If you’re like me and fortunate enough to have a mother who is a senior citizen and also a Facebook addict, you can hopefully relate to these moments:

• Mom makes a post on my wall describing her planned activities for the day.
• Mom comments on a photo of me that a friend posted to tell me that she’s glad I have friends.
• Mom sends private messages to several of my friends to say they seem like good people.

So…all of these hilarious events prompted me to write up a quick list of Facebook Etiquette points for my mom…

Your own wall

Post something about yourself or about life in general that you want all your friends to read and comment on.  Only comment on your own wall post if other people have already commented.  It isn’t meant to be used as a monologue or a journal.

Your friend’s wall

Post something related to your friend that you want all their friends to read and possibly comment on.  Don’t post things that are only about yourself, because their friends will be like “who are you and who the heck cares?”.

Private messages

Send something that is private and that only the specific friend (or friends) should receive.

Photo comments

Only write something that pertains to the picture.  Don’t talk about the weather or what you ate for lunch or a synopsis of the latest Twilight movie.

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Feel free to send this list to your mothers too

Once and a while a WordPress plugin comes along that I consider to be a “game changer”.  The Like plugin is one of ‘em.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like/

One of the great things about Facebook Pages is that they can become viral.  It may take you a month to get to 100 “fans” (I guess they’re now considered “people that like your Page”), but you could easily reach 1000 in the next week and 100,000 a week after that.  This is due to the Facebook engine that automagically suggests Pages to your friends, and your friends’ friends, and so on and so forth.  And of course it helps that many Facebook users are addicted and will click “Like” to anything they see.

Well, the Like plugin helps to make your WordPress posts and pages viral too!

See the buttons at the top and bottom of this post?  Those are from Like.

One super cool feature is that it works with the new Facebook Open Graph API which makes it very easy for developers to integrate Facebook applications into websites.   I suppose this is furthering Facebook’s goal to take over the world…but you could at least join them for the ride and get more visitors on the way!

Here’s what the plugin settings look like:

As you can see, it also hooks up to a Facebook application, although I haven’t tested this myself yet.

So what are ya waiting for?  Download and install this wicked plugin and join the viral train.

So, just when you thought you were already overwhelmed with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, along comes yet another social networking/sharing service.

Google Buzz has joined the party.

There’s already lots of rants floating around about why it’s awesome or why it’s great, but I’m going to talk specifically about what should be improved with it.  To be perfectly honest though, I do like the idea of having a social networking tool integrated into Gmail, since I already use it for all my email as well as chat.  Plus, the Gmail search feature is wicked-cool and will undoubtedly be useful with Buzz.

Confusing Privacy Features

Most people want to be able to manually approve each follower, rather than having them auto-follow.  However, they don’t realize that Google Buzz is integrated with your public Google Profile.  So this means whatever you post in Buzz as “public” can be viewed by ANYONE on the internet via your Google Profile page.  Therefore it doesn’t matter if people have chosen to follow you or not.  If you are concerned about the privacy of a post, simply choose “Private” and optionally post to a “group” of Gmail contacts.

No Way To Tell Which Post is New

It’s nice that there’s an indication near the Buzz logo in your Gmail menu of how many new Buzz posts there are, however once you get into Buzz there’s no way to know which posts are the new ones.  So you’re stuck reading through a lot of what you’ve already read.  Definitely a time-waster.

No Tags / Keywords / Categories

These would be very handy to help search and organize our Buzz’s.

Can’t Include an Image in a Comment

When you create your own post there’s a useful link to insert a photo from your computer.  However, this isn’t possible when commenting on your friend’s posts.  There’s been a few times I wanted to include a pic in my comment but wasn’t able to.

Re-Buzz?

Similar to a Twitter Re-Tweet, it would be cool to be able to send a Buzz from one of your contacts along to your other contacts.

That’s about it for now.  Does anyone have other ideas?

For the last couple months I’ve been working on this new Web 2.0 social bookmarking services community.

What is it all about?

• Rather than submitting merely your own bookmarks to the many services available (like Digg, BlinkList, Delicious, etc.), members submit each others’ bookmarks
• This makes it less likely that you’ll be considered a “spammer” for constantly promoting only your own sites
• This also gives your pages potential to be bookmarked many times with each service, rather than only once like you would do for yourself
• The bookmark submission process happens behind the scenes and is fully automated. You only need to enter your account details once.
• Members are encouraged to only submit quality pages; we don’t want to promote garbage
• The functionality is easy-to-use…it literally takes seconds to add your own bookmarks or to share other members’ bookmarks.
• No more messing around with different tag formats!  SocialAdr takes care of all that craziness for ya.

What prompted me to create this website was a few things:

• Even though SocialMarker is a very useful tool, it can be extremely time consuming because it still involves a lot of manual dragging-and-dropping.  Just to submit a single webpage to 20 services usually takes half an hour!
• I thought about “link sharing” networks which are (as far as I can tell) getting to be pretty outdated in the ever-evolving interweb.  I wanted to come up with a way to combine that philosophy with Web 2.0 social networks and social bookmarking.
• I’m a member of Traffic Drill, a forum in which members can request other members to bookmark their webpages.  But since the bookmarking process is manual and unable to be controlled in a “fair” manner, it’s entirely possible for a member to contribute WAY more to the community than they receive (I was a perfect example of this).  I think it’s a great idea, but I saw room for improvement.
• There’s many software packages out there that do social bookmarking submissions, but for each webpage you have, it’ll only be submitted once to every service.  With SocialAdr, you can potentially have your webpage submitted tens or hundreds of times to each service!  Instead of merely 1 backlink, you’ll get 10, 20, 30…50…etc.  And this all happens on auto-pilot.

I’ve had beta testers in the system for about two weeks now and they’ve been great!  Lots of bugs have been fixed and new features added.

Hopefully in a few more weeks I’ll be able to open it up to the public!

If you’re interested in helping beta test (it’s really not that difficult and you’ll get free backlinks and traffic while doing it), you can either read this WarriorForum thread, or contact me for more info.

 

Edit [Sep 12, 2009] – It’s now open to the public, so go get your FREE account now!

 

The more I learn about this new service being developed by StumbleUpon, the more psyched I get.

If you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon, they are one of many social bookmarking websites, but they are unique in the fact that they offer users the ability to just browse or “stumble” through a never-ending list of sites recommended by other users.  Pretty cool idea.

I read about their new product, called SU.PR (pronounced “super”), from the blog of Tim Ferriss (the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”).

Well apparently SU.PR will allow users to do the following:

• Submit their content to StumbleUpon’s 7.9 million users with each post
• Have their best content showcased in a right-hand sidebar for each page that’s linked to (here’s an example)
• Get suggestions for optimal posting times:  get more traffic per post
• Schedule as many tweets or posts as they want, for any time
• See their click-through statistics in real-time
• See retweets for each post, including the biggest influencers (with rankings)
• Post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, with more platforms to come…
• Use their own short URL (i.e. www.mysite.com/abc123) instead of something like bit.ly

Dang, that sounds pretty bad-ass.  Apparently Tim said while testing SU.PR he started receiving up to 10% of his unique traffic from it, and got 24,000 visits to a single post in 24 hours.  Holy smokes!

Here’s a sample of the SU.PR dashboard:

Well if you’re excited and want to get in on the action ASAP, they’re giving out free beta testing accounts for the next few weeks.  Here’s how to get one:

1. Go here http://su.pr/
2. Click “request one” if you don’t have an “invite code”
3. Follow StumbleUpon on Twitter to get the code when they periodically release new ones