Tech News

Putting all of your social networks in one stylish place

Published

10 years ago

January 29, 2011

We wrote last year about using services such as card.ly and magntize for your online business card and discussed why it was important. Free services like these are useful when you are involved in multiple social networks as well as blogging in more than one place and need a single page that aggregates all of your efforts.

This article was first published on AgentGenius.com on January 25, 2010.

Given that it would be ideal to host a landing page on your own website for the SEO benefits, I still love the aggregator sites.

New service in beta

Today, I want to introduce you to flavors.me which is a little more advanced than the previous options we’ve shared. Flavors.me doesn’t require you to find all of your network user ID names or numbers, rather it allows you to add networks you’re already logged into (with oAuth and such), saving you time. With Flavors.me you request an invitation which is emailed to you (mine was on the same day), then you simply choose a username, log in, begin telling it which networks you want to feature, and then the fun of design begins.

Why I prefer Flavors.me over the others

My profile is simply a photo of me speaking with a simple font choice, yours could be a photo of your city, you with friends, aligned to the right or left or perhaps a custom image like some of the creative options you see on Twitter wallpapers. I like that Flavors.me is a custom design and my page is unique since there are limitless iterations of what a page could look like whereas my page on card.ly or magntize looks exactly like many other peoples’ site. I use my Flavors.me site as my bio link on Twitter and am considering using it on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. because it is a clean design which keeps with the 2010 webdev trend of single page sites with no fold.

Here are some Flavors.me sites (aka eye candy):

If you’re like me and love looking at web design, check out many many other examples in the Flavors.me Gallery.

0 Shares

Related Topics:Social Media social networks Tech

Up Next

Switching from Outlook to Gmail without losing all functionality

Don't Miss

Chrome users to get email and chat notifications via desktop

Lani Rosales, COO + News Director

Lani is the Chief Operating Officer at The American Genius - she has co-authored a book, co-founded BASHH and Austin Digital Jobs, and is a seasoned business writer and editorialist with a penchant for the irreverent.

42 Comments

Susie Blackmon

January 25, 2010 at 5:05 am

Love this Lani. Thanks so much.

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 8:58 am
  
  Have you gotten a chance to play with it yet? 🙂
  
  Reply
Jack Zerby

January 25, 2010 at 11:19 am

Lani this is a fantastic article. Very thoughtful and touched on a lot of points that I hoped the design and functionality would communicate. The goal was to allow each user to create something unique, but stay within certain constraints.

Much more to come so stay tuned!

Jack Zerby
Designer and Co-Creator of Flavors.me

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 9:00 am
  
  Jack, we’ll be watching- you’ve got a great thing going on and let’s just say I’m an official fangirl- will y’all be at sxsw in Austin this March?
  
  Reply
- Nobu Hata
  
  January 26, 2010 at 7:27 pm
  
  Yo Jack! Could I get a beta invite? I’ll promise to use my power for good, rather than evil. Deal?
  
  Reply
Adam Weart

January 25, 2010 at 12:09 pm

Thanks Lani! I will be checking this out ASAP!

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 9:01 am
  
  So did you make yours yet? I want to see it!
  
  Reply
TheRECoach

January 25, 2010 at 12:22 pm

Love reading about your “Cool Tools” Lani, this one however was truly unique. One of the screenshots you used was of a young man I knew as a little boy, and hadn’t had contact with for a long time. It was so nice to see he was following his dreams and looked so happy. #smallworld. Keep bringing us such good stuff 🙂

TheRECoach

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 9:01 am
  
  NO WAY! Which one???
  
  Reply
Nobu Hata

January 25, 2010 at 5:26 pm

Oh lord, I foresee cheeseball mugshots Photoshop’d in front of Sold sign pics. Realtors: please don’t abuse this tool.

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 25, 2010 at 5:30 pm
  
  LOL I agree! And for the record, YOU said it, not me!
  
  Reply
Sherry Lowry

January 25, 2010 at 5:43 pm

Lani, this is really a remarkable way to use this technology.

Thanks so much for both sharing your “find” but also taking the time to put it into context with a few other options out there that are semi-related.

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 9:02 am
  
  Of course! With your artistic talent, I can’t wait to see what you come up with!
  
  Reply
Ryan Hukill

January 25, 2010 at 9:50 pm

Hey Lani, this looks like a great tool that I can see many benefits from. Glad I stumbled across it. Question for you: You mentioned hosting such a landing page on your own website for SEO purposes; do you know of a tool that makes this easy, such as a particular WP plugin or something that would pick up these feeds?

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 9:05 am
  
  Ryan, I don’t know of any that do that, but I’m not the WP expert. So far as I know, that would have to be custom developed. What we could recommend, however, is a page that has the icons of all of your networking efforts (be sure they open in another tab so your reader isn’t forever lost) and direct people to where you want them to be. Then you have pretty good control.
  
  Reply
Barry Cunningham

January 26, 2010 at 12:38 am

Hey Lani..I don’t stop by that often but when I do it’s because something you wrote caught my eye. This is one of those moments. Thanks.

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 9:05 am
  
  Barry, that just made my day, thanks! I can’t wait to see what you come up with for your flavors page!
  
  Reply
Sarah Cooper

January 26, 2010 at 1:27 pm

Thank you for this, Lani! Here’s mine: https://flavors.me/SarahWV

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 2:36 pm
  
  oooh Sarah, that’s really well done, awesome! 🙂 thanks for coming back to share yours!
  
  Reply
Amber Austen

January 26, 2010 at 5:07 pm

Like I said,… NIFTY!! thnx guys 🙂 https://flavors.me/AmberAusten

Reply
- Lani Rosales
  
  January 26, 2010 at 5:16 pm
  
  oooh that looks great, amber!!! 🙂
  
  Reply
Diane Scherer

January 26, 2010 at 10:08 pm

@psexton @agentgenius I need way more hours in the day to check out cool stuff like flavors.me website https://bit.ly/8tvQQF

Reply
T I L L E Y

January 28, 2010 at 2:12 pm

Putting All of Your Social Networks in One Stylish Place https://bit.ly/8tvQQF (via @flavorsme)

Reply
David McClellan

January 31, 2010 at 9:55 pm

Putting All of Your Social Networks in One Stylish Place https://ow.ly/12jwh

Reply
Kent Hu

February 1, 2010 at 7:25 pm

Hi Lani – thx for the info and I will give it a try as soon as I can… I have been struggling finding a centralized site/location for my signatures, business info… this might be it – keep up the good work 😉

Reply
RomanTyrsin

December 24, 2012 at 12:27 am

I have found recently a wonderful webpage which can bring all my social media accounts together on one page – http://www.homesweetpage.com. It’s really cool and the design is nice.

Reply

Tech News

The paradox of CAPTCHAs: Too smart for humans vs AI?

(TECH NEWS) AI is catching up to our cybersecurity technology and often tricking humans too — so what’s next for CAPTCHAs and the internet?

Published

14 hours ago

April 13, 2021

Jack Lloyd, Staff Writer

Person using phone with laptop to verify CAPTCHAs and code.

We’ve all encountered it before: The occasional robot test that feels impossible to beat. If you’ve felt like these tests, also known as CAPTCHAs, have gotten harder in the last couple of years, you aren’t wrong—and the reason is as ironic as it is baffling.

Simply put, AI are just as good as—and often better than—humans at completing CAPTCHAs in their classic format. As machine learning and AI become more advanced, the fundamental human attributes that make consistent CAPTCHA formats possible become less impactful, raising the question of how to determine the difference between AI and humans in the future.

The biggest barrier to universal CAPTCHA doctrine is purely cultural. Humans may share experiences across the board, but such experiences are typically basic enough to fall victim to the same machine learning which has rendered lower-level CAPTCHAs moot. Adding a cultural component to CAPTCHAs could prevent AI from bypassing them, but it also might prevent some humans from understanding the objective.

Therein lies the root of the CAPTCHA paradox. Humans are far more diverse than any one test can possibly account for, and what they do have in common is also shared by—you guessed it—AI. To create a truly AI-proof test would be to alienate a notable portion of human users by virtue of lived experience. The irony is palpable, but one can only imagine the sheer frustration developers are going through in attempting to address this problem.

But all isn’t lost. While litmus tests such as determining the number of traffic cones in a plaza or checking off squares with bicycles (but not unicycles, you fool) may be beatable by machines, some experts posit that “human entropy” is almost impossible to mimic—and, thus, a viable solution to the CAPTCHA paradox.

“A real human being doesn’t have very good control over their own motor functions, and so they can’t move the mouse the same way more than once over multiple interactions,” says Shuman Ghosemajumder, a former click fraud expert from Google. While AI could attempt to feign this same level of “entropy”, the odds of a successful attempt appear low.

Tech News

Move over, Clubhouse: Slack adds their own audio chat rooms

(TECH NEWS) Slack planning to co-opt Clubhouse’s synchronous audio rooms has lead to mixed response. Did it really need to be done?

Published

1 day ago

April 12, 2021

Jack Lloyd, Staff Writer

Woman in green cardigan and headphones listening to audio chat room on mobile, where Slack becomes a competitor.

Slack is adding a synchronous audio chat room feature similar to what Clubhouse already has. While not everyone is happy about it, the addition is true to Slack’s ongoing form—if a little redundant.

Slack’s audio rooms would work similarly to Clubhouse’s current feature of the same persuasion. The rooms themselves would be ongoing for as long as they were open, and users would be able to drop in and out of calls at their leisure, even joining the conversation when permitted by the host or settings. In theory, it’s a cool way to round out Slack’s platform and make for yet another way for people to engage during the work day.

But not everyone is stoked about the addition. Pocketnow’s Nadeem Sarwar makes a strong point about the redundancy of adding a Clubhouse feature to the already-packed Slack deck: “…from a regular remote worker’s perspective, I’d rather use services such as Telegram, Discord, or Google Meet that we’ve grown accustomed to using for jumping into a group call with my teammates.”
“…[T]he need for audio chatrooms to get in a chaotic chat with colleagues, with whom you already chat over work and share memes five days a week, doesn’t make much sense,” he adds.

Sarwar also references research about remote meeting fatigue from Stanford and The Washington Post, positing that—since video conferences are already played out at this point—adding another quasi-conference option to Slack doesn’t serve much of a purpose.

He isn’t wrong. There are multitudinous conference options on the market now, many of which are free. One could argue that Slack, having marketed itself as a text-first communication hub, has no business entering the audio chat landscape.

That argument falls on its face when you consider Slack’s model—something both Sawar and the Slack CEO himself mention—involves “stealing” and implementing “good ideas” from others in order to make their own platform as comprehensive as possible. If one is able to use Slack for the majority of tasks that Google, Discord, and Clubhouse offer, that makes the platform a lot more attractive to users who are on the fence.

And, perhaps more importantly, it ensures that current users won’t migrate to a comparable platform in the future—especially if their colleagues are making the same choice.

It’s a smart move for Slack, especially given Clubhouse’s lack of Android support at this time—something Clubhouse has said probably still won’t launch for a couple of months.

The Clubhouse team, for their part, continues to add new features in efforts to maintain the platform’s upward mobility. One such feature is the option for paid subscriptions to content creators, allowing for people to monetize their presence on the platform. At the time of this writing, Clubhouse is valued at around $1 billion.

Tech News

An industry first: IBM launches quantum developer certification program

(TECH NEWS) Developers with quantum computing skills can now prove they’ve mastered the subject with IBM’s first-ever Quantum Developer Certification.

Published

1 week ago

April 6, 2021

Veronica Garcia, Staff Writer

Quantum developer looking out of the window with a three monitor setup open to various coding programs.

Last week, IBM announced its first-ever developer certification for programming quantum computers, which is also the quantum industry’s first.

“Our team is extremely proud to be able to offer the first-ever quantum developer certification,” a company blog post read. “We hope its availability will provide a valuable learning path for developers and stakeholders looking to prepare themselves for quantum computing in the future.”

The IBM Quantum Developer Certification focuses on IBM’s software tools, specifically Qiskit, their open-source software development kit for quantum computing. Launched in 2017, Qiskit already has over 600,000 installs. And, it’s being used by developers to develop apps, improve code, and participate in hackathons and summer schools.

While the Quantum Developer Certification is the only quantum certification IBM offers now, it won’t be the last. IBM says it is “the first of several in a series of certifications.” This is part of the company’s quantum development roadmap to build a “diverse, global, cloud-based ecosystem of developers who can bring quantum computing skills to their own communities and industries.”

Offered through the Pearson VUE platform, the Quantum Developer Certification exam is 60 questions long. The exam will test a developer’s competency in the fundamentals of quantum computing concepts. Also, it will examine if a person can use Qiskit SDK from the Python programming language to “create and execute quantum computing programs on IBM quantum computers and simulators.”

This certification is exciting for the quantum community because it will officially demonstrate a person’s mastery of quantum computing. And, for the most part, I think most of us can agree that certifying your skills looks good on resumes, and it shows employers you’re serious about your career. However, getting one can be costly. Currently, IBM doesn’t have any scholarships in place, but they say they are working on rolling one out to those who are interested in getting certified.

Along with the certification, IBM is also supporting educators to prepare the future quantum workforce. They are giving educators access to IBM Quantum tools through their Quantum Educators Program and semester-long quantum computing course, Introduction to Quantum Computing and Quantum Hardware, and its free Qiskit digital textbook.

According to a report, quantum computing is predicted to become a $65 billion industry by 2030, and IBM wants to help companies “get their workforce quantum ready” for when it does.

“With our IBM Quantum Developer Certification, IBM Quantum is offering a path for people with all development backgrounds to earn a certification in programming with Qiskit, allowing them to leverage their quantum coding skills into a potential opportunity in this exciting new workforce,” the company blog post read.