And now they can! Over the course of the last year and a half, five different companies have launched programs that allow users to add and save comic book shaped speech bubbles on photos. Each competitor employs slightly different mechanisms and website designs, and some systems are better than others. But all of these web enterprises want the same thing - your patronage.

Of these text bubbling competitors, which will YOU choose?

Blabble

 

The newest competitor is something called Blabble. In August 2008, Rethink Communications, on behalf of Solo Mobile, brought Blabble to Facebook. They did a great job - this photo modifier is clean and simple and produces attractive results.

Blabble is a dedicated Facebook application that specializes in putting text bubbles on pictures. This software only uploads images from Facebook photo albums only - the company has focused exclusively on this one task. The advantage is that Blabble will save Facebook users unnecessary transfer time and repetitive uploads. Right now it's the only competitor capable of this kind of "one stop Facebook photo bubbling" service.

Unlike all other programs Blabble adds a signature orange coloured, square shaped, text box to images. These inserts are actually very sexy looking, and their square shape is more accommodating to text. I would not describe these boxes as "comic book" shaped bubbles - they remind me of the factoids one might see in the margins of a math textbook, or on the menu of a funky restaurant in a boutique hotel.

Unfortunately Blabble's sexy text bubble sizing is entirely automated, which has its disadvantages. Users sometimes find themselves switching words and adding or subtracting punctuation to avoid misshapen boxes.

Superlame

Superlame has been letting users place attractive comic book bubbles on their pictures for years, and they too have a Facebook application (in Beta). This app is very unique in that the control menu is found right inside the four corners of the box around the text bubble under construction. You can bold the text and increase or lower the size of the bubble, and "drag a tail" as they call it, to point to the origin of the text in the picture.

This application is easy to install and the overall platform is slick and effective. The system lets users save their images right inside Facebook. It's great.

Its important to note however, that Superlame was spawned by comic book lovers and designed to be interpreted inside comedic genres - the bubbles and clouds have an obvious "funny pages" style that's difficult to incorporate in a more serious photo design.

Kyolo

Kyolo is very easy to use - the opening caption reads "Speech Bubbles for Dummies" and that's very indicative of the overall experience. This site is nicely laid out and the apparatus is handy and produces great results. It's worth noting however, that users may only upload photos from their computers as the option to upload from a web URL, or browse existing Facebook or Flickr galleries does not exist, yet.

At Kyolo.com the bubble can be easily placed on the photo, and by using a small menu of editing buttons, the caption can be easily modified. Kyolo is the only program that lets users modify the size of the text, as well as the size of the bubble. Users can even change the shape of the bubble and make it wide or thin; the indicator "tail" can be flipped from side to side, top or bottom, or eliminated altogether.

Kyolo.com has a small community of members with a huge collection of bubbled photos in a very public gallery. Although this company has not engineered a Facebook application, they do invite users to email their doctored photos to family and friends and provide all manner of scripts for incorporation into blogs and discussion forums.

Speechable

Speechable is another free photo service that asks for donations. The program lets users upload and add

speech bubbles to their photos "and share them with friends via email or on Facebook". But I can't find a direct conduit to upload my Facebook photos here? The system browses my computer for images only.

The save options don't allow a direct save into my Facebook photo collections, but I can use a tiny bookmark button that allows me to display the image on my Facebook profile, the same way I would display my favourite website or Flickr photo.

Furthermore, this software is hard to use, and yields only modest results. Rather than customize a bubble on the fly, Speechable users must select from a template of shapes at the bottom of the page. When designers click the option they want, the bubble appears on the photo in a random spot, and is quite difficult to move - you must click the top of the bubble to move it and that bit of empiric wisdom is not explained anywhere.

After saving my Basil Martini standard test image, I noticed my carefully spaced text was most unkindly shrunk together - the layout I meticulously designed was completely ruined in the save.

SayWhat

Believe it or not, the foremost thought bubble insertion program on the internet is WigFlip's SayWhat, and I say that because this competitor currently dominates Google search for the keywords "photo bubbles" and "text bubble". As the website's homepage is littered with Google Ads, it's not hard to glean their business model. The text reminds me of a dot matrix printer.

SayWhat is too quick and dirty. There's barely any control of the boxes, besides allowing users to flip the caption up and down, or left and right. There doesn't seem to be any control over shape either, as the bubble expands to accommodate submitted text, and shrinks when you delete it. This photo workshop suffers from a complete lack of creative options.

In summary, although all five of the competitors offer their services free, some of these outfits ask for donations, while others are sponsored by big companies as advertising vehicles. Some of these applications will upload photos directly from each user's Facebook galleries, while other online programs require submission directly from the user's computer. On the back end of the equation, the best web photo modifiers have multiple save options, and let users preserve their doctored images both inside and outside Facebook.

The Speech Bubble battle is raging on Facebook - which application will you choose?

The first step is then to help other people find your blog.

Promoting your blog is rather easy, if you do it systematically. Here are fifteen easy steps to help you get more traffic to your blog.

1. Get an account at  Blogcatalog Post your blog entry there and surf around, make friends, visit their blogs and leave supportive intelligent comments.
2. Get a RSS feed from feedburner so that you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. RSS means Rich Site Summary. It lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication as headlines and summaries.
3. Join Bloglog service and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, and associates.
4. Join MyYahoo.com Choose “Add Content” and add your blog RSS feed.
5. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your subject area. Rather than writing comments like "cool" or "great post." leave intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
6. Use  Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish content on your blog. But don’t do this every five minutes.
7. Submit your blog to blog directories. A comprehensive list of blog directories is here
8. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
9. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website or ask other bloggers to exchange links.
10. Get your personal page at http://wiGoogle and add your blog details there.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures, and flyers. Tell everyone you know about your blog.
12. Write articles on the same topics as your blog and send them to different free article sites like Ezine Articles Include a link to your blog in the author info box.
13. Use sites like Faves.com or Delicious to favourite your blog entries, find interesting favourites from others and make friends.
14. Join StumbleUpon and start stumbling your blog entries and those of others.
15. Post your blog entries to your Facebook  contacts. If you contribute to writing communities like  Triond.com make friends there and mention your blog.

One more thing! Content is king. Do write interesting things in a sensible way. A Niagara of complaints about your boss or your spouse may not make occasional readers come back for more.

By doing all these steps the traffic for my blog at Original Wavelength increased 1000%.

Enjoy your blog!

Everyone seems to be logging on, from the old to the young, the rich to the poor.  Sit in any public library and you'll see that a lot of the internet users are feverishly typing away on Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, OKCupid or Hi5.  And that's just a few of the big names.

Scientists have coined a new term for the distress caused by being deprived internet access - discomgoogolation. 

So what is it about these sites that are so addictive? 

Anyone can log on and feel instantly connected to a group of people, no matter what time of day it is or where they are in the world.  It leads to a feeling of being part of a community.  There are message boards for fan clubs, common interests and favourite TV shows or books. 

It is also easy to stay in touch with old friends who do not live in the immediate area.  But why is it better than simple old email?  Well, the key is this - user profiles for most of the social networking sites contain a wealth of information about any given individual.  Their status can be updated as and when, so you know exactly when somebody is having a bad day, has passed their driving test or has found a new partner.  Humans are inherently curious.  So much easier to simply read this information rather than having to email and ask them how they are, isn't it?

You don't have to make the effort to look good for a messaging marathon or real-time conversation either.  After all, the recipient of your posted messages has no idea whether you're having a bad hair day, have no makeup on, or are even sitting there in your pyjamas!

In short, you can make less of an effort to maintain friends.  This holds particularly true if you meet somebody new and want to stay in touch, but aren't yet at the "Come over for coffee!" stage.  It's less stressful, less humiliating and there are less awkward silences than in a face-to-face meeting.

But social networking sites are not just about old friends.  It's easy to find new ones with similar interests.    There are dating applications too, so you can widen your pool of potential admirers.  And if somebody doesn't post back to you? Well, so what?  Plenty more fish in the sea.

Lastly, these sites contain an abundance of different online games to be played, quizzes to be taken and photos of friends past and present, to be viewed.  Can you think of a better excuse to procrastinate for a while, when you should be working in your boring, mundane job?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to check my facebook...

We're being bombarded by invites to all sorts of social networks daily. And most of the times, we ignore the with grace. And, if you stop to think of it, it's not because we wouldn't have time for yet another social network, and it's not even because we're too picky. No, the answer is a rather simple one: it's because these networks offer absolutely nothing new. No new user experiences, no new interesting features, nothing. They're all the same, but with different names.

And we, being educated consumers, mark as spam or delete altogether. That almost happened when I first stumbled upon PerfSpot.com. And I say almost, mainly because the design resembles Facebook too much. Way too much for my tastes. But I got over it, and I'm glad I did. Here's why:

• Easy registration, in 3 simple steps, with no spyware attached (like what happened to Facebook).
• More than a social network, where you can only meet friendly people and just comment on each other's profiles - on PerfSpot.com, competition is the key.
• The public can and will rate everything you say, do or upload. And that makes for hella fun. As you can return the favor or you can demolish. It's all up to you.
• Classified ads, games, networking, groups, contests. The “perfecting” system that's in place.
•  You can have your stuff perfected, and you can perfect other people's stuff.

These are only few of the many things PerfSpot.com does better than Facebook. Now I'm not saying that PerfSpot.com is a Facebook killer, but if they play their cards right, they just might be. Especially if they change the layout and the color scheme, to make it more ownable. Either way, make sure to go there and check it out. You just might be as surprised as I was.

1. Do not promote you Propeller link in other social bookmarking sites like Digg or StumbleUpon but especially in StumbleUpon. I attempted to do it in SU. When I first submitted my article, I had no read and prop. After I waited for more than two hours, I checked my stats again. There was no change in stats and there was nothing to do but a small cheat. I submitted my Propeller link to Stumbleupon. Ten minutes later,I had only three props and more than 200 reads and my rating increased to 5.0. After one hour passed, my rating increased to 7.5 with more than 1500 read and only four props. At the end, my article was in the frontpage. However, in the next two hours, my submission in Propeller was removed then I was completely banned from the system. This was a great experience since I am not cheating anymore.
2. Join the groups but send related contents to them. I was joining every group I saw. As far as I remember, I joined more than 50 groups before my ban. When I submitted an article, I was sending it to all groups and doing this continuously. This might be one of the reasons for my ban. You should send related contents to the groups. Try to become an active user in the gropus.
3. Make a lot of friends. Follow their submissions and prop their articles if you like. You can always follow your friends' submission from the “Friends' submissions“ part.
4. Check it frontpage articles and try to understand their main properties. Try to learn what active propellers want to read about and what they prop.

Every article has only 24 hours to come to the frontpage. After 24 hours, even if your submission has been rated to 10.0, it will not come to the front page. It will stay as a passive submission in Propeller. So, you should be as fast as you do. Otherwise, your article will pass away without seeing the front page.

Barack's Digg Profile

Thats right, Barack's on Digg. If fact for a busy politician running for president, he's pretty active and has submitted and popularized some great stuff. Digg always has front page info about Barack, so visiting the popular in politics pages, you will find more than enough information on Barack news.

How Obama Stands On Almost Every Issue

A rundown of almost all of Obama's standing on issues from civil rights to the environment to corporations and war. If you're new to learning about Barack Obama, visit this site first to learn more about how he stands on almost all the deciding issues during a election. You can find his stance on almost anything here.

Obama's Facebook Profile

Like Obama's myspace page, his facebook page is very similar. The fact that he is reaching out through mediums such as myspace, facebook, flickr and twitter shows dedication to the youth and trying to connect with them and get them involved with politics and their country.

Barack's Twitter Account

Yeah. He Twitters too. In fact he has great tweets, and their not pesky or bothersome. An informative way to keep up with where he is, who he's speaking too and campaign news from Barack himself.

Baracks Official Wesbite

This link will take you directly to his official campaign website and stance on the issues. I have also included a link with a summary of more of his views in broader categories and his voting history.

Obama's YouTube Channel

Barack's youtube page is the first place to go for new campaign videos, videos of his speeches, meetings, debates and so much more. Almost 1200 videos and countless hours of everything you could ever want for in front of camera appearances.

Flickr Stream

It's pretty cool to see Barack's Flickr stream, where you see the pictures from a president elect's point of view, and not just user submitted photos of him. You can also keep up with where he is, because he has thousands of photos.

Barack's MySpace Profile

If you're a big myspace fan, friend him and check out his myspace. It's similar to his facebook and his official campaign page. Having a myspace page, hopefully he can connect with and encourage more of our youth to do more research and get involved with their countries issues.

Wikipedia Barack

Check Wikipedia for more information on Barack. If your not a wiki fan then go to his website. But wiki has a great database of information about his early life and early political career.

Official Voting History

Check Obama's voting history since being a senator. This is for you if you are a die hard fact checker, you can see how he voted during each of the sessions, on each issue.

Stance on Foreign Policy

A great question and answer session with Barack about his stance on foreign policy, from war in Iraq, to Chinese growth and development, to Iran and North Korea. Great to hear it quoted directly from Obama instead of it being transcribed ten times over by the mainstream media.

Daily Kos

Daily Kos is the biggest political blog on the internet and is a liberally leaning democratic grassroots blog. The idea is activism and contributing editors that are selected through the Kos community. Daily Kos will almost always be in discussion over Obama's political track, many times breaking news and uncovering follies of big media conglomerates.

Hopefully these websites will encourage people to learn more about Obama and educate themselves, their friends, peers and family. Becoming active in politics and issues that directly affect you is crucial, especially for our youth. Voting is the number one easiest way to get involved.

1. Checking E-mails

   One of the first things I usually do is check my e-mail. If I go online 3 times a day, I will be checking my e-mail at the beginning and end of each session, and sometimes in between whenever there is a pop-up from my Yahoo! toolbar to indicate that there is new e-mail for me. Since I subscribe to several e-mail notifications from a few websites, there are many e-mails which I seldom read and just dump them in the trash bin. What I have to do is identify which ones I would like to continue subscribing and which ones I should cancel the subscription. The second thing is to find a way to turn off the new e-mail alert on my Yahoo! toolbar so that I won't be distracted by it.

2. Facebook

   Many of us are a member of at least one social networking site such as Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 or Friendster. I am a member of Facebook. Although I believe that it's a great way to keep in touch with friends and family through Facebook, but there are many distracting, time-wasting activities here, one of which is the applications. Although I have stopped super-poking friends on Facebook, there are many games you can play and things to do. I play 2 games, namely Cute Catz and Lil Green Patch. I don't normally forward useless messages on Message Boards, but I know many people do, because I receive them! I have switched off all e-mail notifications for these applications, leaving friends' messages and new friend notification on.

3. Checking Triond Earnings

   It's crazy but I check my Triond earnings a few times a day, like it's going to increase drastically! It's just so fun, but like I said, a total waste of my time. I also realize that Triond updates the earnings at certain times of the day. Instead of checking my earnings all the time, I should just stick to checking them once a day at a specified time which I know they would already have updated them. The best would be to check it weekly or monthly, but I don't think I have come to that stage yet. It's just so exciting to see my earnings increase, albeit a little bit each day. Actually, I do check other earnings too, such as my Adsense earnings and other affiliate earnings, but not as religiously as I check my Triond earnings.

4. MyLot

   I am a forum member at MyLot. I start my own discussions and make comments on others. I participate in a lot of other activities at MyLot. It is quite addictive. I have to confess. The fact that I did not write any articles for an entire week and very few blog entries in the past few days, can be attributed to spending too much time at MyLot. I have to cut down on MyLot whatever it is.

5. Blog

   Blogging can waste your time too. It is not that I'm against blogging. In fact, I blog myself. But the activities related to blogging can eat up a lot of your time. For instance, you need to research for new materials for your blog. You go hunting for new information and that takes a lot of time. Then you look for suitable photos to accompany your article. You may want to take your own photos, upload them and post them in your blog. Alternatively, you search for royalty-free photos on the internet. That takes a super long time! For me to continue blogging efficiently, it's important to plan ahead. It would be great if I could write a week ahead at one sitting and look for all the photos that I need at the same time, in order to avoid going back and forth from one site to another. Using features available in blogging platforms to schedule your posts ahead of time, blogging should not be a time-consuming activity at all.

If you know that you are wasting a lot of time online and wish to change the situation to be more productive, I suggest you sit down and identify your very own time-wasting online activities you currently engage in, analyse them to see how you can cut down or eliminate these activities altogether. So, what are your top 5 time-wasters?

Triond Application

Useful for members of Triond only. This little widget allows you to submit and review your work through facebook rather than using the Triond portal. While this is a nice feature, it is not the most useful aspect of the program. That lies with the fact your most recent submissions are always displayed on your facebook profile, effectively giving you free advertising, and if you have fans on facebook, a very easy way for them to check your latest work. This is particularly useful for photographers as the thumbnails can attract attention quite easily.

EVE Online

Useful for players of EVE only. This app works like a very stripped down version of the hugely popular program EVEmon. You register your account, provide your API Key, and bingo. You can log in to facebook at any time to check the progress of your character's skills. This is quite useful as there are frequently situations where you might be able to check facebook, but not EVE.

Super Wall

This program works a lot like the wall application, but with many more features. Aside from just sending messages, you can draw pictures, upload your own pictures, add flash files, videos and see what other popular content is being sent through the app. A useful application to have if you want to share a funny video or audio file with people but can't be bothered passing around the link. I don't use super wall very often, but I do find it is useful to have around, even if it is just to spread some humour every so often.

Texas HoldEm Poker

I love poker, and this app lets you play online poker- free. No charges, no gambling, just free poker. A lot of people don't like playing poker without money involved, but for those who do this app is a real treat. There is a massive and growing online community, there is support within the application to automatically put you at tables with your friends and there are many tables at different skill levels and different blind amounts. The application also uses several servers and will try to get one as close to you as possible to minimise lag. If you're looking to learn poker, or you're a high roller, then you'll probably enjoy this application.

Testimonials

This neat little application is an example of how Facebook can be used for business. Testimonials allows people to leave remarks about you for others to view. While this initially sounds like a somewhat childish concept, remember that more and more people are using facebook, and your co-workers, or even your boss might be on there. Provided you only accept submissions from people in a professional capacity, you can build up a bank of references which can be very useful when applying for a job, or any other time you need references. Such as trying to get bail. Admittedly, many employers will not see the worth of this, but even then it's another notch on your belt as they say, and can help make you stand out from the crowd.

Or you can just write “X is a wanker” on it and wait for the streams of hate...

KnightHood

This is an MMO strategy game, and is quite fun. The game concept is simple. You are a state, you recruit your friends to act as your vassals, and then assign them to various parts of your territory. Depending on where they are, they can create new buildings, defend you, or attack your enemies. Attacking your enemies allows you to steal their gold and their vassals to add to your growing empire. The game is very fun, but it does require that you have a lot of friends who are willing to become your vassals, as capturing and holding onto other people's vassals is hard, even harder if you don't have your own loyal vassals. There's also something of a time commitment as you need to check frequently to make sure you are not overrun by your enemies.

Birthday Alert

Does exactly what it says on the tin. Facebook has a birthday alert system built in, but all it does is show you in a small, easily missed panel. With birthday alert though, you actually receive an e-mail warning you of upcoming birthdays. Never get in trouble with your girlfriend for missing her birthday again.

Zombies/Werewolves/Vampires/Slayers

These are four separate apps that link together to provide a larger game. You take on the role of one (Or more) of the above. Recruit people into your army, fight to earn points and in game money, level up as you fight and recruit, spend the money on weapons and accessories, get more money and points for fighting outside your "species"... It's a generic RPG that can be a lot of fun for awhile, especially as it seems to spread through circles of friends like wildfire. Gets boring after a while, but hey! It's not like your paying for it, or you have to play either!

Logging off

Well, there we have my opinions on just a handful of the God only knows how many applications available on facebook. Remember, it's always worth trying out new applications, as if you don't like them you can just delete them afterwards. Some applications are worthless, be very careful of marketing applications or applications that force you to sign up some friends before you can use them. Unless you are certain you will use them, steer clear as you will only end up annoying your friends with unwanted invites. Well, peace out y'all!