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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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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.

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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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.

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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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.

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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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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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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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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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.

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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The team here at Hot Tin Roof love our live music, but it is sometimes pretty difficult to keep on top of what bands are playing nearby.

A new free social platform for live music called SongKick sounds like the solution to the problem. It lets you know when your favourite bands are playing and makes it super easy to track and plan upcoming gigs. Fantastic.

It sends email alerts when your favourite artists are playing in your area, lets you buy tickets for shows and create concert calendars. It scans your iTunes, looks at your locations and sends you a list of gigs that you might be interested in.

SongKick is not yet available on Android so it misses out on a very large market…however Android users can download a free similar app called ‘onTour’ to help plan their concerts.

So TIN IT OR BIN IT?

We say TIN IT. What’s not to like? It’s free, fun and useful and if it helps us to hear more live music this can only be a good thing.

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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It’s officially the start of the summer and so this week Hot Tin Roof have been looking at a fun new app to help you jazz up all your holiday photos and let you rate other user’s images or ‘Shnaps’.

Shnap is a free iPhone app that has been described by Mashable as ‘Instagram meets Hot or Not’. You upload your own photos (which have been stylized with effects and filtering) and rate other users’ photos using the rating system: ‘Lol, Meh, WTF, Cool or Wow.’ As a heads up it can become very addictive!

The bottom line is that if you love taking pictures and you like social media you’re really going to love this app. It takes away the passivity of browsing photos and encourages you to rate them in a competitive fashion.

TIN IT OR BIN IT? This app keeps us ‘shnapping’ all day long so it’s 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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Hot Tin Roof has been looking into the brilliant and unique TheoryMine this week, which lets you name a personalised, newly discovered and totally unique mathematical theorem after a loved one, teacher, friend or even yourself (for the egotistical people out there). For only £15 a pop you can be rubbing shoulders (metaphorically of course) with Pythagoras and Fermat. Amazing.

The newly discovered theorem is generated by one of the world’s most advanced computerised theorem provers. TheoryMine is a spin-out company from the University of Edinburgh and was created by Italian mathematician, Flaminia Cavallo, one of the country’s leading young scientists.

It’s the perfect present for the maths geek in the family or anyone who is struggling to find something a bit different for their loved ones. There is certainly nothing else like it and it is a very interesting concept, so we say TIN IT. We even think a Hot Tin Roof mathematical theorem might be on the cards…watch this space.