There’s been so much discussion on Color that there are even posts talking about how much discussion there has been. Regardless of this, I am going to tell you what I think of it and why I think it’s a poor concept and why it won’t fly—at least with me. I’d love to be proven wrong (and I think Sequoia would love for me to be proven wrong as well, with a pre-launch $41 million round that’s the talk of the town), but let’s roll with this.
Tag Archives: Facebook
Get Your Social out of My Log In
I’m really, really starting to hate seeing this when I download a new application:
My objections:
- What if I stop using the service I choose to log in to your application?
- You are totally going to spam my friends and followers on the service I choose—likely without asking me.
- I use different strong passwords for as many applications as is feasible to limit the surface area of any personal security compromise. You’re not letting me control my own security.
What I think when I see this:
- You were too lazy to write your own login and authentication system.
Adding Specific Sharing Services to Sharedaddy or Jetpack
UPDATED 3/26/11: Sharedaddy is now distributed as part of Jetpack, so I’m taking the opportunity to add some additional services to this list. Please continue to contribute if you have any other services that you’d like to see on this post.
In my previous post, I described in detail the process necessary to add a sharing service to the WordPress.com Sharing tools (also known to self-hosted WordPress users as the Sharedaddy plugin). Even if your favorite social network or sharing site isn’t available, odds are likely that you can find a method to add that service as a custom sharing button.
For the tutorial, I used Delicious as an example service because it’s a service I’ve used in the past, had a good URL structure that’s easy to demonstrate, and had nice screens that helped my instructions to be easier to follow. (It also had a nice site-provided 16×16 icon that we could use to mark the sharing service.)
This is a collection of various common sharing services that aren’t included in the Sharing tools defaults. It provides the necessary information so you can plug them in to your Sharing options. Remember, the three things you need to define a sharing service are:
- A name for the sharing service (used for the text label)
- The URL needed to send a link to the sharing service, which can use up to five variables, which are:
- %post_tags%
- %post_title%
- %post_full_url%
- %post_url%
- %post_excerpt%
- And the URL of a 16×16 icon that can be used for the service.
(If you need a refresher on how to add custom sharing services, please see the previous article.)
I’ll provide the Sharing URL format—including the variable placement—and a 16×16 button icon you can use for the service. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to pull the icon from the sharing service itself to avoid any licensing issues. This means some of the icons are ugly. If you would rather, are there a few very nice sharing service icon collections available, but you’ll have to credit the author if you use them.
Since a good number of WordPress.com blogs have used GetSocialLive in the past, I think that’s as good a place to start as any. I’m only going to include those for version one of this post; if you would like another service or you have one that should be added to this list, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to include it in a revision. I’d like this post be be a kind of “encyclopedia” of these services for people who are using ShareDaddy.
Filling Out the GetSocialLive Services
Of the services included in the GetSocialLive tool, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Twitter are already provided for use in Sharing Settings—so you won’t have to worry about those. As for the rest:
Delicious
http://delicious.com/save?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%
Blinklist
http://blinklist.com/blink?u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%
Technorati
http://technorati.com/faves?add=%post_url%
Yahoo! Buzz
http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzz?targetUrl=%post_url%&headline=%post_title%
Newsvine
http://newsvine.com/_wine/save?u=%post_url%&h=%post_title%
Services I Use, So They Get Preferential Treatment and Are Higher on the List
Evernote
http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%
Hacker News
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%
Instapaper
http://www.instapaper.com/hello2?url=%post_full_url%&title=%post_title%
Other Services
Do melhor
http://domelhor.net/submit.php?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%
FARK.com
http://www.fark.com/cgi/farkit.pl?u=%post_url%&h=%post_title%
Google Buzz
http://www.google.com/buzz/post?message=%post_title%&url=%post_url%
Menéame
http://meneame.net/submit.php?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%
MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?u=%post_url%
Orkut
http://promote.orkut.com/preview?nt=orkut.com&du=%post_url%&tt=%post_title%
Pinboard
http://pinboard.in/add?showtags=yes&url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%
Posterous
http://posterous.com/share?linkto=%post_url%
Tumblr
http://www.tumblr.com/share?v=3&u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%
But Wait; There’s More
If you have a sharing service you either want to add to Sharedaddy’s custom option, or have added and already know how it works, please feel free to leave a comment on this post and I can get it added to this list.
Cultivated Play: Farmville (via MediaCommons)
The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity.
A great essay and a look into why so many of the people on your Facebook friends list are playing a game they will never win that intrudes upon their real life and isn’t even fun.
It’s funny, yes, but it’s a fascinating …
It’s funny, yes, but it’s a fascinating glimpse at just how confused many people are about how web sites and browsers work. They don’t use bookmarks, they don’t type “facebook.com” in the location field. They just Google for whatever they’re looking for and assume the first result is correct. All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple — if anything it’s probably still too complex.