• Backup WordPress Database, Themes, Plugins & Uploads To Dropbox, Amazon S3
• How to Sync Your Game Saves Between Computers for Free
• How to Send Email Attachments to Dropbox Automatically
• How To Run Multiple Instances Of Dropbox

Dropbox has been growing rapidly and there were some hints that they might also integrate with Google Docs soon, however, nothing has come of it yet.

Beta software can often be buggy and sometimes crash your system. However, if you are willing to take the risk, you can download the beta version of Dropbox from here. Also, don’t forget to check our Online Storage section to find free online storage for your files.

[via Engadget]

Of late, scammers have grown smarter when it comes to conning people on the Internet. Several scammers have begun to use Word documents as attachments while sending out scam emails. However, they haven’t stopped there and are now using Antivirus companies to scam PayPal users.

A flurry of emails are being sent out by scammers with subject lines like “Receipt for your payment to AVG” or “Receipt for your payment to Symantec” or “Receipt for your payment to Norton“accompanied by a PayPal receipt which looks very genuine (see image below).

The email in question looks very genuine and the scammer asks you to confirm the payment and also includes a “Cancel Transaction” link. This would definitely make many people click on the link because they might not have made the purchase in the first place. Clicking on the link will take the users to a website which is similar to that of PayPal.

The website in question will ask you for your username and password. However, DO NOT enter it. For testing purposes, I entered a fake username and password and it allowed me to access my false account. It then went on to tell me that my account is limited and that I need to enter my credit card, social security, banking and billing information.

This scam looks to be pretty widespread because not only is it farming your PayPal username and password but it is also stealing your credit card information, social security and banking information.

There are several ways in which you can protect yourself from such scammers like turning on the Anti-phishing feature in Gmail to know when emails from PayPal are genuine. You should also always have a good Antivirus and Anti-spyware or Anti-malware running on your system. You can find tons of free Antivirus software which you can download and use immediately. You can also read our earlier guide to Protect Yourself from Internet Threats.

Google recently started redirecting Blogspot.com blogs to Blogspot.in and other country specific domains. The reason being that Google wants to give more freedom of expression to users while also being able to adhere to removal requests from different governments.

The country based redirection was first rolled out in India thanks to some recent stupid court judgments against websites in India. However, this will highly inconvenience Blogspot blog owners in India since they will not have duplicate content. Even though Google has promised to minimize the  negative effects of this change, you can definitely take an initiative to minimize the problems this will cause.

Google had introduced the rel=canonical meta tag to overcome this issue. This tag allows users to point tell search engines the actual location of the content if there are one or more URLs which have the same content, thus avoiding duplicate content on your website.

If you are Blogspot blog owner, you can avoid duplicate content by adding the following content to your template. Please note that you will have to edit the HTML code of your Blogspot template and add this before the </head> tag.

If you are using a HTML template for you blog, you should add the following code:

<ItemPage><Blogger><link href=’<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>’ rel=’canonical’/></Blogger></ItemPage>

On the other hand if you are using a XML template, you will have to add the following code to include all meta tags:

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Or also individually include the rel=canonical tag by using:

<link expr:href="data:blog.url" rel="canonical"/>

Once you have added the tags, make sure to save your template and then view source of your browser to check if the tag is added to your template. That’s it. Once you have added the rel=canonical tag, search engines will only index one page instead of creating duplicate content.

Google.com has historically redirected to country-specific versions. For example, if you are in Australia, typing Google.com in the browser will redirect you to google.com.au and in India, it would redirect you to Google.co.in. This redirection has been in place so that Google can serve up local content to the users. However, Google is now expanding the country specific URLs to Blogger based blogs as well.

Google OS is reporting that BlogSpot blogs based in India are redirecting to BlogSpot.in from BlogSpot.com. The new redirection policy has been made available in a Blogger help page (emphasis added).

Why does my blog redirect to a country-specific URL?

Q: Why am I seeing a URL change?
A: Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you’re reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or “ccTLD.” For example, if you’re in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location.

Q: Why is this happening?
A: Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.

As per the Google help page, the move to country specific domains is so that Google can allow free expression for bloggers and also comply with valid removal requests from local authorities.

So, why this move? Several social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and Google have come under fire recently from courts (Read: Indian Government and Courts Ignore Common Sense and Laws of the Land in a Drive to Leash the Internet) in India asking them to remove derogatory and inflammable content from their websites. Google however has not yet complied with the requests, but this change will allow them to remove country specific content.

Currently, this changes will only affect blogspot.com blogs and will not affect custom domains. The implementation of the domain redirection has already started in India where Google recently faced problems (read above story).

Also Read: How To Add rel=canonical to Blogspot Blogger Blogs for SEO

Majority of BlogSpot blog owners would be worried about the SEO for their blogs. However, Google has said that they will try to minimize the negative consequences of hosting BlogSpot content on multiple domains. They are also suggesting users to add rel=”canonical” directive to their blogs.

Q: Will this affect search engine optimization on my blog?
A: After this change, crawlers will find BlogSpot content on many different domains. Hosting duplicate content on different domains can affect search results, but we are making every effort to minimize any negative consequences of hosting BlogSpot content on multiple domains.

The majority of content hosted on different domains will be unaffected by content removals, and therefore identical. For all such content, we will specify the blogspot.com version as the canonical version using rel=canonical. This will let crawlers know that although the URLs are different, the content is the same. When a post or blog in a country is affected by a content removal, the canonical URL will be set to that country’s ccTLD instead of the .com version. This will ensure that we aren’t marking different content with the same canonical tag.

If you are a reader of Blogger blogs, you can request to stop the redirects by adding “/ncr” to the end of the URL. NCR stands for “No Country Redirect” and will always display Blogger blogs in English.

Quite recently, Google made several changes to their privacy policy to simplify it and merge several privacy policies into one. One of the changes Google made was to allow users to change their ads preferences easily across the board.

However, one interesting thing that Google has now disclosed through their Ad Preferences Manager is that, Google has been guessing a user’s age and gender based on the websites they have visited.

Google says that the gender and age are determined by the websites a user visits. In my case both the Age as well as the Gender were correct. Google does not say as to how they are coming up with that assumption but their algorithm looks pretty accurate for most users and might include data from Google Analytics as well. Of course, this information may not be right always and Google provides users with an option to correct it as well.

Google uses this age and gender information along with other preferences to display personalize ads for the users. If you are not comfortable with Google collecting this information, you can easily Opt out by visiting this page.

You can view your own Age and Gender information by visiting Google Ad Preferences Manager page, however, you will have to be logged in with a Google account to view this information. Do let us know if Google was correctly able to guess it for you or not.