Facebook applications are the new thing these days, and those (annoying) Quiz applications hold the largest percentage of all applications available out there. But you hardly see any of these applications which have some real value, until now that is.

Mozilla’s Security Quiz is the first Facebook quiz application that actually does something useful. The application asks the user five basic questions about Internet Security, and ranks your knowledge based on them. Interestingly, the application also serves as a security and privacy guideline for developers who design quiz applications because this app doesn’t ask for or store any personal information on your Facebook profile – not even your name.

This is probably the first time I’ve seen a Facebook application taking user privacy so seriously. You can publish your results to your news feed if you like, because that’s the only way to let your friends know about the application.

I hope someone from Facebook is keeping an eye on this little app and decide to make such privacy and security practices mandatory for all applications – but I guess they would just prefer selling our personal information to advertisers for some cash.

Anyways I’m sure most of you wouldn’t want that to happen. And the one easy way to stop it is to kill photo notification emails once and for all. But that would be a little too extreme in my opinion because you don’t always get SPAM. You also get some comments and tags on those old moments shared by your friends when life was much more simple and fun. So here is my tip on how you can eliminate the comment SPAM without compromising the genuine stuff.

Go to the Photos Application on Facebook and hover over the Settings menu (Don’t click it). Select Photos Settings from the dropdown menu.

You’d see the the Edit Photos Settings dialog box. If you don’t then you really need to consider getting a more recent web browser. Just click the yellow bar you see on the top to download one.

Since we only want block a certain subset of photo notifications, we have to make our selections carefully. Click the Additional Permissions tab and uncheck Comments on a photo of me. Just hit the okay button after that.

What we have done here is that we restricted the Photo Comment emails by allowing Facebook to send us email only when we comment on a Photo first. So if you do get tagged on a SPAM photo, just don’t comment on it. You’d be safe from all those notification emails.

As for those who are also annoyed by those Red icons in the bottom right, just hide all Facebook Notifications by the Photos Application. And if you happen to have better ways of solving this problem, then please do share in comments below or post a link to the resource.

Just ran into this new Bing Cashback Ad via TechCrunch (yeah they actually posted something pro-Microsoft). Anyways the ad is cool and happens to be the first ever to only focus on Cashback. Cashback was shown in a couple of more ads like the original Bing launch ad (embedded below).

For those who don’t know Bing Cashback is a special service by Microsoft that gets you a discounted price on your shopping spree if you search for the product using Bing. You can save anything from a couple of bucks to hundreds of dollars depending on the product and the merchant.

Definitely a positive service by Microsoft and something that should be showcased more. And finally here is the original Bing intro by Microsoft.

Microsoft, which last year made a failed $47.5 billion takeover bid for Yahoo, would finally win what it wanted most from the Internet pioneer — huge volumes of queries that run through Yahoo’s search engine.

At the same time, Yahoo is expected to reap additional search-advertising business to expand its share of the market.

It isn’t clear who would benefit the most out of this, as Bing would get the much needed boost in search market volume, while Yahoo! would get better search advisement deals via Microsoft adCenter. Besides that, I don’t think other players like Google would be sitting quietly about this, because the Google Yahoo! advertisement deal also attracted a lot of attention from legal authorities.

Since we don’t have any official details about the deal yet, so we can’t jump to conclusions. Expect more on this topic soon when the details about the deal are finally revealed.

[via WSJ]

While the previous ads in the Bing marketing campaign revolved around the Search Overload syndrome, the latest ad actually shows off a very useful feature of Microsoft’s decision engine – the Ticket Price Predictor.

While other search engines can help you find the right flight, Microsoft’s decision engine can also tell you when is the best time to make that trip saving you a couple of bucks in the process. Watch the Ad embedded below after the break.

Not a long time ago, I created an application project in my image processing code, that hid data and other images inside an image. Something not very unique, in fact anyone with some image processing knowledge can do that.

Anyways Hid.im is a unique service. It converts .TORRENT files into PNG images for you to sneak around anywhere. The files wont be detected by a search engine or anyone else for that matter.

You can upload a Torrent file (less than 250kb) on hid.im or make use of their Firefox extension. Decoding is equally straight forward with the help of this bookmarklet which works on Firefox 3+ and Safari 4. Just give it a shot. The image above is actually a torrent from Office 2010 Beta.

Twitter is popular for its 140 character post format, which we now refer to as Micro blogging. This is the single most appealing thing for me on Twitter – to share my thoughts in just 140 characters and in essence, save a lot of time. Apparently, some people have difficulties doing that, and require a few more characters at their disposal. This is where services like TwitterContd come into play.

By posting through TwitterContd, you get more characters (1110 more to be exact). The tweet you post would be chopped into sections and posted in a reverse chronological order (see the screenshot below if you don’t know what that is) on the Authenticated users profile.

You can also create string based shortcut variables to replace in your tweet before posting it. I really can’t thing of a use for this feature besides like having message templates for common things like Good morning, or something like that.

Other notable features include support for uploading and posting large pictures, audio and video on your twitter timeline. Oh and you can also log in via Twitter’s Oath API, which provides a secure connection.

Just give this app a try, and who knows, maybe you’ll like it.

That said, ScreenCastle is one such service, that gives you an overdose of usability. It lets you record and upload screencasts with just one click! You don’t even need to sign up and create an account. What’s the catch? continue reading.

The website has a big red button on the right, clicking it launches a Java application that lets you choose the are of the screen you want to capture. There aren’t a lot of options here, and I’m guessing that it was the idea to make it straightforward.

You can move the capture window around if you like and can pause between capturing. Once you have captured the video, you can save and upload it to the ScreenCastle website. From here you can embed it on any web page, and can do a number of other things.

The problem with ScreenCastle is not with its design, its the quality of service. The capture frame rate isn’t good. Its between 10-15 frames per second. Even though you can capture the video in any size you want, you’re better off keeping them below 480×360. I tried to capture in HD and VGA resolutions but they seemed to run into some problems once I was done with the recording and decided to save them. I embeded a video below which I managed to capture successfully after several failed attempts. It even refused to load the video once it was uploaded to there website.

Photo Finder uses advanced Facial Recognition algorithms and existing Facebook photos and tags to identify you and your friends around Facebook. The technology, though not as powerful as you see in the movies, is quite neat and works out great most of the time.

Photo Finder downloads and analyzes all the photos of you and your connections. It checks for tags and builds it database of images with the help of tags you put on people. The accuracy of identification is directly dependent on the tagging you did initially. If the tags you placed were accurate, they would easily enable Photo Finder to identify those people in other photos it analyzes all around Facebook.

This capability allows it to unearth photos of you and your friends you didn’t even know were published online. I personally discovered a lot of photos of me and my friends uploaded by other people which I didn’t know about. You can get all your photos in your profile page. It does a great job of separating the manually tagged photos with those which are auto-tagged. If some photos are tagged inaccurately, you can always untag them.

You can see newly discovered photos of friends even if they haven’t installed Photo Finder on their accounts. The application is able to pull out all the public photos around Facebook so that gives it a lot of raw data to build its knowledge upon.

You can add specific friends to your watch-list to keep an eye out for those secret photos they didn’t want anyone to see.

For photos which are incorrectly tagged, or Photo Finder is unable to identify the person, you can go to the Who’s this tab and help Photo Finder identify those people. You can tag every face from your friends list even if they don’t have the application installed on their profiles.

Photo Finder is still in its closed alpha testing days. We were invited to test the application for feature enhancements and bug fixes. During my initial testing, the application seemed to tag me in every face that had two eyes and a nose. But as its information database grew, it started behaving more accurately and can now identify and tag people in even the most hardly recognizable images. It definitely is the best Facial Recognition tool outside of Hollywood and the Department of Defense.

And thanks to an open API, developers have found a fun way to kill their spare time with developing innovative web apps around Twitter, some of which hardly add any value to your experience. Without further to do, here is a list of some of the apps I find good, but would probably never use.

Splitweet

Splitweet is a multi-user twitter management tool, that lets you post and track multiple twitter accounts at the same time. It also lets you develop a brand (a search keyword it keeps track of). The Good about this service is that users with multiple twitter accounts don’t have to do multiple logins to get simple things done. The bad part is that most people with multiple accounts usually have all but one on TwitterFeed or a similar service.

Twilert

Twilert is also a Twitter Search based app which lets you monitor specific keywords and sends you mail alerts when ever someone mentions your brand or product (ouch). The good about this service is that it will inform you in real time. The bad part is a big sign up process and also the fact that most people wont want email alerts with every brand mention.

MyTweetSpace

This is a unique service, and may prove to be a bit useful to some users. What MyTweetSpace does is design a custom background theme for your Twitter profile so you can brand it in your own way without worrying about the design details much. The bad part here is a poor application interface, popup ads and lack of creativity in design templates.

Tweetree

Tweetree is like a visual make over for the twitter interface which features threaded replies, and in-line expansion of links from Flickr, Friend Feed, YouTube and a number of other services. Though some features are welcoming, the overall interface is heavy and slow and may prove to be a pain to some users.

PingVine

Think of Pingvine as TwitterFeed with some extra options. While TwitterFeed would check your feed and publish new items every 30 minutes, Pingvines can be set to do that from anywhere between days to seconds. And that too on multiple services including Twitter, Ping.fm and Identi.ca. The drawback here is that while TwitterFeed lets you manage your feeds via your OpenID, Pingvine doesn’t.

TwitTrans

As the name indicates, TwitTrans is a tweet translator that translates your tweet to any other supported language, by human translators. Having a human being translating your tweets ensures that your message wouldn’t change in context once delivered. The problem here is that it takes a while for them to translate and post your tweets.

BubbleTweet

BubbleTweet claims to put instant video messages on your Twitter profile. What it actually does is that it allows you to record a short video from your webcam and generates your Twitter profile like page with a flash video popup. The bad? its not posting a video on your real Twitter page like it claims.

TwTip

Yet another Twitter Search based application is TwTip. The idea is simple, you give it a topic and it would search for tips related to that topic on Twitter. Nothing you can’t have with simple Twitter Search.

WiiiZZZ

This is yet another Twitter Search application that selects some random music related tweets and shows them to the user for you to discover new music. Why don’t just use iTunes or Last.fm for music recommendation?