To use it, you just have to click and hold for a second and you’ll se a little popup with sharing options for Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper and Tumblr. If you just head to one option and release the button, then it will share using the page’s title. Otherwise you can head over to one option and still hold the click. This will open a form where you can write another title for whatever you want to share. After that you just need to press enter and you’re done.

Check it out in action and click here to install it.

Now here’s what I think Digg must to do regain their users and become the user-powered news website it was before Digg v4:

1. Remove the auto-import feature. It’s really annoying that websites are allowed to import everything they post to Digg. For example, there have been articles from Mashable where they were thanking their sponsors. Also Digg was about choosing only the best and most interesting stories and now is just about who has the most followers.
2. Bring back the upcoming section. The lack of upcoming section only helps the big publishers. Now the users can only get votes from their friends or their friends friends, because the rest can’t see their submissions, while the big publishers have tens of thousands of followers and get much more votes. The algorithm seems to be based on votes and shares on other social networking websites too, which helps them even more.
3. Separate articles, photos and videos. It was just great with the old Digg, when those 3 were separated and one could see what he wanted. Now you don’t know if you are about to read an article or only look at a photo.
4. Bring back the bury button. Now users have the option to hide a story, but it might not be the same as burying it and it’s not that clear for everyone. The bury button was probably the only way to fight against poor article submitted by big publishers and now it’s gone. The only reason I could find for this is that Digg really wants to kill the users and their submissions and transform the social news website into an aggregator.
5. Fix the bugs and stabilize the website. I have been using Digg pretty much lately, because I was curious what they did and wanted to test it. Unfortunately it’s really stressful due to the high amount of errors and bugs. For example, I have 3,082 followers, but when I publish a story I get the message “This story was sent to your 3 followers.” Also I am getting a lot of errors when navigating the website, checking out my followers, voting or hiding stories.
6. Make the top news page default. What’s the point of promoting stories if I see only my friends votes when I login to Digg ? Digg was about promoting interesting things, but doing this goes into the wrong direction.
7. Add the submissions tab to a user’s profile. When I visit a user’s profile, sometimes I want to see what he submitted, not just what he voted lately. With the old Digg it was possible, but now there’s no way of doing this. Also the “friends submissions” page was also really useful. Usually people follow others because they like their submissions and don’t want to follow 50 people and see hundreds of stories voted by them, but submitted by others.
8. Let users socialize easier. A private messaging system or at least the option to comment on someone’s profile would be just great. Digg calls itself a social website, but it lacks a lot of social features.

What do you think about this and is there anything else you would like to see implemented on Digg ?

P.S. You can follow me by clicking here.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams has a scheduled keynote at the South by Southwest conference in March and he should let us know more about the ad network at that time. Also according to GigaOm it seems like Twitter has some major partners around who help them with the ad platform.

Fortunately for them, there already are some ad networks focused on Twitter, like Ad.ly and Izea, which I’m pretty sure Twitter analyzed and will use their experience. According to Twitter, their ads will be relevant and people won’t even think of them as being ads, but that’s what they all say, so it’s probably not the case.

Currently, they said nothing about the ads format, though it’s possible they might promote desktop clients though Twitter’s sidebar and sponsored tweets won’t be missing also, because they have to reach users who don’t use the website.

We shall wait and see what they’re up to.

photo credit: nytimes

If you’ve been using Twitter, then you should know how it works. The more people follow you, the more see what you’re tweeting, though the most important thing is how many of them care and how many really see your tweets. If you’re tweeting about flowers and one of your followers is interested in wines, but does have absolutely no interest in flowers, then he will simply ignore your tweets and not even read them. Also if one of your followers follows thousands of people what are the odds to read your tweets ? They’re really low, because he definitely can’t read all the tweets and those users mostly read only replies and direct messages, which also doesn’t offer you any advantage.

So the important thing on Twitter doesn’t have anything to do with the numbers, but with relevance. You need interested followers that choose wisely who they follow. If you manage to reach those users, then you can consider yourself successful.

How should you manage to do that ? It’s easy. Use the search feature and find people by keywords related to your activity or hobby, follow them or add them to a list, then start interacting with them. You will see the results pretty fast, though don’t expect to become the #1 user by followers, because that won’t happen, as not each and every twitter used is interested in your activity.

After you’ll get a decent amount will followers to which you will interact regularly you will see your followers base growing day by day, because new users will find you on your followers profile when they reply to you or retweet your tweets.

If you want to make a test and see how relevant your followers are to you, then try and ask them something about your interests 3 or 4 times in a day to be sure your tweets get to all of them, due to the different time zones and work schedules. If you only get a few replies, then you should start thinking if you’ve used the wrong promotion method and try what I’ve been saying in this article.

If you’ve listened to my advice and tried the method, then please let me know what was the result.

Google Buzz

Google has released Buzz recently and, like everything that gets out of Google’s labs, it got a lot of, exactly, buzz. In my opinion they’ve screwed it big time with it, being a service that has absolutely no usability and it seems like it got a lot of people mad by integrating it with Gmail.

Google Buzz has almost to no features, except you can “like” and comment to the links shared by the ones you follow, but it’s hard to track and also really cluttered. Of course it can’t be perfect right from the beginning, but this one is not even useful and I wonder if it does bring any traffic to the links shared. I don’t know that because I tested only a bit, as I can’t stand for it.

Other social media and social networking websites let you understand what are them about and offer you some features to help you use them, but Google Buzz does exactly the opposite. It’s just a Gmail page where you can see your followers, the one you follow and a timeline of shared links. Also I started to receive some emails from Google Buzz and I’m glad I didn’t comment to many stories because I believe that’s the reason for the emails. Need I say it’s really frustrating to receive an email for every comment posted after mine on the story ? I guess not.

If I wouldn’t have read so many negative comments about it, I thought it was just me, but it seems like barely nobody embraces Google’s new service.

Please let me know if you disagree and let me know why is that, because I really don’t understand why people use it. Anyway I hope it will improve and will try to use it a few more days, maybe I change my mind. If you’re into it you could follow me, though I might not post too much.

Twitter money

I’m an entrepreneur, webmaster and internet marketer, all at the same time and if someone would pay me to allow him bring me exposure, I wouldn’t be able to refuse him. And that’s exactly what Twitter did. In my opinion, I don’t think this will be Twitter’s biggest income stream, because from this deal, at least, it didn’t make a huge amount, but it’s been an excellent deal.

I’ve always admired Twitter’s founders for what they did and for making an application that looked stupid to be used by so many people. They managed to get people’s trust even if thousands of people were pointing at their application as being stupid and totally useless.

image credit: Halfway Nerdy

I am a relatively active Twitter user and my native language is Romanian, because I live in Romania, but I also have a lot of foreing followers. The problem is that I talk to my romanian followers in Romanian and with the other in English. I’m not sure if the Romanian ones are very disturbed, because most of them can speak English, but I’m sure the others are when I’m Twitting in Romanian.

So the idea is Twitter should allow me to group my followers, so I can Twit in english to a public group, that everyone can see and in Romanian for my followers from Romanian.

I’m sure this would be useful for a lot of users and not only for language, but for example a singer would like to Twit his fans about his upcoming concerts and his friends about the club or party he’s going to go tonight. There can be a lot of examples, just use your imagination.

I would really love this feature to be added. What do you think ?

The new version features a star rating for websites and a button you can place on your website where users can vote you directly. The button also shows how many votes the page has. Take a look at it:

Finally, they seem to have understood that people don’t like to spend time and are lazy, so they lost a lot by requiering them to install the toolbar. Now the toolbar is in a web version and it makes things easier, even if it’s not so feature-full as the install version. Check it out here, it might work for you too.

The website layout has also changed a lot and it offers everyone to vote a website directly from the review page, also it shows websites relevant to it.

The profile page has also changed, but not very much.

In conclusion, they seem to have done a great thing with it and the membership will definitely grow at a much faster rate that it was until now.

What do you think about it ? Do you see it already ?

I have been an active Digg user for a while and I know a lot of other users, including power users and others. Also I read a lot of blog posts about Digg and other’s thoughts. I will try to share with you what I’ve learned until now and try to make you understand the algorithm, at least a part of it, because only they know it exactly.

Along with the algorithm, I will try to share with you some tips that will get the story dugg and to prevent it from being burried.

1. Headline
   It’s very important to write a headline that will attract the users to click on the story and visit the link. Try to make it attractive, but offer the users an idea of what the story is about. The headline depends on what category you submit the story in ( e.g If you submit it in comedy, then make it funny ).
2. Description
   Try to write an excerpt of the article in the description, so if the user isn’t convinced from the headline to click the link, to make him do it.
3. Thumbnail
   Digg now offers you the possibility to attach a thumbnail to the story. If you submit your own website, try to edit the photo to fit well in the thumb size.
4. Category
   If you submit the story in a wrong category, it’s doomed, so think well before submitting.
5. Time
   Don’t submit your story at 3AM, because nobody is using Digg at that hour and won’t be using it in the next 12 hours at least. Your story has to be up and fresh when Digg is most used and that’s starting at 5PM. There is an advantage if submitting at an hour Digg is less used, because you have lower competition, but also less votes. Before submitting it, check what part of the world it’s headed too and make sure they are awake and aren’t at work at that time.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of factors that prevent a story to get popular and I’ve figured a part of them. There are some you can deal with, while others don’t depend on you.

1. Flamers
   There are a lot of users that don’t do anything but burying all stories and posting flaming comments. Unfortunately you can do nothing about it, except submitting something that will seem perfect for them.
2. Headline, Description, Image, Category
   If you write a wrong headline or description, users might not be interested in your story and don’t even check it. Or worse, your story might get buried. Also if you submit in the wrong category, fans of that category won’t find what they were looking for and will probably bury your story.
3. Time
   If your story doesn’t get popular in the first 24 hours after submission, chances to get popular are almost null.
4. Website
   If the website is poorly designed or full of ads, it might disturb some users and leave without voting. If it’s really disturbing, it might even get buried or marked as spam.
5. Content
   The story has to be very well written, with no mistakes or typos and to say clearly what it has to say. Also pictures are very important and attract the users.
6. Moderators
   Even if Digg states that there’s nobody implied in the process, there are stories that have lots of votes and comments, being really interesting, that don’t get popular. What else could keep them from hitting the front page ?

From my experience, a story doesn’t have to be only voted positively and some buries might also help. Many votes, comments, buries and positive/negative votes on comments make a story controversial and this seems to help it a lot get popular.

Still there are stories with a lot of votes and comments that stay in the upcoming page for hours and don’t get popular – some get after many hours, some don’t at all -, in my opinion, that’s where moderators are implied. Let’s take an example: The story in the screenshot below was first in upcoming for many hours and has 332 votes with 97 comments, being submitted 23 hours earlier the sreenshot was made. This example is a lucky one, because the story got popular finally. The strange thing is that while it was just staying there, upcoming, about 20 stories got popular, some with three times less votes than this one and lesser comments.

Maybe you noticed that power users need more votes to get their stories popular. That’s because Digg’s algorithm tries to keep users away from exchanging votes and tries to offer everyone equal chances.

Now it doesn’t only count on the number of votes, but it also depends who’s the voter. If someone is voting your stories frequently and doesn’t vote many others, their vote counts less or doesn’t count at all. So you need to get your story voted by a variety of users.

Power users need more votes from two reasons. Having many fans and many stories submitted, there is a high chance that the same users vote some of their stories and this reduces the votes’ value. Also having more fans it means more chances to get their stories popular and Digg requires them more votes for this, while users with less popular stories, fans and friends need less votes.

One more thing that might keep power users from getting their stories popular with less votes is because fans’ votes might also count less.

Though this is no brainier and I didn’t offer you any secret way to suck Digg’s traffic, I hope it will help you better understand Digg and avoid making mistakes.

Please share your thoughts and opinions !

ReadWriteWeb has written a very interesting post about Mixx. Now it’s one year old and traffic seems to grow really fast, but still can’t be a liable competitor for Digg, receiving less than 5% of Digg’s traffic.

Still, it seems to be on the good road and might grow, especially that Digg is full of spam stories, flames and unsatisfied users.