How to Bypass the Social Reader Apps in Facebook

Some Facebook stories require you to add the Social Reader app before you can access the underlying story. You can however bypass social reading apps easily in Facebook.

Some stories appearing in your Facebook newsfeed, like the one shown in the screenshot above, require you to add a “social reader” application to your Facebook profile before you can access the underlying story.
This social-reading “feature” is enabled for quite a few popular sites including Yahoo, The Washington Post, Guardian, Huffington Post, Daily Motion, and many more.
The problem is that once you add the social reader application, Facebook may broadcast your activity on these sites to the newsfeed of your Facebook friends. Do you really want your friends to know what stories your have been reading or watching on the Internet? Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing” but it can be embarrassing sometimes.

How to Bypass the Facebook Social Reader 

If you would not like your friends to know what stuff you have watching or reading online, either don’t click on Facebook links that ask you to install the Social Reader app or try these simple workarounds.

Option 1: Look for the Cancel button in the window that prompts you to the add the Social Reader app. When you hit Cancel, Facebook won’t install the app to your profile and you’ll be immediately redirected to the underlying article or video page.

Option 2: Some social reading apps in Facebook – Yahoo for example – do not offer the Cancel option and you have to add the app to read the article. In that case, you can just change the privacy settings of that app from “Friends” to “Only Me” and then hit “Okay, Read Article.” Now you activity won’t be visible to any of your Facebook friends.

Option 3: As someone suggested in the comments, simply copy the story title from the Facebook ticker to the clipboard, paste it into the Google Search box and hit the I’m Feeling Lucky Button. This is how you can also read premium news content on the web.
See Also: How to Create Custom Facebook Pages
 

How to Block Facebook Social Reading Apps

If you have added any of the Social Readers Apps to your Facebook Profile and would like to get rid of them permanently (so that they don’t broadcast stuff without your knowledge), follow these steps.
Go to Facebook Account Settings and open the Apps Settings page (direct link). This will show all the authorized Facebook apps that are associated with your profile. Search for “Social Reader” and hit [x] to remove that app from your profile. Alternatively, click the Edit button next to the app and set the visibility of “Posts on my behalf” to “Only Me.”

There are Chrome extensions that help you read articles on Facebook without adding the Social Reading apps but the downside is that extensions aren’t available for all browsers – especially when you are accessing Facebook on your iPad – and second, they may not support every site that’s enabled for social reading. ↓

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Scan QR Codes with the Google Search Widget on Android

You do not need a separate QR code app on your Android phone to scan QR code. Just launch the Google app, switch to the Camera mode and use it to scan QR codes. 

I was previously using the Google Goggles app on my Android phone to scan QR codes but turns out that you don’t need a separate QR code reader as the built-in Google Search widget can decode QR codes as well.

To scan a QR code, you need to tap the microphone icon inside the Google Widget and then choose 

“Search with Camera” option from the menu available in the lower right corner (see the first screenshot).

Now point your mobile camera to any QR Code, tap the on-screen camera icon (see the next screenshot) 

and it will instantly reveal what’s stored in that QR Code. Also, if you scroll the results page, you’ll find Google search results for the text that was decoded from the QR Code.

I have tried this on a Nexus phone running Android 4.2.2 (JellyBean). Google Goggles is also integrated with the Google App for iOS devices.

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How to Host your Website on Google for Free

This step-by-step tutorial describes how you can upload and host your HTML website with Google App Engine for free.

The Royal Family of UK has selected Google as the web hosting provider for Prince William’s official wedding website. The site, available at officialroyalwedding2011.org, contains news updates, photo galleries and videos and everything is hosted on Google App Engine.

What’s new here? Web developers have long used Google App Engine to host web apps in the cloud – see Sleeping Time and Tall Tweets for example – but this is probably the first time that Google’s infrastructure is being used to host a ‘static website’ of an event that will get plenty of press attention and web traffic in the coming days.

Host your own website on Google App Engine

There are quite a few advantages with hosting websites on Google App Engine. First, it should be more reliable since your site will get served through Google’s own data centers.
Second, if you have a low traffic website, it is highly likely that you won’t have to spend a penny for web hosting. You get 1 GB of free storage space for hosting your images, HTML web pages and other files and 1 GB of bandwidth per day. If you exceed that quota, you pay-per-use similar to Amazon S3.


Ready to jump?

With a regular web hosting company, you rend some storage space on their server, you then transfer your HTML and other files to that server using FTP or cPanel and your website is ready to serve. Google App Engine works in similar manner except that the file transfer mechanism is a bit different.

Step 1: Go to appengine.google.com and create a new application. If you have never used App Engine before, you might be asked to verify your mobile phone number before you can create a new app.

Step 2: Give your application a name – it should be unique and may only include lowercase alphabets and digits. For this example, our app identifier is “thisismyawesomewebsite”.

Step 3: The next two sub-steps may scare some of you but trust me, they simply require you download and run two installers in the given sequence.
3a. Download and install Python from python.org.
3b. Download and install App Engine SDK from this code.google.com.

Step 4: Download and unzip this file – website.zip – somewhere on your desktop. It contains a basic website with some HTML pages, images and CSS that we’ll try to host with Google App Engine.

Step 5: Open the app.yaml file with notepad and replace the word ‘labnol’ with the application identifier that you created in Step 2 above. Save the changes.

Step 6: Finally it’s time to deploy /upload our website to Google App Engine. Open the Google App Engine Launcher program from the Start Menu, choose File – > Add Existing Application and browse to the folder where you unzipped the website.


Hit the deploy button, input your Google Account credentials and within seconds, your website should become available online at abc.appspot.com where abc is your unique app identifier. Later, if you add or modify any web page, press Deploy again and your new /edited files will get uploaded to App Engine.

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