Buffer just launched a new Buffer Button that any blog or content site should know about. Buffer is a simple service that lets users save up links in a stack. When a Buffer user sees a story he or she wants to share to Twitter or Facebook, he or she puts it into Buffer with a click. Buffer then automatically sends out the link from the user's social accounts at the best times for audience engagement.
It's a step beyond manual scheduling, like in HootSuite or TweetDeck. Buffer times the posts to go out at the right times and frequencies to get maximum clickage. Buffer studied its users' tweets and found that it increased clicks on links by 200%. Now publishers can put the Buffer Button on their content and make it easier to share.
An app called Path launched its version 2 do-over yesterday. "The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love," it calls itself now. I ignored this app until today. All I saw from version 1 was emoji spam in my Twitter stream. Let's take it as read that version 1 failed to catch on, hence version 2. How does an app help you "share life with the ones you love?"
The tech "world," or "scene," or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went "stealthish" in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does "love" arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It's a life stream. An ego trip. "Share life with the ones you love," especially yourself.
Every year at this time, ReadWriteWeb picks out the best of the Web over the past calendar year. Our annual Best Of series will be even bigger and better than ever in 2011! We have no less than ten themed 'top 10' lists coming your way over the following four weeks before Christmas, each prepared by a different member of our writing team. We'll also survey the top trends of 2011, along with other regular features such as Best BigCo and LittleCo of the year. To kick things off, today we present our list of the 10 best social network and social media products of 2011.
Almost every Web product these days has some kind of social element. But to make this list, the product has to have social networking or community building as a core part of its offering. So without further ado, here are our top 10 Social Web products of 2011:
Even though Black Friday might be happening on Thanksgiving Day after dinner, there is obviously still an offline component to the whole ordeal. Location-based check-in service Foursquare, released an infographic on its blog yesterday that includes tips for finding deals. Users who are looking for an additional option can try Poorsquare, an app that uses Foursquare data to surface nearby locations where you can score free stuff.
ThinkUp, the social media management tool that matters most, hits version 1.0 today. It lets you store all your social activity from networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in a database you control and search, sort and analyze it. If you have a Web server that can run a PHP application, you can take control of your social network data. Ever wanted to search for a tweet more than a couple days old? Don't bother with Twitter search. ThinkUp is the only way.
ThinkUp lets you archive all your social network activity. It's free and open-source, so it's a totally extensible platform with a growing community of developers. You can search, browse, publish, analyze and visualize your content and data in all kinds of ways. Under the terms of service of your social networks, they can delete everything you've created without warning. ThinkUp lets you own your content. This isn't a review; this is a public service announcement. Go get it.
Today Hootsuite announced its new social partnership with Google+ Pages. HootSuite users can manage their Google+ circles, post public updates to select circles, search public posts and push out messaging to select circles. Much like tracking @ mentions on Twitter, HootSuite social media marketers can also see who +1s, shares and comments on Google+ posts. Users can also create, edit and remove Google+ circles through the HootSuite dashboard. This update is available to HootSuite Enterprise clients only, at least for now.
As of October 2011, 850,000 U.S. veterans were unemployed. The jobless rate for post-9/11 vets hit 12.1 percent. With an estimated one million service members scheduled to leave the military between 2011 and 2016, it was high time for President Obama to find new ways to help vets find civilian jobs. In addition to launching a government resource on WhiteHouse.gov, Obama teamed up with LinkedIn and Google to offer additional resources for veterans.
LinkedIn now tags job postings that might be best for veterans, and Google offers additional tools for the building the military veteran community online.
The ReadWriteWeb Global Meetup is coming next week and we have a bunch of great locations lined up for our readers to congregate and talk tech, social media and the evolution of the Web. The Boston contingent of ReadWriteWeb is ready to rock with a fine group of people coming from all over the field of technology, from startups and entrepreneurs to students to some of the finest public relations folks in the industry.
We will be meeting at Meadhall, in the shadow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology right across the Charles River from Boston in Cambridge next Tuesday, Nov. 15 at 6:30 p.m. We are trying to make the ReadWriteWeb Boston meetup the biggest of them all, so come on out and say hello. Libations are sure to flow.
Storify, our beloved storytelling tool for the social Web, has just launched a redesign of its homepage that features top stories, topics and users. It also displays a banner across the top, filled with clickable links to the people of Storify, bearing a clear message: "All the stories happening on social media..."
Those aren't the words of a mere curation tool. That sounds like a news site. The homepage of Storify is now a destination that displays the big stories of the day according to citizens of the Web. That's homepage material for anyone who spends time on social networks, which means it's a natural place to put some ads and turn Storify into a media business.
Google just sealed an acquisition deal with Katango, a company that builds algorithms for automatically sorting friends. The Kleiner Perkins-backed company was founded in 2010. The Katango team will be incorporated into the Google+ team.
Katango's previous product was an iPhone app that sorted Facebook friends into lists automatically. Google could use the same algorithms to make the work of maintaining Google+ circles easier.
