Website owners are starting to realise the impact that social media has on their traffic and site interaction but for some it can be a thankless task. Webmasters need to identify the best social networks to submit their content to but they also need to supply the tools so that their website visitors can submit also.
In one of our recent articles we mentioned how Facebook was making inroads into traditional social media sharing sites, standing out as a large traffic referrer on it’s own. Whilst, there are quite a few tools that enable you to share your content with friends on Facebook, one really simple and easy to setup button stands out for me, so much so it now sits pretty on this very site. This article details how to install a Tweetmeme-like Facebook share button onto your website or blog, giving your website visitors the opportunity to distribute your articles amongst their friends.
It can be a difficult task trying to manage all of your online identities that you use on the internet. Chances are you already own at least one email address, you are registered on a social networking service and interact with likeminded internet users via instant messaging and services such as forums.
Whilst there are quite a few tools that allow you to consolidate your online usernames and identities, one service that distances itself from the rest is Chi.mp, a service that does just that and also gives your own domain and website in the process.
I was lucky enough to gain a beta invite for this service a few months ago and have been actively using it so I could take advantage of it’s features but also review it for WillINeedIt. Chi.mp is now out of beta and available for all to use, this article aims to explain it’s multitude of features and how you can use it with maximum efficiency.
Facebook is a behemoth, harbouring over 300 million users, housing 40 million status updates a day and hosting 14 million new videos a month, it’s easy to see how the service has started to make inroads into the other media sharing services like YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr.
One of the most popular types of media shared on the website are photos, mainly down to the simple usability of the site and the fact you can add and tag photos of friends. This allows users to view lots of different user submitted photos, possibly from the save event from many different perspectives. With 2 billion photos uploaded a month, the proof is in the statistics.
There is one drawback of having being tagged in a set of photos from the same event you attended, you don’t physically have a copy of them. Sure you could sit there and download them, one by one, but that would take all day and night if it was a particularly big album. Luckily for those people who use the Mozilla Firefox browser, there is a clever little addon that allows you to download entire Facebook albums with the click of a button.
A few months ago, Facebook went the way of their competitors (Myspace, Bebo et al) and enabled it’s millions of users to personalise their Facebook profile by registering a unique username that could be directed to their personal profile page. These usernames, or what the internet media have dubbed “Vanity URL’s”, were snapped up quickly by internet savvy users but the service is still available for all today.
In a recent Facebook blog post, the company released information stating that users could now use their Vanity URL to log into their Facebook account, removing the need to enter an email address when wanting to access your account. Read after the jump, how to register your own Vanity URL if you don’t already have one and then how to access your account thereafter.
Google Chrome, one of the newest players in the browser market, has seen a progressive rise in it’s usage throughout the year, really since it’s release. Many coders who had previously embraced open platforms and created extensions for browsers like Mozilla Firefox have started to flex their programming skills for a different browser with the addition of a extension platform within Google Chrome.
That said, some of the better extensions available for the Firefox browser have yet to be ported over to it’s newest competitor. Chrome users are crying out for extensions such as the Web Developer Addon, Adblock (although there is a prototype available in the form of Adsweep) and also the Stumbleupon Toolbar. The Stumbleupon Toolbar is a massive tool for online marketers and social news submitters, some will simply not use Chrome until a toolbar is developed for it.
We recognise that there isn’t a toolbar just yet but it is still very easy to get your Stumbleupon fix. You can still browse, submit and share Stumbles without the addon and we will show you how.
Some people have a love affair with Facebook, they use it to organise their lives and keep in touch with their hundreds, possibly thousands of friends. Others have an account to simply say they have one, they hate the idea of updating statuses and sharing their lives with people they don’t know.
There comes a time in every Facebook users life when they want to give Facebook the chop and delete their account. Most of these people think they have deleted their account but all they have simply done is deactivate it. This article shows you how to completely delete your account and everything associated with it.
If you have been reading WillINeedIt for a while now, you will have noticed that we display a TweetMeme counter displaying the number of “ReTweets” a certain post gets via Twitter. This is a way of gauging how many people are sharing our posts and allows us to be able to connect with them again in the future.
Today, we have moved over to a new ReTweet button, one created by a certain John Resig. This ReTweet button plugs into the URL shortener we use on this blog; Bit.ly and will display the amount of people that have used the link to visit a page on this blog. If you are interested in learning how to place this inside your own blog, follow the instructions after the jump.
Lots of Twitter services has popped up over the year. Some of them are useful, and some of them are just fun to use, such as Twitpaint.
Twitpaint, is a website designed to “paint graffiti and post it on Twitter.” Your followers will then be able to click on your link, and be able to “remix” your drawing. Whilst it’s not very useful, it’s fun.
If you haven’t heard of Twitter, wake up, pull yourself from under that rock you have been living under and look in. Twitter is a game changer, it has singlehandedly evolved how the internet masses communicate, all within 140 characters. You may have an account or have thought about creating one but worry about finding relevant people to follow and have people follow your activity. Today, we aim to list eight simple tips that will allow you to kick-start your Twitter experience and enjoy all the service and it’s user base have to offer.
You have been on a fantastic week away with your friends and family. They all took their own digital cameras and managed to capture the moments you were unable to. You all return home, download the many pictures you took onto your computer and then upload them to your own Picasa Web Album.
The problem with this is you have to singlehandedly visit each one of the websites your family members and friends uploaded to and download the albums they created. Not many online photo storage websites allow users to share albums and collaboratively manage the photos within them.
That has all changed with the latest update from the Picasa Web Albums team. In a move to bring more of a social feel to their service, they have enabled what they call; “Collaborative albums”.
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