You may recall that I’ve written about Advise in the past, but they’ve changed their name and domain to adJelly.

If you missed my previous write-up about them, adJelly offers a fantastic collection of specs for all the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and more. You simply select the social media site you’re creating ads, images or graphics for in the left column and you’re presented with all the specs you’ll need.

The site is particularly useful for designers because sites like Facebook offer numerous options for sizes. For instance, Facebook offers sizes for single image ads, carousel ads, video ads, video slideshow ads, cover and profile images, post images, event images and more. Plus, specs change frequently, and some sites don’t make it easy to find the specs (I’m looking at you, Facebook!).

You can also download PSD and Sketch Packs to use in building your graphics.

I came across this web page that shows what happens on the Internet every second, and though it was extremely cool. I don’t know where they get their data from, but it’s fun to see how quickly various sites grow.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the time it took me to scroll down to the Twitter section and take the screenshot, over 157,000 Tweets were registered on Twitter.

Simple is always better. Simple-to-use always beats feature-rich-but-complicated. If you believe that, then you know why Facebook is beating the digital pants off Google+ in the social media arena.

Facebook is a fairly simple service:

1. You sign up
2. You search for friends or companies you want to follow
3. You click a “Like” button on their page
4. You get a feed of everything they post (text and photos)

There’s very little thinking or learning-curve involved with using Facebook. Finding new friends is dead simple using Facebook, as is finding brands you wish to follow, and sharing photos and video. There is very little in the way of techy lingo used on the site, and outside of the privacy controls, the entire site is easy for even the most non-geek user to navigate and use. Now let’s look at Google+.

This past week, I had cause to re-visit my account on Google+, as well as help someone else set-up an account. Now I don’t consider myself a tech/social media genius, but I think I’m a fairly smart guy in tech matters. It’s rare that I feel completely stumped by a service or piece of software, but Google+ has me (and virtually everyone I talk to about it) completely confused and left wondering why and how anyone would use it.

After setting up your Google+ account, you’re immediately met with the first problem: trying to find friends or companies to follow. There simply aren’t a lot of “normal people” using it. This is a speed-bump on the Google+ highway that isn’t really Google’s fault. But the brick wall you run into as soon as you get on the road is. As soon as you find enough people and brands to follow on Google+, you have to place them in Circles.

Google+ makes you think, really hard, before you can use it. Even if you can figure out what a Circle is, how to use them, or even why you would want them, you’re then presented with the problem of deciding what Circles can see the posts you create. If you’re like many average consumers, you’re probably creating one Circle with everyone in it, then sharing everything publicly – because it’s easier.

Once you get past Circles – which I suspect many people never do – you’ll have a lot of lingo to learn. Hangouts and Ripples will be the first things you see that you have no clue about. What the hell is a “Ripple?” I still have no idea, nor do I wish to expend the energy to find out. How does one send a message to someone?

And if you can get past all the complexities presented with the use of Google+, you run into yet another brick wall. If you want to use Google+ on your smartphone, you’re stuck with Google’s official G+ app. There are no third-party apps like TweetBot, Twitterrific, or the dozens of popular Twitter clients available for Twitter, which helped popularize the Twitter service itself. And unlike Facebook, every app and service on the planet doesn’t integrate with Google+.

Google+ looks beautiful, and the layout of the site is actually simple. But using the service for the average person is anything but. And that’s why even with massive amounts of publicity from Google, and them pushing it on every Google product user, it will most likely remain a distant second to Facebook for average consumers considering the use of social media.

See how innovations from iPad inspire new features for the Mac. And find out what’s coming this summer with OS X Mountain Lion. Messages, Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Twitter, Airplay Mirroring, Game Center, and more. You love them on iPad. Now you’ll love them on your Mac. And with iCloud, they all work better together.

[ilink url=”http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/”]Read more about OS X Mountain Lion here.[/ilink]

2011 was just too much sharing for my taste

There were lots of great things happening in tech this year, too many to talk about here. But I have put together a list of things that managed to annoy me to no end.

Why must I click 12 times to read a three paragraph article?

Hopefully, 2012 will bring some relief in my tech life and all the previously mentioned items will be resolved to my liking – because you know, the tech world revolves around what I like!

Raven offers site-specific browsing, putting the features of the
sites you interact with the most easy to access and use

Raven is not a standard web browser to replace Safari, Chrome or Firefox, though you easily could if you wished. Instead it focuses on improving the experience on the sites you interact with the most. For instance, clicking on the Twitter icon in the left sidebar slides open the controls for Tweets, DMs, @Replies and Search for easy access. The controls available depend on what each site offers.

Think of Raven as the Mac OS X Twitter app, only for a plethora of social and news sites. Raven offers bookmarking to Instapaper, a smart bar, history, and even a toolbar icon that loads the mobile version of the site right in the Raven browser window – so you can view the site just as you would on your iPhone.

Some of the sites that take advantage of Raven’s site-specific browsing are: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, MySpace, Quora, Linkedin, Digg, TechCrunch, Daring Fireball, CNN, New York Times, AllThingsD, The Next Web, Dribble, Instapaper, Dropbox, Hulu Plus, Flickr, Vimeo, and more.

Raven isn’t for everyone, but it’s definitely a cool piece of technology worth checking out.

First of all, the new Profile page (see image below) will take some getting used to. In order to take advantage of what it has to offer, you’ll most likely want to add some additional information. I say want to, because if you’re like most people, you probably like playing with new toys.

The new Facebook Timeline Profile page is actually pretty nice

The new Timeline Profile view offers viewers an easy way to scroll down through your life on Facebook much more easily – via the Timeline bar on the upper right of the page. Want to see what your friend was up to in 2002? Easy, just click the 2002 date in the Timeline bar and you’re zoomed right into place in their Timeline.

The uproar is that it supposedly “invades your privacy” because it puts all your posts in plain view for everyone to see. Well, I’m here to remind you that this has always been the case. It’s just a little easier to find now.

Previously you would have to scroll for dozens, or even hundreds of pages, to go back in time a few years. Now it’s as simple as a click or two. Anything you posted publicly is still public, and anything you shared privately is still private. So the privacy concerns are mostly overblown hype. I say mostly because Facebook conveniently resets your privacy controls yet again to share everything publicly – requiring you to go into your privacy settings to make adjustments.

Adding a new Facebook event in your Timeline is simple

One of the things I love about the new Profile page is how easily you can go back in time and add events to the timeline. For instance, if you and your spouse have a baby, you probably immediately start sharing the obligatory photos and stories of the first few days. Before you know it, a week or two has gone by. But in reality, you never added the fact that you had a baby to begin with. The new Timeline allows you to go back in your timeline and click anywhere to add this glorious “event,” and even add a location and photograph.

Enough about the Profile page, let’s move on to the page you’ll probably visit most often, the main news feed page. Other than the Ticker we all got a few weeks ago, not much has changed about the way it looks or works. I find the Ticker extremely annoying because I only visit Facebook a few times per day, so I don’t really need a second-by-second update. But some people will probably like it. Either way, it’s easily hidden from view with a browser extension, or at least reduced to a small portion of the right-hand sidebar.

Why you won’t be leaving Facebook…

C’mon. You don’t even have the new Timeline Profile page yet. You haven’t even given it a chance. The Feed page Ticker is easily hidden simply by clicking an icon, so I just don’t see you throwing in the towel over that.

But more importantly, you won’t be leaving Facebook because you would be leaving a lot more than Facebook if you permanently delete your account. Think of all the websites you visit that use a Facebook login as an option – rather than having to create new accounts for each one. Now think about all the sites that are now using the Facebook Commenting System, rather than yet another system you would have to create an account for. That’s a lot of usernames and passwords to remember, and yet more places that you would have to hand over your email address to.

Then there’s the biggest reason of all. Everyone else is on Facebook. No, I’m not exaggerating. The explosive growth of Facebook is shown in the graph below. Facebook’s momentum isn’t slowing down, it’s picking up.

The time spent on Facebook is growing at a staggering rate

Cancel your Facebook account and you effectively cut yourself off from all your friends and family whom you carry-on conversations with, share photos of life events with, and the manner with which you easily share interesting info and other sites with the click of a button. It would all be gone. You’ll be spending a lot of time doing all of that via email again. Welcome to last decade.

Now the few “geeks” (of which I am one) will probably say, “I’ll just switch to Google+ with no problem.” Well I’m here to tell you that Google+ ain’t all that. I’ve been on it since the private beta stage a few months back, and while Google claims to have millions upon millions of members, I haven’t seen them. Google+ is filled with members of the tech media, web geeks, and a small amount of the general public. In short, there just ain’t that much happening on Google+. And let’s be clear, Google collects your information just like Facebook. They’re following what you do everywhere on the web, probably more-so than Facebook. And while it’s quite easy to configure Circles on Google+, it’s not obvious at all how or why you would do so for the average Joe. This will improve over time, but right now I find Google+ to be barely worth visiting.

As Google tries to make Google+ more like Facebook, they’re going to suffer through the same growing pains, and users will be an uproar over the same perceived privacy issues. After all, Google’s entire business model is to gather as much information about you as it can, and use it to sell advertising. In reality, they’re two different products that will probably coexist for a long time – much like Twitter and Facebook have for years – both thriving.

A year or so from now, we’ll all be sitting around complaining about yet another round of changes to Facebook – forgetting that the changes we’ll get in the coming weeks nearly drove us to quit. We’ll all be asking Facebook not to change anything. Again.

Thanks to artbees.com for the Facebook icon.

Ostrich is accessed through a button in your browser bar which drops down an overlay window containing Tweets from your Twitter stream. The icon also notifies you of the number of unread Tweets with a red badge.

Ostrich adds Tweeting to Safari with the click of a button

One of the few features of Ostrich is the ability to automatically add a link to the page you’re currently on to a new Tweet, which you access by clicking the plus button in the upper right corner. And that’s what brings me to the single problem I have with this extension. When you click that plus button, a new window is spawned with a tiny text entry box; a royal pain in the behind, if you ask me. To be fair, the Ostrich feedback page does indicate that the developer is working on adding text input without spawning a new window.

Ostrich isn’t for everyone. Twitter power-users will want to avoid it due to it’s simplistic interface and lack of extra features. But if you’re only the occasional Tweeter, or you own a Macbook with a smaller screen and are trying to save screen space, Ostrich might fit the bill.