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Over a decade has passed since the arrival of BitTorrent & it is continuing to evolve & remains one of the best file-sharing tools available. Read the full guide below if you really want to make your downloads faster & make it secure.


Some of you may find BitTorrent a bit old but that doesn’t mean BitTorrent doesn’t have a place in your routine. It’s still the more widespread.
We’ve divided the post into three sections:
  1. Increase Your Speed and Privacy with a Few Easy Settings
  2. Keep That Newfound Speed from Hijacking All Your Bandwidth
  3. Hide Your Traffic with External Solutions
For the purposes of this guide, we’re focusing on two BitTorrent clients: uTorrent for Windows and Transmission for Mac OS X. That doesn’t mean you can’t use other clients like Vuze (or KTorrent and Transmission for Linux, if you are of the Linux persuasion), but there are just too many clients out there for us to give specific instructions for each. uTorrent and Transmission are some of the most popular clients out there, so where appropriate, we’ll give you specific instructions for each client. Note that uTorrent for Mac is not nearly as mature as uTorrent for Windows, and may not have some of these features. So, in this particular case, when we reference uTorrent, we mean uTorrent for Windows.

1.Keep Your BitTorrent Speed & Privacy at the Max with a Few Simple Settings

BitTorrent clients have come a long way in the past few years, and where it used to be much more difficult to hide your BitTorrent activity, it’s now a matter of checking the right boxes. Here are a few settings every BitTorrent user should have enabled.

>Randomize and Forward Your Router Ports

If you’re connected to your internet through a router, it’s likely that many of your ports are closed, meaning your speeds will be much slower than you’d like. You’ll need to let your router know which ones you want open for BitTorrent traffic, which is known as port forwarding. Furthermore, many ISPs or organizations (say, if your neighborhood or leasing company provides your internet) will block popular BitTorrent ports, so you’ll want to switch up the port you use every once in a while to keep them guessing.



Both of these are extremely simple in uTorrent and Transmission. in uTorrent, just to go Options > Preferences and hit the connection tab. Make sure all four boxes under the “Listening Port” section are checked. Enable UPnP Port Mapping, Enable NAT-PMP Port Mapping, Randomize Port Each Start, and Add Windows Firewall Exception.



In Transmission, open up the app’s preferences and head to the Network pane. Check both the Randomize Port on Launch and Automatically Map Port boxes. If you see that the light next to the port’s number goes from red to green, then you’ve successfully opened your current port to BitTorrent traffic, and you should notice a good increase in speed.
Note: For best results, you’ll want to make sure your router is UPnP capable and has UPnP enabled. Most routers are UPnP ready, but if you find that you’re having trouble, you may need to look at your router’s manual and settings page to enable its use.

>Encrypt Your BitTorrent Traffic

Nowadays, many ISPs will throttle your bandwidth, prevent you from seeding, or do any other number of annoying things to try and stop you from torrenting. Apart from randomizing your ports, another thing you can do to try and keep them out is encrypt your traffic. It won’t necessarily work on every client, but we’ve found that it nearly doubled our download speeds, so it’s certainly worth a shot.



In uTorrent, go back to the preferences and hit up the BitTorrent section in the left sidebar. Under Protocol Encryption, open the dropdown menu labeled Outgoing. You have three options: Disabled, Enabled, and Forced. Try Enabled for a while, but if you don’t see a good speed increase, using the Forced setting might give you better results. Also note the Allow Incoming Legacy Connections checkbox If you have a specific torrent that doesn’t have a lot of people seeding, you might want to check this box temporarily, though we try to keep it unchecked whenever we can. This ensures that any peers you connect to will use encryption and that your ISP will be less likely to throttle you.



In Transmission, head over to the Peers pane of the app’s preferences and check the Encryption section. Definitely check the “Prefer Encrypted Peers” box, and we would highly recommend checking the “Ignore Unencrypted Peers” box, if you are noticing that there aren’t a lot of peers connecting for a specific torrent, try unchecking it to see if that helps your speeds.

>Block Peers that Might be Snooping

Even worse than throttling ISPs is the threat of the snooping RIAA, MPAA or other organization looking to take you down. Often, they’ll post fake torrents of copyrighted material (or just join in on real ones) and track those downloading, leading them right to an unprepared you. While there is no foolproof way to avoid them, a really great simple way is to use a peerblocker. Transmission has this feature built-in, while Windows users will need to use a separate program.



If you’re a Mac user, open up Transmission’s preferences and head back to the Peers pane. This time, check the box that reads “Prevent Known Bad Peers from Connecting” down under the Blocklist section. Hit the update button to make sure the list of bad peers is recent, and check the Automatically Update Weekly box to keep it up to date.



Windows users will need to download PeerBlock to block the bad boys from snooping. The first time you run it, it’ll take you through a setup wizard, in which you can decide who you want to blacklist. Check the box for anti-P2P organizations (as well as anything else you may want, though the P2P box is the only important one for BitTorrent) and schedule it to update as often as you want. You might as well update it every day as there is no reason to be stingy with your privacy here. Then, just make sure it runs when you use your BitTorrent client & it’ll keep you safe from those bad peers.
Download: PeerBlock

2.Automate Your Client & Free Up Bandwidth

These are some tricks that have been around for a while, but they are useful for keeping BitTorrent from overtaking your internet connection, especially if you’ve experienced some heavy speed increases from the above tips. Here are a few ways to automatically manage BitTorrent’s use of your bandwidth.

>Set Global Bandwidth Limits



BitTorrent downloads and uploads can hog a lot of your internet connection’s bandwidth, especially if you’re sharing popular content. The simplest way to keep BitTorrent from hogging your connection is to set global upload and download limits. In uTorrent, you can find them in the Connection section of the Preferences. The settings are fairly self-explanatory. You just have to set your max upload and download rates (in kB/s), or choose 0 to keep the rates unlimited.



In Transmission, it’s under the Bandwidth pane of the app’s preferences, just check the “Download Rate” and “Upload Rate” boxes and set your speeds however you want. You can also set a “Speed Limit” mode, if you want to switch between to different bandwidth limits, give it more bandwidth when your just checking email and the like, and cut the limits down when you need that bandwidth for streaming video or online gaming.

>Throttle Your BitTorrent Downloads on a Schedule

You could just quit your BitTorrent client (or manually turn on Speed Limit mode) whenever you want to conserve your bandwidth, but if you’re like us, you’ll forget to start it back up which means you’ll end up delaying your downloads (most likely until you want whatever was supposed to be downloading, at which point you will slap your forehead).



To remedy this situation, uTorrent and Transmission both come with simple Scheduler features that you can access through the Preferences. In uTorrent, go to Options > Preferences, then find Scheduler in the sidebar. Tick the box next to “Enable Scheduler” and you’ll see a grid of green boxes light up. The grid runs Monday through Sunday, midnight to midnight (or 0:00 to 23:59), one box per hour. Here’s how it works:
  • Dark green boxes indicate that uTorrent will download and upload at full speed (or whatever you’ve set as its full speed).
  • Light green boxes indicate limited download and upload rates.
  • White boxes indicate that uTorrent will not download or upload any content.
  • Pink boxes indicate that uTorrent will only seed, not download. I’m not exactly sure when one would be inclined to use this, but it’s there if you want it.
We have always got a little bandwidth to spare on our connection, but we certainly don’t want uTorrent hogging our bandwidth while we are working, so we set the Scheduler to limit speeds from 8am to midnight every day. In morning, when we very unlikely to be at our computer, we open the flood gates and give uTorrent unlimited upload/download speeds. Also, since we generally stay away from our computer on Saturday, we keep uTorrent at full throttle. See the screenshot above to see what this sort of schedule would look like. Like we said, our connection can handle a little bit of bandwidth bleeding all of the time, so when we are running at limited rates, we set our upload speed to 5 kB/s and our download speed to 15. 
 


In Transmission, it’s a bit more basic. Just open up Transmission’s Preferences and to to the Bandwidth tab. You only have two modes instead of three, your global bandwidth limits and Speed Limit mode. You can schedule the speed limit mode to turn on and off at a specific time either every day, on weekdays, weekends, or on a specific day of the week. It’s not quite as flexible as uTorrent’s scheduler, but works well enough. Generally people just limit its speed during the day, and let it tear up their connection when they are sleeping.

>Ensure a Good Share Ratio Without Wasting Extra Bandwidth

An important part of BitTorrent is sharing, and a good member of the BitTorrent community gives as much as he/she takes. In fact, many sites, especially private trackers, keep a close eye on your share ratio and may even ban you if you don’t keep your ratio above a certain point (i.e., if you are a “leecher”). This isn’t as widespread as it used to be, but it does still happen. We are in total agreement of the whole share-and-share-alike attitude, but once we have shared an equal part of what we have downloaded, we don’t want to waste too much extra bandwidth on that torrent.



Rather than constantly checking your torrent ratios, you can remove them as soon as they cross the 1.0 barrier. Just go to the Queuing section of uTorrent and find the “Seed While” section. There you can set a goal ratio for a file you’re sharing, then set how much bandwidth uTorrent will allocate to the torrent once that goal is reached (in the screenshot, for example, uTorrent will stop sharing the file after its share ratio reaches 150%). If you prefer, you can just limit the upload rate when uTorrent reaches its goal by checking the corresponding box at the bottom of the window.



In Transmission, head to the Transfers pane of the preferences and click on the Management tab. Check the box that says Stop Seeding at Ratio and set the ratio to whatever you want, like 1.50 (meaning when your ratio reaches 150%).

3.External Solutions for Hiding Your Traffic

We won’t go into too much detail here, but we thought some of the more extreme measures deserved mentions in this guide. Here are a few other ways to really keep others out of your business.

>Use a VPN

While there are a number of great solutions to hide your identity while downloading, using a VPN is usually a very cheap and popular way to do so. You can use any number of VPN services like ItsHidden, which will route your traffic through another server, keeping your IP address away from prying eyes.
Download: ItsHidden

>Set up a Proxy



One of the other popular methods of obscuring yourself is using a proxy, which works similarly to a VPN. You could roll your own SSH proxy or use something a bit easier like BTGuard. You very well may see a speed drop when using this method, though, so if speed is more important to you than privacy, this may not be the best route to go.


Google pagerank is an analysis algorithm that focus on linking, which is developed by Google Search Engine that measures the numerical weighting of the elements of hyperlinked set of documents. This reflects that Pagerank is an analysis that which counts the link to the website as a vote and measures it on the scale of 10. Thus, this Pagerank is analysis of strature of the Website which reflect number of people are voting to the website. Pagerank is patented Trademark to Stanford University.
The Page rank is measures on the strength of Incoming as well as Outgoing Links to a website, which ultimately gives us the exact Status of a website. In-order to analyze the Pagerank of a Website we need certain tools to helps us out. There are many tools existing all over the web for analyzing the Pagerank, but still everybody is in need of quality tools.

Do Visit
  1. Find Income, Stats and Other Details of any Website


So, Here is My list of 5 Best Sites for Checking Google Pagerank
#1. PR Checker
  • Page Rank Checker is a completely free service to check Google pagerank instantly using their online page rank check tool by passing the Captcha test and also it will generate the Pagerank button code which you can place it on your Website.
  • One of the Most popular website for checking the Pagerank. You can switch to this website to check your blog’s Pagerank here.
#2. Check Pagerank
  • Yet another Free Pagerank analysis tool, that gives us the correct Pagerank status of a blog or website. Here also you need to pass the Captcha test.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.
#3. Website Grader
  • Most reliable Pagerank checker tool, that which also gives the total rank of website/blog in the world.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.
#4. DigPagerank
  • The Most popular Pagerank checker tool for testing the Pagerank.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.
#5. Popuri
  • This website will give you the entire criteria about website from Pagerank, Alexa rank to number of backlinks etc.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.
#6. Check Website Stats
#7. My Pagerank
  • The fastest Pagerank Checker tool. No need to pass captcha or any other security orientation just enter the website address and click you are done.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.

Facebook Chat might have become a nightmare for some users of Facebook. But certainly it has been one of the main feature of Facebook. Chat allows two people to interact while they are online. The reason for Facebook Chat not being up to the mark is its poor connectivity and chat facilities.


You might have observed a new option called 'Create Group...' on the left side of your Facebook profile. This is not an ordinary group where members simply join in and stay almost dead. This is something more fun and useful. I found this feature very nice.

It allows any user to create a group and add any number of members from his friends' list. Now the group can be made public or private or secured, depending on the administrator's choice. Once the privacy is set, members can share files, post comments, create events, share links, upload images and videos etc.

Group Chat is the main feature of this group. The members of this group can chat in a single chat window. Members who are online are listed above. Any member can join the chat without anybody's permission. This is fun and also saves time when a group of people need to chat and decide on something. In that case, each person has to interact with different people and share all the information with others to let them know about it. This group chat facility avoids all these nonsense.

I have observed that group chat connectivity is way better than the normal chat feature of Facebook. Now, don't be smart to create a group and add all your friends there. Then all your friends can see what you are chatting with other friend of yours. Group chat reveals your words real time to other members of the group. So be careful!

Another facility of this group is the users receive e-mails for all the posts and comments, provided they are subscribed to it! Unlike Facebook mails, they are sent directly in the name of the member who comments or responds to your posts.

On the whole, Facebook group chat is indeed a nice feature to admire. Try it out and have fun!


Why does all the names of various technologies sound weird? How did they derive their names? Lets have a look at some of them.





Nintendo

Nintendo is a Japanese firm, which designs games for PlayStations, Xboxes and PC. The three words “Nin” “ten” “do” is Japanese for “we do all that we can, as best as we can, and await the results.” Nintendo is sort of a motto and company name all in one. Who knew that the gaming giant was so poetic?

Zappos
Zappos was originally named ShoeSite.com when it was founded in 1999. This posed a bit of a problem when it wanted to start selling more than just shoes. While still quite fond of shoes, the team didn’t abandon the theme entirely. They decided on a variation of the word “shoes” in Spanish. Thus “zapatos” was converted to Zappos for the company name.

Apple
Apple has no official story, which means that you can take your pick of the following rumors:
  • Steve Jobs used to work at a California or Oregon apple farm during the summer. He grew to really appreciate apples.
  • Steve Jobs really liked the Beatles.
  • Steve Jobs was three months late filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if his colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 p.m.
  • Steve Jobs wanted to distance the company from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time.
Blackberry
Despite popular belief, the way that the buttons look a bit like the seeds of a berry wasn’t taken into account. The name BlackBerry was purely a marketing decision. The communications team offered up this explanation in an e-mail:
“RIM wanted a name that would be distinctive, memorable and fun and that would work well internationally and appeal to a wide range of customers. RIM decided to go with a connotative word for the brand name rather than a descriptive or invented word.”

Adobe

Adobe founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke were working for Xerox during the late 70s and early 80s, and living in Los Altos, CA, and Adobe Creek just happens run through the town.
According to the creek’s Wikipedia page, it was named for the nearby house of a 19th Century governor. So, at least in some sense, the company was named for the building material.

Yahoo!

Founders David Filo and Jerry Yang started what would become Yahoo when they were Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University. The project originally consisted of categorized lists of favorite links on the web, which made its original name, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” at least accurate if not so catchy.
Yahoo is actually an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” But according to the company, the team chose the name for its definition: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”

Foursquare
Dodgeball, Dennis Crowley’s first attempt at social networking for mobile phones was acquired by Google in 2005. When Google killed the project, Crowley founded an improved location-based social game he named Foursquare.
Dennis chose to name both companies after playground games because they were both designed to be fun and playful. Apparently Foursquare was actually always Crowley’s first choice, but the domain name wasn’t available when he founded Dodgeball.

Android

Apparently Andy Rubin, the co-founder and former CEO of Android, really likes robots. “You have to be a little bit careful when you’re around Andy and his robots,” says Nick Sears, the other Android co-founder.

Twitter
The name Twitter was picked out of a hat. A small group of employees from Odeo, the San Francisco podcasting startup where Twitter initially began, had a brainstorming session. They were trying to come up with names that fit with the theme of a mobile phone buzzing in your pocket with an update.
After narrowing down the options (which included Jitter and Twitter), they wrote them down, put them in a hat, and let fate decide. Know more about Twitter here.

Facebook
Facebook originally was called thefacebook.com, when the students of Harvard designed it to interact and share files among themselves. Later it turned to Facebook. Know more about Facebook here.



Ever wanted to put your thoughts somewhere? 
Or you wanted your friends to know more about you? 
Or you wanted to put constant updates about your field of interest on net? 
Or make a file sharing platform? 
Or you wanted to have a website of your own?
Or you wanted to know more about Internet?

Answer for all the above questions is having a blog. The best way of achieving all the above questions is of course, having a website. However, you need to have the domain where you can design your website. And this is not free. You need to purchase and register your domain. So, blog is the perfect option.
Create blog


How to create?
 There are plenty of blog platforms where you can build your blog. Some of them lists as:
www.blogger.com
www.wordpress.com
www.sosblog.com
www.thoughts.com
Blogger and Wordpress are the most widely used and you can experiment so many things here. I would suggest blogger or wordpress. Just login to its account and start posting!

What to post?
The answer to this question is in your hands. What to post is completely dependent on your perception and your ideas. Be very specific on what you want to post. Once you start posting about one topic, you may find it hard to deviate. You can use Tumblr and other platforms to post articles.

How often you need to post?
It is advisable to post atleast 2 to 3 articles per week. Do not leave the blog static. Keep posting articles so that the visitors keep visiting your blog often.

What next?
Next thing is to submit your blog to search engines if you want your blog to be found there. Google uses Webmasters, Yahoo uses direct link submission and so on. To make your blog reach the first pages of search engine, you need to optimize your blog.

How to make it attractive?
You can place lot of attractive widgets, compromising loading time, which can attract users. Also, you can add some interactive sessions, feedback forms, links to other sites, funny articles(pertaining to your topic) etc. Also you can use eye-catching blog templates available on various websites like blogtemplates, bloggerstyles etc.

How do you draw visitors to blog?
Add a sharing widget using which you and your visitors can share the blog posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Orkut etc. Their friends can view this link and visit your blog. This is very elementary of course. Next, you can submit your blog links to various blog search engines like Blogged.com, Spillbean.com, blogsearchengine.com, indiblogger.com, getblogs.com etc. Finally you can get traffic from search engines. But to achieve this, you will have to keep your blog up and running for months.

How to make money out of blog?
To make money from your blog, only way is to get advertisements to your blog from famous Ad providers. Google AdSense provides ads to blogs,but they expect your blog to have large content and atleast 6-8 months old. Adbrite is another Ad supplier who expect you to have large content on your blog again. Similarly there are many other websites which provide Ads, provided your blog pass their tests.

Advantages:
Gain better hold on HTML.
Web Designing becomes easy and interesting.
Develops interest in Search Engine Optimization and Network Marketing.
Develops network world wide (If you are smart enough).
Understand the importance of HTML, Java, Javascripts, Analytics, Web Traffic etc.

Disadvantages:
Difficult to pick up a topic to post articles.



You might have seen in some Hollywood movies, that a car is being driven on its own. May be in a Super Hero movies or in fact more, in horror movies! Now Google has conducted a horrifying experiment successfully and has indeed become a Super Hero!
Google Car
Google Car
Aligning with Google’s optimistic view about technology’s ability to advance society, Google has made a surprising move! Google developed the technology for automated cars and test drove the car from Google’s Mountain View campus to Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard and logged over 140,000 miles (225,308 kms)! This project uses artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver. The automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps to navigate the road ahead.

The project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, the 43-year-old director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the co-inventor of the Street View mapping service. Google is using six Priuses and an Audi TT in the project.

While the test is conducted, the car was manned by a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control. With this automation, Google expects to reduce traffic accidents.
“Your car should drive itself; it’s amazing to me that we let humans drive cars,” Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, said at a technology conference last month. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”
Unmanned Car
Unmanned Car


The car's already traveled 140,000 miles, depending on cameras and a scanning laser to do the driving so you don't have to. You just tell it your destination and it plots a route for you, taking into consideration speed limits and traffic patterns. A Google engineer describes it as "Super Cruise Control," a way to augment your experience rather than usurp it. Although part of me is pretty sure that if I had this function available to me, I'd never turn it off.

The bad news: Google's not anywhere close to even thinking about retail at this point, and even if they did the cost would be astronomical. Besides, I'm sure they're just using the extra time to figure out how to make this baby fly.

However, this is a tremendous experiment and we could see these cars on roads in the near future and see a great decrease in the number of accidents.


 




Twitter is one of the most famous Websites in the World. Twitter is used as micro-blogging website. In other words, Twitter allows its users to share anything from the user's profile. Friends and others who are in your network can come to know what's happening on your side. Twitter, like Facebook, began life as a tool for college students. Allowing only 140 characters per message, a "Tweet" was used to update friends and family in a casual way via the tagline "What are you doing?"
Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you're looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you're declaring an emotion and expecting a human response.

 Twitter is called the micro-blogging site since it allows users to type in only 140 characters at once! Also Twitter is a social networking site since it allows a set of users of common interest,friends etc. to stay connected in a network. This is given a name 'Follow' on Twitter. Friends can share information through DM's(Direct Messages).



Basic Working:
•    Twitter allows you to post short updates (AKA Tweets) as often as you want; they are limited to 140 characters.
•    Follow other users, and you’ll be able to read their tweets.
•    When they follow you, they’ll read your tweets. 
•    A business should follow everyone who is following them, because when they follow you, it means that they want to engage in a conversation.  This is an opportunity to make a connection with your existing or prospective customer. 

Twitter is mostly used for marketing rather than just chatting with friends. Twitter is most powerful when it comes to networking and marketing. Any website links can be shared in Twitter and get your followers reach the Website links. While most film actors use Twitter for publicity purpose, corporates use it to share the services offered by them and improve their customer relationship. Each day 5 to 10 thousand new people join Twitter, and it currently has around 5 million users, according to the State of the Twittersphere report. That’s a lot of opportunity waiting for your business!


Here are a few more reasons why you need Twitter for your business:
1.    Your message can reach hundreds and thousands of people instantly, so you won’t have to chase after customers.  They will find you—for free.
2.    You can grow your reputation as an expert by offering advice and/or referring people to interesting business-related articles.  As long as you go easy on the self-promotion, people will come to trust your advice and will be more open to visiting your website to find out more about you and your business.
3.    You can provide coupons and special offers in a matter of seconds with a Tweet.  

Lastly, here are some of our favorite Twitter related services, which makes tweeting even more fun:
•    Twitpic.com lets you share photos on Twitter.
•    Cheaptweet.com scans Twitter for the best deals, coupons and sales that people are tweeting about.
•    Twitterholic.com gathers data and updates a list of the most popular twitter users. Who’s the most popular Twitter user? Our new president with 346,422 followers.
•    Crazybob.org searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.

Twitter is obviously one of the main targets of business using which they can grow more than expected.


Sea Bird




You may have seen a lot of mobile phone concepts, but the one you are going to see below will blow you away, seriously this is one of the best concepts ever made. The concept is made by the masterminds over at Mozilla Labs, and they are calling it Sea Bird. The Sea Bird is running on Android, and there are a lot of amazing features in the concept phone. Seabird was created by Billy May, a Mozilla Labs community member who in early 2009 created an initial vision of what an Open Web mobile phone could look like. Seabird is Billy’s followup project in which he incorporated the feedback he received from the wider community on his first throw-away concept. To learn more about Billy May, please visit his homepage.

Overview

The Mozilla Seabird, part of the Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series, is an experiment in how users might interact with their mobile content as devices and technology advances. Drawing on insights culled from the Mozilla community through the project’s blog, a focus quickly developed around frustrating physical interactions. While mobile CPUs, connectivity and development platforms begin approaching that of desktops, the lagging ability to efficiently input information has grown ever more pronounced. 


Interaction

The Seabird, then, introduces a few possibilities into how user interaction might evolve with the advancing motion capture and projector driven innovation in the market. First out, the Seabird imagines how a multiple use dongle might augment the crowded gestural interface with greater precision and direct manipulation of content in 3D space.

Pico Projector

With mobile phone companies such as Samsung, LG and Motorola moving towards display applications for projectors, the technology remains open for expanding user interaction and input at the same time. The Seabird, on just a flat surface, enables netbook-quality interaction by working with the projector’s angular distortion to deliver interface, rather than content. With the benefit of a dock, each projector works independently and delivers laptop levels of efficiency.

Design

The form development took its cues from various aerodynamic, avian and decidedly feminine forms. Its erect posture intends a sense of poise while its supine conformity to the hand reconciles that with the user’s desire for digital control. The curvature of the back also serves a functional role in elevating the projector lens elements when lying flat.

Seabird is a community-driven exploration and does not mean that Mozilla has plans to produce an OS or hardware at the moment. Find out more about Mozilla Firefox for Mobile here.

  






The Most Social State is California:

As far as Facebook goes, California is the most social state, with an amazing 15,267,160 users in the region. This amounts to a 41% penetration rate — pretty astounding that nearly half the state is connected via Facebook.
The next biggest user-base can be found in Texas with 9 million users, but it’s nowhere close to California. New York comes in third with 8 million.


Mark Zuckerberg Calls Himself a “Harvard Graduate”:

As you can see for yourself over at facebook.com/zuck, Mark Zuckerberg tells a little fib on his profile page. He lists himself as a “Harvard Graduate,” which simply isn’t true, as he dropped out to concentrate on getting Facebook up and running.
When a reporter confronted Zuckerberg with this little inconsistency, he said:
“That’s true. We don’t have a setting for dropout.”


The Average Facebook User Has 130 Friends:

How many Facebook friends do you have? To put your friend count in perspective, the average user has 130.Facebook’s official stats page is full of little gems like this, and more staggering stats, such as the fact that people spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook, while the current active official user count now stands at over 500 million.
As far as Facebook the platform goes, over a million websites have integrated with Facebook, and more than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.




The Meaning of the Term Poke Has Never Been Defined:

While Facebook explains how “poking” works on its help center, there’s no explanation to be found for the origin of the phrase. The most common definition is a friendly “nudge,” but the more flirtatious connotations cannot be ignored.
David Kirkpatrick reveals in The Facebook Effect that Zuckerberg once responded to a question about what a poke meant on the social networking site with:
“We thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose… So mess around with it, because you’re not getting an explanation from us.”




The First “Work Networks” Included Apple and Microsoft:

Many of you may know about Facebook’s initial staggered rollout, where they started with Ivy League colleges before encompassing other educational institutions. But do you know who Facebook first went corporate with in terms of official work places?
In May 2006, Apple and Microsoft were among the first, as was Intel, EA and Amazon. Others in the first round also included Accenture, Gap, Intuit, Pepsi, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the non-profit organization Teach for America. It wasn’t until September 2006 that everyone, regardless of school or company affiliation, could join Facebook — and just over a year later the site hit 50 million active users.




One Early Facebook Function Was a File Sharing Service:

You won’t find this in the official Facebook timeline, but one of Facebook’s early add-ons was a peer-to-peer, or more technically friend-to-friend, file sharing service called Wirehog, developed alongside Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg and three others.
It launched in 2004 and is reported to have been planned as an integral FB feature. In 2005 Facebook was actively promoting the service and Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson ”I think Wirehog will probably spread in the same way that the facebook did.”
However, likely due to piracy concerns, Wirehog was axed in 2006 before Facebook got really big, although its photo-sharing functionality lives on in spirit.
If File Sharing feature was still available on Facebook, I cant imagine how outstanding FB would have been!




Al Pacino’s Face Was on the Original Facebook Homepage:



Prior to a major homepage redesign back in 2007, Facebook’s front page used to feature a man’s face partly obscured behind a cloud of binary code.
Dubbed the “Facebook guy,” it was not known who the mystery man was — until recently. David Kirkpatrick has revealed in his book The Facebook Effect that the image is a manipulated photo of Al Pacino created by a friend and classmate of Mark Zuckerberg.




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