ReadWriteWeb

The social Web is noisy. Each individual social network is noisy enough, but there's a second layer of noise - notifications - in which all the social apps compete with each other just to draw the user in. The creator of Handpick sent me along his solution today, and I love where it's going.

Handpick is a social Web app that doesn't interfere with the Web itself. It lives in your bookmarks bar or Chrome extensions. When you find a link you want to share, you click it, and it pops up a simple form for a title, link, description and a checklist of recipient groups you've created. When you click 'share,' it doesn't buzz all your friends' phones right away. It collects links for you all day and sends an email digest to each group in the evening.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published a Request for Comment on a proposed standard for link relations across multiple web formats. From rel="stylesheet" to rel="bookmark," rel="payment," and rel="me," according the the consensus of the IETF community members, link relations are now first class citizens with a centralized Registry where they can be found. The IETF is a nearly 25 year-old Internet standards body.

What does that mean? "Web linking is the most fundamental web building block," says Yahoo! standards wonk Eran Hammer-Lahav. "Typed links - links with a clear semantic meaning - existed on the web since the very beginning, but for the most part lacked any generally acceptable definition... Agreeing on what a link type means across formats is critical for a semantically rich web, in which links are used to provide a richer user experience, as well as better search and automation features."

As we noted yesterday, Twitter isn't so much a social network as a broadcast medium. For most Twitter users, broadcasting information mostly means sharing links. Whenever you share a link, however, there is always the lingering question if your followers haven't already seen this link in their streams before. Thanks to Link Different, you can now easily check if any given link has already appeared in your followers' streams.

Facebook users who choose not to link their user accounts to Facebook's public Pages are ending up with blank profiles containing no information at all. If you haven't experienced this problem, it's probably thanks to the somewhat high-pressure tactics Facebook is using to get you to accept these changes.

The next time you visit your Profile page (if you haven't done so already), you'll be introduced to the new "Connected Profiles" option, one of the many potentially concerning privacy-related changes announced at Facebook's f8 developer conference last week. With this option, the text in your Facebook profile section where you list your hometown, education, work and interests, is now being linked to the respective pages on Facebook. So for example, if you live in New York, that's linked directly to a page for New York. If your favorite TV show is "Lost," you'll be linked to that show's page, and so on.

Those who choose not to link, though, are informed via a Facebook pop-up box that their Profile page will be left empty.

Sharein, the new bookmarklet-based service for link sharing, which launched earlier this summer, has just today introduced some new features which further solidify this up-and-comer as the new must-have tool for sharing links on the web. The service, already an easy way to share to Twitter, Facebook, and via email, is most notable for its ability to track statistics like views on the back end, a feature that should appeal to marketers looking for hard data on their social media efforts.

Today, the analytics feature has been enhanced to provide even more data than before, this time with a specific focus on Facebook shares. Also new today is the integration of Tweetmeme and Digg data into shares as well as YouTube stats for video shares. For anyone using Facebook to promote their content, Sharein has just made itself indispensable.

ClikBall is a handsome looking new application built in part by Jesse Andrews, the man responsible for Greasemonkey script repository Userscripts.org. Described literally, ClikBall is a browser plug-in that allows you to share links and messages with friends, groups, privately, on Twitter and on FriendFeed. The service is in Private Beta, but Userscripts visitors were just welcomed in and the Andrews says ReadWriteWeb readers can join (and follow me) via this link.

That description above doesn't really do the service justice - it's the user experience that makes ClikBall stand out. There's something magical about the grace of the app, and there's clearly a premium put on sharing links that lots of other people will want to click on and share.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're big fans of URL shorteners (although not all URL shorteners mind you). We use them for microblogging sites where we have to conserve characters, tracking how many people are clicking through links we share, and keeping groups of links organized. That's why we like Sqworl, a URL shortener that acts like a lightbox for links we're sharing.