As a blogger I routinely asked myself the same question, until I finally realized that I (as the CEO of Woopra, the Web analytics company) had access to all the data I needed to make an absolute determination about which areas deserve the most attention.

This meant looking beyond my own site's statistics and finding out what was broadly occurring across all domains. Only through a comparative analysis can we determine where our strengths and weaknesses lie as compared to the average.

The Methodology

Woopra monitors well over 100,000 websites, however, all of our client's data is kept separate for security and privacy reasons. This meant the first step was to set up a new specialized server that would poll all other servers in our network in order to aggregate the data.

After building this new platform, the Woopra team provided me with the raw information that I used to create the charts below. This report is based on hundreds of millions of data points collected during the month of June 2010.

Virtually every category of Website is represented in the dataset - education, news, government, SMB, Fortune 500, blogs, adult - and while it clearly doesn't reflect all of the sites on the Internet, my guess is that it is a statistically significant and representative sampling.

Top Referrers of Traffic

For the purposes of this analysis, referrers have been segmented into different categories in order to more easily compare traffic. For example, there is no use in comparing Google to Flickr since they are not categorically related. If we're making a determination which search engine to focus on, Flickr would not be in the mix - and if we're looking for a photo hosting site, Google would not be in the mix. The four main referral categories that drive virtually all traffic are: Search Engines, Media, Social Bookmarks and Social Networks.

Social Network Referrers

Perhaps the one result that was the most surprising is the Social Networking category. Although Twitter seem to be the talk of the town, Facebook is the 900 pound gorilla when it comes to actually driving website traffic, sending nearly 7 in 10 visitors from the Social Network category. LinkedIn comes in a distant yet still respectable third place.

There is one giant unknown in this area, however. Many Twitter users access the service through applications instead of via Twitter's website. These applications do not report http-referrer data to Web servers, which makes it impossible to tell where the clicks originate. The same can be said about traffic driven by mobile apps (including Facebook).

All of the other players in the Social Networking category cumulatively amount to less than 3% of inbound website traffic.

Social Bookmark Referrers

Social bookmarking sites are also extremely sought after sources of traffic, with the highest profile member of the group being Digg. Interestingly, this is another case where a smaller source seems to receive a disproportionate amount of attention, since StumbleUpon drives nearly double the traffic to websites.

Another surprising standout in the Social Bookmark category is YCombinator's Hacker News site, which drives 12% of the traffic in this category. Reddit and Del.icio.us drive 5% and 2%, respectively. Interestingly, SlashDot (the grandaddy of them all) drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures - although webmasters still call the rush of traffic that can take down a website a "Slashdotting".

Search Referrers

In the Search Engine space, perhaps the only surprise is the absolute dominance of Google when it comes to actually driving traffic to websites. For example, Experian's Hitwise published a press release setting Google's share of the search market at 72% in May 2010. However, Woopra is seeing 92% of search visitors originating from Google.

This begs the question: Where does the discrepancy lie?

• Is the Hitwise data set more representative of the whole?
• Are there more searches taking place on other search engines that don't result in click-throughs to websites?
• StatCounter's Global Stats seem to closely mirror Woopra's data.

Regardless of the reason, what we do know is that focusing attention on optimizing for Google search is absolutely the right thing to do. (Here's the official Google SEO starter guide.)

Media Referrers

The media referrer category is reserved for sites that focus on various forms of multimedia, including images, video and audio. These sites are often overlooked as a source of traffic because they are destination sites; however, media sites can also drive large volumes of traffic.

As an example, world-famous HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff posts travel photos on Flickr, and includes a simple link back to his site in the description of each image he posts.

This technique generated nearly 13,000 pageviews on StuckInCustoms.com in April alone.

What's more notable is that Flickr is not the dominant referrer in the Media category. YouTube drives 900% more traffic to websites than Flickr. This is accomplished the same way, via links in the description of the video.

Amazingly, 99% of referrer traffic in the Media category comes from only four providers: YouTube, Flickr, Last.FM and Vimeo.

Lessons Learned

The only question we are trying to answer with this analysis is where it makes sense to focus resources and attention in order to drive traffic. So here's what we know:

• Search engine optimization specifically targeting Google's index is key. Working hard to satisfy other search providers probably won't pay off as much as spending the time elsewhere - like Facebook and Twitter promotion.
• If multimedia isn't part of a site's strategy to drive traffic, it should be. Adding photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube will not only pay off in terms of adding content for your brand, but will also drive eyeballs to your site.
• Sites that are not seeing traffic from Facebook, Twitter, or both, are missing out on a major traffic-generation source. Additionally, if the balance is not in Facebook's favor, you are likely under-utilizing this channel.
• Don't waste time promoting your site on any Social Media network other than Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Your time is better spent elsewhere (like YouTube or Flickr for example).
• By all means, submit articles to Digg in the hopes of making it to the homepage, but more importantly make sure articles work their way into StumbleUpon, which can bring a larger, more sustained and less server-crash-creating stream of traffic.
• For those looking to more accurately track Twitter click-throughs, some service providers such as Bit.ly enable tracking of short links. The bad news is that the tracking is not aggregated into existing Web analytics provider data.
• This analysis doesn't take into consideration back-links (which Web authors should pursue whenever possible) because on the aggregate they do not drive global traffic. However, links from related or high-traffic sites can not only dramatically increase site traffic, they can positively impact search result listings.

Questions, comments or alternative interpretations? Drop a comment below and let us know!

Top photo by Lars Sundstrom

Before today, bookmarks in Chrome for Mac were unbearable. Now they are a joy to click, drag around, delete and rename. The only remaining problem I see? Major issues with Adobe Flash. Is there anything else you wish was fixed in Chrome?

Unfortunately, the ability to quickly tap a button to add something to your reading list was so easy - perhaps too easy - that users ended up with long, unwieldy lists of saved content. Now ReadItLater is introducing a new Digest feature which helps you get caught up by automatically sorting and organizing articles for you.

ReadItLater's creator Nate Weiner calls the new Digest "Read It Later with a brain." Instead of being presented with a simple list of headlines as you were before, the Digest organizes all your articles and groups them into topics.

Its layout is somewhat reminiscent of Feedly, the popular start page made up of your Google Reader RSS feeds and Twitter posts. Like Feedly, which organizes topics by Google Reader folder names and tags, the Digest also employs a categorization system of sorts. The difference is, in ReadItLater's case, that filtering and organization is performed automatically with no extra effort required on your part.

Articles you saved about the latest gadgets would end up in one section, for example, and those about politics would end up in another. Even if you're typically focused on just one topic - like, let's say technology - the Digest is able to break down those similar articles by sub-category.

Case in point - my digest. All the articles are focused on tech but are broken up into categories like "mobile," "Apple," "business," and "advertising." The sorting algorithm slips up a little though and creates one page of "Technology" articles - well, that would be all of them, wouldn't it? It also oddly categorizes a CNet article about Google Buzz's privacy issues under "advertising." Still, even with these small misfires, this new organized homepage - like a personal TechMeme of saved content, makes it much easier to know where to begin attacking your long list of unread items.

Interacting with Articles and other Features

When you click on an item to read it, it pops up in a separate overlay window on the screen. Options at the top let you see "more" or "less" of the article or you can click "original" to be redirected to the website where the article was first posted. And as before, you clear an item off the list by clicking the check mark.

Other Digest features include an "edit topics" option that lets you create your own categories and a sharing feature that allows you publicize your digest for others to read.

Future Plans: ReadItLater for iPad and Premium Services

For now, the Digest is free for all beta testers on a first-come, first-serve basis. However, in a few weeks, the new Digest option will transform into a subscription-based premium service. Those who use ReadItLater's free service will be presented with just a simple list of headlines as before while the Digest will only be available to subscribers. Pricing for the service will be announced in the coming weeks.

Weiner says this represents "a very good taste of what to expect from ReadItLater on the iPad," hinting at the service's future offering for users of Apple's highly anticipated slate computer.

Those interested in beta testing the Digest feature can sign up at http://readitlaterlist.com/digest to try the new service for themselves.

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.

Delicious Import and Common Tags

With the new semi-automatic Delicious import feature, Faviki users can enter in their Delicious information and the service will import their saved sites. However, before the import is initiated, Faviki displays a list of sites along with suggestions of "Common Tags."

Common Tags are a new open tagging format introduced this year which help eliminate some of the problems inherent in user-generated tagging systems. Prior to common tags, users could create a number of different tags that mean the same thing. For example, "new_york" and "nyc" could both mean the New York, the city. Also, there is the problem of one tag that refers to different things such as "jaguar" the animal and "jaguar" the car. With the new standardized format, tags are linked to concepts complete with metadata and their own URLs. That way, "new_york" and "nyc" would both be known to mean the same thing and an article about an animal tagged "jaguar" would link back to the concept for the animal. The metadata in these "concepts" provides additional information about the item being tagged, too. For example, a tag for "obama" would be linked to a concept which indicates that he's the President of the U.S. and married to Michelle Obama.

After Faviki suggests the appropriate common tags for each link being imported, you can make corrections and suggestions as you see fit. Also, if any of your own Delicious tags don't resolve to a common tag, you don't have to fix that issue before import. Instead, the next time you go to use that particular tag, Faviki will prompt you to define it then.

Automatic Posting to Delicious and Twitter

Another nice feature in today's upgrade is that you can continue to use the Delicious service to complement Faviki. Through automatic posting settings, your bookmarks tagged in Faviki will copy over to Delicious. Not only that, but you can continue to use your Delicious tags, too, once they're mapped to common tags after import. Twitter posting is also supported as of now.

While this update is a relatively minor one, it was a much-needed feature in order to get users to make the big switch from one service to the next. Now that we don't have to abandon our bookmarks - and can even still use Delicious if desired - Faviki looks a lot more appealing.

According to Google's blog post about the beta release, the sync feature has to first be activated on each of your computers where Google Chrome is used. To do this, you'll need to download the beta build of the browser available here. Once installed, click the "wrench" menu (yes, the one with the wrench icon) in Google Chrome and select "Synchronize my bookmarks" from the menu that appears. Sign into your Google account in the dialog box that pops up. If you've already set up Sync on another computer, you'll then be prompted to confirm that your different sets of bookmarks should be merged together. In that case, click "Merge and Sync" to complete the process. Finally, click "OK" when you've finished.

Not only does this feature sync your bookmarks, it also creates a copy of your bookmarks file on Google Docs in a new folder called "Google Chrome." (Wonder what else will go in that folder in the future?)

What's in Store for Sync

For now, the Sync feature is only synchronizing browser bookmarks, but the framework behind Sync is ultimately designed to handle the synchronization of other kinds of browser data as well. As to what sort of data that could be, Google can't provide any official confirmation just yet. However, they did say that you could imagine that "this type of infrastructure could be extended to other types of user data such as passwords" in the future. We'll speculate that it will eventually include those passwords, your browser history, and whatever favorite websites appear as thumbnails on the New Tab page. After all, if Mozilla's Weave Sync prototype can handle those sorts of tasks already, there's no reason to believe that Google couldn't do the same.

Because the new Sync feature uses an XMPP connection to synchronize the changes, changes made on one computer are synchronized immediately to another. Not just quickly, mind you, but immediately. This is possible because XMPP is what's known as a "real-time" communication protocol - the same one that powers Google Talk, the company's IM service.

The use of this sort of technology hints at how Google plans to make their Chrome web browser the core of their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. The new OS will run web applications "in the cloud," a radical change from current OS offerings where many applications are still installed on the computer's hard drive itself. With Chrome (the browser's) ability to synchronize data in real-time between computers, it's easy to see how a cloud OS could operate. It wouldn't matter which machine you used, your data would be available, stored in the cloud, synchronized, and all accessible upon login to your Google account. That prospect is either amazing or terrifying depending on your trust level when it comes to Google. Perhaps it's even both. 

Chrome Gets Faster, Too

While Bookmark Sync is the most interesting feature to debut in the new beta, there are some notable speed improvements to mention, too. The latest build improves performance by 30% since the current stable release of Chrome and by 400% since the very first stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests. 

As noted earlier, speed was a major factor in Firefox's 3.6 beta 1, released just this Friday. Both companies are going head-to-head when it comes to browser speed, JavaScript performance and startup times, but no official speed tests have been done yet to compare the two new beta releases.

To download the latest build of Google Chrome beta, head over to the Chrome beta site here. The official beta requires Windows XP SP2 or higher.

1. Mutual reinforcement of user expertise and document quality: A user's expertise in a particular topic depends on the quality of the documents she or he has found, and the quality of documents in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have found them.
2. Discoverers vs. followers: Expert users should be discoverers - they tend to be faster than others to identify new and high quality documents...SPEAR gives more credit to users the earlier they find high quality documents.

After analyzing more than 500,000 Delicious users and 2 million shared bookmarks, the solution produced a set of trustworthy users. No spammers were found in the top 200 recommendations.

While there are obvious uses for SPEAR in shopping and friend recommendation engines, says Noll, "The SPEAR algorithm itself is not restricted to the online world. We imagine to use SPEAR, for example, for estimating the expertise of researchers by analyzing scientific publications. Such publications - whether available as online versions or printed out on paper - provide all the information we need."

Expertise may have an algorithm across all industries. Be first and be fascinating. For more information on SPEAR visit Michael G. Noll's site.

If you haven't yet used Xmarks, you're missing out on one of the better bookmarking services available on the net today. Instead of having you bookmark and share your favorite sites with a network of friends like social bookmarking services Delicious and Diigo do, Xmarks lets you make use of the bookmarks you have saved right in your web browser itself. Once installed on your computer, the Xmarks add-on will keep that bookmark list in sync with any other computers you use, assuming they too have Xmarks installed.

That alone would make Xmarks a useful service, but it doesn't stop there. The company uses the data collected (anonymized of course) to recommend sites to you through integration with Google search. In your search results, Xmarks icons highlight top sites based on how many people have bookmarked them. Hover your mouse over those icons to see quick site info like popularity, rating, and related topics or click though for more details.

Xmarks for Chrome

Unfortunately, early adopters who made the leap to the newest web browser on the block, Google Chrome, have had to go without Xmarks for some time. And it's definitely one of the add-ons which make you question whether going Chrome-only is even really possible. Luckily for this group, the wait may be up: Xmarks has built a version of their extension for Chrome users.

The Chrome extension program is still very much under development - in fact, unless you're running the dev release of Chrome, this feature is out of reach. (See our tutorial on installing Chrome and Chromium side-by-side for another way to play with the latest Chrome features.) But you brave early adopters are now invited to test out the Chrome bookmark sync feature by signing up for the closed alpha program here. As you test the new extension, you can check the Xmarks for Chrome news page for updates on known issues and recent changes. The alpha release doesn't yet support advanced Xmarks features like the discovery features mentioned above, nor does it support sync profiles or running Xmarks on your own server. However, those features will be added in time.

Update! Invites Available!

We spoke with Xmarks and they're willing to give 10 ReadWriteWeb users exclusive access to try the alpha service without having to sign up and wait for approval. To get your invite, be one of the first 10 people to leave a comment on this post. Remember you have to provide your email address (it will not be published).

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/xmarks_comes_to_google_chrome.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/xmarks_comes_to_google_chrome.php Product Reviews Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:21:26 -0800 Sarah Perez Read It Later, a cross-platform browser extension for saving online articles for later reading, has just debuted their newly updated iPhone application. This latest version introduces a number of useful features for voracious mobile readers including support for articles spanning multiple pages, support for sites requiring logins (like WSJ or NYT), new sharing features, and a lot more.

But the bigger news from this company is the release of an API that will allow anyone to build their own Read It Later applications - and not just for mobile, but for any platform.

The Read It Later application on the iPhone, available in both a free and paid version, lets you mark articles you're reading in Safari using a customized bookmarklet. Originally, the installation of this bookmarklet was a bit of a challenge as you first have to save a link then edit it, but thanks to iPhone OS 3.0's introduction of copy-and-paste, the process is much simpler.

With the update to Read It Later version 1.3, iPhone users will have access to a number of new features. Although each one is a minor tweak or upgrade, when combined, the overall experience of using the application is greatly improved.

1) Better Access to Articles: The first of the many changes includes support for multi-page articles. These articles will be detected by the application and combined into offline web and text modes. Also supported are articles that sit behind a paywall or are password-protected in some way - such as those on the Wall Street Journal's site, for example. Now Read It Later can store that content by caching your login credentials so you don't have to enter them again when the app needs to download that content. And while you're reading these saved articles, a new scroll bar makes it easier to navigate.

2) Reading List Improvements: To keep track of your reading list, the new app introduces a "Currently Reading" section where your list of "to-read" articles are tracked. It even remembers your position in every article you're reading! When you finish an article, it's moved to the newly created archive (the "Recently Read" section).

3) More Sharing, Rotation Lock (Pro Users Only): For users of the Pro (paid) version, you'll now be able to share articles to other iPhone Twitter applications like Twitterlator, TwitterFon, and Tweetie. Also added is Evernote, which complements the current list of sharing methods that already included Facebook, Delicious, and email.

Another new feature for Pro users is the ability to lock the rotation of the phone so that it stays put in the viewing mode you want (portrait or landscape) - a feature we wish the iPhone itself would include, to be honest!

The Read It Later API

As developer Nate Weiner explains on his blog, "as a solo developer, it's just not possible for me to develop for every mobile device and browser." That's why he decided to open up his API so others could build apps that do everything his does including tagging, syncing, account management, and more.

Hopefully, this new openness will encourage other developers to step in and help build applications for Palm, Android, Blackberry, and Chrome or implement the good features he hears suggested to him on a regular basis.

There's a good chance that developers will jump on this opportunity - and not just because Read It Later already has a user base of 1 million that grows by 5000 new users per day - that's just one incentive. The other is that API is open for both free and commercial applications, meaning the first (or best) apps developed for new platforms can actually earn money for their creators, just as Read It Later has done for Nate on the iPhone.

To access the API, sign up for an API key here.

For the new iPhone applications, you can download Read It Later Free here or Pro here ($2.99).

Earlier this year, Zotero, which is based at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, opened up the online components to its service when it released the first beta of version 1.5 of its plugin, including the ability to access a backup of libraries online and sync between different computers, as well as some very rudimentary social networking features.

Today's update represents a major step forward from Zotero's first online offerings. Now, users who are working on collaborative projects can finally share their research in an easy, straightforward manner. If you are working on a research project in a group, for example, you can now easily create a new group and all the members of the group can just add the papers and books they found to this new group, including notes and other remarks they added to the new entry.

Sadly, though, Zotero doesn't offer a storage solution yet, so every group member still has to track down the actual documents (the team is looking into adding this function, though).

Groups Make Zotero a Great Tool for Users Outside of Academia as Well

This update will also make Zotero more interesting for users outside of academia. While the service's focus is obviously on making it easy for academic users to manage their research and to create bibliographies, Zotero can also function as a general bookmarking tool for any kind of purpose.

Coming Soon: Recommendations, Storage, Feeds

Some of the most exciting changes to Zotero are still ahead. The team also announced that it expects to roll out a recommendation engine in the near future, as well as a storage solution for sharing attached files (PDFs of academic papers, for example), as well as the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds from public groups and libraries.

Make a Backup!

If you are already using Zotero, we recommend that you back your library up before you update. In our own experience, Zotero updates have never been a problem, but the data you have saved in Zotero so far is probably something you don't want to lose due to a freak accident.

Because the iPhone doesn't allow users to easily copy and paste a code snippet into a bookmark (yet), installing the bookmarklet is a bit complicated, but the company provides a good set of instructions, and installing the bookmarklet shouldn't take more than a minute.

Once you have installed the bookmarklet, you just have to open up your bookmarks folder, click the Read It Later bookmark, and the page will be saved for you. Because your data is saved on the company's server, you can easily sync bookmarks from multiple devices.

In the app itself, you can then read your bookmarked stories in the built-in browser at your leisure. You can also sort your reading list by date, title, or site.

Read It Later's most important feature, however, is that it caches the content of your saved Web pages and lets you read it offline. Thanks to this, you can catch up on some of your reading while on a plane, for example.

Pro Version

The paid version, which costs $2.99 (iTunes link), adds a number of great features to the app, including a 'Tap To Save' bookmarklet that allows you to save any link on a given page (see this video for how it works), a full-screen reader that hides the Read It Later bookmarks, the ability to share links on various social bookmarking services, and an unread count on the apps icon on the iPhone's home screen.

Verdict

Read It Later's closest competitor is probably Instapaper, which also offers a free and pro version (at $9.99). Both apps are very similar, and Instapaper has a dedicated following that swears by the product. We like both apps, and would recommend that you try the free version of both Read it Later and Instapaper to see which one works best for you. For us, Read It Later's 'Tap to Save' bookmarklet is a killer feature in the pro version, but not everybody will really need this.

Where Are the Other Cloud Agents?

Back in December, we wrote about the rise of cloud agents (a term coined by Chris Arkenberg). These agents are automated applications that help us parse through the data swarming around us to provide us with the information we need. At the time, we highlighted a service similar to Tweecious called Twitchboard, another app that also posts the links you tweet to Delicious. According to the Twitchboard site, more services beyond Delicious were "coming soon," but here it is April now, and no others have been integrated. That's disappointing to say the least, but what's even more disappointing is that these sorts of "cloud agents" are so few and far between.

At the time of the previous post, some people missed the overall point, thinking we were raving about a Twitter to Delicious cross-posting app. The truth is, we were excited about this concept of automated agents. Unfortunately, since that time, we've seen very few apps that fit the description. In fact, only a couple of others really come to mind...and to be frank, we're not sure if they even count.

One such service is SocialToo, a "social web companion" which has the ability to automate many tedious Twitter tasks like catching you up on your follows, unfollowing people who didn't follow you back, deleting all your friends, or automatically following people for you. It's the service's automated, "set it and forget it" behavior that we think might allow it to be classified as a cloud agent. Another is "Twollo," a Twitter service that finds like-minded tweeters and follows them for you automatically.

Within the Twitter ecosystem, there are probably slews of others which we just can't think of right now. But do apps that automate tasks within Twitter count as cloud agents? They're not all parsing information to separate signal from noise (well, maybe Twollo is), they're just saving us time. We would love to see some "real" cloud agents emerge that provide more than just automation. We want intelligent cloud agents, too. Know of any?

LookSmart acquired Furl in September 2004. At the time, the company announced that it wanted to leverage the data it gathered about users' online behavior through Furl in order to create better search algorithms for web search. Over time, however LookSmart has withdrawn from improving search and the company sold off its FindArticles search engine to CNET in late 2007. Given that Furl is not part of LookSmart's core business anymore, it only makes sense for the company to offload responsibility for the service. We can't help but wonder if LookSmart actually tried to sell Furl but, given the current economic climate, wasn't able to find a partner that wanted to acquire the service directly.

A Good Fit for Diigo

Diigo looks like a good fit for Furl, as it also provides social bookmarking services at the core of its product. Furl at one point looked like it had a bright future ahead of it, but it never really took off. In February 2008, Furl launched a major redesign of its site, which included interesting new features like cached-copy archiving, export in bibliographic formats, and recommendations. According to Diigo, Furl has about one million users - though, as usual, it is hard to say how many of these are active users.

It is not clear how (or if) Diigo will integrate Furl into its own product, but in the announcement, Diigo stresses that it will release version 4.0 of its service soon. Whether this will already feature some integration of Furl's features remains to be seen. For now, Diigo has released a tool that allows Furl users to easily transfer their bookmarks over to Diigo.

After installing a small Firefox plugin, Facette adds two icons to your status bar - one for bookmarking new pages and one for accessing your bookmarks. The Facette site itself presents both the standard, tag-based view of your bookmarks and Facette's own, more structured data. Because Facette sits on top of Delicious, all your Facette bookmarks are automatically also available on your default Delicious page. Indeed, Facette works by creating a number of new tags in your Delicious library.

Being a research project, Facette is still a little bit rough around the edges, but it looks like a great way to keep your Delicious library more organized - especially when you are using Delicious to keep track of a larger research project. If you decide to use Facette, the developers also request that you sign up for a user study on the homepage, though this is completely optional.

This synchronization feature was already part of Opera's desktop browser, but version 9.7 of the SDK will also give developers the ability to integrate it into their own devices. According to Opera's CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, Opera wants to give operators the ability to create a unified experience across their triple-play offerings and on phones, computers, TVs (or entertainment devices like the Wii).

Opera Zoon

The new version of the SDK also includes Opera's new hardware-accelerated zooming capability for devices with small screens. While not as elegant or intuitive as Apple's multi-touch gestures, Opera Zoom, which saw its debut on the Nintendo Wii, does work quite well.

Syncing Bookmarks as Competitive Advantage

Opera already syncs its bookmarks with the online version of Opera Link, but it would be great if Opera also allowed you to sync with other online bookmarking services like Yahoo's delicious. Other devices like the iPhone also allow users to sync bookmarks between the desktop and mobile phones.

Now that web browsing is slowly becoming a standard activity on mobile devices, being able to keep bookmarks in sync is clearly starting to become more important. Opera is in a good position to leverage its experience in cross-platform development here, though Mozilla and other browser developers are also working on similar projects.

Unfortunately, no one knows when Google will release an update for Chrome that will provide add-on support. But until then, there is a way to at least simulate the use of browser add-ons. This is done using bookmarklets (small pieces of javascript code) which you can easily add to Chrome's bookmark toolbar.

Google Chrome Bookmarklets

Thanks to the blogote web site, there's a useful list of Chrome bookmarklets available which has been updated off and on since September. However, at the time of writing, the site seemed to be suffering from some sort of CSS design issue that had the blog comments overlaid on top of the post, rendering it unreadable. (Update: this has now been corrected).

We decided to recover that data and recreate the list here as a resource for our readers while also adding several additions of our own.

HOW TO: To use the bookmarklets listed below, just drag and drop the link onto your bookmarks bar in Chrome.

• Share in Google Reader - Share the web page you're on using Google's RSS Reader. There's also a Note This in Google Reader bookmarklet which lets you share the item while adding a note along with it.
• Stumble it - Add this link and click on it whenever you want to Stumble a page you liked. Another way of stumbling a webpage can be found here.
• Gmail This - Email any page using Gmail. For Google Apps Mail, try this instead. (You will need to replace "yourdomain.com" with your own domain name).
• Linkify - Convert plain text URL's into hyperlinks
• Socialize - Submit a blog post from Google chrome to more than 50 social bookmarking website with a few clicks.
• Google Pagerank - Since Google toolbar was not available for Chrome, you can't use the toolbar's smart Pagerank system. Instead, drag this bookmarklet and click on it whenever you want to check the Pagerank of any website or blog.
• Twitter now - Drag this bookmarlet to Chrome and  click on it whenever you feel like updating your Twitter account. You'll get a pop up which will let you update your twitter status and check messages.
• Tumblelog - If you own a Tumblr blog then this bookmarklet will allow you to quickly post to your tumblelog.
• Dictionary - This bookmarklet lets you look up words in the dictionary. If you are in need of a Thesaurus, though, just drag and drop this Thesaurus bookmarklet to your toolbar. Another, similar bookmarklet called Reference is available, too.
• Translate - Click this bookmarklet to translate any web page to English. You don't even need to know the source language.
• Post to vi.sualize.us - This bookmarklet posts your favorite pictures to the photo-sharing web site vi.sualize.us.
• Delicious - Save a page to social bookmarking site delicious with this bookmarklet.
• Share on FriendFeed - Share a link to social media lifestreaming site FriendFeed.
• Snipshot - Crop and rotate photos on the web, with Snipshot.
• Digg - Digg a web page using this bookmarklet.
• Clip to Evernote - This bookmarklet saves pages to note-taking application Evernote.
• Take Screenshot - Take a screenshot on a web page using WebShotsPro.
• Google Bookmark - Bookmark a page using Google's own Google Bookmarks service using this bookmarklet.
• Adblock+ - This Adblock bookmarklet removes java, flash, background music, and third-party iframes. It won't render properly on this page for some reason, but you can grab it from the original site.

Bonus!: Get Greasemonkey for Google Chrome - see our previous post for instructions.