Digg.com has slowly transformed itself from a simple social bookmarking site into a voice of millions gathered together online. Information sharing and publishing has never been better with Digg.com. Even though you don’t have an account in this site, you can still learn a thing or two everyday just by browsing Digg stories.
But Digg.com doesn’t stop there; they released their own tools and released an API so that developers can create their own add-on for Digg. Although Digg.com’s tools are not quite as popular compared to blogging and SEO tools, any Digg.com user will find that most of the things they need could be provided by these tools.
We scouted the net and found five worth noting tools for Digg.com that could be useful even for less frequent users.
Digg Toolbar – a great option if you’re a frequent digg.com user. It works like Google.com in a sense that you can log-in to your toolbar and access your personal information in Digg.com. The Digg toolbar could also be used to search popular search engines. It also has a pop-up blocker that works like a common pop-up blocker. You can also find other information such as news from Digg.
Smart Digg Button – very easy to install and is very small in size (5kb). You will not see any changes in your webpage after this tool is installed. However, right click on any webpage and you’ll see more than copy and paste tools. Your right click will be transformed into a great Digg tool. You’ll be able to see how many people have Dugg (see? “Digg” is already a verb) the link, and if they are not Dugg yet. You’ll also have the ability to post it in your own Digg.com account.
Digg This! – works like Smart Digg, but very simple. If you like what you saw online, just right click on the link and you’ll be able to post it in Digg. However it has its fair share of problems and the last update was still in 2006. But compared to Smart Digg Button, it works really simple, and Smart Digg Button could eat a lot of your RAM power.
Digg Navigation Firefox Extension – you can find and download this tool from Wisegeek.com. Personally, I’m not a fan of right click extension since it will clog up my view of the webpage. But this “Me too” right click tool could convert your views in right click add-ons. Aside from right click, it can also be accessed in the Firefox options menu. If you’re in Digg.com, you can even access more information about users and posts such as related stories.
DiggNotify – it has been in beta version for the longest time but it doesn’t matter. This tool will notify you once someone actually Diggs the same story. Although it only works for the last 15 posts you did in Digg, it still useful as it monitors your posts constantly.
A toolbar, a right click tool and a notifier will be more than what you need to get you going in Digg.
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Amazon.com is the world’s leader in selling books and music. However, not many people realize that they themselves can resell stuffs on Amazon. If you’re an online entrepreneur, you should try your hands in this gigantic online superstore. It’s a billion dollar industry that has made people earn more in their spare time. So don’t just depend on eBay for your stuff, but start now in Amazon and earn.
Although Amazon.com is best known for their books, it has slowly evolved into a full blown online store. Compared to eBay, you don’t have to auction your item, but you sell them directly. That means you don’t have to wait for the highest bidder, and you’ll know your earnings once you post them in Amazon.com.
I personally recommend Amazon.com if you want to sell books. eBay could still give you additional earnings from auction but books being sold on eBay are not as popular compared to Amazon.
What makes Amazon store special about selling books is that it has an extensive listing of ISBN. If you’re a book seller you’ll have to search for the ISBN of the book before posting them online. That way, Amazon.com will have accurate information of the book, which will give more credibility of the book that you are selling, compared to the listings on eBay.
However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t just sell any book and expect it to be an instant hit. Not all books that you post online will be sold like crazy; you have to do a little bit of research to find out what could be sold in a particular month or day. Personally, the best books that will be sold online are college books. If you can find a good book that was only used for a year and purchased it at a lower price, you can certainly write it as a profit since most college students go online to purchase almost about anything…including books. Remember, you don’t need to stack your house with thousands of unnecessary books; you need to have enough books that are quality and saleable.
Best of all, setting up an account in Amazon.com as a seller is completely free. It also provides all needed security during checkout. It works like eBay store where they get a little bit of commission for using their website as a store for selling your stuff so you have to consider that in your pricing.
If you don’t have books to sell, don’t worry. You can still earn from Amazon.com through their referral program. This is great for webmasters or bloggers since they can easily post their referral links in the content, and those clicks that lead to purchase books will give you commissions. Amazon doesn’t only sell books but also gadgets and music, so you’ll have commission for various items you’d like to blog about.
Amazon.com only gives you two possibilities of making money, but they are all proven to give users good earnings in their spare time.
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Everyone who has ever been online is familiar with emoticons. You know, those chubby little smiley faces and other cartoon-like characters that are usually found in e-mails, blog posts, instant messages and other online communication.
The smiley is easily the best known emoticon — think of him as the king of the emoticons. But the smiley is by no means on his own these days; there are now hundreds, or perhaps thousands of animated 3-D emoticons capable of expressing a staggering number of different feelings, activities, moods and states of mind.
While in the old days, you pretty much had to settle for just smiley faces, frowning faces, and a handful of other emotions that could be expressed with simple characters on the keyboard, the new generation of 3-D animated emoticons are capable of communicating pretty much anything!
For example, there are now emoticons that swim, eat, sing, paint, laugh, dive, play basketball, fight, as well as a handful of pornographic ones that do things best unmentioned in this article ;-)
In other words, emoticons don’t just express emotion anymore, as they did in the beginning; they are now capable of communicating activities and much more complicated concepts. Which begs the question: how long will it be before we are able to write a complete e-mail (or blog post) by only using emoticons?
Of course, an e-mail message or blog posts consisting only of emoticons would probably get just as boring as a page full of flat text with no emoticons. The truth is, emoticons like the smiley face are popular because they add spice to our online scribblings. And just like any good spice, too much is as bad as not enough.
There is no denying, however, that emoticons are now more popular than ever, and I suspect that the new breed of 3-D cartoon-like animated smilies are the reason why. For some people, I think they become more like pets than tools to use when communicating online.
But whatever the reason for their popularity may be, there is no denying that the 3-D emoticons are cute, chubby little buggers that are quite addictive to use. In fact, it is downright difficult not to smile (or at least have a half-smirk on your face) when looking at some of these little characters.
And at the end of the day, anything that lightens the mood a bit in our day-to-day e-mails or instant messages is bound to be popular. And as long as they continue doing that, emoticons will probably stick around. :)
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With the Internet increasingly appearing to be a “big brother,” that knows your search habits, frequented sites and preferences, many Web surfers are demanding greater privacy online. Ask.com, the former “Ask Jeeves” search engine, has recently announced that it will go to greater links to protect users privacy, including the development of a new feature called the “AskEraser” which allows users to delete their search activity information permanently from the company’s server.
The feature works by eliminating all “cookies” on the user’s computer that are associated with the ask.com site, and by sending a query to the company’s server which will delete all previous search-related information gathered for the user.
The move is seen by Web analyst as a way of increasing user privacy, and dispelling fears that many Web surfers have about the growing amount of information online companies collect pertaining to their web-surfing habits. The AskEraser service is free, and deletion of an individual’s associated data takes place in only a few hours.
Online privacy advocates have been railing against the use of “cookies” and other information gathering applications employed by many of the biggest names online. Google, for example, collects an enormous amount of information about its users, and keeps this data available for users to see under their “Google History” page.
And although Google allows users to delete items from their search history, the company does not permanently delete this information from its servers. Amazon.com also uses advanced software cookies to collect data from users, though in Amazon’s case, the user is not presented with an option to alter or delete their prior history on the site.
In fact, remembering user’s preferences and previous search history on their site is a feature which Amazon.com boasts about. It allows the company to show an individual special sales and items that they are likely to be interested in, based on their prior viewing experience.
And although this type of collected search data can be convenient in some cases, it also raises very real privacy concerns, especially at a time when cybercrime and identity theft are rampant. Users are rightly concerned that many online companies know too much about their personal shopping and search history, and perhaps even other, more personal information that could leave them vulnerable to online scams.
In light of the growing discontent over a seeming lack of privacy online, Ask.com’s new “eraser” feature seems like a step in the right direction. Now if we can just get Google, Amazon, eBay, iTunes and other big names online to follow suit, we’ll really be getting somewhere.
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The biggest thing online at the moment is social networking. Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace are hugely popular, with millions of members from around the world. Facebook, for example, currently has over 50 million users and is growing at a meteoric rate. But what’s the next big trend online going to be? That, as they say, is the billion-dollar question.
Web experts are predicting that 3-D virtual communities are the wave of the future. Forbes.com quotes a study by the Gartner research group that predicts a staggering 80% of regular Internet users will take part in a 3-D online community by the year 2011. That amounts to an astounding 250 million people.
These predictions have not gone unnoticed by the biggest players in the industry, and advertising agencies are already chomping at the bit for a chance to get their message in front of such a huge potential market of Internet users. But what will be 3-D social networking communities of tomorrow look like?
Many analysts predict that online communities of tomorrow will feature virtual worlds similar to the biggest online multiplayer games out today, such as World of War Craft. This could mean that, instead of reading the day’s headlines on your homepage, your avatar (a 3-D character representing you) could be reading them instead in a virtual world.
Plans are already in the works for virtual malls, nightclubs, bookstores and other commercial ventures, as well as sponsored virtual concerts and book tours. In fact, many of these virtual items are already being used in virtual worlds such as Second Life. So how will the virtual social networking communities of tomorrow be different from Second Life (which already has 11 million registered users) and other 3-D worlds already in place today?
The biggest difference is likely to be accessibility. As technology advances, the 3-D virtual worlds of tomorrow will be easier to function within than those currently unavailable. Another difference is that the 3-D worlds currently online are appealing to a very specific demographic. Mostly either serious gamers, or those who wish to escape to a fantasy world.
But the social networking 3-D sites are likely to be much more grounded in reality. Think of Facebook profile pages connected to a 3-D environment in which you and your friends could “hang out” in an online virtual world.
One web site, Kaneva, is already jumping on the 3-D social networking bandwagon. On Kaneva, users create virtual “homes” instead of profile pages, and can upload their favorite photos, music and videos to their online home to share with friends. Kaneva also has its own currency they can be used to buy or sell virtual goods and services within the online world.
So far, virtual worlds have been the domain of the geeks among us, but as social networking creeps into virtual reality, we are likely to see a huge shift taking place online. The MySpace or Facebook of tomorrow will likely be a place where you socialize naturally within a virtual 3-D environment — and it won’t be limited to just computer nerds, gamers and fantasy world enthusiasts.
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The social networking web site, Facebook, has been increasing in popularity over the past year one. The concept of Facebook, like all so-called social networking sites, is to attract users that provide content to the site. The site owners then profit from this enormous input of user generated content as the site becomes more and more popular.
But lately, users of social networking sites such as Facebook are demanding to get paid for their participation. The latest example of this comes courtesy of the Canadian-based advertising network, Weblo, which empowers Facebook users to sell ads on their profile pages via an easy-to-use advertising application, or “ad widget.”
So far, more than 1500 members of Facebook have placed advertisements from the Weblo network on their profile pages. The problem? Advertising on user profiles is in direct violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
So far, Facebook has taken no action to curtail users selling ads on their profile pages, and with good reason: many of the users incorporating ads into their profiles are extremely popular, and attract a great deal of attention to Facebook by their participation. In other words, by alienating their most popular members, Facebook could be cutting off its nose to spite his face.
As a result, Facebook is walking a fine line between enforcing their stated terms of service, and keeping their users from jumping ship to join another social networking site such as MySpace, to name one example.
But many people think that users of social networking sites have every right to sell ad space on their profile pages. At the end of the day, the sites would have no content — and thus, no profit — without the contributions of their users. Therefore it makes sense that if users are responsible for the site’s success, they should also be able to make a few bucks off of their participation.
But this logic worries many social networking web sites, not just Facebook. MySpace and YouTube are two other wildly popular sites that are entirely dependent upon the contributions of their users. If those same users began demanding a piece of the action for their participation on the site, the Web could quickly wind up as one giant billboard (some say it already is!).
More and more, the question of user generated content, and how it should be compensated (if at all) is becoming an issue online. How Facebook handles its current situation will likely have far-reaching consequences throughout the Web, especially for mega-popular social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace.
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Word came this week that Google has finally integrated AOL instant messaging into Google Talk, the company’s Gmail instant messenger. This announcement comes pretty late in the game, as Google has held a $1 billion share in AOL for a couple of years now.
The result of this integration is that Gmail users will now be able to access their AIM accounts directly from Google Talk. Users can also access their AOL Buddy Lists when using Google Talk, alongside their usual Gmail contacts.
Google’s decision to include AOL instant messaging directly into its Gmail Google Talk application makes a lot of sense, but it would have been much more relevant a couple of years ago, before the instant messaging market got so competitive and overcrowded.
And there are already various services that facilitate using different instant messaging programs within a single application. Sites such as Meebo, Adium and others have jumped in to fill this void in the marketplace long ago, leaving Google a late newcomer to the party.
Google’s latest Gmail update also includes colored labels to more easily identify your saved e-mails, a simple feature that has been sadly lacking from the Gmail roster thus far.
As far as the AIM integration into Gmail, most users would not even notice the difference unless they were specifically looking for it. For example, the AIM login is located within the Google Talk “status” indicator in the contact list. The drop-down menu now includes an option to sign in to your AIM account.
After signing into your AIM account, your AOL Buddy List will appear, seamlessly integrated within your Gmail contacts. Overall, it is a nice feature, and very well implemented, even if it would have been considerably more relevant 18 to 20 months ago.
While the addition of AOL instant messaging and colored tabs is not likely to sway the “Google haters” out there, these kind of small touches do contribute to the overall usability of the Gmail interface, resulting in one of the most intuitive and highly functional e-mail programs ever produced.
When compared to Windows-based e-mail, such as the ubiquitous Outlook program, Gmail is far easier to use, and includes a lightning fast search function that can locate any topic among your saved e-mails quickly.
Considering that Gmail also offers approximately 5 GB of storage space, it’s easy to see why Google’s proprietary e-mail service has been gaining users at a staggering rate over the past few years. Integration with AOL’s Instant Messenger is simply the icing on the cake.
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AOL recently launched their newest online offering, the AOL Desktop. The software is thought to be the new AOL as it repackages itself to be more appealing to the public. I believe there used to be a time where AOL was an industry giant that can look straight to the eye or even stare down Microsoft. But one thing led to another, and although they are not yet a footnote of internet history, they are now in the category of those that “used to be.” With this desktop, AOL hopefully could reconnect or even create new connection to the general users. This software is absolutely free and could be downloaded right from their website.
AOL Desktop basically brings everything to your desktop most of the AOL services. From our e-mail to your messenger, everything related to AOL could be accessed from your desktop. This all in one portal is independent of web browser which means you can still enjoy your web.
Sounds a pretty good deal for me, so I downloaded the software to try it out a little. The first thing I noticed is that it’s way too slow to download. I have more than enough bandwidth with me to download other files real fast. Ok, that’s could be forgiven since there might be millions who are also downloading this file. I selected quick install so that I could try out the software immediately. Less than five minutes of installation and 10 minutes for download, the software is finally ready to use.
I was surprised however, that my IE interface was changed. I like to think I’m an obsessive compulsive when it comes to my browsers where everything has to be in place. Imagine the horror that my homepage is now AOL, a toolbar is already installed and the search engine will default to AOL. That was the deal breaker for me. So before I uninstall the software, I tried to run it just to see if all that craziness in my explorer is worth it.
To be honest, I didn’t see any “desktop like” experience from this software. The only reason it could be called a desktop tool is that it could be launched right from the desktop and has all the buttons from AOL you’re so familiar with. Its only difference is that it can access e-mail from its outlook like software. But generally, the service is quiet mediocre. The only thing I like about the software is its integration of AOL and GMail messenger which could be accessed in Meebo. Plus, they have cool games there and I already have Google Talk. In the end, the software is just another web browser that looks like Flock. It is honest enough to say they are a browser instead of a desktop.
But AOL fans don’t be disheartened. Nobody gets them the first time so there’s a big chance that something better could come out from this software. I, in the meantime will just have to wait for the next update as I uninstall this from my computer.
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