Social Networking, Wopular | featured news

I just noticed in the last couple of days that the sharing platform AddThis has removed “via @addthis” at the end of tweets using their widget. I use AddThis throughout the site. It’s a handy little widget that allows users to share articles through any social bookmarking/sharing site, like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest.

As a website owner, I use it to tweet articles to my Twitter account. I used to manually get rid of the “via @addthis” suffix each time to give me more available characters and to make the tweet cleaner.

I’ve switched over to Facebook’s comment system a while back. I did it for two reasons. First, offloading comments to a third party takes the load off my server. Second, I’m hoping to get some Facebook traffic juice.

The first part worked out. I disabled Drupal’s commenting system, which resulted in less cron jobs and queries to the database.

The second part hasn’t quite worked out. My Facebook referrals have mostly stayed the same. I’m also noticing less comments, which is a surprise. I figured since most people are on Facebook already, I would get more.

I just started noticing this recently. It’s a nice touch. Before, you would have to go into a specific comment moderation page to keep track of comments. Now, it’s all tied into your profile page, just like when someone likes or comments on your status updates.

Months ago, I converted my commenting system to Facebook’s. I had my reservations before. Most of it is that because it’s javascript based, the comments will not be crawled by Google. All Google sees is the javascript code, not the actual comments.

I'm finding that StumbleUpon has been the most effective social button on the site. I've been consistently sharing my blog entires on StumbleUpon and other content sharing sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin, +1, Facebook, and maybe a couple other ones. It's mostly a waste of time except for StumbleUpon.

I knew Yahoo Buzz was one of the “sunset” sites - properties that would be shutdown by Yahoo. I still kept it on the site, but moved it to the bottom of the homepage. The quality of the articles being voted up have been on the low-end months before its eventual demise was announced; sometimes, you even get spam. The site had also been redesigned to its bare essentials.

On most websites nowadays, you'll see somewhere on the page, usually at the top right corner, links to the site's RSS feed, Twitter account, and Facebook fanpage. I've always wondered why MySpace, being the second largest social networking site by far, isn't on that list.