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?

Recently one of my non-computer-savvy family members asked me about this.  I knew that a few months ago it wasn’t even possible.  With the Gmail Labs there was an option to set a “canned response” which included a font type/color/size.  But this was sorta of a PITA way to set a default font to be used in ALL emails.

Apparently in late December 2009 Google heard the complaints and finally created a Lab feature that allows us to set a Default Font.  Woot!
 

Here’s some instructions:

1. Click the green lab beaker in the top right (or go here https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings/labs)
2. Scroll down about 2/3 until you find Default Text Styling (or CTRL-F to search for it)
   
3. Click Enable
4. Scroll up to the top
5. Click Save Changes
6. Click the General Settings tab at the top (or go here https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings)
7. Set your Default text style about half-way down
8. Click Save Changes at the bottom

Now marvel at how with this time-saving hack Gmail became even more awesome

SocialMarker is a free tool that I use fairly often.  It makes it a heck of a lot easier to submit my sites to social bookmarking services, than if I was to do it manually.

After my negative review of SocialBot yesterday I figured I should discuss what I do find useful for social bookmarking.

So why do I use SocialMarker?

• It helps me get traffic.
• It helps me get a lot of backlinks, some from high PR sites.
• It works with many of the popular social bookmarking services…51 in total!
• It’s free!

Now let me explain how it all works:

1. First I load up whatever page I want to submit in FireFox.  I’ll use im-fun.com as an example.
2. I have a “SocialMarker” bookmark in my Bookmarks Toolbar.  The SocialMarker site explains how to get this setup.
3. I click the “SocialMarker” bookmark.
4. Another tab appears with SocialMarker loaded and the Title and URL of my page auto-populated.
5. I manually enter text (a description of the page) and appropriate tags.
6. I select the social bookmarking services that I want to submit to (I usually choose the “Dofollow” and “Best” ones, not all of them).
7. I click “Submit”
8. SocialMarker loads up a frame that opens up pages for each service, with buttons at the top to navigate between services
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9. I then go from service to service, logging in (often I’m already logged in from a prior session), and submitting my page by dragging and dropping each field from the helpful bar at the bottom of the screen.  Often SocialMarker is smart enough to populate these fields without me having to do anything.
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So, although there’s still some manual effort involved, SocialMarker does make it easer to submit sites to social bookmarking services.  And it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s FREE.  I’ll keep using it until I find something better or win the lottery and can finally afford to spend more money on internet marketing tools.

One last thing I should mention – I also use the Tag Format Converter tool (or the downloadable spreadsheet) that I wrote.  There’s 5 different tag formats that social bookmarking services require; you can’t just use the default comma-separated format for each service.  Yes, it sucks ass.  Hopefully one day those social bookmarking bigwigs will decide on a standard format.  But that’s just wishful thinking

Well, at least the best one that I’ve found so far…haha.

Why?

Let me list the reasons…

• It’s FREE
• It’s got a name generator > Creates pronounceable names using language rules and parameters
• It’s got themes >Combines your keywords with preset wordlists
• It’s got a spinner > Combines various methods of search
• It’s got a dictionary > Looks for word relations in semantic databases; combines them with your suffixes or prefixes
• It’s got a randomizer > Looks for word relations in semantic databases and rearranges the word parts to come up with new names
• It’s got a blender > Uses your Favorites or Custom Theme to create random permutations
  
• It’s can handle bulk phrases > Enter up to 100 keywords or phrases on separate lines

Some of the stuff it does is insane!  There’s no way I could come up with even 10% of the domain names it generates by myself.

Anyways, I’m a big fan.  You should cheggit out…