The extending market of URL shortening is growing with Twitter’s user base. Recenlty the whole Digg thing with their bar and all that noise is pretty neat, Adjix (which I loath) and even Facebook are doing their own thing now… So why not include StumbleUpon into this bucket of “we want your traffic, your traffic wants us?” apps.
Makes sense to me. Apparently it makes sense to them as well, hence Su.pr. (more…)
Visual bookmarking sites are handy; and though I don’t use bookmarking sites on a regular basis, they serve their purpose, like this one time I was looking for a link I remembered I wanted to remember, and in doing so I used delicious to save it, and then I was able to refind it… Other than that – I don’t use’m.
Speedtile on the other hand, is pretty enough for me to use, at least more than once. Which says a lot for a bookmarking site in my book.
The feature set: (more…)
My heavens! What’s this? … Really, what’s this you’re reading? A negative review about a site! I’ve only done this once before and have since re-reviewed the site I reviewed poorly and gave it a much better standing based on their improvements, let’s see how I do here.
Zeadoo. Okay, first off, if I made watercraft? I’d kick these guys all the way to the US patent office for trademark infringement, but they’re not, and I’m not, so I believe they’re safe from any seizures, lawsuits, etc. But they’re not safe from Sociosophy.
I’m very forgiving with new sites, betas, hell… I even find the good in sites that barely have any. But something about Zeadoo pissed me off, and it’s simple. Too much bull to get to your shit.
I watched the Zeadoo video, created an account – let’s face it, it looked pretty straight forward in their demo. It’s a whole other story once you’re in there though. If you’ve ever used StumbleUpon, Delicious, Magnol.ia… hell even your own Bookmarking feature in your browser, you’ll loath Zeadoo. The cumbersome and tedious process of data entry for all your bookmarks, even with a bookmarking Firefox plug in, make this site remind me of hand input data record days back at my first tech job.
Perhaps a remedy will be to allow imports of favorites from other sites, but even still, adding new ones is simply too many steps. Bad UI planning, damn it. Interacting with them via the “Dashboard” is also simply too much… My attention span on the Nowternet is about || < that short, and like I said, I’m a nice guy on the net looking for the good in sites.
Zeadoo, your logo is pretty, the concept is nice – it’s not new – but you guys have GOT to look at your market before you design something more complicated than any other solution like yours out there. Especially this late in the game.
When it comes to finding the hottest pages on the web, the number one spot you should check is Technorati. The interface is as simple as any social-bookmarking site, and the premise is much like all the others as well – the more people that favorite the same link? The more popular it is.
Technorati, much like the other social-bookmarking sites, has a “favorite this page” option, adding it to a list of personalized awesomeness you find neat. But unlike digg, delicious and magnolia, there’s an attachment to your blog, allowing you to keep track of your “Authority” – whenever someone adds you as a favorite as well – increasing your Authority and thus helping you score new exposure and more traffic, sweet!
But before you get too excited, if you’re running your own blog, and hoping that you can use Technorati to bootstrap your traffic via you adding posts of yours to favorites and getting linked from other sites – chances are you’ll continue to rank below the 4,000,000 marker and pretty much get lost in the vast nothingness, unless you have a way to turn water into wine.
Before the soapboxes get pulled out, it is no mystery that it takes more than one site’s benefits to gain exposure – and it never hurts to be a part of a site like Technorati, in fact, I like the interface for the social-bookmarking better than digg, or reddit, etc; but if you’re looking to boost traffic to your newly spawned baby, Technorati is not your site, from my experience, reddit, digg, propeller and the coveted stumble upon are the most responsive.
But before you go running off to any of those sites, make sure you write something worth reading – really worth reading – otherwise you’re just helping making all these awesome utilities completely worthless with your lame rubbish.
Adding link stuff to the blogging goodness via Snap (SnapShots) or AdaptiveBlue is something I’ve been noticing more and more on web sites. With Snap in particular – I can’t say I’m sold on the idea, though it does increase the usability of your content, it still just seems like a pain in the ass when accidentally scrolled over and OH!… browser lags while it loads the div with the info… But still, these dandy tools are indeed… handy at times. So… if you use’m, use them sparingly.
Snap is pretty damn slick, they integrate YouTube, Wikipedia, flickr, The Google, Amazon and Myspace into their content window when you hover over a SnapShot marked link. As you can expect, these links are related to the whatever it is specified, so – yes – increased usability and qualified information of your content. Neat idea, huh?
Same thing with AdaptiveBlue’s SmartLinks. Now, just the simple fact that I have to actually click on the box to see the SmartLinks div instead of hovering over the icon for Snap, makes SmartLinks my favorite of these two link tools, so far. It does seem to be more specialized content, media-based, or specific types of information, but I could be wrong. I’ve chosen to play with AdaptiveBlue’s SmartLinks over snap in the near future out of preference for how it acts.
In general, it would seem that a very giving person is the type of blogger/site owner that would have these on their site. It is extremely informative, that much is certain, and it is nice to give your viewers even more reason to web 2.0 surf their way across the Internet… so perhaps this will show up on here sooner than later.
