Content aggregation and ranking engine StumbleUpon is releasing a new widget for publishers today that can be placed on a website or blog to help users find meaningful content relevant to them.
The StumbleUpon Widget can be used by publishers to surface content on the site with the best shelf life. The widget will come in three sizes and requires a line of script to be embedded on to a webpage. The widget will surface stories and videos suited to the users' interest based on what has been rated highly by the StumbleUpon community of 15 million users.
Social aggregation magazine Zite (our review) released an update to its application this morning that is a direct response to the Cease & Desist letters it received from news publishers after launching the application in late March.
The company also announced that it has a new CEO as Mark Johnson replaced founder Ali Davar as chief executive. Davar will step into the role of president "where he'll lead the publisher relations team to explore innovations in publisher monetization," according to a post on Zite's blog.
A common theme of our product innovation series has been exploring applications that take advantage of new devices - and the user experience patterns that evolve out of that. Instapaper is perfect example of this. It started out as a web application, then embraced smart phones, and now it's being used by many iPad owners. In a nutshell, Instapaper is an app that saves web pages for reading later. But unlike older 'web 2.0' social bookmarking services, it doesn't just bookmark a web page. Instapaper saves a copy of the content so it can be read later, offline if need be, within the app.
Instapaper was launched in January 2008 by the co-founder of Tumblr, Marco Arment. In fact Arment has only just gone full-time with Instapaper, announcing last month that he's moving on from Tumblr after 4 years as its lead developer. He has big plans for Instapaper as a business, as you'll discover in this interview.
The launch of Digg's redesign will likely go down in the history of social media as a textbook example for how to alienate your users. Over the last few weeks we have chronicled the demise of the Digg community in great detail, but thanks to the latest data from Hitwise, we now have some hard facts about the current state of Digg. At its peak, Digg had over 40 million unique visitors every month. Since the launch of the redesign, Digg's traffic has been in free fall, though. Traffic from visitors in the U.S. has declined 26% since the redesign went live.
Social bookmarking sites like Delicious are useful for collecting bookmarks, but they don't allow users to really draw connections and tell stories. That's where curation-focused services like Pearltrees and Trailmeme come in. Trailmeme, which we first looked at in December, was incubated at Xerox and launches at DEMO this week. It allows users to bookmark sites and then organize them in tidy diagrams, making it easy to highlight the relationship between different items and for readers to browse these links.
Social news and bookmark site Reddit has been working lately to battle against its stereotyping as the less-significant, red-headed stepchild to Digg.
After Digg-founder Kevin Rose revealed Digg's July traffic numbers on his blog, Reddit administrator and programmer KeyserSosa publicly requested that the "entire mainstream media" quit with the diminutive adjectives already, as Reddit looks to have more traffic, not less, than Digg.
Digg's users are still in the middle of their fifth major revolt on the site and the effect of this current uprising is now starting to become more apparent. According to the latest data from Statcounter, referral traffic from Digg to its network hit its lowest point ever on Monday, while traffic from Digg competitor Reddit increased dramatically. Statcounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen notes that "Abandon Digg Day" on Monday turned out to be a "Redd Monday" for Reddit.
Today's the day - the "Oauthpocalypse" - that Twitter users and developers (well, mostly developers) have been anxiously awaiting. It's the day that Twitter will begin using OAuth rather than basic authentication for third-party applications, a move that has implications for both users and developers alike.
At 8 a.m. today, Twitter shut down basic authentication forever and, if your Tweetdeck or other Twitter app doesn't work, there's likely something you can do - update.
AddThis, one of the most popular bookmarking and sharing buttons on the Web, has today released a new version of its sharing menu for the Apple iPad, the iPhone and Google Android. Now, when you visit a site from one of these mobile devices, tapping the button will present a sharing menu that's been built to specifically work with the touch interface of your mobile device and better integrate with its functions, like the built-in email client.
We have to admit - European startup Flattr appears to have its act together. The site is smooth, has an active group of beta testers, received positive press and boasts a famous name - Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay.
But Flattr is diving after a particularly elusive pearl. So far no one has discovered a sustainable system for collecting micropayments from Web users to support those who make the articles, videos, websites, infographics and other diversions we all love. And many have died trying.
