People soshalize. They don't care how it's spelled. They just do it.
From the looks of it, Facebook is gearing up its Open Graph platform to be its very own app store, one that could possibly one day compete with the likes of iTunes and the Android Marketplace. The social networking company has been working diligently on the platform over the last year, and recently introduced more than 60 new applications for users to play with.
For most people and most pictures, sharing it on Facebook or Twitter is enough. It may be a quick snapshot of you and your friends out on the town or a cool sunset from a mountaintop and sharing it with our friends and family is enough. Other times, we’re able to capture something amazing, stunning, hilarious, or otherwise important enough to want to expose it to the rest of the world.
With those, we want to go viral. Here’s a (relatively) quick way to maximize the exposure of your perfectly-timed, once-in-a-lifetime shot.
This is going to be a make or break year for Digg.com. After the debacle of 2010′s V4 launch, many in the industry thought that the site would die a quick death in 2011. As the year comes to a close, Digg is far from dead and is poised for a rebound in 2012.
Over the last year since the launch of version 4, Digg has faced challenges in regaining its relevance in social media. Traffic is down. Users are less active. It has seemed at times as if Digg may go the way of MySpace, Propeller, and Yahoo Buzz – social sites that were once big news but failed to adapt to a changing social sphere.
Today, they launched Digg Newsrooms in limited beta. If it’s as successful as they hope, it could mark the shift that the site has needed to get back to the top of the social news game.
One of the biggest complaints of Digg has always been in sorting. Even before V4 was rolled out nearly a year ago, it was often difficult to narrow down results and find content based upon certain criteria without having to do a direct search for keywords. Newswire, a new Digg feature still in limited beta, appears to be addressing the issue nicely.
What do people think social media professionals do for a living? They are not wizards like Gandalf. They can’t raise their staff and command visitors to become permanent residents of a site. [Read more...]
In an effort to improve “shareability” and make the site more sticky, Digg is experimenting with embedded images on the Digg submission permalinks.
For months, Digg has had (off and on at times) inline videos that could be played directly from the Digg post page for certain video sites like YouTube and Break. Last night, Digg started rolling out embedded images as well.
No, Digg is not dead. Not yet. Recent lack of certain actions have prevented the site from growing at the brisk pace it needs to regain relevance, but it’s not too late. Not yet.
If you’d come up to me just a couple days ago and asked if Digg were going to survive for the long haul, I’d have sadly opined, “No.”
After lobbing a few hand grenades in the form of questions at (relatively) new CEO Matt Williams the other day, I’m happy to report I can upgrade that to a Magic 8 Ball-like response of “Cannot Predict Now.”
Did you notice? There seems to be a paradigm shift going on over at Digg that hearkens to the cries of users and publishers alike longing for the glory of old. It would appear that for the first time in over a year, Digg senior management is not only listening to the users, they’re acting upon what they’re hearing.
