Did you know that many college admissions boards Google prospective students these days? It’s true and what they find there may work for you or against you. Too many potential students these days are posting photos and stories of themselves in compromising situations bragging about illicit activities and bad behavior. This doesn’t sit well with college boards or future potential employers, for that matter. If you have posted any free photo stories online that cast you in a bad light it would be wise to remove them and give yourself a more positive image.
Creating free online photo stories that illustrate what is unique and good about you is a much better idea. You could post photos of yourself winning an award or playing in your favorite sport. You might also consider posting photo stories that feature you doing a service project for a local charity. Anything that makes you look like a responsible person that is looking to achieve great things in life will make you more desirable to potential college admissions officials. This makes a great compliment to your college application and the photo stories you post should reflect and support the information you give there. If you volunteered at the local animal shelter to gain experience for a future career in veterinary medicine, post a photo story of you working closely with the animals, for instance.
And you don’t have to wait and see whether the college admission reps are going to Google you or not, just include a link to the photo sharing site right in your college application letter. This will show great initiative on your part and let the college know that you are creative and comfortable with a computer as well as sending whatever message and image you have created with your free online photo sharing stories. Image is everything and while it won’t compensate for lousy grades or low SAT scores, it may just give you the edge you need to outshine the competition and make it into your college of choice.
You may not get a chance to meet with the college admissions board in person until after they have made their decision so the only chance you have to make a good impression is with your application and online photo story. Adding compelling pictures and stories to your site will help the board feel as though they know you and like you. You become a real person to them instead of just another paper application they have to choose from. It is much harder to say “no” to a real person than to a piece of paper.
You only have one chance to make a first impression and your free online photo sharing stories can make whatever impression you want to make. Let yours tell people that you are intelligent, honorable, active and a real go-getter. You never know what opportunities may lie ahead until you give it a chance. In today’s world it takes every possible advantage to succeed and your online photo stories are just one more way to create an advantage.
Yahoo and Google to turn their e-mail and instant message systems into something closer to social networks. Both companies figured it was futile to take on Facebook and MySpace directly. So they rushed to develop new ways for their users to trade news, photos and so on with the people already in their address books and buddy lists.
The winner of that race is…Microsoft.
Thursday, Microsoft announced a complex new version of the Web sites and PC software that use the Windows Live brand. Over the next two months, the company will introduce dozens of upgraded features involving its e-mail, instant message, calendar, blogging and other services. It will also add some entirely new functions, including group collaboration and photo sharing.
A lot of the effort has gone into weaving the functions of social networks throughout many of these services. For example, the service has a “what’s new” feed, modeled after the Facebook news feed, that can publish short comments by users as well as links to when they take certain actions, like publish new photos. The feed will be displayed on the instant message client and on new profile pages for users. And after you send an e-mail to people who use the new feed, you will see their most recent updates.
Microsoft is also reaching out to draw in information from other sites. Users can add updates from their accounts on services like Yelp, Pandora and Flickr into their “what’s new” feed. They can also bring the list of their friends on other social networks into Microsoft’s new contact manager, called Windows Live People.
“There is not going to be one provider of software and services for the scenarios that are interesting,” said Chris Jones, a Microsoft vice president for Windows Live. “People will be members of many social networks. They will use many different sites to share, different e-mail providers, instant message providers and different types of devices. And in the end, the service that has value will be the one that helps them make sense of it all.”
Yahoo and Google, of course have all sorts of features that let people communicate and share information and photos. Google’s iGoogle personal page and an upcoming revision to the Yahoo home page offer ways to display information from various other sites. But for now, Microsoft offers a more unified approach to collecting information about people from a range of sites and using it in different ways.
Microsoft is not creating many ways to get information out of its systems, however. It doesn’t have the equivalent of Facebook Connect that lets people see their friends on other sites. And it is not enabling social applications from third-party developers on any part of this sprawling set of sites.
Mr. Jones said that the Windows Live profiles are meant to be simple, but they can have links to pages on MySpace or other sites that do allow applications. He said the company would eventually develop methods to export some of the data it keeps about users to other sites.
In addition, Microsoft is updating its SkyDrive service that stores files on its server and Windows Live Sync (formerly know as FolderShare) that keeps copies of files identical on two separate computers.
Microsoft takes a lot of heat, much of it deserved, for its plodding nature and overly complex software. Since the services haven’t been introduced yet, I can’t tell how well these new Windows Live features work. But the fact that the company is the first to actually introduce social networking features to its e-mail is a sign of Microsoft’s discipline, or maybe the lack of resolve at Google and Yahoo. Or both.
If you want to improve the quality of your photo printing or find fun ways to turn your photos into printed works of art, the following free software tools can be a great way to start.
Kodak Easyshare Software
This free printer software provides a lot of features that can help you make better use of your photos once you’ve added them to your computer. Here are a few examples:
• Tagging and rating of your photos to make searching for the ones you want easier using the software’s built-in photo search feature
• Correcting red eye – one of the most common photo problems – can be done with the touch of a button
• Cropping and rotating photos can be done easily
• You can choose photos and blend them with music into a video that can be shared with friends and family
• Use the software to send photos to be printed or to your own photo printer
Picasa
This
free photo software comes to you from Google which has a reputation of releasing some outstanding products. Here are some reasons to give this one a test drive:
• Scans your computer to locate your photos even if they are scattered in a bunch of different folders and drives
• Lets you change the photo file names easily even for a group of pictures at one time
• Creates albums that you can use to organize and share your photos more easily and conveniently
• Gives you the option to add password protection to some of your photo albums in case you want to save their contents for select audiences
IrfanView
If you want to work with a
free photo software that has a long reputation, this is one is definitely worth considering. It has been around since 2003 and is still going strong thanks to a simple-to-use interface and features like the following:
• Lets you copy, crop and edit photos easily
• Gives you the option of creating slideshows using your photos – the finished product can be saved as an executable file and/or burned to a CD-Rom
• Allows you to add effects, such as blur, to your images
• Makes it easy to work with batches of images at one time
ADG Panorama Tools
You’ve taken some great pictures and now you want to use them in a unique and creative way that can be shared with others on the Internet? This free software gives you the option to do that.
• Combines multiple photos into a single 360 degree panorama shot seamlessly
• The panorama can be viewed as a moving image on a web site that is created for you through the software
• Create hotspots and add hyperlinks throughout the image so visitors can learn more about the individual shots or find other useful information relevant to the photos