My relatives very rarely send me emails except when they want to share photos of the family. Not everyone is comfortable with photos being uploaded and shared on Facebook or Google+. But I prefer to save my attachments on Google Drive (or Dropbox). A single click solution is available as a Chrome extension but I liked MetisMe, which automatically saves attachments from certain address to your chosen cloud service.
MetisMe – automatic rules to send attachments to a cloud service
As you can see in the image above, installing the MetisMe Chrome extension allows me it to sort my attachments. Most importantly I can make quick rules to send attachments from certain email ids to either Dropbox, Evernote or Google Drive.
The service is still not open for public and there is still more work needed on the service. For instance, I found that it was showing me attachments from emails within my spam folder or previously deleted emails in the option called “Attachments Stack”.
If you want pre-launch access to MetisMe, you can use this link.
Try out MetisMe and drop in your comments and views.
Facebook has tried to solve some long standing issues of being overwhelmed by feeds in a newly designed ‘News Feed’ layout. Though I have registered for it long ago, it has not been activated for me as yet.
One major issue with Facebook for me is coming across the same post over and over again. For instance a friends shares a photo today it shows up on my feed. Then when another common friends “Likes” or “Comments” on that photo, it shows up again on my feeds. I can choose to micro-manage every single friend’s news feed settings but that is tedious and more or less impossible if you have hundreds of friends.
Social Fixer is a cool browser extension that eliminates the same post from showing up over and over again. More importantly, it also provides several other useful features.
Social Fixer actually works without the need of sharing your username or password. It basically fixes your feeds and the layout. The most important feature for me personally was “Mark All Read” option showing up on my timeline. This way my News Feed was clean and posts were not repeated (image above).
There are several options like hiding certain boxes, ads, even sponsored posts from your news feeds.
The browser extension allows various different Facebook themes but I did not really find any more useful than the default one.
Another great feature was how images from a feed could be previewed. These were not just from uploaded photos but also images from a link shared in your news feed (see below).
It also has a small box which shows the friends who have unfriended you.
Last but not the least, Social Fixer is supported on all major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. It does not support Internet Explorer.
I felt that Facebook could learn a few things regarding social fixer. Unfortunately Social Fixer works only on your PC browser and not with your phone apps. This is because, SocialFixer only fixes the layout, customizing what you can hide and display while browsing through Facebook.
Still in my opinion a must have browser add-on if you are surfing through Facebook on your PC browser.
Recently I came across this new search tool, that allowed me to search for related links from a list of custom selected websites. The new service called Asterisk Search works as a plugin on Firefox and Chrome. While visiting a webpage, if you want more related information, we just have to select the text and click on the Asterisk symbol.
Features of Asterisk Search
Install the GoAsterisk pluging for your browser. It supports Firefox and Chrome at the moment.
Highlight text from the webpage you are reading. A small asterisk symbol will show up.
Click on it and some results will show up on the left-hand column. There are some popular sites already added like Wikipedia as sources.
I could remove these sits and add and customize the sources as I wished. So next time I am reading something, I can simply search from the sites I want to look up rather than all of them.
The only downside of Asterisk is you need to register before you use their service. But you can easily sign-in with your Twitter, Facebook or Google accounts.
