The Reddit Alien - a great social bookmarking advantage

Some people think of search engine optimisation as being strictly building links and content, and that was very much the case before the advent of microblogging and social networking. Now being social is very important for search engine optimisation. Using social networking, social bookmarking and other such sites can really help boost your traffic, both via increased rankings and faster indexing in search engines as well as the potential for viral marketing and promotion of your content.

Let’s go over the main points. Using social methods of promotion for your website can help:

1. To get your site indexed faster – Promoting your site via services such as Reddit, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon and blog pinging services can ensure your site is indexed in search engines as fast as possible.
2. To increase search engine rankings – Although many social bookmarking and similar sites now use ‘nofollow’ rel tags on their links, there are still several services which do not. Reddit, a social news/bookmarking website that I have recently become addicted to, is a perfect example of a social website which does not use the ‘nofollow’ rel tag on any of its links.
3. To virally promote your content – Social bookmarking and news websites are great for promoting websites and interesting or funny website content in a viral nature. This can have a cascading effect for content this people find really interesting. To virally promote content, always ensure you post links to the relevant categories and in a way that makes the content seem interesting, either be being funny, outstanding or highly controversial.

Overall, social networking and bookmarking websites are a fantastic tool for website and content promotion and for improving your search engine results page rankings. Most importantly, you should promote good quality and interesting content without looking incredibly spammy or promote spam like web content… there is enough of that on the Web already!

"Hi! I'm Google Buzz" - Screenshot of the Google Buzz welcoming screen

Like my pun? I know, I know. It is ingenius.

What is Google Buzz?

Google Buzz is a new social networking venture from the almighty search engine. It is designed to integrate well with their webmail service Gmail. Google have dipped their toes in the social networking marketplace before with services like Orkut and Google Friend Connect. Orkut is a big hit in Brazil and India, but is not as large as many of the other social networking websites such as Twitter or Facebook. Google Friend Connect, on the other hand is a system designed for web developers to quickly and easily integrate Google-powered social elements into their websites via iframe’s, Javascript and AJAX.

From the point of large scale social networking, Google Buzz could really be a hit. It has a huge initial base of users, as all of Gmail’s existing consumer user base is automatically given Buzz as of a few days ago. Roll out of Google Buzz to consumers began on the 9th of February 2010 and has now finished being deployed for all standard public Gmail users.

Google Buzz for Google Apps?

You may be wondering if Google Apps users (Business, Schools, Enterprises or Personal) have the opportunity to use Google Buzz? Sadly not, it seems Google Buzz is not available for Google Apps users yet, but Google have promised this will be available within a few months times. The delay is apparently due to the additional complexities involved with restricted Buzz to an individual business or enterprise environment.

What about the Privacy Concerns?

There have been quite a few people heavily concerned about the privacy aspects of Google’s new social networking system. This focuses primarily across Google’s decision to make information about people users regularly contact public by default. This is done to ensure when you activate Google Buzz, you are immediately following your friends and family and they are following you. However, the people you are following is shared public. Twitter has been doing this since the start, allowing anyone to see who is following who. However, Google stores a lot more information about its users by default.

A lot of people are having doubts initially and there has been plenty of bad initial press related to the privacy of service. This is almost always the case and to be expected with all new social networking systems put online. However there are a few genuine horror stories, such as a story in which Google Buzz auto-followed a woman’s abusive ex. Is this a bad move by Google? What do you think?

Currently, in the Ubuntu 9.10 (the latest stable version of Ubuntu), the indicator applet and messaging menu looks like the following screenshot taken from my computer.

Looks relatively bland. It essentially list the current communication or social programs for instant messaging, microblogging, e-mailing and general social networking. It also list any recent communications, stating the user name of the contact you’ve spoken to recently (not shown in above screenshot). Many new improvements are planned for the next iteration of the messaging menu and indicator applet (currently at version 0.3). The following design mock up of the messaging menu emphasises the most important and visible changes for the end-user.

As you can see, there is a lot more content in the new messaging menu. One of the important points is the ability to access certain programs actions directly. So, for example, if I wanted to send an e-mail to someone, I could just click the messaging menu and hit ‘Compose New Message’ which would very easily let me start writing and e-mail without the need to find my e-mail application, start it and locate the ‘compose new message’ button, which can easily vary in location and appearance between applications. By adding this action to the messaging menu, this has the effect of not only making the option easier to find, but also – potentially more importantly – it abstracts away the specifics of the application itself and draws the focus towards the user, their desire and their content.

In my opinion, application abstraction is very important. Most users do not wish to ‘use Evolution’ or ‘use Thunderbird’, they want to ‘check their e-mail’ or ‘compose a new e-mail’. Allowing them to do this regarding of the e-mail client they use reduces the learning curve significantly. The same principle applies to many other applications, including those outside of communications, such as productivity applications. Users tend to want to ‘create a new document’, ‘draw a picture’, and ‘check a budgeting spreadsheet’ rather than ‘open OpenOffice Write and create a blank OpenDocument Text file’, ‘open image editing software and create a new blank image’ and ‘open spreadsheet application and locate/open relevant file’. Even saying the specific non-abstracted alternatives takes a long time, but essentially the users content should be priority over the application itself in the vast majority of cases. One says that work is on a spreadsheet, an image or a document and not an Excel, GIMP or Writer file.

The new messaging menu brings on this concept of application abstraction with the instant messaging system. You can see in the second and third sections of the menu, instant messaging contacts and recent microblogging activity (mocked up as messages from ‘sabdfl’) are shown as independent of the application which controls them. In this case, it would be likely be Empathy (for instant messaging) and Gwibber (for microblogging) that controlled these sections, but note the application name itself in not even mentioned, as it is not relevant to the actual social actions, which again demonstrates abstraction away from the specific applications and a focus on user content.

The final two sections indicate e-mail notification from GMail and IRC conversations with XChat. In these cases, definitely so with the GMail e-mail notifications, it is relevant to display the application name as this is an important part of the relevant content itself (the e-mail account).

Hope this quite summary gives you a good idea of what changes are coming to the messaging menu and its attached indicator applet in Ubuntu 10.04. More information is available about the new messaging menu at its design specification while these is additional information about the new indicator applet available on the applet’s Lauchpad pages.

What are your opinions on the new messaging menu? Will it affect your social use of Ubuntu? Will it affect your work flow? If so, how?

]]> http://jordanhall.co.uk/ubuntu-linux/new-indicator-applet-messaging-menu-for-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx-5101423/feed/ 6 http://jordanhall.co.uk/ubuntu-linux/ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynxs-social-networking-features-0801414/ http://jordanhall.co.uk/ubuntu-linux/ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynxs-social-networking-features-0801414/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:43:08 +0000 Jordan Hall http://jordanhall.co.uk/?p=414 Social media and social networking are huge now-a-days, with Twitter, Facebook and the like being hugely successful at keeping friends and family in touch. Now only that, but social networks are huge for charities, with many causes being supported and heavily promoted via social networking. Corporations and business use social networking too to promote their products and services to users in a manner which is so relevant that they tend not to annoy as is generally the case with more corporate advertising.

With the currently in development, Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx, the development road map is set to take huge advantage of the major social networks. Common social networking actions, such as updating your Facebook status, or sending a Tweet to your friends are set to be integrated directly into the operating system allowing users to keep their friends up-to-date and share information without the need to even open a web browser.

Take a look at the image below. This is a basic mock-up of the new social menu codenamed the ‘Me Menu’, which is aimed to become to a simple, centralised way to manage your social activities. It has options for a user avatar, multiple social networks, instant messaging and microblogging services and the setting and broadcast of custom and preset statuses and microblogs.

This clever menu will link into other social applications, like your instance messaging application. In others words, you set your status in the me menu, and the update is reflected automatically in all your social networks and configured social applications. Related to this, in the diagram above, ‘Chat Accounts…’ will refer to all forms of instant messaging and direct communications, while ‘Broadcast Accounts’ will refer to social networks which allow you to share a status update such as Twitter, Facebook and identi.ca.

The Ubuntu One service will also be integrated into the Me Menu and Ubuntu’s new social infrastructure. This will allow social network information to be synchronised and related to your Ubuntu One login, along with the existing file synchronisation, contact management and note synchronisation services already offered by Ubuntu One.

The Me Menu will be the overall representation of ‘you’ within Ubuntu. If you want more information regarding the Me Menu, which is to become the central social network integrations of Ubuntu, you can take a look at the design specification.

This deal will mean tweets will appear from Twitter alongside normal Google and Bing search results. Without a doubt, this will make Twitter an even larger SEO tool than it already is. Constantly the microblogging service is bombarded with spam bots attempting to promote their services, which is certainly an issue when those the tweets those bots submit provide very little in the way of useful information or news.

With blogging slowly being seen as an activity which can be done professionally, this deal could potentially open the doorway to professional microbloggers, a promotional medium which has so far been the realm of mainly automated agents (or bots) and celebrity/government public relations agencies.

Regarding this deal, Microsoft have already make a move to set up a separate, standalone search page on Bing for microblogging results from Twitter. This is likely to be a preceding step towards integrating the tweets into the main Bing search results. Google will be doing the later from the start, when its microblogging service is rolled out “in the coming months”according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google in a recent blog post.

For both companies, this deal will mean the search engines will have direct syncronised access to the tweets almost as soon as they are posted on to Twitter’s microblogging site.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, wrote the following in an open letter to Facebook.

“However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and weve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan weve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

Were adding something that many of you have asked for – the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, well also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks well ask you to review and update your privacy settings. Youll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When youre finished, well show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once youre done youll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.”

What do you think? Should Facebook change to this system? Are the regional networking features redundant now or are regional networks useful to you?