Splatforms

When Digg launched Version 4 in August 2010, users weren’t happy about it. Some called it a revolt. As Kevin Rose said recently in a Reddit AMA, the company made some decisions during the rollout that “went against its core” to stave off declining traffic. As the story goes, it wasn’t long before the layoffs started and Rose (and other execs) resigned from the company.Betaworks acquired Digg in July and put its News.me team in charge of the site. Six weeks later, the new operators launched a complete overhaul of Digg. However, while interest in Digg had remained (a surprising amount, according to new CEO John Borthwick), the new site removed user access to old data, i.e. everything they’d ever posted to the old iterations of the site, like Diggs, comments, articles, etc.The new owners had focused on getting the new version up and operational (with less expensive infrastructure) instead, but they promised a rectification to the historic data problem in the near future.

Joshua Schachter, who in a past life founded the social-bookmarking service delicious and sold it to Yahoo, has released Human.io, the newest offering from his startup, Tasty Labs. Last year, Tasty Labs launched Jig.com, a “market place for things people need.”What is Human.io? To me it appears to be a micro-task platform that uses mobile devices as a way to distribute and aggregate tasks. Schacter defines it as a platform for doing micro-tasks.

Building your company’s social media presence takes time and effort, and it starts with a solid strategy that includes goals and measurements. However, even the best strategy can be undermined by common mistakes that you may not even realize you are making.Here are five of them.

Everyone likes free stuff, right? A proven method in boosting followers, social media contests are nothing new. However, the popular platforms and rules to follow are always changing, so it’s important to evaluate your options regularly. Here, we take a look at the leading social media site, Facebook, and the ever-growing new kid on the block, Pinterest.

It’s got the stylings of Martha Stewart, Tory Spelling’s preferred dwellings, the curiosities of our own Katie Couric, and, recently, Reese Witherspoon just could not stop gushing about it.”it's just this incredible place with the most incredible crafty images ever,” Witherspoon beamed on Conan O’Brien’s show.It is the web start-up Pinterest and, simply put, there is a whole lot of interest in the Pinterest.

YouTube has enabled Internet users to watch videos, TV shows, and movies anytime they want to. It has connected people around the world, launched careers of aspiring musicians or singers and witness current events around the world. Significantly, it also has created a new avenue for businesses to market their products or services wherein it reaches new target audience—the online users around the world.It allowed companies to use a medium that cost less than the usual expenses of putting an advertisement conventionally on TV, newspapers or billboards. There are numerous advantages of online marketing enabling businesses to buy YouTube views that can increase their revenues.

Reddit is one of the largest social bookmarking sites on the web. Despite its popularity among millions of users worldwide, it still lacks a dedicated client for Android devices. However, there are a bunch of third-party Reddit applications to fill in the gap. Fresh from the Google Play Store is Reddit ET Free, a third-party Reddit client that is packed with features and claims to be the most comprehensive application to give users the complete Reddit experience.Reddit ET sports ICS-inspired Holo-style menus, columns, dropdowns, and tabs. Also included in the package are several familiar Reddit features, such as threaded comments, a native browser, the up/down voting system, subscriptions, customization with themes, NSFW support, homescreen widgets, custom links, and text submissions.

Location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Highlight are useful for gleaning information about people and places close by. But what if you wanted to tune into the online chatter of those attending a political rally in another state, or see photos being shared at a rock concert halfway around the world?That’s the idea behind Banjo, a startup founded in late 2010 to help smartphone users view all the posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites that are tagged to one geographic location. With its flagship app now counting more than 2 million users, the company is launching a new program.Pin a Post, a free application that goes live in Apple and Google app stores today, lets users save social media posts emanating from a specific spot that they want to refer back to later.

The rules of search have changed. In fact, they change on a daily basis. But never so dramatically has rank been uprooted since the explosion of social media. Social media sites, especially the power houses of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, have become backlink central for affecting organic search results.Social media’s influence on driving business via the web is expected to surpass search engine optimization (SEO) in 2013, according to eMarketer. Web marketers and PR professionals must pay attention to how social media affects search, and ultimately how it can change the rules of online visibility and (online) brand engagement.Prior to Facebook’s takeover of the online universe (800 million active users today), online visibility in natural search was a sum of several measurable components: SEO site compliance on site structure and meta tags/content, directory link submissions and qualified and relevant site/blog linking.

AddThis today announced the integration of Social Sign In to its suite of social plug-ins, enabling users to log into a website using their existing social credentials from the three largest social networks - Google, Facebook, or Twitter. Social Sign In provides publishers with a simplified and lightweight method to take advantage of social identities within the social web’s most comprehensive sharing toolset.“Consumers increasingly want personalized content experiences but resist the inefficiencies and hassle of unique registrations at each site they visit. Social Sign In gives consumers a more interactive connection to the site while providing publishers with accurate authentication and demographic data,” said Charlie Reverte, Head of Publisher Products at AddThis. “Our goal is to use social infrastructure to strengthen the consumer-publisher connection by speeding up registration and sign-in with a secure, privacy-assured process.”AddThis’ Social Sign In delivers new competitive advantages to publishers, including the most lightweight, sign-in capability; the flexibility to host the technology on publishers’ own sites, allowing for access to customer information databases; and specialized access to content and tools. AddThis’ Social Sign In will now be available on more than 14 million domains, to support more than 1.3 billion users monthly.

The aim of Finnish startup Kippt is to improve the way people bookmark, save and organize online links. It is not alone. There are a large number of bookmarking services which offer variations on a similar theme. These include the likes of Instapaper, Pocket and Evernote.The difference is that Kippt is not attempting to be an alternative to these services, but to automatically save all your links in one place where they are easy to search. Now it is rolling out its syncing services.

It seems there is another marketing infographic hiding around every corner of the web, and it will probably fall well short of its potential.Instead of making information easier to consume, many infographics make it harder to understand the information they present or even outright mislead.Here are 5 of the biggest infographic mistakes marketers make with an example of each.

Diffbot’s API uses visual learning robot to instantly identify page content that lies behind any URL. Telesocial releases an extension to their API. Plus: Facebook announces their upcoming World HACK tour, details on the TwilioCon 2012 Workshop Day and 16 new APIs.

So you don’t work for Nike and you don’t have a few million dollars sitting around to throw at a 30-second Super Bowl commercial…don’t worry, there’s still hope! Unfortunately, not every business out there has hundreds of employees and millions of dollars to spend on marketing and advertising. For small businesses and startups with limited resources, implementing the right strategies to grow your business can be a real challenge. Enter social media. Whether you’re targeting a B2b or B2C audience, social media marketing can greatly increase your online presence and eventually convert leads to sales.For any company, social media is a great place to connect with future customers and grow relationships. However, before your business plunges into every social site, here are a few important things to consider.

A week after dropping its invite-only requirement and letting the masses sign up for accounts, social-bookmarking service Pinterest has made another expansion, this time to Android devices and the iPad.Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool for collecting and organizing content you find online by theme, such as women's hats, cake recipes, cat photos or motorcycles. Users mark, or "pin," sites they like and make carefully crafted collections that other people can view and share.Since it launched last year, Pinterest has only been available on the Web and through its popular iPhone app. As the company rolled out new features and expanded into additional languages, it has heard one request back from users: Make an Android app.

Social publishing site Scribd has given itself a new look over the past month or so, with a new logo, a redesigned website, and an update to its iPhone app.CEO Trip Adler and his team gave me a quick tour of the new features last week. The website was previously dominated by your social feed, showing you the documents uploaded and read by other users that you’re following. Now the social feed has been pushed off to the side, and in its place there’s a feed of “featured” content, which has been hand-picked by Scribd.The problem with the old layout, apparently, was the fact that the social feed can be pretty empty when you first sign up and haven’t found anyone to follow. Adler also says the site has lots of good content that “wasn’t getting surfaced enough.” With the new layout, Scribd can help ensure that the best content doesn’t get buried, while also giving new and casual users something interesting to read without their having to hunt for it.

There are plenty of reasons why you'd want Googlebot to recrawl your website ahead of schedule. Maybe you've cleaned up a malware attack that damaged your organic visibility and want a clean bill of health so rankings recover faster; or maybe you've implemented site-wide canonical tags to eliminate duplicate content and want these updates sorted out quickly; or you want to accelerate indexing for that brand new resources section on your site.To force recrawls, SEOs typically use tactics like resubmitting XML sitemaps, or using a free ping service like Seesmic Ping (formerly Ping.fm) or Ping-O-Matic to try and coax a crawl, or firing a bunch of social bookmarking links at the site. Trouble is, these tactics are pretty much hit or miss.Good news is, there's a better, more reliable way to get Googlebot to recrawl your site ahead of your standard crawl rate, and it's 100 percent Google-endorsed.