MELANCHOLY404 TECHNOLOGY

A person who is a die-hard fan of Game of Thrones hears that the first episode of the season is out and it might be a few hours before he can watch it. So, probably he would lock himself in a room, throw away the key and cut every communication through social media and WhatsApp and all that just to save himself from the spoilers. Not just Game of Thrones, spoilers can ruin almost any movie and TV show for you that you have been waiting for months.

Most of these spoilers are from popular social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. Some of your friends consider it their birth right to spoil the movies just for fun but they really don’t understand that how important it can be for an individual who has waited for quite a few months just to enjoy the show like everyone else.
So today, I will share with you a few tricks that you can use to fight such spoilers on Facebook and Twitter and make sure you enjoy the show or a movie without any spoilers.

Blocking Spoilers on Facebook

We will be using a tool called F.B. Purity which is a browser extension available for most of the modern day browsers. The extension works out of the box to fight irrelevant content on your Facebook timeline and hides them to show only the ones which matter to you. Most of these contents that F.B. Purity hides from newsfeed are game requests, application spam, ads and sponsored stories.
When you install the extension and load Facebook, you will see the F.B. Purity link under the Status Update box which will tell the number of updates that the extension has hidden from you. If you click on the F.B. Purity link, it will open up the F.B. Purity Options.



Under the Newsfeed Filters section, you will see a lot of options to filter the news feeds that you get on your FB timeline. Under the option where you see Text Filter, enter the words or phrases (on separate lines) that you wish to filter from your news feed. For example, for Game of Thrones, it should be GoT, Game of Thrones, Jon Snow and whatever you think might be used by your friends in their status updates.

That’s all, once you are done, you can click on Save and Close to save the settings. You are now safe from spoilers as far as browsing Facebook on your browser is concerned.

Blocking Spoilers on Twitter

There are extensions like Open Tweet Filter and Larry filter for Twitter available for Chrome and Firefox respectively using which you can block tweets containing specific keywords while you are browsing the official website. You just need to install these extensions and enter the keywords, hashtags and even the users you wish to block on your Twitter timeline.

It’s as simple as that. These extensions will protect you to a great extent when it comes to spoilers and other useless updates you get on your Facebook and Twitter timeline.

What About Smartphones?

For Facebook, there is no app or settings that I am aware of that can block keyword based updates on the official app. You can anyways uninstall the app and do your phone a favor with huge battery drain and unnecessary background app activity.
For Twitter, there are various third-party apps available for Windows, Android, and iOS using which you can blacklist certain keywords on your timeline. We have already covered some of the top tools with this feature in one of our previous articles and you can have a look at.

Conclusion

So that was how you can protect yourself from spoilers on Facebook and Twitter. If you would like to share any additional tips for our readers that can help in fighting spoilers, please reach out to us through comments or our forum.

Especially if it’s about filtering updates on Facebook for smartphones, I would love to hear.

Facebook today is now a giant in the social media arena. Facebook’s Messenger is also a giant but in a different way. It started off as an extension to Facebook’s website but now it is its own entity and used by many for messaging on their mobile phones.

Messenger has grown to a point now where it has around 900 million users. Over the years, several great features have been added. It may even be the case that there are many features that you are not aware of. For that reason, we will be exploring the various features which Messenger has to offer.

What Messenger Has to Offer

Did you know that Messenger has its own web client? Point your browser to messenger.com to try it out.

In addition to sending text-based messages, you can also make video and voice calls with Messenger. Voice calling is also available within group chats.



Users also have the ability to share their location on mobile devices. Simply tap on the 3 dots in the vicinity of the text input area and you will be able to select Location from there. This is useful for giving directions.

Clicking on the information icon within a chat offers users a variety of options. The two which stand out the most, however, are the ability to add nicknames as well as the ability to change the color of a contact’s chat window.

On Android devices, users have the ability to add their favorite contacts as shortcuts on their home screens. Simply press and hold on a contact and a menu will pop up presenting several options including the ability to create a shortcut.

You can also edit a photo from directly within the chat interface which can come in handy. You will need to select the photo you wish to use and then hit the edit button.

You also get the ability to draw and add text to your photos.

It is also possible to integrate Messenger with several third party apps. Press the 3 dots in the vicinity of the text input area and you will be able to choose from a variety of apps whose functionality can be blended with that of Messenger.

Like I mentioned before, Messenger is now a separate entity from the Facebook website. In line with this, a Facebook account is no longer required in order for people to use the app. If you are on a mobile phone, you can sign up using your phone number.
 
Finally, Messenger can do a whole bunch of random stuff! You can play basketball for instance by sending a basketball emoticon in chat and then tapping on it.

You can even play chess! To begin playing a game, send @fbchess within a chat. You will only be able to use the pieces using text input, however.

As if that wasn’t enough sending @dailycute within a chat, provides the receiving person with a surprise in the form of a random cute animal!

Conclusion

Messenger has really evolved and offers layers of functionality. There are so many things that it can do in addition to its text, voice and video chat functionalities. You will notice the different sizes and slightly different appearances of some of the screenshots.
This is another plus for messenger. I took some of them using my Android device and some of them with my iPad in order to illustrate that the functionality that Messenger offers is generally uniform across platforms.
There are clearly many cool things which you can do with Messenger these days. So what are you waiting for? Go try them out and let us know what you think.

When it comes to online media sharing, photos and videos are the only two things that come to our mind. While Photos are evergreen, videos carry much more emotions with you being able to see all the moments. However, we are not always comfortable with videos and mainly because of the large file size and believe it or not, also because of the background sound that comes with these videos.
Then there are GIF files which carry the best of both the worlds. They are fairly small in size and thus are ideal for online sharing and at the same time, they are motion pictures and looks more of less like a video with lesser details. Now, as I mentioned, they are a sequence of images which moves so fast that they look like a motion picture and at the moment, the internet is full of it. There are many websites that host public GIF images that you can use and share online. We have also shared quite a few ways on how you can make GIF files from photos and videos and you can have a look at the previous articles for some brush-up.
This article, however, is to guide you on how you can use these GIFs on social media like Facebook, Twitter or a personal blog. To get started, you will either have to find a GIF that you would like to share on Giphy or Imgur, the largest online database of GIFs. Do explore them before you begin and if you have created a personal GIF that you would like to share, I would recommend you to upload the GIF files to one of the two mentioned services to ease things.

How to Share GIFs on Facebook

Now to share a GIF on Facebook, it’s utterly important to first upload it online and Imgur or Giphy are the two best sources to do that. If you don’t have a personally created GIF, you can use the online library and select a GIF to share. In the article, I will take Giphy as an example, but the process would be same across other image hosting services.

Basically, for Facebook, we need the direct URL of the GIF image file with ends with the extension .gif. To do that, open the advanced tab on Giphy and copy the URL against the option GIF Download. To make sure it’s the right link for Facebook, just make sure it ends with .gif.
Now all you need to do is, copy the link and paste it in the Facebook Status Update box. Facebook will automatically fetch the GIF file and once it’s done, you can delete the link pasted in the box. Additionally, you can write additional text and finally click on the publish button. That’s all, your GIF will be shared with friends.

How to Share GIF on Twitter

Now moving on to Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Twitter has an integrated button  search and embed GIF directly using Giphy. If you have already searched for a GIF on Giphy, you can copy the link from the Twitter section and paste it in the search box. Finally, when your GIF shows up, you can click on the Tweet button.

Twitter gives the option to upload GIF files as an image directly and if you have a personal GIF, you can upload it directly to Twitter rather than first uploading it to Giphy. But if you choose to use the GIF more than once on social media and blogs, it would be best to upload it on Giphy.

Sharing on Blogs

If you have shared any YouTube video on your blog, you can relate it to sharing GIFs as it’s almost the same. You will have to get hold of the iframe embed code and then paste it to the blog in HTML format. The code can be found under the sharing option and it’s the first sharing option on both, Imgur and Giphy. Just make sure you paste the HTML code in HTML format and not the right text format.

Apart from that, if you have unlimited online web space, you can upload the Gif files directly to your server and insert then just like any other image files.

Conclusion

So that was how you can share GIFs on Facebook, Twitter and personal blog Thanks to Google Plus, other social networking services saw potential in GIF image sharing and included the feature in due course of time. Now all I am looking forward to is the feature to be included on WhatsApp and once it does, I will make sure I update it on the post.