40Tech

Cookies. We have a love hate relationship with them. They track what we do and report all kinds of information back to the site that generated them — and to third parties as well, in many cases. But they also often provide a better user experience, keeping track of our preferences and removing small annoyances like having to sign in to a website every single time we open it up. Unfortunately, as is the case with most things on the internet regarding your privacy and security, the only completely effective way to protect yourself is to simply turn the potential problem off. The only problem with this course of action is that turning off cookies also has the effect of making a huge part of the web practically unusable.

So what to do about it? Well, if you use Google Chrome, try out Disconnect.

People use Twitter to connect with others, to publicize projects, and to catch up on news.  Now, a group of researchers have used Twitter to measure the mood of the United States.  As discussed on Business Insider, researchers from Harvard and Northwestern tracked three years of tweets to gauge the mood of the U.S. on a minute by minute basis.  The results are interesting, but not surprising.

Do you need a seamless method for translating tweets or Facebook statuses from other languages? Thanks to an enterprising Chrome developer, you now can do so. So, you could find a German who tweets or updates his Facebook status with news on David Hasselhoff’s daily comings and goings, and the extension, Social Translate, will translate the messages for you. Read on for more.

Traveling around the Internet, it is impossible to miss Tweet buttons on websites. You know what Tweet buttons are – those buttons that say “Retweet” or “Tweet This” at the beginning or end of posts. The big player in Tweet buttons was, until last week, TweetMeme. Now, though, Twitter itself has thrown its hat into the ring, teaming with TweetMeme to create an official Tweet Button. In fact, the official Tweet Button works much the same way that the TweetMeme button works. With a little bit of elbow grease, you can get the Tweet Button up and running on your WordPress site in a way that allows you to have a button for each post on your front page. Read on for details.

If you are overwhelmed by the multitude of services you are a part of and need to maintain, Cliqset may be the definitive service for you. Originally thought to be a slightly prettier FriendFeed clone, the service has taken big strides in the past eight months. With over 80 connected services, including deep integrations with Evernote, Twitter, Foursquare, and yes, even Google Buzz, Cliqset is well on its way to becoming your social media command centre.

You might remember our post on Threadsy Beta way back in January. Threadsy is a great web app that pulls all of your email, Facebook and Twitter info into one neat little interactive package, and even gives you some detailed multiple social network info on your contacts. In May, Threadsy went live to the public with a slew of new features, and has added even more in the last week. It’s safe to say that Threadsy is growing fast and doing well, so if you tried it and dropped it, you might want to look again — and if you haven’t played with Threadsy yet, we recommend you check it out!

Here’s the shortlist of Threadsy’s new features, some detail on their latest updates, and a few things we would still like to see:

How smart are your Twitter followers?  How do your followers stack up against the followers of other Twitter users out there?  Fret and worry no longer, for now you can learn the answers to these important questions, using Stupid Fight.  Stupid Fight is a website that allows you to input two Twitter usernames, and compare [...]

Remember, back in the day, when email was one-dimensional? The good ol’ days when all you had to do was remember one contact list and deal with one inbox? Well, those days are long gone, buddy. Today, we are in a world of social media: connecting and sharing with the planet at large in as [...]

As is apparent from my last article on 40Tech, I have been playing around with a multitude of Google Chrome Extensions since the official beta-door was opened, last week. Last night, I discovered Feedly, a social RSS extension based on Google Reader and Twitter that “organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page” [...]

Windows Mobile is not known for being either pretty or exceptionally user friendly, and the apps have been repeatedly put to shame by iPhone and Android software. WinMo users were waiting with baited breath for the launch of the Windows Mobile applications store (Skymarket), but initial offerings were largely disappointing and often grossly overpriced. Hope [...]