Webware

Twitter and self-promotion go together like peanut butter and jelly, but without the right tools it takes work. I've recently begun using a handy service called Autopostr that takes most of that work out of the equation, by posting whichever of my Flickr photos I want straight to Twitter with a minimal amount of effort.

On any photo or photos you wish to share with your Twitter buddies you simply add a hash (#) in the title or "autopostr" as a photo tag. The service scans your Flickr account every five minutes, and takes any of those tagged photos and sends them out as new tweets.

Now I wouldn't recommend doing this on more than two or three photos a day since it's a bit spammy, but this system provides a very quick and simple way to promote photos without having to use URL shorteners or sign into your Twitter account. It's also makes it simple to see which photos you've shared to Twitter by sorting out which ones have hashes in the titles or autopostr tags.

Worth noting is that Autopostr won't start sending out your marked photos as tweets until it verifies your information. It also doesn't tap into your Twitter account using the popular Oauth, so you'll have to give it your Twitter username and password for it to be able to post. Creator Tistan Teunissen tells me that's coming soon though.

See also:
flickr2twitter and
You can now post pics to Twitter from Picnik

It's #FollowFriday on Twitter, which means people will be updating their streams today with lists of users they think others should follow. Usually, the tweets say something like this: "#FollowFriday: @donreisinger @rafe @josh @caro @stshank"

Follow Fridays are a good time to add new people to your Twitter list, or promote the contributors you like the best. But what we really all want to know is this: How do I get included in Follow Friday notes? I did some research to see how a user could capitalize on Follow Friday to increase their follower count. I tried a handful of ideas. Some worked, others didn't. Here's what I found:

Idea 1: Beg
I decided begging would be the first option in trying to be added to Follow Friday tweets. I thought my followers would pity me and add me to their lists, thus exposing me to a whole new group of people.

It backfired. After updating my Twitter stream, many of my followers responded angrily, saying I was missing the point of Follow Friday. Others simply made fun of me. I didn't add a single follower.

Result: No change to follower count.

Idea 2: Insult Follow Friday
What better way to ingratiate yourself with Twitter followers than to insult them for being a part of a "Twitter scam"?

I updated my stream with discussions on why Follow Friday was a joke. I told my followers they shouldn't be engaging in such activity. I even told them that I didn't want to be on any lists because it was so dumb.

After three tweets and five minutes of keeping up with this ploy, it became abundantly clear that my Twitter insults weren't adding any followers to my list. In fact, I lost about 10 followers in that time. Most chastised me for not recognizing the value of Follow Friday. Others put it more succinctly by calling me a jerk. It wasn't a smart move.

Result: Follower count decline.

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Internet Explorer 8 has a cool feature where you get more than just one option in the search bar when you type in a keyword. But the default only gives you two options. Here's how to add more search options to the IE 8 search bar.

Go to Tools and select Manage Add-ons.

Then select Search providers.

You'll see Microsoft Live Search and whichever options you chose during install. If that was Live Search, that's all you'll see.

Now click Find more search providers.

You'll get a list of various options. Press "Add to Internet Explorer" to add the providers you want. Each time you'll get the option to make it a default search provider, and include terms in the suggested search terms. If you don't see your favorite. Scroll to the bottom and click "Create your own search provider."

Now open a new tab, and enter the URL of the search engine you want to include. Search for the word TEST in all capital letters. Copy the URL of the search results page by highlighting it and pressing the "Windows" and "C" keys at the same time.

Now click back to the tab that says "crate your own search provider." Use the "Windows" and "V" keys to paste the URL you copied earlier into the box marked URL. Then give the search engine a name. And press Install Search Provider. If you want to make this your default search provider, check that box. Then press Add one more time.

Now when you type a keyword in the search box, icons for all the search engines you selected will show up. Just click on one with your mouse to search the keywords you typed in that engine.

The Twitter site doesn't allow you to create groups on it, a significant missing feature. But just because the site is lacking group support, it doesn't mean that you don't have any options available to you to create your own group with free Web tools. Believe it or not, if you really want to create groups and watch them grow, it's not all that difficult.

The group formation phase

Step 1: Use Tweetworks If you're tired of waiting for Twitter to add group support, use a site called Tweetworks. It allows you to create or join groups. It only took about 10 seconds for me to set one up. Just put in the name and description of the group and you're all set. It's the simplest way to create a group and get it off the ground.

Step 2: Promote your group on Twitter It seems counter-intuitive to create a group on another service and promote it on Twitter, but that's precisely what you need to do, since you're trying to get all your like-minded friends together. Tweetworks offers an automatic tweet that allows you to input a few characters followed by a link inviting friends to join the group. But unfortunately, it's not very informative. Do it yourself.

Step 3: Get informative And that brings us to the next point. Because Tweetworks doesn't make its tweets informative, you'll need to do the legwork yourself. Put your group and its topic area into your own tweets on Twitter and place it in your e-mail. I've found that simply putting "Join my tech-focused Tweetworks group" followed by a link in an e-mail is a good way to get people to join. And since you're appealing to the Twittersphere, make sure all your tweets make it clear what your vision for your group is. For example, if you're forming a New York Yankees group, updating your stream with a message like, "Join my NY Yankees Twitter group on Tweetworks" followed by a link to the page should do the trick.

Step 4: Make sure the group is active What good is a group if it's not active? If people come back to your group every day to find out what's being said and see what kind of links are being shared, they're more likely to tell their own followers about it.

Step 5: Join other groups If you really want to grow your own Twitter group, you'll need to join others. See, most of the people who actually want to join groups are doing it already. So the best way to promote your own group and add members is to engage those people on Tweetworks. I joined four or five groups over the weekend. After talking with other members and coming to the realization that we had similar interests, I asked them to join my own group that I created earlier in the day. By Sunday night, my small Tweetworks private group of 3 had ballooned to 25 members.

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With the economy in continuing decline, keeping tight control over your money is no longer just for obsessives. These financial apps for Google Android help you count every penny.

Personal Budget Droid is a simple budget- and bills-tracker that lets you create multiple monthly budgets for groceries, housing costs, and so on. You enter every budget name and transaction by hand, but the app keeps a transaction history and calculates how much you have left for each category.

The more sophisticated FireWallet works with budgets inside various accounts and protects your information behind a four-digit pin you change from the all-zero default. It's a bit trickier to navigate, but also shoehorns in more options. In addition to a more refined interface, FireWallet has graphs and charts to help visualize your spending, and a rudimentary tool to alert you of upcoming bills. Both it and Personal Budget Droid are missing templates and more powerful features to optionally suck in real-time data from your checking, savings, and stock portfolios. Time for a mobile version of Mint?

TouchTip is our current favorite tip calculator for Google Android. Flick a finger left or right to slide between a simple tip calculator that rounds up to the nearest dollar or ten dollars, and one featuring a ten-digit keypad. Both views use the bill total, tax, and number of diners to calculate your total payment. Flicking up or down produces a breakdown of what you owe that you can pass around the table to friends.

Personal Tip Jar hails from the same developer as Personal Budget Droid, and shares a few visual characteristics, including a useless "news" tab. Yet Tip Jar is a great niche nod to those whose incomes are built substantially on tips. While a fuller budgeting app could easily accommodate gains from tipping, this application provides a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly summary at a glance.

Stock apps on Android are extremely mediocre, but the simply named Stock App is better than other skeletal tickers. This one opens with Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500, Yahoo, and Google presets. You can add your own by pressing the menu key, and can browse frequently traded stocks. Stock App displays the value and percentage change up front; double-tap an entry to see more stats. While it's functional, Android is sorely missing the completeness of a stock-tracker like Bloomberg for iPhone. Get to it, developers.

If you're itching to take your struggling start-up to the big time, you could do worse than take Sun Microsystems' Chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy advice to heart. After all, in three months, McNealy and the three others of his cohort turned their start-up profitable and brought us Java, Solaris, and OpenOffice.org.

Besides, how could you not want to listen to a guy who, when flummoxed over launching a PowerPoint presentation during a keynote talk at the Plug and Play Expo in Sunnyvale, CA, sarcastically quips, "You know, this Windows thing...I use Open source. F5? That's intuitive."

Rule #1: Have a controversial strategy. Look for the counter-intuitive idea and go after it. If you're conventional, you'll do things the same way things have always been done. Differentiation is key. The hard part is, you have to be right.

Rule #2: Break the rules of business, but don't cheat, lie, or steal to do it. If you do, you'll drive off your brainiest collaborators and will lose your credibility among your once-loyal staff.

Rule #3: Get a little money, but not too much. A small funding pool will force you to be scrappy, efficient, and to find new production approaches.

Rule #4: Have a cause. "Humans are coin-operated in general," McNealy says, "But they also like a little psychic income." As an example, Sun created Curriki, an open-source cirriculum wiki, that solved a problem McNealy and his son encountered during his son's grade school project.

Rule #5: Just do it, but marry well. Pour your heart and soul into a start-up, but try to do it before you marry. McNealy didn't marry until he was 39, he said, but has since caught up with four sons. "The most important decision you make is who you marry and have kids with," McNealy advised. "Pick a spouse or significant other, or whatever you want. Just make sure you pick a good one. There's some real technical advice for you from an entrepreneur."

For more concrete products, downloads, and tips, start-ups can visit Sun's Web page for start-up essentials. Or, McNealy suggests, just e-mail him: scott@sun.com.

Earlier today, Rafe and I hosted a lively Ask the Editors chat about Google Chrome. As is often the case, we both learned a bit while we were answering your questions. Here's a round-up of some of the more interesting answers.

Once you've imported bookmarks, it turns out there is a way to manage them. It's not readily apparent, though. Hit CTRL+B to show and hide the Bookmarks bar. When the bar is showing, at the right end there's a folder icon that you can use to manage those bookmarks.

One reader pointed out that there is a Home button option, although it won't be shown by default. Go to Tools, that's the wrench icon, choose Options and then Show Home Button On Toolbar. The same reader noted that there is no print button, nor a hidden remedy for it. However, the standard Print command that works on every program I can think of also works in Google Chrome. Simple hit CTRL+P and you're good to go.

Another reader complained that his installation of Chrome was running Flash-intensive Web sites at a much higher level of memory usage than in Firefox or Internet Explorer. This struck us as a bit odd, because Chrome imports its Flash engine from the one currently installed in other browsers on your system. However, it might have something to do with the fact that each tab on Chrome functions as its own browser--they're all sandboxed. Keep that in mind, because if you have a lot of tabs running in Chrome you're likely to see memory usage skyrocket.

We didn't bring up the about:memory command specifically, which will show you all memory usage by active browsers on your system, including Chrome. We did talk about about: commands. I erroneously told one questioner that about:config brings up a default advanced configurations list, as it does in Firefox. It doesn't. Other about: commands do work, though, including about:cache to reveal the contents of your cache, about:dns for DNS information, and about:crash which forces the tab to crash.

Chrome may look slick, but it's definitely still in beta. Some of the bugs and hacks we discussed concerned Facebook login failures, scrolling on a Gateway laptop, ad-blocking, and even getting a Google Toolbar in Chrome.

If you have any questions about Chrome that you don't see answered here or in the full chat transcript, feel free to ask away in the comments.

Click here for full coverage of Google Chrome.

This post is part of a multi-part series about tech abroad.

It's summertime and that means that people across the world are taking vacations to faraway places. Many people would be satisfied with checking in on their e-mail every couple of weeks, for five minutes, at an Internet cafe while on vacation. Techies like me, however, crave a higher level of contact with their information online. You may not be as much of a power user as Robert Scoble, however the world keeps moving even though you are abroad.

Everyone knows to bring power adapters to hook up their electronics, but here are some tips that you may not have considered, that I have gathered during my stay in Europe so far.

1. Free Wi-Fi is scarce, take advantage when you can. You may luck out and land at a hotel or hostel where they provide free Internet, but most of the time you are going to have to pay or go without access. Orange is a popular provider of paid W-iFi in Europe, for reasonable prices (15 euros for 10 hours). They have a lot of hotspots, but you are going to want to watch your time and not go overboard there. Some cafes will have free Wi-Fi and usually advertise it on a sticker in their window. For a more casual setting, the McDonald's, on the Champs Elysses in Paris, has free Wi-Fi to go with your Royale with Cheese. Some public places, such as the parks by Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, also provide access.

If and when you find free Wi-Fi access, jump over to Google Reader and download your RSS items with its offline Google Gears functionality. If you take the couple of seconds to do this, you can catch up on your news even when you're not basking in the glow of free Wi-Fi.

2. With that said, bring your Wi-Fi enabled phone. iPhone users take note, a quick download of your emails onto your phone saves you a lot of trouble of lugging a laptop around. This helps you to leverage the scarce free Wi-Fi to the best of your ability. While you will benefit greatly from having Wi-Fi on your phone, remember to turn off data roaming, or else you will rack up a massive bill during your trip.

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Delighting some Firefox browsing loyalists and distressing others is the so-called "awesome bar" in Firefox 3 (download for Windows and Mac).

Officially known as the Smart Location Bar, it has earned a mixed reputation by suggesting 12 bookmarks and URLs of previously visited sites as the user types keywords into the URL field. If you're one of those users clamoring for an option to silence the 'helpful' new feature in Firefox 3, released on Tuesday, look no further than this Quick Tip video. CNET Editor Tom Merritt, working off a user tip, demonstrates how it's done.