Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, LinkedIn. Chances are you are on at least one of these social networking sites. How can you make the best use of these sites though? I am going to share some hacks to make better use of these sites, make you look professional, and make these sites easier to use.

To start off, I am going to share some general things you can do with all social networking sites to make you look more professional. Now these hacks may not be for everyone, but if your looking to get more followers, look professional, or be more social, I would follow these tips.

1. Profile Picture
First impression is everything right? Well your profile picture plays a big part in what people will think about you. If you have a picture of something that isn’t you, how are people supposed to know it’s you? Sure there’s the name, but chances are there are others out there with the same name. Put a picture of yourself as your profile picture, and one where you are the main subject of the picture.

What if you want to look more professional? Don’t put one of you at a party, one taken of yourself in a mirror, or one with many people in it.

2. Smart Status Updates
What I mean by this, is don’t sound like an idiot with your status updates.

How do you do this. One big way is to spell things right. You look like an idiot if you’re saying things like “i is uploadin sum pics to fb now”. Even capitalization, punctuation, and grammar matter.

3. Be Social!
It’s called social networking for a reason. It’s not called “aggrandize-yourself-and-ignore-everyone-else networking”. The point of social networking is to connect with other people, share information, and to be social.

If you are just posting things and not interacting with other people, chances are people won’t be as social with you.

That’s all the general tips I have for right now. Next I will be going into more specifics with Facebook and Twitter as I know a lot about these social networks. If you have experience with another social networking site, why don’t you write a guest post?

Almost everyone has at least one social networking account, whether that would be Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or LinkedIn. You probably started it because someone said that you should. Now social networking isn’t for everyone. I know that Twitter isn’t popular among my friends, but I tried to force it onto some people. Some of my friends gave in a created a Twitter and that was it, they didn’t do anything else with it.

Some people (I call them crazy) may have made a new year’s resolution to clean up or completely get rid of their online presence. I’m not really sure why anyone would do that, but if they did that, it’s their choice.  Maybe they have a million accounts and want to clean up some of those that they don’t use (that is understandable). Someone saw an opportunity from this and created Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.

Suicide Machine is a web app that will delete your Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, and (until recently) Facebook accounts. There has been a little bit of controversy over this app. Facebook blocked this app and made some pretty out there claims (see post from Cnet). They said that user information, including pictures, were being downloaded onto their server before the account deletion.

I guess the way that it deleted accounts was a little weird too. It would change the profile picture to a noose, change your password (so you no longer have access to your account), and then go through your friends one by one deleting them. According to the article at Cnet, some ‘killed’ accounts still had friends.

If you want to get rid of your account, it’s not that hard. Every site has a function that can delete your account.

On Facebook go to settings and there is a link that will deactivate your account. On Twitter, go to settings and there is a delete account link on the bottom. See how easy it is? Why give your account information to someone else, when you can easily do it yourself?

What I’m trying to say here is if you do decide to leave a social networking site, it is more secure and just as easy to do it your self. And besides we’re here for DIY (do it yourself)!

How are your New Year’s Resolutions going? Do you have room to add one more resolution to your list? How about using stronger passwords?

What is a strong password? In short, it uses letters, numbers, and special characters. It also does not use a dictionary word, that is a word that is common or can be found in the dictionary. Using part of your name, first or last, is also a bad idea.

Most places where you sign up for an account has a strength meter for your password. It’s a good idea to at least get it to Medium, though strong is preferred.

It’s also a bad idea to use the same exact password for every site. If someone gets one password, they’ll have access to all your accounts.

So how do you come up with a strong password that you can remember? For one, you could install a program like KeePass, LastPass, or 1Password to keep track of all your passwords, but if your not on your own computer, then you don’t have access (unless you use KeePassPortable). I would recommend coming up with a password using a method. Here’s what I mean by a method.

1. The site’s initials (e.g. Everyday Hacker = EH, Facebook = Fb)
2. The number of characters in the domain name (e.g. EH = 18, Fb = 12)
3. Every odd character of your user name (e.g. username = uenm)
4. A special character (e.g. `_-.)

You can come up with your own method or formula for coming up with passwords, just make sure you remember it.

A couple more notes on password security.

• Don’t give your password to anyone.
• Don’t give your password to any other site.
• Don’t respond to emails asking for passwords.
• If you store your passwords in your browser, use a master password to protect all your passwords.

Doing all that won’t let those bad hackers get your accounts and personal information.

Make it a New Year resolution to use stronger passwords, and to change them once in a while. This will make your online life a lot better.

Do you hate having to type google.com into your browser every time you need to go Google? Would you rather type something like g and have it go to Google? Good news, you can. There is a system file that deals with re-routing your internet traffic. It’s called the hosts file.

These instructions are specifically for Windows XP and up. This works on Mac and Linux, but the host file is in a different place.

To get started you need the IP Address of the server you want to make a shortcut to. You can do this by running a ping command. Go to Start then Run, when the Run Dialog comes up type in “cmd”. The command line will come up. Type in “ping url” replacing url with the domain name of the site you want. Something like this will come up:

Pinging google.com [74.125.53.100] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 74.125.53.100: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=48
Reply from 74.125.53.100: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=48
Reply from 74.125.53.100: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=48
Reply from 74.125.53.100: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 74.125.53.100:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 83ms, Maximum = 83ms, Average = 83ms

The bold is the IP Address, remember this, as you need it to edit the hosts file.

The next step is to modify the hosts file. This is located at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. The easiest way to edit is by typing C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in the Run Dialog. An open with file will come up, choose to open with Notepad. At the end of the hosts file there should be this line:

127.0.0.1 localhost

Now we get to add some shortcuts. It’s very easy to do, one a new line, enter the IP Address you want to go to then a space or tab and what you want to type in to go there. So for example:

74.125.53.100 g

Now when you type “g” into your browser, it should take you to Google’s homepage.

You can do this with any IP address. You can also have fun with someone and make a web site point somewhere else. I pulled this on my brother by making runescape.com point to a web page I made that said his account had been canceled.

Have fun with this one.