With Voxini, you get to create a mobile landing page that displays links to all of your social profiles. Plus, it also includes four useful tabs: Call Me, Write Me, About Me, Send Me. If you add your phone number and email to Voxini, others will be able to call and email you without needing to know your actual information. About Me is pretty self explanatory – write a little something about yourself. Send Me lets people share your Voxini profile with others via text message.

So now that you get the general idea of Voxini, lets go through the process of setting an actual profile.

Edit Your Social Channels

Upon signing up you’ll need to connect all of your social accounts. As always, this is a process that could be pretty quick or pretty long depending on how many social accounts you need to add. For each site, you’ll see a explanation and an example of what you should be entering in the text box.

Unfortunately, you’re limited to just one account for each service. So you won’t be able to add multiple websites, Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, etc.

However, I do like that you can see how your mobile landing page will look as you’re adding your accounts. You’ll see a mobile device on the right site of the page that automatically updates each time you add a new account.

As you probably already guessed, this is not a static image, it’s very much dynamic. You can click on each social profile button to see just how your landing page will work when others interact with it. This is also a great way to test each button and make sure that it goes to the proper page.

Upload an Image

The next step is to upload an image. This is not required though and you will be able to skip it. If you prefer not to have a picture, then only your name will be displayed (as pictured above).

Personally, I feel that a picture should be required. As they say, ‘”a picture is worth 1,000 words”. Also, pictures are very important for any brand or individual looking to make a name themselves and want be taken seriously.

Update Your Profile

Lastly you’ll need to edit your actual profile. This is where you can enter basic information like your name, address, and short bio. As mentioned above, the information you enter in the “About Me” section will be displayed in the “About Me” tab on your landing page. So it’s pretty important to have at least a little something here. Also, keep in mind that your address will not be displayed publicly.

Get Your QR Code

After the final step you’ll get your own Voxini URL to share with the world along with your very own QR code. Just to test it out, I scanned the QR code with my iPad, and my Voxini profile does indeed come up. You can try scanning the code below to see for yourself (you’ll need a QR code scanning app for your device).

This is definitely a creative way of sharing your social profiles; almost everyone has a URL of some sort to share, but what about a QR code? You don’t see that being used too often. Voxini will give the code in jpg and png format so that you can download them to share on your website, blog, or anywhere else.

View Your Stats

Voxini also provides you with stats regarding your pageviews, scans, visits, and browser version of visitors. Right now it’s in a pretty basic format, but “more comprehensive reporting” is coming soon.

I can confidently say that I’ll be sharing my Voxini QR code on my blogs and using it for networking purposes.

How about you? How do you plan to use Voxini?

So if you’re still suffering from social overload or just looking to make your life easier, FanMix is worth giving a try. It will help you keep up with all mentions of you or your company/brand (depending on how you decide to use it).

Let’s take a look at how FanMix can help the not-so-average social user.

Connect Your Accounts

Upon logging in you’re prompted to connect your social accounts: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. For now you can only add one account for each service. Once you click on the “Connect” button (when done) it will take quite some time to pull in all of your conversations.

It’s important to note here that this step takes pretty long – we’re talking 20-30 minutes here. So this is a great time to grab a cup of coffee or do a little reading or browsing.

Inbox View

Once all of your conversations have been pulled into FanMix, you’ll see that it’s almost as if you’re looking at your email inbox!

The default view is the Priority Inbox. Here you can see important messages, starred messages, and then everything else is below that. Each message can be starred and/or flagged as important. You’ll see that some messages are already automatically flagged as important, although I’m not sure how this is determined.

You can go through the different inbox views to see which works best for you. Besides priority inbox, there’s also: inbox, important, starred, sent messages, archive, and contacts (which is not an inbox, but a place to save and view contacts).

There is also a search box at the top of the inbox so that you can search through all of your messages. You can search for a contact name or a word within a message.

Reading and Responding

Clicking on a message will open it up just like an email; if there is an image in the message, it will be displayed here as well. What’s nice about this is that you’ll be able to write a reply to that message right from within FanMix. Once other sources are implemented here, this is going to be an excellent tool for responding back to messages all over the Web and will be a huge time-saver!

No need to insert that @username that you’re replying to on Twitter, it is automatically inserted for you. When you add a reply, it will display right below the message you’re replying to. So this is also a great way to view conversations on Twitter in a thread-like manner. You will also get Direct Messages here too and will be able to respond back.

Once messages have been read (or marked as read), you can archive them; there’s no delete/trash option. Also, clicking on your contacts name in a message will take you to their social profile (depending on which account the message is from).

Sending Messages

If you would like to post a status update to any of your accounts, just click on the big “Compose” button in the top left corner of your inbox.

You can only post to one account at a time, by clicking on the desired avatar image for that social account. Twitter, of course, has the 140 character limit, but Facebook and LinkedIn do not have any limitations.

Final Thoughts

I’m definitely a fan of FanMix and I’m finding it extremely useful. If only I could read my regular email here, it could serve as my one main tool for responding to ALL messages. Regardless, I can see myself keeping this open in a browser tab so that I can quickly respond back to all of my messages on Facebook and Twitter. I can’t wait to see how the service improves and what new sources are added to the mix.

Note: FanMix is currently in private inbox and an invitation is needed to get started.

What about you? What do you think about FanMix and will you use it?

There’s not much to say about these search engines. You simply enter your query, press enter (or click on search), and view your results. So let’s take a look at 5 amazing visual search engine results.

Search-Cube

Watch the cube fill up as your results fall into place. You can use the arrow keys to flip the cube, shift+mouse to drag and rotate, and left click to open results .

Spezify

Use the search box to “spezify” any word and view results in grid-like form. Use the toolbar to show/hide images, show/hide text, show/hide videos, show/hide music, and show/hide tweets.

Tag Galaxy

Much like Search-Cube (mentioned above) you can see your results fall into place as a globe fills up with image results. You can use your mouse to zoom in and out, drag your mouse to rotate, and even switch to fullscreen mode.

Your results are first displayed as a solar system with your main search term as the largest planet and similar keywords orbiting around. You can then click on any planet to see visual results for that term.

oSkope

“A visual search assistant that lets you browse and organize items from Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, Fotolia, Yahoo! Image Search, and YouTube in an intuitive way.”

There are several customization options such as being able to change the size of your results and changing your results view from grid to stack, pile, list, or graph.

RedZ

Results are displayed horizontally so that you can scroll through them using the scrollbar below. If you have a touchpad on your laptop or for your desktop, scrolling through results is as easy as sliding your fingers back and forth. This one is probably more convenient than amazing, but it’s still quick and easy to use.

Honorable Mention

Oolone is a new visual search engine that displays 4 results at a time and lets you scroll through them horizontally (viewing 4 new results with each scroll). At the moment it’s not very stylish, but worth giving a try.

Visual Search Engines are great for viewing results and even better for finding images for your blog posts. Sometimes it’s just much easy to spot what you’re looking for via an image instead of text.

What’s your favorite visual search engine?

Spool is much like Read it Later and Instapaper because it lets you save items to view later or even offline via your mobile device. It is also like the service Readability because it removes all the junk and unnecessary elements from your articles, so that you have a nice clean format that lets you focus on reading. Spool does give you the option to view items in their original form, but it’s so much nicer with a Readability-like view.

Saving Content

So how do you add content to Spool? Well, there are quite a few ways. You can use your “personal Spoolbot email” to send items via your email account, use the mobile app, or install the Chrome extension. Items can be added via the website as well, which is also the place where you can archive or delete read items and add items to favorites.

The Favorites and Archive feature comes in handy because on both the website and mobile app, you’ll have a folders for each which gives you quick access. Unfortunately, you also have to use either the website or mobile app to favorite or archive items, because it’s not an option when using the extension.

Social Integration

Once you install the Chrome extension, you’ll notice a very useful addition to some of your social networking hangouts. When you go to Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Techmeme, Google Reader, Google Plus, Google News, you’ll see a small Spool icon next to each item/post. Clicking on this icon will let you save items to your account and share with specific Facebook friends (optional).

Facebook Sharing

As mentioned above, when you add something to your Spool you can choose to share it to your friends’ Spools via Facebook. Once you connect your Facebook account, you’ll be able to search for friends that you want to share with and then send it to their Facebook pages. It’s pretty simple and you also have the option of making the item viewable (or not) to their friends.

Dropbox Integration

Additionally, Spool lets you connect to your Dropbox account. This makes for easy sharing of items; you’ll be able to manually take items from Dropbox and send to Spool. To do this, simply copy the desired file(s) over to the queue folder by navigating to Dropbox > Apps > Spool > queue.

Mobile App

Spool is available for mobile devices — both Android and iOS (iPhone and iPad). You can use the app to view your saved videos, images, pages, and articles — even when you’re offline. Items are automatically synced when on a WiFi connection. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add items from your mobile device to Spool. Hopefully this feature is coming soon as it could be a very handy way of sharing images taken with your mobile device.

From the app, you can swipe left to right on each item to bring up options for downloading, sharing, deleting, and archiving (to free up space). The app lets you manually set the amount of space that you’d like to use for saving content so that it doesn’t use up too much or too little.

I do like the sharing functionality on the mobile app because it not only lets you share on Facebook, but also lets you send out a tweet.

Final Thoughts

There’s no doubt about it, Spool is definitely a very useful tool that lets you manage all of your Web content in style, but is it good enough to make user switch from Read it Later and/or Instapaper? Or maybe Spool is a tool that can be used in conjunctive with Read it Later and Instapaper? What do you think?

I do like all of the added benefits of using Spool such as flawless integration with Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, and Google products; the mobile app is a huge plus too because I can see my saved content while on-the-go. As a matter of fact, the only huge downside I can find is that you currently need an invite to use the service (it’s currently in closed beta). So be sure to add your email address to their invite list before installing the Chrome extension or getting the mobile app because you won’t be able to sign up or sign in!

Let’s see what Flup has to offer.

Getting Started

To get started, you can sign up by using your Facebook account or creating an actual account on the site. Then you’ll need to import your contacts from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Google. This is pretty simple.

Viewing Contacts

Flup lets you see all of your contacts in alphabetical order – each letter on a new page. You can also filter your contacts by tag. Your contacts will already have tags attached to them, but you can edit these (see below for more info). In your list of contacts you can see icons representing links to social profiles, email addresses (though most aren’t displayed), and a description (if they have one).

There is a star next to each contact, but clicking on this does not add them to your favorites. Any contact that you star will show under “follow-ups” as a reminder that you need to contact them in the near future. It’s also a great way to keep in touch with important contacts – just add a star next to the ones that you want to remember to contact regularly.

One issue I noticed here is that Flup seems to match up contacts with the same name and then combines them. For instance, I have a friend on Facebook named Adam Smith and a different friend on Twitter named Adam Smith, so Flup created only ONE Adam Smith it my contacts. It then added the Facebook profile and Twitter profile of both Adam’s to the one contact. So be sure to watch out for that as it could cause the wrong message to be sent to the wrong contact!

Contact Details

If you need to edit a contact’s details, just click on their name in your contact list. Here you can add a note, edit their personal and business details, and add/remove tags. Under personal, you can add a mobile number, address, social links and website. Under business, you can add a job title, company, address, and phone numbers.

If you need to remove a contact from your list, this is also where you can find that option.

Connect with Others

Flup also has a button that you can add to your website or blog. It allows you to connect with your visitors without having to make your email address or phone number public. The button will send them to your Flup profile, so that they can see your both your personal and business contact details. It’s up to you what is displayed here.

On the downside, when I tried to go to my own profile while signed out, it prompted me to either sign up or sign in. So it looks like your visitors may have to sign up just to see your information. While this is great for protecting your privacy (because your information won’t be public), your visitors may not be too thrilled with having to sign up for the service just to contact you. Just keep this in mind.

Flup also offers 50 free cards to all users (via Moo.com). It’s a pretty basic card that will include your photo, name and email address (optional) on once side and your Flup URL on the other. You can also customize the colors of your card. For a free service, this is definitely a great added bonus and makes it easy to connect with people in real-life - especially if you don’t have your own business cards.

So how does Flup stack up to the others? You be the judge!

Give Flup a try and let us know what you think.

What attracted me to SocialFolders was the ability to access and share your social content online from a single application. You can also upload, download, and manage your photos and documents right from your computer.

SocialFolders works much like Dropbox since it creates a special folder on your computer and lets you access your social photos and files right from there. You can then use Windows Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) to view your files and download them to your computer, or drag-and-drop them between different services.

You can use the menu bar icon to add new services, refresh your folders, and change your preferences. You’ll also see notifications when new files have been added to one of your folders.

Getting Started

Signing up for SocialFolders is easy and only takes a few seconds. You’ll then be taken through a short tour and directed to the website where you can connect your desired services. There are numerous services that can be connected to your SocialFolders account.

• Box
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Google Docs
• Instagram
• Photobucket
• Picasa
• SmugMug
• Twitter
• YouTube

With most of the abovementioned services, you can upload and download photos and files to/from that service and also copy those items to other services that you have connected.

Account Types

SocialFolders is free to use, but with limitations. You will only be able to have a maximum of 500 files in your account. Also, you can only add 3 out of the 10 available services. If you need to manage more files or want to add more services, you can upgrade to the Premium account. Don’t worry, it’s actually pretty affordable at $1.99/month or $9.99/year.

You can also earn more files and services by referring friends to SocialFolders.

Service Settings

For each service that you connect, you can manually select the albums that you want to connect or disconnect in settings. So all because you have 10 folders or 200 items in one service, doesn’t mean that you have to sync them all. This is a great feature since it helps you to stay within the free account quota of 500 or less files.

For some the limitations of SocialFolders might be a deal breaker, yet the low monthly/yearly fees make it worth the upgrade. It’s very convenient to have your files synced to your computer because you’ll have access to them at all times – even if you’re offline. Also, if you happen to delete a photo or file by accident, you can rest easy because there is a backup in SocialFolders.

What do you think of this service? Will you use it?

If you’re interested in using SocialFolders, there is a download available for both Windows and Mac systems.

Bonfire is a very simple extension that adds chat functionality to Twitter.com. As a matter of fact, it adds a small IM window to the bottom right corner of Twitter so that you can chat with your friends privately and conveniently. Bonfire does not post your conversations as tweets on your Twitter account, it simply lets you have private chats using your Twitter login.

Getting Started

It’s not hard to get started with Bonfire. First you’ll need to install the extension for your browser of choice. Bonfire currently supports Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Signing In

Since Bonfire only works on Twitter.com, you’ll need to visit the site to see it in action. You’ll notice a “Sign in” button at the bottom right corner of the screen. Clicking on this will sign you into Bonfire so that you can use the service.

Finding Friends

More than likely, when you first sign in you won’t have too many other friends using the extension. This is mainly because Bonfire is in early beta. That’s ok though because you can simply invite friends by sending out a tweet to let them know about it. You can use the button in the friend’s list window or use the convient link that Bonfire adds next to each person’s name in the Twitter timeline. You’ll now notice a link that says “invite to Bonfire” next to each persons’ username if they’re not already using the service.

Note: If they’re already using Bonfire, their online/offline status will show next to their username instead. There will be a green circle for those who are online along with a link that says “chat” and a gray circle for those offline (as seen in the friend’s list).

Chatting on Twitter

Once you do have a friend online, you can start chatting just like any other instant messaging or chat service.

Clicking on a contact will open a small chat window on the side of your friend’s list. Even if the person is offline, you can still leave a message and they’ll be able to see it once they sign back in to Bonfire.

Features

Just like a regular IM service, you can set your status to online or offline on Bonfire. Unfortunately, there aren’t any options such as away, busy, dnd, etc. Maybe these options are coming soon?

You can also turn chat alerts on or off.

That’s all there is to Bonfire. As you can see, it’s a really simple and easy-to-use tool, but can be pretty useful depending on the circumstance.

For instance, maybe you want to have a long conversation with a Twitter friend and find the process of tweeting back and forth a nuisance, Bonfire to the rescue! Also, you may want to have a private conversation that no one else can see and don’t want to DM back and forth, Bonfire is great for this too.

The only downside I can see to this service is that there is no record of your chat, so if you need to reference something that was said you won’t be able to – unless of course you jot it down somewhere else.

Thoughts on Bonfire for Twitter? Will you use it?

Getting Started

Since Hangout Canopy is simply a Google Chrome extension, it’s easy to get started. Just download the extension from the Chrome Web store and you’re all set.

Finding Google+ Hangouts

If you’re already signed into your Google account, you’ll see a number on the browser icon. This represents the number of Hangouts that are currently going on. Clicking on the icon will show you those public Hangouts in the ‘Stream’ section of the window.

Clicking on the arrow on the right side will slide open a window over the stream that lets you go to the Google+ profile of everyone in that Hangout. There is also a Join button that you can use if you want to immediately join the party.

Keep An Eye on Favorites

The ‘Watching’ section is a great addition to this extension because it allows you to add your favorite users who you ‘d most like to hangout with. You can then keep a closer eye on them and know right away whenever they decide to create or join a Hangout.

In order to add users to ‘Watching’ you’ll need to get their profile URL from Google+. Now you’ll never miss your buddies again!

Random Fun

Finally, there’s the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that you’ll probably recognize from Google search. If you just want to join a random Hangout, you can click on this button to so do. The Google+ Hangout will open up in a new tab and just maybe you’ll make some new friends!

Hangout Canopy also includes a list of the team members who are responsible for this tool along with the Twitter timeline for the Hangout Canopy Twitter account – if you’re interested in seeing what they’re up to. Donations area also welcome, but not required.

What do you think of Hangout Canopy?

Getting Started

For starters, Flockler is in private beta, so you will need an invite to get started.

Once you get access, you’ll get started by adding your magazine name, description, and email address. While the magazine name cannot be changed at any time, the description can. You’ll also be asked to add keywords for your magazine, which can also be changed later if needed.

Next you’ll get to choose a “preset color” and upload a magazine cover.

That’s it as far as customizations; next it’s on to adding content to your magazine via the editor.

Magazine Editor

In design mode you’ll see 6 blocks where you can add content. In order to add content to your magazine, you can search through tweets, news, videos, and images or add your own links. If you have something specific (like a web site or article) that you’d like to add, your best bet is to add it by link. You can search for any of the keywords that you added when you first created your magazine; additionally, you can add and remove keywords here if needed.

If you find something that you’d like to use, you can click on it to go to the actual source page. From there you can choose to add a title and your own opinion (or short description) and then add it to your issue. If you don’t like what you see, simply close it out and go to a new result.

After you add 6 different items, you’ll be able to publish your magazine. If you’d like to add more than 6, you’ll be given the option once you click on the “publish” button.

After Publishing

Once completed, your published issue can be shared all over the Web and directly from Flockler to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. You’ll also get your own custom URL for sharing and viewing.

Those who visit your magazine will be able to subscribe via email, that way they’ll be notified anytime you publish a new issue. If you’d like to see a completed issue, you can view my first issue here.

Final Thoughts

After trying out Flockler, I personally have no complaints about the service. While it’s pretty basic (as far as features), it seems to work well for this type of service and makes creating a magazine super easy.

I also like that when a magazine item is clicked, it shows within a frame of your magazine – along with your opinion or description that you added along with social sharing tools at the top of the page. Another great thing about Flockler is that you can create more than one magazine, so if you’re interested in publishing content on numerous topics you’re not limited to just one niche.

I’m definitely interested in seeing how Flockler progresses and I do see myself creating another issue in the near future.

What are your thoughts on Flockler?

Since there are so many new and useful cloud tools that are regularly popping up on the scene, I decided to share 5 that I feel are extremely beneficial to bloggers and social media users. So here are 5 excellent cloud tools that you should be using, if you aren’t already.

Pogoplug

Plain and simple, Pogoplug is “cloud storage for your mobile life”. You’ll get a free 5GB for storing files (photos, music, videos, documents) in the cloud. Once you sign up, you’ll be prompted to download the free desktop software. Pogoplug also offers mobile apps for the iOS and Android so that you can easily transfer images and videos from your device. You can also add files to your storage by email; once enabled in settings, send items as attachments to upload@mypogoplug.com.

Pogoplug is great for streaming music, movies and photos from your mobile device. You can also set the mobile app to automatically add all your photos and images to your Pogoplug cloud storage. You can even backup your cloud storage to your computer for safekeeping. With 5GB of free storage and so many great features, it’s definitely a cloud app worth checking out.

ZeroPC

ZeroPC is known as “your content navigator for the cloud”. It supports a ton of services like Dropbox, Box.net, Evernote, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and more. It then lets you unify your documents, photos, videos, emails, and social content from these places within your ZeroPC account. This is great for those who have content all over the Web and want to access it safely and easily from a single location. You’ll really be able to get organized and can drag-and-drop files from your computer to ZeroPC.

ZeroPC has mobile apps for the iPad and Android and can run in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. You can check out the features page to see everything that ZeroPC can do. With a free account you get up to 14GB of cloud storage from your connected services and an additional 1GB from ZeroPC (with a paid account you get an additional 150GB).

MakeTechEasier has a really great review on ZeroPC, if you’re interested in learning more.

sideCLOUDload

sideCLOUDload is a very simple service that lets you send files from URL or direct upload to the cloud, without having to download anything on your computer or mobile device. There is a 25MB files size limit and items can be sent to a Dropbox or email account.

sideCLOUDload also offers a bookmarklet for quickly sending files on the fly while browsing the Web.

Mougg

With Mougg you get 2GB of free storage for storing your music in the cloud. While it is free, they also offer Premium plans (unlimited songs) for $2.99/month or $29.99/year. Mougg currently has mobile apps for iOS and Android.

To get started, simply upload your music by using the “upload music” link. You can organize your music into playlists via drag-and-drop. There is also a search feature for finding specific songs within your library. Mougg has an integrated music player with a few added features like sharing what you’re listening to on Facebook and Twitter; you can also repeat and shuffle songs.

Flapcast

Flapcast is kind of like Mougg, except it’s just for podcasts. It lets you “play, share, and discuss your podcasts over the Web”. You can subscribe to podcasts from the “Manage Subscriptions” tab or import your own collection from iTunes. You can also add people to your network and see what they’re listening to.

Once you subscribe to a podcast or import your own, you can listen to it with the integrated audio player (shown at the bottom of the page).

What is your favorite cloud tool?

(Image Source)

Since most people usually end up taking a nice, long nap after Thanksgiving dinner, I decided to highlight 6 social apps to check out before dinner. So if you’re looking for something to do while waiting for family to arrive and/or dinner to be served, here are a few social apps that can help pass the time.

Livestation

If you like to keep up with the news, you’ll enjoy Livestation. It “brings together news channel from around the world, to give you truly all sides of the story”. All stories can be watched for free, but if you prefer high quality there is a Premium account available. Additionally, you can connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts for sharing and discussing news stories and channels.

Unbox (Waiting List)

Unbox is stunning infographics for your inbox. It will show you stats like who you email the most, what time of day you email, how many emails you’ve sent/received, and more. It’s made to work exclusively with Gmail.

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is a social media dashboard that is meant to help your business grow and manage its online presence. It gives you insight into your audience so that you can see where you need to improve and also helps to increase engagement.

Pmints (Waiting List)

Pmints is a social payment system that lets you sell products in exchange for a tweet or post on Facebook.

Smarterer

Just how much do you know about Facebook, Twitter, Google Search, Social Media, etc? Well, now you can find out with tests on Smarterer. It’s a fun, social way to see just how much you know and then brag on your social networks. Questions are timed and the system “uses adaptive difficulty to identify your skill level and then gives you questions at the appropriate difficulty”.

Unthink (Waiting List)

Unthink calls itself the “anti-Facebook” and aims to help you maintain your freedom. One of the unique features of this social network is the fact that you can choose a brand to sponsor your page, as opposed to having your user data sold to brands. If you choose not to become an advocate for a brand, it will cost you $2/year to use the service. Their mission is to “emancipate social media and unleash people’s extraordinary potential”.

Wishing all who celebrate a very Happy Thanksgiving!

For instance, liking a message on Welshare can be posted to your Twitter account and likewise, liking a tweet on Twitter can be posted to your Welshare account. You can also get notifications every time your messages are liked, retweeted, or replied to. So Welshare also makes it easy to keep up with your own content and who is sharing it.

Welshare gives you a score (social reputation), which is calculated using a special formula created by Welshare. This gives Welshare the ability to rank you among other users and also based on your city and country.

Connect Your Accounts

Currently you can connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts to Welshare.

Each account has its own customization options and you can also format the way that messages are posted. Google+ and LinkedIn even give you the option to enable active sharing by default.

Welshare uses its own URL shortener by default, but you can also enter your bit.ly credentials (username and api key) so that you can track your links via your own account if you prefer.

Home Page

Your home page is where you’ll find status update from your friends, which are imported from the accounts that you choose to connect to Welshare. This page is where you can like, reply, and add messages to your favorites. As you can see from the image below, messages from all accounts are mixed together and you’ll be alerted of new messages at the top of your stream.

Your Page

“Your Page” is where you can see all of the messages that you’ve shared via Welshare. There is a status update box where you can enter messages (up to 300 characters) to be posted to your social accounts and add a picture and/or link. There is also an option to schedule posts for later (though I couldn’t get it to work at this time).

Top Users

In this section you can get a glimpse of the top Welshare users along with their score and number of messages posted. You can also search by country or city to help you find local users and follow users right from the list. This is a great way to find and connect with other Welshare users.

Final Thoughts

The design needs some tweaking and there are also a few features which I couldn’t get to work properly (like using my bit.ly account and scheduling messages). While Welshare advertises itself as simply a like button for all of your content, it does so much more than that.

On the features page, you can see that it’s a unified stream, message scheduler, viral graph, notification center for your shared content, and much more. The design and buggy features could be a deal-breaker for some, yet it’s definitely a useful tool that will come in handy for many others.

Let’s see just how Handpick works.

Step 1

Of course you’ll need a way to actually “handpick” links on the Web, so you’ll need to install the bookmarklet or Chrome extension.

You can also add a Handpick bookmark to your iPhone or iPad. Just visit this page on your device and follow the directions so that you can “handpick” links on your mobile device.

Step 2

The second step is to create a group of people to “handpick” for. These should be all people that will like the types of links you’ll be sharing; therefore they should have a common interest. You’ll be able to create as many groups as you want. Each group will show up as a check-box when sharing and you’ll be able to choose which groups you want to share to.

All that is needed to create a group is a name and time that you want the group members to receive their daily email digest.

Step 3

Next you’ll need to add members to your group. As mentioned above, those members will receive a daily email digest of all of the links that you handpick for the day. Members are added by manually entering their name and email one-by-one. Just keep adding members until you’ve got everyone that you want to share with in that specific group. Since Handpick is in early beta, I’m sure that this method of adding members will change since it would surely be so much easier to import your email contacts or choose friends from Facebook or Twitter.

You can also manage your group and change the name, delivery time, and email subject for the daily digest. Additionally, you can choose to turn on/off delivery via BCC. If you turn it on, all members of the group will be able to see the email address of each group member. This is a very bad idea if the members do not know each other. However, if you’re all friends then this shouldn’t be an issue since you’ll more than likely have each others email addresses and probably correspond with each other frequently.

There is also a feature called “Contributable” which you can also turn on/off. With this on, you will allow all members in the group to handpick content for that specific group. So if they have a Handpick account, your group will show up in their accounts as well so that they can also send links to it.

Step 4

All that’s left is to browse the Web and “handpick” links. When you find something you want to share, click the bookmarklet or browser icon in Chrome and you’ll get a small window with sharing options.

You can change the title and enter a description. Don’t forget to choose the group that you want to share to! Finally click on “share” and you’re all done.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, it has never bee easier to share links with specific friends. I not only love the concept of Handpick, but I love how easy it is to set up and share to people that I usually have to email individually. I do, however, hope to see an improvement in the design of the site and also in the way that you add members to the group.

Handpick is currently in private beta, so you will need an invite to try it out.

So if you want to know more about what your friends are saying and what they’re interested in, try out Wisdom!

News Feed

The feed is where you can see all status updates at a glance and then filter them by popularity and type (based on what they’re referring to). This way you can see what kind of mood people are in, who’s in love, what’s going on with the health of your friends, who’s traveling, and more! You can also see the date posted, number of comments, and number of likes. Each status will have a corresponding icon such as a star (as pictured above), smiley face, heart, briefcase, etc – based on the topic.

Unfortunately, I was unable to really experience the rest of the app since it takes 24 hours to complete the reports needed for these areas. However, I can give a general idea of what each section is for.

Friends

Image Source: http://wisdom.com/what-is-wisdom/

This section gives you a great overview of who you’re friends with on Facebook. Wisdom gives you a list of all of your friends along with their last status updates. This gives you a chance to quickly see what each of your friends is up to. You can also filter this section by age, gender, relationship status, and location. Lastly, each friend will have a rating based on their Facebook activity, popularity, communication, influence, and cheer.

Chatter

If you’re interested in what others are saying to your friends, then you’ll love this section. You can basically see everything that your friends are chatting about with others from a single location (it’s almost like spying). “That is, everything except repetitive ‘happy birthday’ posts.”

Interests

Image Source: http://wisdom.com/what-is-wisdom/

Wisdom uses your friends’ “likes” to show you the most popular and trending interests across sports, entertainment, and nightlife. So you can see things like what artists your friends like the most, the best places to hangout, the most popular movies among your friends, etc.

Places

Here you’ll be able to see the most popular check-in locations and the top cities and hometowns among your friends. You’ll also get demographic information for each place listed.

Events

Image Source: http://wisdom.com/what-is-wisdom/

As expected, you can see all of the events that your friends are attending and see how many others will be there too. Wisdom will also recommend events to you based on the number of friends attending.

About Me

Finally, we have the about me section will will, of course, show you information about yourself and track your communications across Facebook.

Wisdom is currently available via Facebook.com as well as an iOS app available for both the iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad. The only downside is that you have to wait 24 hours to see any other section besides the news feed. From the description and screenshots on the Wisdom website, it definitely looks promising; so let’s hope that those sections do not disappoint once they are available.

If you’re just looking for people to connect with, you can search within the directory. When viewing someone’s professional profile, you can add them as a contact or request an endorsement from them. Not only is this great for proving your skills, but it could be instrumental in landing a job or freelance work.

To get started, you can sign in with either your Facebook or Google account. Whichever account you choose to sign up with, that will be the profile used to import employment and education data from. However, if you want to import from another account (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn) once signed in you can do so.

Once inside your account, there are only 3 steps needed to get started: upload a photo, customize your profile, and add your skills. Since some of this will be filled in from your imported profile, you’ll just need to double check it and correct anything that may be wrong.

Your about me info consists of your name, title, biography, location, industry, and photo. You can then add up to 5 “endorseable skills that define you as a professional.” These are what others will be ranking you on.

Underneath your skills you can connect your social networking accounts: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ plus your own website and email. You can choose whether or not to display these on your profile. Underneath that is your work experience. For each position you can enter the company, title, skills uses, state date, and end date. Lastly there is your education, where you can list your school, degree, start date, and finish date.

Your profile can be customized using a premade theme or you can choose a theme and then customize it further.

Finally there is the dashboard, which is where you can see recent activity, today’s stats, and tips and tricks. Under the stats you’ll see a link to view your full analytics. If you would like to go a step further, you can even set up Google Analytics and enter the UA code in your Path.to settings for improved stats and analytics.

If you would like to see the final result of a Path.to profile, feel free to check out my profile.

What do you think of Path.to? Do you find it useful? Do you think it’s worth signing up for to get endorsements or is it easier to stick to something like LinkedIn recommendations?