Category Archives: Social Networking

Free Software, Social Networking, WeChat, WeChat

Explore the World with WeChat

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Photo of Shake 1
7158 KM away.

We’ve been using QQ for many years. QQ is similar to MSN or Yahoo but it’s mainly used in China. Tencent, the company that created QQ, has released WeChat (Weixin in China). WeChat is a fully tricked-out chat app that is taking the world by storm. We’ve put together some thoughts on the international flavor of WeChat.

Photo of Shake 2
A good reason to communicate with people from around the world, right?

1. Maybe we’re a bit sensitive, but we’ve noticed a vague trend of dissatisfaction among some WeChat users when they get mainly Chinese contacts on Shake or Look Around. We’re concerned because we’ve got hundreds of friends in China and, from what we’ve discovered, they’re pretty much like us. China has about four times the population of the United States, about forty times the population of Canada, so it stands to reason that there are more Chinese at the end of a Shake ‘shake’ than anyone else. Add to that the fact that WeChat originated in China and that the Chinese are well known to be early-adopters of new tech, well, you get the point.

Photo of Shake 3
8202 KM Away.

2. For many years, the U.S. seemed to be on the cutting edge of everything. That’s changed but the myth persists. Tencent named the international version of Weixin ‘WeChat’ so, naturally, most American users assume it’s an American product. Is that the reason for the surprise and seeming disappointment when social contacts appear who are half-way around the world? We think so. In this particular case, the rest of the world is way behind Tencent because the rest of the world seems to have forgotten ‘chat’. We never seen anything spread out around the world in quite the same way as WeChat.

 

Photo of Shake 4
Sao Paolo, Brazil.

3. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a fair amount of sabre-rattling going on now. 9/11 was devastating, to say the least, but the by-product of that fateful day was the ever-increasing xenophobia we see in the world now. If someone looks ‘different’, then they are considered a threat. We’ve been down that path before, history is full of these examples. But, if you let it, WeChat will open up your world and show you that people are the same all over the world. Will WeChat finally bring world peace? Hey, it might just help, right?

4. English is the constant in all of this. While WeChat supports other languages, the vast number of users, yes, even the Chinese, will default to English when necessary. If you already speak and write English, you’re miles ahead of many other WeChat users but you are also valuable to those same users, simply because they want to learn English. Live a little, take a chance and help them out. If you’re only looking for the girl or guy next door, maybe WeChat isn’t for you. If you want to know more about the whole world around you, then WeChat fills the bill perfectly.

Curiously enough, we just shook for a few photos for this post and got no one from Asia. Why? Because it’s almost 3 AM in Asia. If you’re in Europe, shake when Europeans are shaking, if you want to meet people close to you. If you want to live a little, shake when people across the world are shaking. We think you’ll have a lot more fun that way.

Thanks for reading! Comments, questions, observations are always welcome. Hey, why not Like us on Facebook? Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook . 

 

Hootesuite, Social Networking

Hootsuite – it makes Twitter a whole lot easier to use

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Hootsuite, available here: http://hootsuite.com/ , is Twitter on steroids, in our opinion. Twitter itself has a decent interface but it’s missing a few of the tweaks that Hootsuite offers. We haven’t talked about Twitter very much but you should have a general idea of what it is by now.  We’ll do full posts on Twitter and Hootsuite later. Right now we want to spread the word about Hootsuite and explain a bit about it.

If you don’t use Twitter, you probably don’t understand why you’d need more than one account. Everyone here at Computers Made Simple has at least two Twitter accounts, one for business and one for fun. Some of us have more than two. The point of this is that Hootsuite allows you to link up to five social networking accounts, whether they are all Twitter or a combination of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

There isn’t any way to schedule tweets within Twitter. With Hootsuite you can easily schedule future tweets; even receive an email when the tweet is sent. Why would you want to schedule future tweets? Some Twitter users like to tweet links instead of their own thoughts and words. While we don’t agree with this, it’s common. Hootsuite allows you to collect links, schedule them for prime tweet times and then do something else. Additionally, Twitter users in other areas of the world who want to be noticed in North America, have to schedule tweets or they wouldn’t get any sleep, right?

Here are some of the Hootsuite offerings:

Photo of Hootsuite Apps for Chrome
Lots of app for Google Chrome, the best browser out there.

There are many versions of Hootsuite. Choose the right one for you. We use the Chrome extension and love it. There are apps for mobile devices as well as a full desktop program for Macs.

We’ll do more posts on Hootsuite in the near future but why not give it a shot? The basic version, the one we use, is free. If you’re in business, there are several paid options which help you tune your tweets in order to cultivate an audience.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Computers, QQ Instant Messaging, Social Networking, WeChat, Weixin

Weixan/WeChat – Shake your way to new friends

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EDIT: We’ve been in touch with WeChat on Twitter. They’ve sent us a couple of Direct Messages there. Here’s what they said: 

“Hi Brian. Thx for helping us answer users’ questions! I can see that ur site is a super useful resource! We really appreciate it!” 

All well and good but how about some help! Here’s the next one: 

“We read through some of the comments & submitted these issues to the team. We’ll get back to you as soon as I hear back….”

The last one was back on September 27th, 2013. Still waiting. We’ll post when we hear from them. 

 

Last week, we wrote about WeChat. Here is the post: WeChat/Weixin . Here is the link to WeChat at the Apple Store. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wechat!/id414478124?mt=8 It’s available in the Android app store, as well.

Sometimes it seems that the only innovations in social networking are coming out of China. Honestly, that’s not all that hard to figure out, seeing as how there are over a billion people there and almost half of them use the Internet. Of those users, about 400 million access the Internet using the various mobile devices available, many of which are Smartphones.

Add the fact that Chinese Internet users are very sociable, probably more so than North Americans, and you’ve got a perfect wave forming for a company like Tencent (http://www.tencent.com/en-us/index.shtml). Enter Weixin or WeChat. Tencent already has a huge market with QQ and its own version of Weibo but now, with WeChat, they have come up with a purely mobile chat application that is, to us anyway, stunning.

Read our previous post then come back and find out how to meet new people using WeChat. Take your time, we’ll wait.

OK! Here we go. There are three completely different ways to look for other WeChat users. Of course, you can plunk in your other social media passwords and find out which friends already use WeChat or you can invite them to start using it, but here we’re talking about meeting completely new people.

1. The first way is to simply ‘Look Around’. If your mobile device has a GPS monitor, you’ll be able to search out WeChat users who live in your area. In my case, I found users within 900 meters of my home. To me, that’s kind of like standing on your porch and shouting, “Is there anybody out there?” Of course, the local users are all Chinese, except for me that is. Most early adopters of WeChat are overwhelmingly Chinese but, theoretically, that will change.

Once you find a WeChat user nearby, you can simply say, “Hi”. You can also tune the Look Around feature to show only males, only females or both. Personally, I think this feature is pretty cool but I can also see how it might seem creepy to some of you. If it does, you can easily delete the Look Around plug-in. It is part of the default set of plug-ins and is easily removed.

2. Instead of looking around for other WeChat users, you can shake your way to new relationships using the Shake plug-in. Choose the option from the screen and simply give your mobile phone a shake. WeChat looks around for other users who are shaking their devices at the same time and gives you the option to say hi to them. This plug-in is more proactive than the Look Around feature since you already know that the person shaking their phone is looking to make contact with someone. Say hi and see how it goes. You can always shake again if things turn sour. Remember, again, that virtually every user you contact will be Chinese. If you know anything about China and the Chinese people, you will know that almost everyone wants to learn English but many Chinese already have a rudimentary knowledge of it.  Many Chinese speak and write better English than some of your friends and neighbors, too.

TIP: If you meet someone you like and the English thing isn’t getting you anywhere, you can download QQ International. We’ll do another post on it but, for now, we’ll simply say that you can chat with someone who only knows Chinese even if you only know English. There is a wonderful translation app built into the International version which has opened up the world to China and, of course, China to the world.

3. The last way to meet new friends is to simply cast a bottle out into the ocean. Of course, this is a virtual bottle but it works the same way as a real bottle with a message in it. Type in your note or use a voice message and then toss your bottle into the ocean of WeChat users. WeChat will notify you when someone replies. Just now, I tossed a bottle out and almost instantly got three replies. One was a female exchange student in Denmark, another was a man who left me a voice message and the third was also a guy who just said, ‘Hello”. In the span of five minutes, I’ve got three new people to share things with. Cool!

WeChat isn’t for everyone. At this point, you have to have a keen interest in China and the Chinese people. You also have to be patient and be able to understand that not everyone in the world speaks perfect English. Once you’re over those hurdles, WeChat is loads of fun. Additionally, if you wait a year or so, WeChat will be flooded with millions of other users. At this point, it supports Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Portuguese, plus English and Chinese. (If you know social networking, you’ll see the importance of having WeChat available in Portuguese. Orkut, the Google version of Facebook, is extremely popular in Brazil.)

Questions, comments, links are all welcome. Thanks for reading!

 

 

WeChat, Weixin

Weixin or WeChat – the hottest new chat app out there!

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Some things come out of China that are totally unique; some things come out that are copies; Weixin is a combination of both. If you’re looking for the best chat app that I’ve ever seen, head over to your local app site, either Apple or Android, and look for Weixin or WeChat. They are the same thing, one totally English and the other a combination of Chinese and English.

Tencent, the same people that brought out QQ a few years ago, have managed to cobble together an amazing app which allows text chatting as well as video messaging, photo sharing and voice messaging. You can tie Weixin in with your QQ account, which is what I did, or you can sign up for a whole new account. Once you’re into it, you can then find out which of your friends on other social media, including Facebook, are already on Weixin/WeChat. Of course, as is always the case, you can also invite your friends to use the app as well.

I don’t have an iPhone or an Android device but I do have an iPod Touch. Weixin works perfectly well with it and I’m usually chatting away when I have wifi around. The text is a bit slow with my touchscreen keyboard but the photo sharing and video or voice messaging are extremely fast and stable.

One of the best or weirdest things about WeChat, depending on how social you are, is that you can find other users who live close to you by using the GPS gizmo in your mobile device. I’m in Canada and almost all of my online friends are in China. Well, enter Weixin and all of a sudden I’m chatting with people who live only a few kilometres away. To me, that is a lot of fun, specially since only Chinese users are online at this point. As time goes by, I’m sure many Western peeps will adapt Weixin but, for now anyway, it’s not as cluttered or spammy as Yahoo or Msn or even Skype.

Basically, if you want to be on the cutting edge of social media, download Weixin on your mobile device and start having some fun. There is a whole world of innovation over there in China. Over 100 million Chinese have started using Weixin in its first year. Tencent already has a massive number of users with their QQ chat app. Consider the fact that at any given time over 100 million QQ users are online at the same time, you’ll understand how China has adapted to online social networking. When you consider that about half of those people are using mobile devices, you’ll understand why it’s important to keep up with what’s happening there. At this point in time, 123,000,000 Chinese are online using QQ. I don’t have stats on Weixin but I’d safely assume that there are millions online with it, too.

Thanks for reading!

Facebook, Facebook Tricks, Fotobounce, Photography, Social Networking

Fotobounce – downloading a Facebook photo album

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I’ve written about Fotobounce before. If you share photos from one social media site to another, Fotobounce is a great tool. It allows you to download complete Facebook photo albums to your computer. What you do with them after that is your business, I guess, but you really should ask for permission if you are going to share anything that isn’t your own. Here is an explanation about what Fotobounce is: Fotobounce Made Simple   (The original post wasn’t named that but it sounds good, right?)

While Fotobounce is a cool app, the actual downloading of albums can get tricky because of the way the instructions are worded. In this post I’ll try to help you figure out the odd English that they use in the selection process. Before I forget, Fotobounce is available here: http://fotobounce.com/

1. Download and install Fotobounce…duh!

2. Open the program and head over to Facebook. Sign in to Facebook with Fotobounce. You’ll have to allow it access but, according to the makers, they don’t save your password. You can always remove the access after you’ve downloaded the albums that are of interest.

3. Find the album you want to download. You have to sort through your friends, your likes and your acquaintances to find the right album(s) but that’s pretty basic.

4. Once you find the album, right click it. You’ll see the ‘Download’ button. Click it and the following menu pops up:

Choose where you want the album to be downloaded.
I've selected Events by clicking on it but I haven't started the download.

5. In this menu, you are choosing the main folder for the download. If you click ‘Select album’, Fotobounce will start the download to, in this case, Events. That’s not what I want. I want to create a sub-folder and then maybe a sub-sub-folder. Let’s do that. We’ll make a sub-folder inside of Events.

6. Click New Album. Fotobounce will show you a new album dialogue, as pictured below, and it will have the same name as the album has on Facebook. We don’t want that. We need to sort out the downloaded albums according to whose they were on Facebook, right?

Make a new album in Fotobounce
Type the new name of the album in the box and hit Enter.

 

7. Instead of Profile Pictures, I want to name my new album ‘Joe Nemechek’. (Joe and I are lookalikes to the point that I get stopped in stores. If I ever headed South and wore a NASCAR jacket then I’m sure I’d eat free wherever I went.) Type in whatever name you want and hit the Enter key. A new album will be created and Fotobounce will give you a notice at the top of the page.

8. Once you’ve found your new folder, click on it and you’ll see the same menu window come up same as before, giving you the option to Select that album or make a New album inside of it. This time you can leave the name the same, if you want. The default name is the same name as it was on Facebook.

9. If that name is fine, click on the Select Album button and Fotobounce will download the album inside of the album that you just created.

This sounds pretty simple, right? It’s not. Here’s the problem, as I see it. When I see the words ‘Select album’, I expect to get a choice. Instead of the normal ‘OK” that everyone else uses, Fotobounce uses ‘Select album’ as the button that starts the download. Unless you make a folder or a folder within a folder, Fotobounce will happily download your albums into the same directory. Good luck trying to figure that out when you’ve got more than a few albums in your collection. You have to create new albums if you are ever going to figure out which album is which. Sure, you could to all of this within Windows Explorer but it should be a one-step process or the wording should be a bit clearer. That’s what I think, anyway.

Fotobounce does a lot more than simply saving albums in Facebook. Check it out. I’ve just scratched the surface here.

Thanks for reading!