Monday, June 25, 2012


Amazon Gives You 5 GB of Storage Space for Free


Amazon Cloud Drive
Amazon today unveiled a new storage service called Amazon Cloud Drive that gives you 5 GB of free online storage space to store your documents, photos, music and other files securely in the cloud. All you need is a free Amazon.com account to upload your files which you can then access from anywhere using a web browser.
Amazon Cloud Drive is purely an online file storage solution and the only client that you can use to upload or download files from your Cloud Drive account is your web browser.
Thus, for example, if you plan to copy your entire My Documents folder from the computer to Amazon’s cloud, you’ll have to upload files manually from the browser, one by one. Or, to save time, you could zip the entire folder into a single file and upload it in one go as Cloud Drive supports files as large as 2 GB in size. (Dropbox has a file size limit of 300 MB).
Amazon offers a handy desktop client that will scan your hard drive for music related files and will automatically put them to Cloud Drive – you then listen to your music from anywhere using the browser itself without having to download anything to that computer. Other than that, I think the Cloud Drive service is also good for manually backing up some of your really bulky files online – like those Outlook PSTs.
Pricing - Amazon Cloud Drive vs Amazon S3

Amazon S3 vs Amazon Cloud Drive

There’s however one part about Cloud Drive that has surprised me a bit – the pricing structure. The service internally uses Amazon S3 for storage but if you compare the storage cost of these two services, you’ll find that Amazon S3 is nearly 80% more expensive than Cloud Drive.
Amazon charges 14¢ per month per GB for S3 which converts to around $1.78 per year (including the 10¢ data transfer fee) while Cloud Drive is available for a flat $1 per GB per year with no transfer-in or transfer-out fees. S3 is one of the popular choices for online backup but going forward, Cloud Drive could be a more cost-efficient option.

Bonus Tip – Upgrade to 20 GB for less than $1

All Amazon Cloud Drive users get 5 GB of free online storage space or you can pay $20 to upgrade to the 20 GB plan.
There’s another option as well. Amazon will upgrade your storage to 20 GB if you buy any MP3 Album from them. Now there are quite a few music albums on Amazon.com that are available for less than $1 – buy any one and you’ll be upgraded to 20 GB.
The only downside is that while Cloud Drive is available to everyone worldwide, Amazon’s music store is only for residents of the United States with a U.S. billing address.
Thankyou@dattu.

Disable the Most Annoying Feature of Gmail


Each time you send, reply or forward an email message to someone through Gmail, it automatically saves the email address of that person to your contacts list.
gmail contacts
This auto-add feature is normally a good thing if you correspond with a limited set of people but for everyone else, automatic contacts can quickly clutter your address book and it becomes ever more annoying if your contacts are set to automatically sync with your phone’s address book.
Fortunately, you can now completely disable the auto-add feature in Gmail. Just go to your settings page and choose “I’ll add contacts myself” for the setting that reads “Create contacts for auto-complete” – now you’ll have manually added email addresses to your Google Contact which am sure most won’t mind.
The Gmail team has added a few other enhancements like you get better warnings if you make typo in email address. More on the Gmail blog. I just hope they are working on improving the Gmail site speed as well.
Thankyou@dattu.

Mails on USB

Put all your Emails on a USB Drive for Offline Access


How do you ensure that you always have access to all your emails – even at places where there is no Internet or when you aren’t carrying your own laptop?
One of the popular options is that you use a tool like Microsoft Outlook to download all your emails to the computer beforehand and you can then read them anywhere even in offline mode. Both Gmail and Hotmail offer POP3 access to help you download messages using any email client while there are easy workarounds for Yahoo Mail.
There are some downsides though. First, most email clients aren’t portable (can you carry emails on a USB drive?) and second, if all you want is offline access to your Gmail messages and nothing extra, Outlook is probably too heavy a tool for that purpose.
I have been testing a Windows-only utility called MailStore that seems like an ideal solution for such a problem – the tool is free, there’s a portable version for your USB stick and best of all, it works out of the box with your email account without requiring any configuration.

Step by Step – How to Backup your Emails

The way MailStore works is something like this. You install (or unzip) the software to a folder and then select the email accounts that you want to archive. They can be your Gmail accounts, Microsoft Exchange, your old Outlook PST files, Thunderbird and any other web email service that supports either IMAP or POP3.
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
The tool will pull your email messages from all these places into a central location. If you have a large mailbox, you may specify criteria to skip emails that are older than ‘n’ days. It skips the Spam and Junk folders by default but you may also manually specify any folders /labels that you wish to include (or exclude) from the backup.
That’s it. There’s a convenient search box allowing you to search all your email accounts from one place. You can copy the MailStore folder to your USB drive, or even your Dropbox folder, and access all the emails from anywhere, anytime. Since this is more of an email backup utility and not a full-blown email client, it cannot be used for replying or sending new emails.
To quickly recap, here are some scenarios where you may find Mail Store useful:
0. You want to backup all your web mails to a safe location.
1. You want to carry your Microsoft Exchange / Outlook emails on a USB drive.
2. You have multiple email accounts and need to search all your mailboxes from one place.
3. You want offline access to all your web-based email accounts.
Thankyou@dattu.

Bandwidth Limits in Dropbox


The other day I shared how you may use Dropbox as a CDN to host the static content of your WordPress site. That will not only improve the performance of your website, because you are now using a CDN, but will also decrease the bandwidth requirement of your own web server since some of the files are getting served through Dropbox.
Dropbox provides nearly 2.5 GB of free storage space and that is obviously more than enough to host all the images, CSS and other static files of most websites. However, there’s a caveat you should be aware of. 
Dropbox Public Folder
Bandwidth Limits for Public Folders in Dropbox
If you have a low-traffic site, the above solution may work without issues but for everyone else, it may not always be a good idea to use Dropbox as a file hosting service.
That’s because Dropbox imposes certain bandwidth limits on files in the Public folder and if you exceed that limit, the URLs of your public file may be temporarily disabled thus returning a 404 error to your visitors.
According to Dropbox support, public links for free accounts may not use more than 10GB of bandwidth per day while that limit is 250GB per day for paid Dropbox accounts. The links are automatically suspended if any of your files exceed that limit.
For comparison, let’s say you have a one page website hosted on Dropbox and the entire weight of all the images, CSS and other static files served through that page is around 400 kb. That means the page should have less than 25k impressions in a day for you to stay within the Dropbox limit.
And if another site decides to hotlink to your static images, it may exhaust your “free bandwidth” quota even sooner.
Thankyou@dattu.


dropbox 1

Download Dropbox 1.0


Dropbox, a hugely popular online storage solution that also helps you keep files across multiple computers in sync, has just hit a milestone. The team has released Dropbox 1.0 for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux – more than two years after the first beta hit the tubes.
Dropbox 1.0 contains numerous bug fixes, performance improvements and should consume less CPU resources than the previous versions.
Among the new features, Dropbox 1.0 includes Selective Sync – you can instruct Dropbox to keep certain file folders in the cloud only and not download them to your computer’s hard drive.
To give you a practical example, let’s say you have a 500 MB file on computer A that you only want to backup online and not sync across computers. You may configure Selective Sync on computer B and that particular file won’t download on the second computer thus saving you plenty of bandwidth.
dropbox sync
The other very useful enhancement is that you may now share even non-public folders on Dropbox with anyone outside. Just right-click on the file in Windows Explorer and choose “Get Shareable Link” to get a secure (https) short link powered by db.tt that anyone may use to access that file.
However, you’ll be a bit disappoint to know that the Dropbox team has skipped the most-requested “Watch any Folder” feature in the 1.0 release even though it was in the initial plan as per the Votebox. That means you’ll still have to copy your files to the “My Dropbox” folder for keeping them in sync.
I have been using Dropbox v.0.8.x for some time on Windows and have found it to be pretty stable so far. The 1.0.0 RC is a direct jump from 0.8.x builds.
Thanyou@dattu.

Use Dropbox with your own Web Domain


Your Dropbox account comes with a special “Public” folder that you may use to host documents, images, and other stuff that you want to share with everyone. To give you an example, I distribute the Always on Top utility only through my Dropbox Public folder – the file is always available for download and puts little strain on the server.
Personalized Dropbox URLs
dropbox public links
All public URLs on Dropbox follow a very standard pattern as illustrated above. The first part of the URL, which reads like dl.dropbox.com/u/ID/, is common for a Dropbox user and you can easily map it to your own domain or sub-domain.
This will make your Dropbox URLs appear less complex, you get to indirectly promote your brand since its now mentioned in the download links and, best of all, you can track individual file downloads.
How to Map Dropbox to your Web Domain
Option A. If you have a domain and a host running Apache, use the following approach:
Step 1. Go to your cPanel and setup a new sub-domain (for example, files.labnol.org). This should create a new directory with the same name on your server.
Step 2. Log in to your server and create a new file called .htaccess in the above directory. Do remember to replace XYZ with your Dropbox ID.
   1: <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   2: RewriteEngine on
   3: RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/XYZ/$1 [L,QSA]
   4: </IfModule>
That’s it. Now before sharing a Dropbox URL, replace dl.dropbox.com/u/ID with your web address (like files.labnol.org) and the recipients will still be able to download your files as before. Here’s a live example – files.labnol.org/tech-guides.html.
Option B. If you don’t have access to a web host, you may use Google App Engine to have custom Dropbox URLs.
Step 1: Download the source code for your new project from code.google.com and make the following changes in the code.
  • Replace XYZ in mirror.py with your Dropbox user number.
  • Replace APPNAME in appl.yaml with some unique name.
Step 2: Deploy the above project through the Google App Engine launcher. Refer to my previous Web Proxy tutorial for details on how to get started with GAE.
Step 3: This is optional. If you already have a web domain configured with Google Apps, you may serve your Dropbox redirection app on that domain else your Dropbox URLs will have structure like appname.appspot.com but without your Dropbox ID.
[*] You may use CNAME addresses to map Dropbox URLs to any sub-domain but in that case, the mapping will only happen at the root level and thus your custom URLs will still look complex – you don’t want your URLs to look like files.labnol.org/u/123/abc.txt.
[**] You are only re-mapping URLs and thus the previously-stated bandwidth limits in Dropbox will still apply to all your file downloads.


Thankyou@dattu.

Use Dropbox to Test your Website Locally


test local website
Whether you are designing a one-page basic HTML site or are developing a slightly more complicated site that uses JavaScript and jQuery functions, you need to thoroughly test the design and functionality before putting the HTML/CSS/JS files on a live web server.
How do you test the files associated with your project?
If you are a professional web designer /developer, you’ve probably set up a local server to test the sites on the computer itself but the workflow is a little more tedious for the rest of us.
You write the code in a local folder, then upload the associated files to a FTP server and finally, you load these online files in a browser for testing – this code-upload-test cycle may have to repeated multiple time until your site works as expected.

Test your Local Website with Dropbox

There is however an easier way as well that should save you some time.
If you can move your local development folder to the Dropbox public folder, you don’t have to worry about uploading files to an FTP server as Dropbox will do that for you.
As soon as you change code in the local file, the changes get uploaded online to Dropbox servers almost immediately and you can use the “public link” in Dropbox to open and test that file in your web browser. Dropbox can understand relative URLs and hence your associated JS and CSS files will also get picked up without you having to specify the full path.
In other words, you code websites on a local computer but test them online just like the real environment. This technique may however not be used for testing PHP and other non-HTML sites
Thankyou@dattu.

How to Easily Transfer Files Across Cloud Services


Cloud storage services like Google Docs, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc. have made it easy for you keep your important files and documents online. These services are mostly free and you can have multiple accounts on them as long as you use separate email addresses.
This leads to another problem though. When you have files spread across multiple cloud services, managing them can be challenge. You may have stored one group of files on Dropbox, the other on Google Docs while some of the older files could be hosted on your old Google Docs account that you abandoned long ago.
Would it be nice if there were an easy to way to manage / search all your online files from one place without having to download them to the computer first?
move_cloud_files
Meet Otixo – an impressive web-app that lets you access files stored across different cloud service from a central location. To get started, you associate your Dropbox, Google Docs, Picasa, Amazon S3 and other online accounts with Otixo and then you can easily move or copy files between any of your accounts via simple drag-n-drop.
Otixo supports FTP so it can also be used to directly transfer files from any FTP server to Google Docs or Amazon S3 without having to write complicated scripts. You can even add multiple accounts from the same cloud service – like your old and new Google Docs accounts – and transfer file across these accounts easily.
Otixo offers unified search to help you quickly find all your files that are otherwise spread across multiple cloud services. You can delete files, create new folders, or upload files from the desktop to any of the associated cloud services. Everything just works. [via Netted]
Thankyou@dattu.

The Best Apps for your Dropbox


Dropbox has made our digital lives so much easier. You put a file in your Dropbox folder and it becomes available on mobile phone, your tablet and on all your other computers. If you have shared a Dropbox folder with another person, say your mom, any files that you add to the shared folder instantaneously appear on her computer. So useful!
Best Dropbox Apps

The Best Web Apps for Dropbox

Dropbox has 50 million users worldwide and, because of such immense popularity, an entire ecosystem of apps has been created around Dropbox that add new functionality and extend the service beyond the realms of online storage. Here are some of the best apps that you should try with your Dropbox account.

1. Use Dropbox to Host a Website or a Blog

Your Dropbox has a public folder and files that you add to this folder can be accessed by anyone on the web as long as they have a link to that file. You can thus put all your HTML, JavaScript, CSS and image files into this folder, map it your domain and your mini website is ready for public consumption.
Alternatively, if you want a more simple solution, check out apps like DropPages.com,Scriptogr.am and Pancake.io all of which let you publish simple websites using Dropbox for free. DropPages and Pancake are more suitable for publishing regular web pages while Scriptogram is geared towards the blog (reverse chronological) format.

2. Keep Google Docs and Dropbox in Sync

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could write a document inside Google Docs and access it offline inside your Dropbox folder. Or vice-versa where you add one or more files to Dropbox and they magically appear inside your Google Docs account?
There’s an excellent service called insync that keeps your Google Docs files in sync with your desktop folders and with a little trick, you can get it to work with Dropbox as well. Launch the Insync utility (it’s available on Mac and Windows) and under Preferences, just change the default Insync directory to one of your Dropbox folders. The other alternative iscloudHQ though their free plan has a few limitations.

3. Save Email Attachments in Dropbox

With attachments.me, you can quickly save file attachments available in your Gmail account to your Dropbox folder with one click.
There are two ways of doing that. You can either install the attachments.me Chrome extension and, as you are reading a message thread in Gmail, send any of attached files to your Dropbox without leaving Gmail. Alternatively, you can use the attachments.me website to save any of your email attachments to Dropbox.

4. Save Web Clippings to your Dropbox

Gimme Bar is a neat bookmarking service that lets you clip web pages, photos and everything else that you see on the web. It even grabs screenshots of whole web pages so the archived pages look exactly like what you see on your screen.
You can connect your Gimme Bar account with Dropbox and it will periodically dump all your saved web clippings to your Dropbox folder. The backups aren’t instant though.

5. Download Online Files to your Dropbox

With URL Droplet, you can download any of the online files to your Dropbox folder even from a remote computer.
Simply copy and paste the URL of any web file to URL Droplet and the app will save that file to your Dropbox folder in the background. This is especially useful when you want to download an online file to Dropbox but the computer you are working on, say your office computer, is not linked to your personal Dropbox account.

6. Request Files in your Dropbox Folder

Do you want other people – like your clients – to upload files to your Dropbox but without having to share any of your Dropbox folders with them?
There’s a free service called DropItToMe that lets you receive files from anyone, anywhere and the files are added straight to your Dropbox. Alternatively, you can create an online form using JotForm and any files uploaded through this form are again sent to your Dropbox.

7. Transfer Dropbox Files to any Cloud Service

If you are looking for any easy way to transfer files across different cloud services like Dropbox, Google Docs, Picasa, etc. or if you need to move files between Dropbox and an FTP server, Otixo is a near perfect solution.
Otixo connects to all popular cloud services, including Dropbox, and lets you access all your online files at one place. Then, like Windows Explorer or Apple’s Finder, you can copy or move files from service to another using easy drag and drop.

8. Upload Files to Dropbox via Email

Dropbox, unlike SugarSync, doesn’t offer an option to upload files by email but there’s a free app called Send To Dropbox that can help you do that.
Once you connect your Dropbox account with the app, it will provide a unique email address and any files sent to that address will get saved to your Dropbox account. This is useful for uploading files to Dropbox from a mobile phone or when you want to quickly save Gmail attachments to your Dropbox. There’s a DIY alternative as well.

9. Dropbox for Distraction-Free Writing

Write Box is a minimal writing app for your browser that auto-saves your text document into any of your Dropbox folders. You can also open any of the existing Dropbox text files into Write Box and edit them in the browser.
The app has no toolbars and you can switch to your browser’s full-screen mode (press F11) for more comfortable and distraction-free writing. Press Ctrl+S anytime to quickly sync your edits with Dropbox.

10. Add More Power to your Dropbox

With tools like IFTTT and Dropbox Automator, you can easily glue your Dropbox with various other services like Facebook, EverNote, Twitter, Instagram, etc. and do some really clever stuff that would otherwise require programming.
For instance, you can setup a task that will auto-upload your pictures to Facebook as soon as you add them to your Dropbox folder. Or a task that will auto-deliver your ebooks and other documents to your Kindle when you put them in a designated Dropbox folder. The possibilities are endless and if you spend some time understanding IFTTT, it will probably be the only add-on that you’ll need for your Dropbox.
One more thing..
These apps connect to Dropbox using OAuth so you’ll never have to share your login credentials with either of them. That said, if you have tried a Dropbox app and don’t plan to use it later, go here and permanently remove that app from your account.
Thankyou@dattu.

What to Do When You Cannot Open a Particular Website


Your computer is connected to the Internet but you are unable to open a particular website though all the other sites are loading without issues.
For instance, you can open yahoo.com and bing.com but it takes forever to load www.google.com even though the site is up for everyone else in the world.
Error Loading Website - Flowchart

How to Troubleshoot your Internet Connection

Step 0: Like with everything else, switch off the modem, restart the computer, and turn on the modem again. Also clear the Internet cookies and browser cache. Problem gone? No, proceed to the next step.
Step 1: Temporarily disable your computer’s firewall and close any anti-virus software that may be running in the background. If you are now able to access the websites that were previously not loading, your security program is causing the problem. As as workaround, you can add that site to the “trusted” zone in Internet Explorer and see if it works.
Step 2: Open your hosts file and see if there are any entries for sites that are currently unreachable from your computer. The hosts file is located in the following folder:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Step 3: Try a remote screen capture using Aviary. For instance, if the URL of the error site is abc.com, try opening aviary.com/http://abc.com in your browser. This will help you make sure that the site you are trying to access is not down at the source.
Step 4: Clear your DNS cache and run the ping and traceroute commands against the problematic site to make sure that it is not an ISP specific issue.
ipconfig /flushdns
tracert www.error-website.com
ping www.error-website.com
If the DNS server is an issue, you can easily switch to Google DNS or OpenDNS without having to call the ISP’s support. However, if the ping and traceroute connections are successful but the sites remain unreachable, proceed to the next step.
Step 5. Reset the modem to factory defaults and re-configure it with the same username and password that was provided by the ISP. You can reset the modem by pressing a pin inside the hole located at the back of the modem for about 10 seconds. Or you can call your ISP support and let them guide you through the steps over phone.
The last step is very likely to fix your internet connectivity problem.
Thankyou@dattu.

Compare SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox


Compare SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox
You have your files, photos and documents on your home computer that you would like to access from other locations on different devices. Dropbox has been the de-facto choice for long but that could potentially change as Microsoft and Google have just entered the arena with the launch of Windows Live SkyDrive and Google Drive respectively.
The three services are very similar – you get online storage (you can access your files anywhere) and file synchronization – edit a document on one computer and the changes are propagated to all your other computers almost instantly.
Let’s see how these online drives stack up against each other:

SkyDrive vs Google Drive vs Dropbox

Supported Platforms
Dropbox is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, BlackBerry and Android devices. Windows Live SkyDrive is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone devices while Google Drive is currently available for PC, Mac and Android phones /tablets. All services do offer a web mobile version that can help you access your files from the web browser of any mobile phone.
The other important difference is that Dropbox is also available for Windows XP and Linux while SkyDrive is not.
Storage Limits
Dropbox offers 2-3 GB of free online storage storage, Google Drive offers 5 GB while SkyDrive, if you are new, offers 7 GB of storage space.
You can upload files of any size to Dropbox through the desktop client while that limit is 2 GB in the case of SkyDrive. Both SkyDrive and Dropbox let you upload files up to 300 MB from the web browser while that limit is 10 GB in the case of Google Drive.
Storage Plans
If you are running out of storage space on SkyDrive, you can buy an additional 20 GB for about $10 per year or 50 GB for $25 per year. Dropbox Pro offers 50 GB of storage space for $99 per year while Google Drive offers an extra 20 GB for $2.49 per month.
Built-in File Viewers
Both SkyDrive and Dropbox web apps have built-in file viewers for most common file formats including Office documents, PDFs, videos and images. Google Docs supports even more formats – including Photoshop mockups and AutoCAD drawings – and no wonder that you can also view these files in Google Drive without additional software.
Unfortunately, maybe because of licensing issues, none of these drives will stream MP3 songs in the browser – you will to have download the MP3 file locally to play the audio.
File History
Your free Dropbox account will save any file’s history for 30 days meaning if you accidentally delete or change a file, you can easily restore the previous working version for the next 30 days. SkyDrive and Google Drive also store the previous versions of all files though they have not exactly specified how many reversions are preserved.
If you delete a file or folder inside SkyDrive web app, it’s gone forever whereas in the case of Dropbox and Google Drive, the files are moved to the Trash from where they can be easily restored.
Account Security
Since your Google Drive is connected to your Google Account, you can apply 2-step protection and non-authorized user won’t be able to access your online file even if they are aware of your Google username and password. This extra layer of protection is not available to Dropbox and SkyDrive users.
Google Drive and Dropbox also maintain a detailed log of every single change that was made to your files (or account) but this seems to be missing in SkyDrive.
File Search
This is one area where Google Drive has a definite upper hand.
When you search for a file on Dropbox.com, it returns results where the file names matche your search keywords. SkyDrive lets you search the content of documents that are in common Microsoft Office formats. Google Drive goes a step further as it can even read the text content of scanned documents and photographs using OCR. That is, if you have saved a photograph of the whiteboard to your Google Drive account, you should be able find that image by text without having to remember the filename.
Offline Access
The mobile apps of Dropbox and Google Drive let you save any document or file on your mobile for offline use.  Such a facility is not available in the iOS apps of Windows SkyDrive though you can always export the document to another app (like iBooks or Good Reader) from SkyDrive and access it offline.
Selective Sync
If you have multiple computers, all these “online drives” will copy your files across all your machines. Sometimes, you don’t want this to happen and both Dropbox and Google Drive offer you an option to selectively synchronize folders per computer. For instance, you can tell Dropbox not to download your family photographs folder on the work computer.  This saves bandwidth and your hard disk stays light too.
Selective Sync is however missing in SkyDrive.

What I like about Windows SkyDrive

SkyDrive offers plenty of storage space but the best part is that the SkyDrive web app lets you access files and folders of all your other computer right from within your browser. You just need to have SkyDrive on these machines and you can then easily access any of their files from any other computer, anywhere simply using your Windows Live ID.
SkyDrive is an absolute must-have service for Microsoft Office users because it gives you the ability to edit documents in the web browser while preserving all the formatting.

What I like about Google Drive

Google Drive offers the most pleasing interface, the search feature is brilliant and the new grid view lets you quickly browse your stored files visually. You can email any file from your Google Drive account to another user as an email attachment, a useful feature that’s missing in all the other online drives.
If you live in the Google ecosystem and do not have Microsoft Office on your computer, skip SkyDrive and go with Google Drive.

What I like about Dropbox

The basic Dropbox account offers a mere 2 GB of storage space but you can easily increase your account space to 16 GB by referring a couple of friends to Dropbox. Also, you can findtons of apps that make the Dropbox service even more powerful and useful.
Google Drive and Windows Live SkyDrive are extremely promising services but none of them support as many platforms as Dropbox does. The best part about Dropbox is that it just works and it won’t be easy even for Google and Microsoft to build the kind of developer ecosystem that currently exists around Dropbox.
Thankyou@dattu.

Facebook Finally Lets You Edit Your Comments


We’ve all typed things on Facebook that we regret. Over-the-top angry responses to shared political articles. Weirdly inappropriate comments under a friend’s photo. Typo-ridden exclamations under a big announcement.
Before, Facebook only gave you a few seconds to make an edit, which resulted in moments of panic before you either had to delete a comment or just live with it. On Thursday night, that all changed when Facebook decided to let users edit comments.
Now all you have to do is hover over the right corner of your comment and a pencil icon will appear, letting you edit or delete it. Don’t worry if you can’t do it right now; Facebook is gradually rolling it out to all users.
You’ll also be able to view the edit history of any comment by clicking on the “Edited” button near the timestamp. That means that any typos or regrettable things you edit out aren’t gone forever; they’re just gone at first glance.
This is all well and good, but what about the Facebook feature everyone really wants — the ability to edit Wall posts? The day that I can edit a rambling screed written at 3am after a night of watching my team lose at a sports bar is the day I know that Facebook is truly safe for the impulsive writer.
Thankyou@dattu.