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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 9 March 2012 – MindSnacks

Thanks to a new app called MindSnacks, gone are the days when you have to read a pile of boring textbooks to learn a new language. The new educational app provides fun, interactive language learning games in over 13 different languages.

It features six entertaining games designed to build essential vocabulary, reading, writing, listening and conversation skills. You work your way through 50 levels of language content, playing games and completing fun challenges as you go. The app also includes a unique learning algorithm that uses proven methods of memorisation training to make sure you don’t forget anything. Muy inteligente.

The goal is to progress through a set of engaging and fast-paced challenge games that test your knowledge of material provided by the app. After each game is completed, the user can see how many points they received toward unlocking the next level, and how many words have been mastered. These features are fantastic for motivation and mean that you can become hooked very quickly. It was created to make learning as much fun as possible and it seems to do exactly that.

MindSnacks is aimed at those who are just starting out, as well as beginner and intermediate learners. For English speakers, there are options to learn French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Chinese.

The only drawback is that it is currently only available for iPhone, iTouch and iPad devices. Despite this, MindSnacks is a Tin It. Fantástico!

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 17 February 2012 – Facebook Cover Photo trouble? There’s now an App to help you

Last month we reported that Facebook’s Timeline will be eventually rolled out to all users.  We, like many others, have struggled to find a really cool, cute or clever cover photo to impress our online buddies. Also any pictures we did decide on didn’t quite fit the rectangular space allocated. So we were excited to hear that there is a free Android app available that saves you hassle by helping you choose a cover photo.

Facebook Timeline Covers:D33P (pronounced Deep) lets you input your own photos or lets you choose from its own gallery of cover art. There is a selection of over 50 cover art to choose from – zombies and dinosaurs can inspire a frightened profile picture for example. You can also take a photo right in the app, while previewing how it will look on your profile.

This app is a lot of fun and there is an option called “seamless mode” that takes a segment of the cover photo to become the profile picture, which means you have one quirky, seamless image.

Some of the new Cover Arts photos installed include special holidays such as Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Australia Day etc.

This app is currently free but will not stay that way for long so if you like the sound of it you should download it while you can. Facebook Timeline Covers:D33P is fun and does what it says on the tin. TIN IT.

Look no further!

Look no further!

TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 27 January 2012 – Facebook Timeline

Facebook announced this week that they are rolling out Timeline to all users. It will be compulsory in February for user’s entire history (the ‘story of their life’) to be exposed in reverse-chronological order on their profile. That includes status updates, photos, marital changes and other major life events. In a nutshell it means that those embarrassing posts and photos that you had forgotten about will resurface. Yikes.

Not surprisingly Facebook has received wide criticism for this. Key tech site Mashable said, “Facebook must know that putting a ticking clock in front of users is bound to make very few of them happy, yet here it is, stop watch in hand.” Until recently users had the choice to opt-in to Timeline, now they will be automatically switched over – whether they like it or not. However you are given seven days to delete the content that on you profiles and hide what you don’t want to display.

We have taken a peek at the new look and played about with it. It looks fairly slick with the cover photo and new layout but it is also quite cluttered due to the massive amount of statuses and photos now displayed in the Timeline.

To tie up with the new feature, Facebook are also introducing apps to personalise your page with interests such as cooking, listening and reading. A user listening to Spotify on a smartphone, for instance, will default to posting every song to their Timeline for all their ‘friends’ to see. So it’s crunch time, is Facebook’s new Timeline a yay or a nay, a Tin or a Bin? It’s an interesting idea but the fact that they are forcing their users to change to this radical new feature leaves a bitter aftertaste. It would have been nice to have a choice in the matter.

For now it’s a Bin It.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 23 September 2011 – Give Em This…

Sometimes finding the perfect gift for your nearest and dearest is, if we are being honest, a bit of a struggle. If you are stuck for ideas, then GiveEmThis.com might just be what you are looking for.

This free web app, by Imply Labs, is a personalised gift engine that algorithmically analyses your friend’s social media updates to recommend relevant gift ideas that your Facebook friends actually want.

The system connects to your social media and analyses your friend’s interests based on their likes, dislikes, interests and other data stored in their profile. GiveEmThis.com then recommends original gift ideas relevant to your friend’s interests and activity.

GiveEmThis.com doesn’t select one perfect gift (that’s up to you) but looks at countless options to show you the things they will love the most.

The app works by calculating your Facebook friend’s online data, behaviour and patterns. Events, status updates, shared links and “Likes” are all included in the algorithmic calculations.

It doesn’t just evaluate Facebook data. Twitter is also analysed, although the downside it that it isn’t as detailed.

The programme is still in its early stages, with only Amazon being used to generate gift ideas. However there are plans to expand, with companies potentially being able to add their products to the system, and Google+ and LinkedIn integration.

Now, don’t get us wrong, we really like the practical application of this gift generator…so we should TIN IT, but we are going to BIN IT purely because we don’t like Facebook and Twitter knowing so much about us. And Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without those weird and wonderful random presents we get but don’t want!

This gift generator is a BIN IT.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 26 August 2011 – Maximising your impact on Twitter

Twitter is great and we sure love to tweet, but lets be honest, it’s sometimes pretty difficult to be consistent with your tweets. It seems to be that you either post lots at once or don’t tweet enough. This is where Buffer comes in.

The app, co-founded by Leonhard Widrich and Joel Gascoigne, builds a ‘tweet queue’ and spreads your updates out over time, meaning that you never have to flood your followers again with tweets. You simply add your tweets to your ‘Buffer’ and they spread them out over the course of the day. Simple.

Now, when you’re browsing the net and you come across lots of great content, you don’t have to post it all at once – this handy little tool will spread it out so you don’t tweet eight things in a row and annoy your followers.

Conveniently Buffer also has an analytics feature for every tweet you send so you can see exactly how many people your tweet has reached and how many followers have re-tweeted.

Another advantage is that Buffer has extensions for every major browser so you don’t even have to visit the website.

We think scheduling tweets is definitely the way forward, however we would not recommend scheduling all of them. Finding the right balance between ‘Buffering’ and live tweeting seems to be the best and most efficient way to use Twitter.

Buffer is a TIN IT.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 4 August 2011- Internet Addict?

Have you ever stopped to wonder how long you actually spend on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube? Or is it simply too scary to think about?

Well for those who are curious (like us), there is now a new browser plug-in called Voyurl that will tell you how many hours you actually spend browsing online.

Users who install it get a detailed description of how they use the web, which is updated in real time. This includes how much time you spend browsing, the sites you spend the most time on and your browsing patterns. Additionally you can compare your behavior to the average user to see where you fit in.

Voyurl also produces a complete list of what sites you visit and how you behave on them. Detailed factors like scrolling and mouse hovering are taken into account.

Voyurl is currently in private beta but there is a section on the site that allows you to click to ‘get a beta invite’.

So TIN IT or or BIN IT?

This is a TIN IT for those who are brave enough to confront their browsing habits. However for those who are freaked out by the concept, this would most likely be a BIN IT.

Look no further!
TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 22 July 2011 – Picture this…

With so many different social networking sites and photo applications you can literally have hundreds of images scattered across different platforms and websites.

This week we have discovered Pictarine, a website that gives you a way to pull together all your shots from Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc into one simple place. Genius.

Pictarine creates an album on your chosen service, with the title, description and specified privacy whilst maintaining third party site album structure. The site also allow users viewing access to their friend’s photos on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, meaning that Pictarine enables you to see nearly all of the photos your friends are posting to the web. Clever eh?

You can now share you private Flickr photos with a few Facebook friends or your Instagram photos with your Yahoo contacts (something that was unheard of before) using what Pictarine calls a ‘Zest’. When you create a Zest you choose photos from wherever they are and share them with anyone and everyone you want.

It has been available to the public since May this year and has already attracted 3,000 users. They have just updated their features this week to include Instagram and Twitter integration.

We think this is a great site that helps to pull together all your photos in one place. There is no denying it, Pictarine is a TIN IT.

Look no further!
TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 15 July 2011 – Last.fm introduces free festival app

Summer is well and truly here which means the temperatures are high, the days are long and the music festival season is upon us.

However there is a slight problem … the dilemma of which festivals to go to. With so many on offer, all with amazing line ups, how do you pick? Well using Last.fm of course!

The popular music website has introduced a new free Festival App to help you make your mind up. It is available on iTunes and Android and was launched just this week.

All you need to do is download, connect to your Last.fm account and the app will make some recommendations based on your individual music taste and also tell you which festivals your friends are attending.

Drawing from Last.fm’s database of almost two million events, the app narrows the choices down to approximately 4,500 upcoming festivals worldwide.

It organises the festivals under the headings of ‘compatibility’, ‘nearest’ and ‘date’ and once you select a festival you will be offered information on the event and the lineup.

The downsides are that you can’t buy tickets for the festivals using this app, and it won’t be useful if you don’t currently use Last.fm. However this is still a very nifty little app.

This is a Tin it.

Look no further!
TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – Friday 8 July 2011 – Facebook expands to video chat

This week, Facebook announced a partnership with Skype to add video chat to the social networking site used by 750 million users.

Now, whenever you browse to a friend’s profile, you’ll see a new button between the ‘Message’ and ‘Poke’ buttons that says ‘Call’. Click that, the other user will see a popup asking if they want to accept a call, and you’ll be connected straight away. The first time you use the feature you will need to install a small plug in, but once this is done you are good to go.

We at Hot Tin Roof love to keep in touch with our friends so think this will be great new way to connect with them, whether they are in the same city or on the other side of the world. It seems like it will easily fit into our current social media habits as well.

The new feature is great as there is minimal amount of set up (just a few seconds to install the plug in) and you don’t need to create a new Skype account to use it.

One drawback however is that at launch, Facebook’s video chat service will only be able to connect two users, whereas the new Google+ system (which was announced a week before) allows group video calls. To stay ahead of the competition, Facebook will probably have to offer similar features.

We are very excited about this. TIN IT for sure.