Social Bookmarking Script
Creating your very own social bookmarking website has become very easy thanks to ready made social bookmarking scripts like MarkIt. If you have looked at websites like Digg or Delicious then you know how popular these sites are and how much value they have with all their members, indeed in 2005 Yahoo purchase Delicious for around $30m and the speculation between Google and Digg has been going on forever with numbers of up to $200m being talked about for the value of Digg.
Evidently there is a lot of money to be made from owning a social bookmarking website! However in the past many people have been put off setting up competing sites or even niche sites because the development costs alone can run in to the tens of thousands of dollars.
But if you choose a ready made social bookmarking script such as Agriya’s MarkIt you are saving yourself time, effort and money, not to mention the fact that you could be up and running within hours of buying this software. The benefits don’t end there either because MarkIt has all the same features of the top social bookmarking sites and more. Your users can even download a Firefox toolbar to instantly bookmark websites.
One thing to be aware of though is if you want to create a social bookmarks website then taking on the likes of Furl, Delicious and Digg is probably not going to get you very far. Choosing an appropriate niche is the key, so you could start a website about a particular sport where people can post news stories, rumours and forum discussions that are related to that sport. So if we took soccer and looked at all the rumours surrounding Christiano Ronaldo, your social bookmarking site about soccer could become the place to go to get a round up of all the stories about this sensational footballer.
Obviously soccer is just an example, but there are thousands of other untapped niches which you can exploit and cash in on by using social bookmarking software.
You can create a social bookmarking website with MarkIt
MarkIt costs just $87 and comes with more features than any other bookmarking script (or major website!). Find out more
Social Networking Software
Building a social network website has become very easy nowadays with the availability of high quality social network software like iSocial. With just a domain, hosting and iSocial anyone can create a social network around the topic of their choice, whether it’s for celebrity gossip, school alumni or a local community group, online social networks can benefit a whole range of people.
Nor do you have to make concessions on the type of features because when you choose software like iSocial it comes with all the same features as you are likely to find in Facebook, Orkut and Hi5. With groups, online chat, profile pages, photo albums, videos and more you get everything the ‘big boys’ get for a fraction of the price.
Although most social networking software does everything that the major players can do, you might need to customize the design or add some of your own features specific to your requirements. For example you might need to add some geo-location feature or integration with SMS. Regardless, iSocial is very easy to customize since it is built using PHP and mySQL (just like Facebook!) and has an external templating system which means you don’t have to be a programmer to change the layout and design.
To make iSocial and even more compelling choice to power your social network, it has Open Social integrated which means that all the apps that have been built for sites like Orkut and MySpace can also run on your website! You can create your own Developer Network for your social network and since iSocial uses Open Social for the external applications, there are already tens of thousands of developers who can start creating applications for your site right away.
iSocial lets you create your own social networking software
So while you might not want to create an exact Facebook Clone, using ready made social networking software can save you a lot of time, money and frustration compared with developing a site from scratch.
Advertisers try to Use Geolocation – and the Law Wonders if it Should
In the world goes crazy over privacy breaches on Buzz, and Facebook, there is a lot of material in the new geolocation services, to get worked up over. There are nearly 100 location sharing applications out there, and one thing that really comes across anyone who has used any of these, is that Privacy features are not really central to the way these applications work.If we thought that Facebook and other social networking applications, outraged our privacy, that sounds so old next to what geolocation services are able to do. The US government is quickly trying to catch up with protecting the rights of the citizens affected by these new services. It can’t be long before advertising services try to geo-locate you to serve you advertisements for the place you are in at any point. But now, if everyone can find you – you could be in trouble with the government, or with your job for it – if you can’t ever keep your life to yourself. And will the police be allowed to check on your location if you forget to turn off that function when you are on the run? Do they have the right? All these will be thrashed out, over the coming years as privacy begins to be defined as has never been imagined before.
Meanwhile, there are major new services jumping on the bandwagon all the time. Google Chrome’s latest version, uses a new kind of geolocation. It looks at your WiFi network, and all the ones around you to determine where you are. And the most anticipated entry in the arena is Facebook – as it plans to announce at its f8 developer conference. Facebook has been trying to get this feature right for about a year now, and has included location sharing regulations on its boilerplate. App makers are now going to be able to make use of the Facebook location API to get some real useful functions out there.
But Facebook isn’t really trying to steal market share from established players like Foursquare. In fact, Facebook plans to make use of all the location services, to present them all on its network. What Facebook seems most interested in, over destroying any startup’s business model, is in trying to gain advertising share from Google. Facebook has had revamped business pages for months now, in hopes of enticing small business advertisers away from Google. Google’s Latitude is a great competing service in this area.
With such a Fragmented Geolocation Market, how does one keep Track?
South by Southwest (SXSW) is a group of immensely popular cultural festivals for music and film in Austin, Texas,that rouses tremendous interest in culture buffs everywhere, and this year’s edition, is set to start this week in March. The reason this is of interest to a tech blog like this is, that social media services get a tremendous boost catering to events of this magnitude where there is always something spectacular happening undiscovered that someone or the other needs to spread the word about. But in the months leading up to the festival, social media reports have been completely swamped with one new buzzword – Geolocation.With breakout services like FourSquare, and Gowalla leading the charge, and now with Twitter and Facebook getting in on the act, one has to wonder, if geolocation as a market really big enough to take all this action? To begin with, there are at least 50 new geolocation services coming up right now. And that is on top of the players that make it crowded market as it is. But some of them can be quite useful. Take the Twitter app SitBy.Us. If you are at a conference for a festival, it lets you see exactly where everyone is, physically.
Vicariously is another. It collects check-ins across all kinds of services around the city, to give you the exact locations of the people you’re interested in. It is quite Beta as of now though, as it isn’t really reliable. Or take AOL Lifestream – you don’t have to track specific people on it, you just need to check out the location you’re interested in, and it’ll give you the names of everyone who was there. And it works with Foursquare. So there are alliances forming already; and this can’t be a really good thing. There are so many competing services, that people will probably miss out on check-ins on a service other than one’s own. These geolocation services just need to get together and share their data, before the market gets too fragmented. Gowalla for instance, isn’t readily available on any of these third-party services. Google of course, has an answer – GeoRSS. As you could probably well imagine, the service aggregates information from all the location services for any given place.
When geolocation really takes off, we’re going to get used to a new way to look at a representation of our neighborhoods on the Internet. And if people are not to lose interest, new applications will have to keep coming in. But these innovators are going to have to offer new ways to people harness all the information. Facebook and Twitter could be answer to this problem. They are entering the geolocation space soon; and after the really throw their weight behind their vision of getting every service to come together.
Reasons for Twitter Holdouts to Join in the Fray
As wildly popular as Twitter is, most people still haven’t tried it, for the simple reason that there is nothing they believe they have to say worth sharing with the world. Which is a curious thing to say; Twitter is as much about subscribing and following, as it is about tweeting and posting. Twitter could be the best newspaper, the best gossip column or the best community gathering place – anything you need it to be – to answer to your very specific interests and viewpoints. This is in fact, true of even the most active tweeters out there. Tapping into what everyone has to say about a subject that is close to one’s heart, a favorite movie, sports team, thoughts about George Bush or anything, has quickly become the most important part of connecting through Twitter. You just need to be there in the cloud of information people share with you, to understand how useful, and appealing it can all be; and while you’re at it, you’ll probably find yourself reacting to what you read, with a tweet of your own. You probably won’t come away from your time on Twitter empty-handed; there are tens of millions of tweets published on Twitter each day. Here are more reasons to turn Twitter on in your life, if you haven’t done so already.Conferences and trade expositions are such difficult places to keep track of people in, that conference organizers quickly realized how useful a tool Twitter could be in sending out thoughts and messages to groups of people all at once; and to use the ubiquitous Twitter hash tag for this. For instance, if you are attending a medical conference called UniMed, you just need to add #Uni or something to the end of each one of your tweets, and right away, everyone who is tuned in to that hash tag, reads you.
Twitter is also great as a way to know what is around you in places you travel, or go to. Twitter now allows you to search for trending topics, for whatever geographical area you are in. There are apps for Twitter with names like Twitter Local, that allow you to look for tweets coming out of places close to you. And if you want to find out what happen to be the most discussed topics in the area you are in, you could check out Happn.in.
And of course, all this leads up to how you can participate yourself one day. A good way to participate, if you feel you have something to actually contribute, is to simply ask the question. To set the ball rolling, you could ask a question on a popular topic that people are sure to have strong opinions on. For instance, you could ask people if watching the Academy Awards ceremony, is as hip as it once was. Or, if there is a strange physical symptom that is bothering you, you could put out a question about it on twitter, and watch wonderful inputs for and by the truckload. Twitter is what you make it to be. And the best part is, it’s greatest uses, probably haven’t even been discovered yet.
Is the Mutual Friends List on Facebook but the Warmest Social Networking Tool Ever?
Facebook hardly stood still long enough in 2009 to let its millions of new members get a little used to being on board. They’ve brought redesign after redesign to Facebook, and never stopped trying their hand at getting privacy on Facebook right. That is only understandable; the social networking scene is only a couple of years old, and certainly does need to find itself before it settles down to something more constant. And even if Facebook does try a little bit to look like Twitter, it could be forgiven that. But Facebook’s greatest invention this year has to be the Mutual Friends feature. To begin with, this isn’t anything that other competing social networks couldn’t begin to copy. When you log on to your account on Facebook, and visit someone’s page, Facebook will display on the bottom left, a little list of all the people this person knows, that you know too.At most times, this could be the perfect way to break the ice with someone. The moment you learn someone’s name, you can look him or her up from your Facebook account on your mobile, and walk up with a great line like, ” Oh I seem to recognize your name; aren’t you friends with my colleague from work? I’ve heard so much about you”. And if you meet a stranger who’s a little more with it in the social networking scene, you could even have a little fun, and explore what friends you have in common. Once they know that they have a certain number of friends in common with you, they absolutely will have to take you on too. Twitter could never do something like this; Twitter is about following people, and not about being friends with someone.
No other service grows at a half-million new members a day; pretty soon,you could be looking up people in a room, not just by who they know in common with you, but what interests they share with you. If you catch someone at a party about whom you get an alert for Facebook that he enjoys the music of the same rock group you do, you are in business.
Via – to Repost links on Facebook With
One of the most well-used and addictive features on Twitter has to be the ReTweet. People find an idea they like, they just pass it on so quickly; and millions of people can get on to it in no time. It is practically viral. Facebook,the name that gets mentioned in the same breath as Twitter, happens to be much more popular, and is much larger; but it doesn’t spread news like wildfire quitein the way Twitter does.Facebook is all about privacy; Twitter is all about letting it all hang out, with almost all Twitter profiles listed as public, open for anyone to see. On Facebook, you could not even make your profile public until a year ago. Facebook has the need to change its culture, turning away from jealously guarded privacy, to compulsive sharing. So far, names have not been clickable on Facebook as they have been on Twitter; and of course, there is no simple ReTweeting syntax. ReShare has been Facebook’s lukewarm attempt at bringing in the sharing function, but it hasn’t been successful so far.But Facebook is not done with tweaking its own ReTweeting feature. They’ve just released a Facebook feature called Via. It lets you repost something a friend shared with you, and it stamps the originator’s name on it with a Via attribution. It’s online already; you just need to pick up an item a friend has posted in your News Feed, and click on the Share button. You’ll get a Via option here with the name of the original friend stamped on it. When you finish sharing it, it will show up on your profile, with a link that goes to your friend’s profile too. Your friends will also find them on their News Feeds, and that is the closest thing to the ReTweet that you can imagine.
But Via Is only useful for links that someone’s posted. You can’t Via a status update, or your picture for instance. But it’s a first step, and it could evolve. They have the most useful kind of reposting feature up now with the link reposting ability, and that is what counts. Facebook will probably have a service like Tweet meme tracking how far a reposting of anything goes, and it could make Facebook really valuable in a world where instant real-time search is becoming deeply mainstream.
Is it Really Relavant – Following Bing’s Market Share?
People can’t stop breathlessly following Bing’s core search share in the US and across the world. Every fraction of a percentage point that Bing gains over Google and Yahoo is noted, analyzed and digested like it was a sports statistic. For instance, Bing is reported to be growing at a faster pace each month than the month before. In December, Bing took an additional half percentage point to bob close to an 11% market share. Following the search engine share battle very closely is serious business; why then should these statistics close the club to Google, Yahoo and Bing? Why ignore the elephant in the living room, namely,China’s Baidu?Google has been in the news (and when hasn’t it) this past week for holding its ground in taking the moral high road in not submitting to China’s demands in censorship. Google’s announced pullout from China has earned it quite a shine for its reputation. It’s dignified walkout in China has done more for its business than just earn it a good name though. China’s Baidu search engine is no longer just a Google copycat making do with scraps in the dark. Baidu happens to be bigger even than Bing, and will easily soon overtake Yahoo to be number two after Google. Baidu now has 20% of the search market worldwide, not just in China.
If you really want to tabulate search market shares, how can you do it when you ignore the soon-to-be number-two player? With China’s search market losing Google, the market share that is now up for grabs iss already being carved up by other local Chinese players in search. China’s Internet businesses seem set to become great competition to Google for everything on the Internet, valuable Internet company acquisitions included. The other American search companies hardly seem primed for aggressive market positioning anyway. The fear now is that,China could end up owning valuable Internet properties in the US, and that that would be a blow to Internet freedom.
If you Always Absently Click on “Accept Rcommended Settings”, Here’s Why you Should Not
Facebook has been hard at work trying to really find its balance between privacy, user-friendly design, and open community. The latest instance in its self-discovery occurred in December, when they made some really contentious changes, that reworked everything about Facebook’s take on privacy. Some accuse it of trying to be more like the privacy-free Twitter. If before December’s changes, you went in and used Facebook’s Tool to keep your privacy settings unchanged, you would have nothing to worry about. If you chose to go with the recommended settings in the Transition Tool dialog box though, would you be distressed to learn that you just allowed Facebookto publish all your private information, photos and all, to just anyone?Anyone at all can see your status updates too, because that is the default position you chose. And if you have certain search settings in place, anyone just searching on the Internet, can see all that information appear in their general search listings too. But to change this to something more sensible is not difficult. You just need to go to the “Profile Information” setting under the Settings menu, and make sure that the Posts by Me parameter is set to Only Friends.
How about getting your personal data off Google? When you bring up the Search Settings page on Facebook, you get a message that tells you that there has been a malicious rumor abroad that leads people to believe that Facebook information is all spilled out on Google. Facebook assures you that this is not true. Nothing could be more misleading. Because Facebook’s Public Search setting in the Search Settings page, lays down what exactly you’re putting out on Google. If you have Allow selected, all information you have on Facebook that you chose to share with “Everyone” goes out on Google. You will need un select Allow to to get a reasonable bit of privacy back.
The forums are on fire with how irresponsible of Facebook it was to throw your personal information so quickly to everyone with an Internet connection. No doubt, quite a few people found their marriages breaking up, and found themselves losing their jobs because information and pictures they thought was private on their Facebook pages, was suddenly all hung out for the world to see.
Bing Tries to be too Thoughtful for Google
Have you ever wondered how it is that when you try to look up the weather on the Internet, all the brand-name weather sites just can’t agree on what the weather is going to be like. Well, Microsoft certainly has noticed this, and is trying to win some points trying to smooth this over for for you. When you search on Bing for the weather in your local area, we will certainly get your usual list of major weather forecast websites; but if you venture further, you can find an automatic Bing Compare laid out for you of what all the other websites say. And to help you decide which website you prefer for your forecast, Bing will even write up a journal for you of what the weather has been like over a period of time. Additionally, Bing will also match up the forecast against what really happened, and over the course of a month or two, to give you recommendations on which forecast service is best to choose.Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.
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