Facebook Just Fooled You with this Notification to Sign-Up for Saving Free Basics in India

Facebook’s Free Basics has been on fire in India since its inception. First it started with internet.org but even it got a lot of negative response from experts all over the country as it was violating Net Neutrality. And now again Facebook has come up with Free Basics in collaboration with Reliance. Again all the experts started firing Free Basics as it was violation Net Neutrality in the country.

• If you are new here is everything you need to know about Net Neutrality.

In an attempt to save Free Basics from getting banned in India, Facebook came up with this strategy by sending notifications to all the people and signing up in support of Free Basics.

What does the notification say?

This notification is very persistent, and it comes whenever one of your friends signs up without his/her knowledge. A regular internet user who doesn’t has much knowledge about Net Neutrality and Free Basics tend to fall for it and signs up in support of Free Basics which you shouldn’t.
When you click on the notification you see a sign up page in support to Free Basics which reads as:

“To the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, I support digital equality for India. Free Basics provides free access to essential internet services like communication, education, healthcare, employment, farming and more. It helps those who can’t afford to pay for data, or who need a little help getting started online. And it’s open to all people, developers and mobile operators. With 1 billion Indian people not yet connected, shutting down Free Basics would hurt our country’s most vulnerable people. I support Free Basics – and digital equality for India. Thank you.”

Free Basics gives people access to vital services like communication, healthcare, education, job listings and farming information – all without data charges. It helps those who can’t afford to pay for data, or who need a little help getting started online. And it’s open to all people, developers and mobile operators.

But Free Basics is in danger in India. A small, vocal group of critics are lobbying to have Free Basics banned on the basis of net neutrality. Instead of giving people access to some basic internet services for free, they demand that people pay equally to access all internet services – even if that means 1 billion people can’t afford to access any services.

The TRAI is holding a public debate that will affect whether free basic internet services can be offered in India. Your voice is important for the 1 billion Indian people who are not yet connected and don’t have a voice on the internet.

Unless you take action now, India could lose access to free basic internet services, delaying progress towards digital equality for all Indians. Tell the TRAI you support Free Basics and digital equality in India.

Read the last line: “I support Free Basics – and digital equality for India.”

Facebook was taking an unfair advantage using this Campaign by fooling most of the people by setting up this trap. When a typical internet user gets this notification he/she might feel that their friends have supported the cause and they also tend to do the same thinking that they are doing it for a good reason which is not.

We guess by this time most of you people fell for this well planned trap. Now, visit Savetheinternet and sign petition to ban free basics completely and save Net Neutrality.

However, as per the latest news, Reliance was suggested to put Facebook’s Free Basics on Hold. Do let us know what do you think about this in your comments below.

– See more at: http://www.alltechbuzz.net/facebook-free-basics-campaign/#sthash.R3A45pDa.dpuf

The Top Android Apps on the Google Play Store

This is an updated list of the top Android Apps that have amassed more than 50,000,000 downloads on the official Google Play store. The data has been screen-scraped from Google Web Search and the Google Play store. You can also download the raw data as an Excel sheet.

Legend: The blue bars indicate the average user rating of an app while orange reflects the total number of users that have rated that app on the App Store.

Android App Install Base 500 million to 1 billion Gmail YouTube Google Play services Maps Facebook 100 million – 500 million GO Launcher EX Twitter Viber Facebook Messenger Voice Search Google Play Books Subway Surfers Google Play Music Tiny Flashlight + LED Pandora WhatsApp Messenger Skype Fruit Ninja Free Dropbox Adobe Reader Angry Birds Talking Tom Cat 2 Free Street View on Google Maps Google+ Hangouts (replaces Talk) Google Search Chrome Browser Google Play Movies & TV LINE: Free Calls & Messages

50 million – 100 million GO SMS Pro KakaoTalk: Free Calls & Text Google Translate Temple Run SoundHound Tango Video, Voice & Text Yahoo! Mail Brightest Flashlight Free ® Advanced Task Killer GO Locker Pou Angry Birds Rio Hill Climb Racing Barcode Scanner WeChat TuneIn Radio MX Player PicsArt Shoot Bubble Deluxe Despicable Me Talking Tom Cat Free GROUP PLAY Shazam ChatON Kindle ZEDGE. Jetpack Joyride AntiVirus Security Pool Billiards Pro Opera Mini web browser Google Earth Flipboard: Your News Magazine

Quick highlights:

• Facebook is only non-Google app in the Google Play Store that has been downloaded more than 500 million times. The others are Gmail, YouTube, Google Play and Google Maps that are mostly pre-installed on Android phones.
• The 50m+ list has 65 apps but the one app that enjoys the highest average user rating is Brightest Flashlight, a free app that turns your Android phone into a torch.
• Facebook has been rated by over 8 million users while 4 million Android users have added their ratings for WhatsApps Messenger on the Play Store. No other app comes close.

Create a Public Folder Where Anyone Can Add Files

Dropbox and SkyDrive allow you to have “Shared Folders” where a folder is shared between all members of the group. Any member can contribute files to the shared web folder and such a thing is ideal for collaborative efforts like for sharing photos with guests after an event. People can view photos uploaded by other users as well as upload their own to the shared folder.

A limitation with these “shared folders” is that the folder owner must invite a user before he or she can add files to the folder.

OneTimeBox, a web app that went live at the recently concluded MIT hackathon(coding contest),  takes a different approach to shared folders. The app creates a disposable, public web folder where anyone can add files as long as they know the unique URL of your shared folder.

There’s no registration required and neither do you have to invite anyone as a contributor. Just share the URL of your folder with friends and they’ll have full access – including delete permissions – to the files in that folder.

OneTimeBox is built using Meteor.js and the source code can be found onGithub. Internally it uses the Filepicker API which uses the Amazon S3 service for storing files in the cloud. The app is neatly designed though you cannot add file to the shared folder from your mobile devices.

How Does WordPress Make Money?

How can a software company like Automattic make money when they are giving away WordPress blogging software for free? WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg shared how WordPress makes money:

1. Web Hosting – WordPress offers web hosting services to big brands like WSJ’s All Things D, CNN, TechCrunch, Time.com and more. The pricing forWordPress VIP Hosting starts at $15,000 per month.

2. Google AdSense– Free blogs hosted on WordPress.com may sometimes carry Google AdSense ads and the ad revenue goes to WordPress. The Google ads will only appear if all the following three conditions are met:

1. The visitor is not using Firefox browser.
2. He has logged out of his WordPress account, if he has one.
3. The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So if you land on abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com, you won’t see any Google Ads.

Even with all these conditions, the revenue generated from serving Google AdSense ads on WordPress.com hosted blog may still be significant as they do around a billion page views per month.

3. WordPress themes – The WordPress themes directory offers premium themes that cost anywhere between $50 and $100. These GPL compatible themes are developed by third-party WordPress developers and Automattic gets a commission per sale.

4. Premium Accounts – While anyone can host a blog on WordPress.com for free, they charge you a fixed fee if you want to buy additional storage space for your multimedia files or if you wish to use custom web domain instead of the default wordpress.com sub-domain. These are premium features.

There are unconfirmed reports that WordPress may soon allow users to add AdSense in their free blogs for a subscription fee.

5. Web Host Referrals – WordPress.org suggests of list of third-party web hosting companies where you may self-host your WordPress blog(s) for a fee. Now all these are referral links so Automattic gets a commission per sale.

In fact, this hosting referral system may be extremely profitable for Automattic because if you search for “WordPress Hosting” on Google (a very competitive keyword phrase), the first sponsored link on the Google results page is paid by WordPress itself and it says – “Top 5 WordPress Web Hosts – Chosen by the developers of the WordPress blogging software”.

6. WordPress Support – If you need help with WordPress (or WordPress MU) but the free support forums aren’t solving the purpose, consider subscribing to the Support Network of Automattic. The WordPress development team will help you solve problems related to your WordPress system and the response time can be as low as 6 hours. This service is primarily for Enterprise users who are willing to shell out a $2.5-5k per year for support.

7. Poll Daddy – I am not sure if Matt discussed this but Automattic also provides a paid version of Poll Daddy where you can have unlimited number of questions per survey and there’s no Poll Daddy branding in your polls or surveys.

8. Guided Transfers – If you wish to move your blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, Automattic offers a service called Guided Transfers to help you with the transfer. They charge a one-time $119 fee for the transfer.

9. VaultPress – Should you wish to automatically backup your WordPress blog to the cloud, the VaultPress service from Automattic can help. With packages starting at $15 per month, they will backup your WordPress blog in real-time and will also notify you of potential security issues.

10. VideoPress – The VideoPress plugin for WordPress lets you host videos and audio files on your own website. There are no limits on bandwidth or duration of videos, the videos are served without ads and it supports HD playback as well. Starts at $60 per year.

11. Automattic Kismet – You don’t often see spam in your blog posts because it all gets filtered by Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), the excellent spam protection plug-in available for WordPress.

Now Akismet spam catching technology is free for non-commercial personal blogs but if you maintain a corporate blog or run a network of blogs, you are required to buy a commercial license of Akismet that starts at around $50 per month. Professional bloggers, or anyone who makes more than $500 per month in advertising revenue from a WordPress blog, is also required to pay $5 per month for the Akismet license.

What’s next – WordPress is expected to release premium WordPress plugin that could be another source of revenue for Automattic.

Create Price Alerts on Junglee

Amazon owned Junglee.com is probably the biggest price comparison website in India. Unlike other comparison engines that mostly focus on “popular” online sellers, Junglee lists prices from smaller stores as well that aren’t well-known brands but may sometimes offer better deals.

Get email notifications when prices drop

What some may not know is that Junglee offers price alerts, a useful feature that is not even available on its parent Amazon website. You can add one or more items to your watch list on Junglee and the site will send you an email alert whenever the price of a monitored product drops by 300 or more.

To set your price alert, open any product page on Junglee – like this listing ofiPhone 6 – and click the button (screenshot) that says “Price too high”. Next click the “Set alert” button and the product will be added to your watch list. You can manage all your price alerts from this page.

Junglee’s price tracker is reliable but a downside is that it will not show prices from the biggest e-commerce websites like Flipkart or Snapdeal. For them, you can always build your own Price Tracker using Google Sheets.

What is the Best Color for Text Captions in Photos and Videos

Whether you are adding titles in the lower third of a video or creating text captions to be placed on top of a coloured photograph, the text should be readable irrespective of the color of the background image.

If you have been struggling to find the perfect text colours for your video or image, try this simple rule. Set the fill colour as white and use a thin black outline and your text captions will be clear readable over any other colour and brightness.

This is exactly the reason why most meme generators on the Internet, including the one available on Google+ and Cheezburger.com, use a white font with a black outline for the text to be readable over any background.

And if you enable text captions for any YouTube video, you’ll find they also use the white colour with a black outline and a little amount of drop shadow. Thus the titles ill display well in the foreground even if there are different colours used in the video. The source is unknown.

One more thing. Prefer using Sans Serif fonts, like Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Tahoma or Verdana, for your video and image captions as they are more readable than Serif typefaces.

Find the Most Optimized Ad Sizes for your Website

Go long. Go wide. Go big. Google recommends that AdSense publishers switch to wider ad formats as more Adwords advertisers target these ad sizes, more competition among advertisers leads to higher eCPMs thus translating into increased earnings for the website owner.

The statistics suggest that the best performing banner sizes are the 336×280 Large Rectangle and the 300×250 Medium Rectangle. In addition to standard IAB units, the AdSense program now supports custom-sized ads which may serve even bigger rectangular ads. Will they perform better than the standard ads?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and what is working on my site may or may not be the most optimized solution for some other website. As a publisher, you need to run A/B tests on your site for about a week and only then you can you reach a conclusion based on the CTRs and CPMs of individual AdSense ad units.

Split Testing isn’t a new concept for most AdSense publishers but with the introduction of asynchronous responsive ads, the older methods no longer work. AdSense does offer a new feature called Experiments but that’s primarily for finding the most effective color scheme for an ad unit and not the most optimized ad sizes.

How to Split (A/B) Test your AdSense Ads

Here’s how you can perform split testing for AdSense ads on your own site. I am using the rectangle format for this example but the approach is similar should you wish to run split testing against vertical or horizontal units.

1. type=“text/javascript”>
2.  
3. google_ad_client = “ca-pub-xxx”;
4. google_variations = [
5. [“slot-medium-rectangle”, “display:inline-block;width:300px;height:250px”, “width:300px;”],
6. [“slot-responsive”, “display:block”, “width:100%”],
7. [“slot-large-rectangle”, “display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px”, “width:336px;”]
8. ];
9.  
10. google_style = Math.floor( Math.random() * 3 );
11. google_ad_format = ( google_style == 1 ) ? ‘data-ad-format=”rectangle”‘ : “”;
12.  
13. document.write (
14. ‘
15. + google_variations[google_style][2] + ‘”>
16. + google_ad_format + ‘ style=”‘
17. + google_variations[google_style][1] + ‘” data-ad-client=”‘
18. + google_ad_client + ‘” data-ad-slot=”‘
19. + google_variations[google_style][0] + ‘”>

How to Check if an Email Address is Valid and Exists

HOw do you know if an email address exists or not? The easy option would be that you send a dummy mail to that email address, wait for an hour or so and if your message bounces, it is very likely that the particular email address does not exist. The approach works but wouldn’t it be nice if you could check any email address instantly without even sending that test message?

The other slightly technical option to verify an email address is by querying the mail server. You connect to the mail server through telnet (see video), enter your email address and the other email address that you are trying to verify. If the server response is an error code, the email address is probably not valid.

How to Check Email Addresses Instantly

Let me share an extremely simple method for checking if an email address is valid and exists or not.

Go to the login page of the email service and pretend that you no longer remember the password of your email account. The service will ask for your email address where they can send the password recovery instructions. Here if you enter an email address that does exist, the service is mostly likely to tell you that the particular user name does not exist. I have tested this with Google Apps, Yahoo Mail and Outlook (Hotmail) and the method works with them all.

For Gmail and Google Apps Accounts

Go to Google’s password assistance page at google.com/accounts/recovery and choose the I don’t know my password option. Enter the email address that you are trying to verify – it could be an @gmail address or a Google Apps address – and choose Continue. If that address is not valid, Google will throw an error saying No account found with that email address.

Alternatively, you can go to the Gmail Sign-up page ataccounts.google.com/SignUp and try creating a new Gmail account with the address that you are trying to verify. For valid email address, the error would saySomeone already has that username.

For Outlook, Hotmail and Live.com Addresses

Go to account.live.com/ResetPassword, choose the I forgot my password option and enter the Outlook email address. You will get an error saying The Microsoft account is incorrect. for addresses that do not exist.

For Verifying Yahoo Email Addresses

Go to Yahoo’s account recovery page at edit.yahoo.com/forgot, enter the @yahoo.com email address that you are checking for validity and click the Next button. Yahoo will say We couldn’t match the Yahoo ID you entered with information in our database if the email address does not exist.

The Best Online Tools To Know Everything About a Website

How do I contact the owner of a website? Where is a particular website hosted? What other websites are hosted on that same server ? Is the site using WordPress or the Drupal platform? What ad networks are they using to monetize a site? Is the site accessible from China?

The best tools to know everything about any website. Picture credit: Flickr

Here are some of the most useful online tools that will help you know each and every detail of any website. Let’s get started.

• just-ping.com — Use Just Ping to determine if a particular website or blog is accessible from other countries. Unlike other online ping services that have service in a couple of locations, Just Ping has 30 monitoring stations across the world including Turkey, Egypt and China. If the ping results say 100% Packet Loss, most likely the site is inaccessible from that region.
• who.is — If you like to know the contact address, email and phone number of the website owner, this free whois lookup service will help. This is a universal lookup service meaning it can simultaneously query the whois database of all popular domain registrars.
• whoishostingthis.com — Enter the URL of any website and this online service will show you the name of the company where that website is hosted. This may come handl if you need the contact information of the web hosting provider for writing a DMCA Notice or if you are looking to switch web hosts.
• popuri.us — You can use popuri to estimate the relative popularity of a website on social sites like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. It also display the Google Pagerank of a website and the Web of Trust matrix.
• chillingeffects.org — When there’s a copyright related complaint against a website, a copy of that letter is archived in the Chilling Effects database. Anyone can query this public database to know about all the copyright infringement complaints against a particular website.
• myip.ms — MyIP.ms offers a comprehensive report of any website or I.P. Address. You get to know about the hosting provider, the physical location of a website, the IP Address change history of a website and the DNS information.Netcraft also offers similar reports.
• ewhois.com — Ewhois, short for enhanced whois lookup, will help you determine other websites of someone. It looks the whois details, the AdSense publisher ID and the Google Analytics code of websites to figure out other web domain that may belong to the same owner. See example.
• builtwith.com — Use BuiltWith to know the technology stack of any website. It helps you figure out the mail service provider of a domain, the advertising partners, the tracking widgets that are installed on a website and whether the site is using any CDN like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud. See example.
• semrush.com — If you wish to analyze your competitor’s website, this is tool to go with. SEMrush will help you figure what organic keywords are people using to find a website, what is the site’s traffic and which are the competing websites. See example.
• whatsmydns.net — When you buy a new domain or switch from one host to another, the DNS records for the domain change and it may take a while to propagate these changes worldwide. WhatsMyDNS check your DNS records from various locations and it can check your domain’s A, CNAME and MX records.
• modern.ie — This online app will help test your website’s compatibility with various web browsers and detects coding errors that might cause problems. The site is integrated with BrowserStack so you can quickly know how your site looks on different devices and browsers.
• developers.google.com — Find the Page Speed score of any website on both desktop and mobile devices. The higher this number, the better. The Google tool also offers suggestion on how the score can be improved.
• ctrlq.org/sandbox — – The AdSense sandbox solves two problems – it shows the various advertisers that are targeting a website and it will also help you figure out if a particular web domain is banned in the AdSense network or not.
• httparchive.org — The HTTP Archive is a repository of all performance related metrics for a website. It keeps a record of the size of pages, their average load time and the number of failed requests (missing resources) over time. See example.

The 10 HTML Codes You Need to Know for Writing on the Web

The computer keyboard creates “dumb” punctuation marks that may not be acceptable in printed work but are common on web pages. It outputs straight quotation marks (“) while your writing may require curly quotes. You can only type hyphens using the keyboard while an em or en dash may have made your text look more elegant and professional.

HTML Entities for Punctuation

HTML Codes for Punctuation

Your keyboard lacks the keys for inserting the correct punctuation marks but there are simple HTML character codes, on entities, that you can use to mimic the typography of printed books on the web. Here’s a quick guide to using HTML codes for inserting typographically-correct punctuation marks in web writing.

Hyphens (-)

Hyphens, or half-dashes, are most commonly used to join together two or more words. You can type a hyphen directly without using any HTML codes.

• The next-generation iPhone is expected to become available in mid-September.
• The word email contains no hyphen but there’s one inside e-books and e-commerce.

Dashes (– —)

Dashes come in two sizes: the En dash (–) and the Em dash (—). The En dash is longer than a hyphen but shorten than an Em dash.

The En dash (–) is used for suggesting a range of numbers such as time periods, sports scores or page ranges.

• Our bank is open 8a.m.–8p.m., Monday–Friday.
• The players are disappointed after losing the match 3–1 to Spain.
• Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was the 16th President of the United States.

The Em dash (—) is used to indicate breaks or pauses in a sentence, to quote sources or to separate a series of words within a phrase.

• We plan to visit London this summer — if the visa is approved.
• My three friends — John, Peter and Richards — are moving to New York.
• “Well done is better than well said.” — Benjamin Franklin.

Ellipsis (…)

An ellipsis (…) is a series of three dots (periods) and two spaces in a row and they are used to indicate omission of one or more words in the quoted material. If the ellipses follow a complete sentence, end that sentence with a period, insert a space, then the ellipsis (…) followed by a space.

• “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.…” — Shakespeare
• “I have a dream … they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King, Jr

Quotes & Apostrophes (‘ ’ “ ”)

Your computer keyboard creates straight quotes (or dumb quotes) though what you really need to use are smart quotes (or curly quotes) that can be easily written in HTML. The dumb quotes are best used for writing programming code.

Use double quotation marks (“ and ”) to identify the exact words of a person, to indicate irony or for writing titles of creative works.

• The last episode of “Friends” was the most-watched program of the year.
• Thoreau said that “that government is the best which governs the least”.
• They recalled the “toy safety” buttons as they were contained lead paint.

Use single quotes (‘ and ’) to indicate quotes within quotes. The right curly quotation mark (’) can also be used for smart apostrophe instead of the straight apostrophe.

• John said, “I told her, ‘the traffic will only get worse.’”
• Her answer was, “I’ll call you in the next hour or so.”

Prime (′ ″)

While we often use apostrophe (‘) or quotation marks to indicate units of measurement (like feet or seconds or degrees), the correct symbol is Prime that are likely slightly slanted quotes written as ′ (single) and ″ (double).

• The height of this Ferrari car is 47′8″
• I am currently at 27° 11′ 45.315″N, 78° 1′ 27.1668″ W.

Web Typography: Further Reading & Resources

Punctuation Mark	Symbol	HTML Entity	Code Decimal
Apostrophe	’	’	’
En dash	–	–	–
Em dash	—	—	—
Ellipsis	…	…	…
Single Quote (open)	‘	‘	‘
Single Quote (close)	’	’	’
Double Quote (open)	“	“	“
Double Quote (close)	”	”	”