Remember that whole thing, where social news and bookmark site Reddit came out asking its users for donations without offering any specific features or much of anything in return? Well, it looks like it's working.
While the Reddit team only offered its "undying gratitude and an optional trophy", it looks like users have gotten some new site functionality and even a potentially more stable site in return for their donations.
A new browser add-on by L.A.-based Border Stylo aims to bring the social web experience closer than ever before to the experience of sitting next to a friend and pointing to something on your screen. The Glass add-on (now in private beta for Firefox, coming soon to Google's Chrome browser) combines elements of social bookmarking, Facebook and the humble Post-It note.
Glass lets people talk about the Web with their friends in the bluntest way possible - by posting comments, photos or video in boxes on the page, directly over whatever headline, photo or element they want to highlight.
In Reddit's continuing effort to weed out spammers, it has taken another not-quite-traditional step: email verification.
Okay, so it sounds perfectly traditional, but the site has gone and taken it one step further - email verification that is completely voluntary.
Out of the seven social media platforms considered in web analyst firm StatCounter's latest look at social media websites as drivers of traffic, Facebook unsurprisingly comes in with nearly half of all traffic.
The site takes a look at social media driven traffic and gives us a look at how the lay of the land has changed over the past year.
Yesterday morning, social news and bookmarking site Reddit announced to its users that they were being drafted. For what, you might ask? The ongoing battle of sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon against that ever-present foe, the spam submission.
Using crowdsourcing to combat spam submissions on an already trained populous that already votes on everything seems like a smart way to outsource an otherwise difficult task.
Yesterday, Jay Adelson stepped down as the CEO of Digg and was replaced by the company's founder Kevin Rose. Soon after this change of guard, Kevin Rose announced some sweeping changes for Digg. First of all, the controversial DiggBar, an iFrame toolbar Digg introduced one year ago, will be replaced by basic links from the Digg homepage again. Second, Digg will unban all previously banned domains. All of these changes will go into effect once Digg v4 launches in a few months.
Bookmarking service Delicious has just rolled out a Google Chrome browser extension.
Like other Chrome extensions we love to play with, this one is lightweight, fast and useful. There's no bulky sidebar here. Bookmarks can be created and saved with a miniscule "TAG" button and they can be searched from Chrome's excellent omnibar. So, do you think this will prompt loyal Delicious users - many of whom had been holding out on Chrome in favor of Firefox - to switch to Google Chrome entirely?
When we first came across Faviki back in 2008, we were intrigued by the concept of a social bookmarking service built using semantic tagging capabilities. Instead of organizing bookmarks based on user-created tags, Faviki tags come from structured information extracted from Wikipedia. After Faviki's update earlier this year which improved the tagging process and introduced OpenID support, we again wanted to make the move to this semantic web-based service. There was just one thing standing in our way: no bookmark import feature.
Unfortunately, until now, the only way to use Faviki involved abandoning your extensive bookmark collection and starting fresh. Today, things have changed. Faviki has, at long last, added a Delicious import feature.
Digg CEO Jay Adelson told FOX Business tonight that ever since rolling out Digg Ads, the social link-sharing service has been making money and that profitability is right around the corner.
Although advertising continues to be the only seemingly reliable model for monetizing content-centric websites, Adelson reports that click-through rates are higher than expected. That being said, typical rates for online advertising are generally abysmal, so if Digg's ads are working better than most, good for them, and let's all study their model. Read - and watch - for the rest of the story on how Digg has grown and will continue to expand and monetize.
Starting today, social bookmarking service StumbleUpon is allowing users to beta test a shiny, happy redesign of their site.
The new interface is streamlined and more social with an updated relationship system. A focus on consistency (e.g., limiting user control of visual elements) and removal of clutter (e.g., presenting tags in a drop-down menu rather than a cloud) characterize the design changes made. Also, a few tweaks to group sharing were made to help reduce share-spam.
