iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store's launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it's parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.

The Software Side

While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other... because they can't. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.

He says, '... the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it's gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.' In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven't bought/listened to. If you're a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you're probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn't come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn't introduced 2-3 years ago).

While this feature itself isn't social and can be implemented entirely on the back end, the implementation required for that functionality is so close to a networked experience (monitoring of habits and correlation across users) that they might as well take a small next step and add a visible social layer with which those users can interact. In fact, if you look at the results from a 2006 iTunes survey, you will see the people want to be able to see what people with similar interests and tastes (i.e. friends) are purchasing and consuming, so they can experiment with and pick from the same selection. More specifically, consumers want:

1. The ability to view a friend's wish list, with permission.
2. The ability to view what a friend is currently listening to, with permission.
3. The ability to view a friend's playlist, with permission.
4. The ability to view a friend's recent purchases, with permission.
5. The ability to view a friend's favorite artists, with permission

What's also interesting about this approach is that it reaches the exact opposite conclusions of EMR's UK social networking study [PDF]. The study implies that social networks will be the content distribution channels of tomorrow, but the relationship may actually work better in the other direction. With the addition of networking and recommendation features to iTunes, the application could become the most efficient, most engaging, stickiest (always-on), and most profitable social network almost overnight.

But Apple's social networking potential doesn't end there. Remember Microsoft's 'welcome to the social' campaign that centered around the launch of its Zune digital media player? If you don't, you're not alone. The goal behind the campaign, 'to create a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers and will inspire discovery of new music and artists,' was actually a formidable one. Unfortunately an inferior device, coupled with disasterous software integration made the campaign a $100 million failure.

Enter Apple.

The Hardware Side

With a formidable install base, great hardware and one of the most versatile mobile operating systems around, the iPhone is ready to herald in the future of mobile social networking. Furthermore, with 3G/EDGE/WiFi/GPS capabilities, the iPhone is a great tool for both networking as well as wirelessly sharing digital media like the Zune promised (but failed miserably at). Not only does the device work seamlessly with the iTunes software, but Apple's DRM is more consistent and perhaps more forgiving that Microsoft's (which was partly responsible for crippling the Zune's ambitions).

The Cloud

With a firm grasp on the software side with iTunes and on the hardware side with the iPhone, Apple is in good shape. Their killer app, however, could end up being the cloud. Apple already operates MobileMe (previously .Mac) which faciliates the management of contacts, calendars (events), email, photos, and any other files or digital media. Admittedly the service has been an utter failure since launch, but Apple has acknowledge the failure and is on the path to fix its shortcomings.

The previously discussed iTunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iPhone's versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager. The only limitation of the network, however, (and it will be a deal breaker for many) is that unlike every other social network today, the experience will come at a steep cost. Knowing Apple though, I have no doubt it will be an experience worth the cost (especially considering what they had to deal with at the MobileMe launch).

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. Desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed 'traffic mecca' have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to Yahoo's main page. Here's what you need to know about the current state of Buzz.

Note the important distinction between the Yahoo! main page and the Yahoo! Buzz main page, and the distinction between content made popular (i.e. promoted to the Yahoo Buzz main page) and Y! featured content (which is content cherry picked from Buzz to be featured on the Yahoo! main page).

ReadWriteWeb's one (and so far only) appearance on the yahoo.com frontpage - Wikipedia story bottom right

1. Yahoo! Buzz is not a social experience. The process of being featured on Yahoo! Buzz is socially driven (based on votes, shares, and search patterns), but if you consider the site's place in the overall structure of Yahoo's strategy, the experience isn't social. Yahoo! Buzz is the picking ground for the content that ultimately gets featured on the Yahoo! main page, which means it is social in the exact same way Slashdot Firehose is social. Your votes may get a story to the main page of Yahoo! Buzz but after that it's up to an editor's judgment whether a story gets featured on the Yahoo! main page or not. So the final result, or the process of getting featured on Yahoo's main page is not entirely social. Furthermore, there Yahoo! has turned off the comments so there are no conversations, and because there is no networking aspect to the site, there are also no relationships.
2. Your votes don't mean much. Number of votes is one of the metrics used to determine content popularity. Even then, I've learned that the impact of votes is arbitrary. I know people whose content was featured on the Yahoo! main page with 0 votes, and people whose content didn't even get to the Yahoo! Buzz main page after 75 votes. The other metrics are the number of times content is shared via email and on other social sites, as well as search volume.
3. Exposure is very limited, inequitably distributed. The Yahoo! Buzz main page presently is less significant than even the upcoming/most page on Digg. Although being on the page may increase your odds of catching an editor's eye, you don't get any exposure unless you are featured on the Yahoo! main page. Furthermore, such an insignificant number of stories cross from Yahoo! Buzz to the Yahoo! main page that for the average person, participation in the quest for exposure is an act in futility.

To summarize, Yahoo! Buzz is social insofar as a community of users gets to submit content, and vote/share it. Anything more than that, Yahoo! Buzz doesn't do.

That said, the site also doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is. It doesn't consider itself to be a competitor to other social news and networking sites, in fact it allows you to and even recommends you to share Buzzed stories on other social sites and then counts 'shares' as another metric to measure content popularity. As the popularity of Yahoo! Buzz grows and more people start frequenting the Yahoo! Buzz main page to read and at some future point discuss stories, that will all change. Until then, that page is just a stepping stone to the Yahoo! main page, which is the end goal.

Who should participate on Yahoo! Buzz?

From a content producer's/publisher's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz should without question be used by anyone publishing multiple posts a day on a site, or anyone that owns a network of blogs publishing content for different niches (heck you can automate the submission process). Networks like Hearst Digital Media and Conde Nast Publishing come to mind, but the strategy should also work for networks like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media. From a community member's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz's features are so limited that they would probably appeal to someone with a passive interest in social news, or someone just entering the space and wanting to get his or her feet wet. If you are interested in making friends, participating in heated discussions, etc., look elsewhere.

What kind of content works on Yahoo! Buzz?

It's a wry twist in the story. The people most interested in exploring Yahoo! Buzz and participating on the site are the digerati. But the kind of audience Yahoo! Buzz is designed to cultivate is quite the opposite. Before you give up in frustration, understand that the audience the site is supposed to appeal to is the same audience for the Yahoo! portal for news and entertainment. That's why you won't see a lot of insider Silicon Valley news featured and instead you'll see content from mainstream news outlets (a lot of syndicated content from Yahoo! News) about mainstream news events or entertainment.

What's the future of Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz is an interesting service because it has become an awkward balance between social news and mainstream news, where some of the basic social news and networking elements are intentionally missing. At the same time, it is also interesting because although the site made some buzz for supposedly dethroning Digg, the prevailing social news champion, the site doesn't compete with it and is not cannibalizing the social news audience. If anything, people who use Yahoo! Buzz may very well over time switch to sites with more robust social news and networking capabilities.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

If you think about the basic functionality, all micro-blogging sites offer more or less the same. You can create an account, add some friends, and then message back and forth (privately and publicly) and share stuff with each other. What Plurk does differently is the user interface and the effect of this change reverberates throughout the site. Here are the major UI changes and their impact.

1. The Timeline View

Not everyone has been happy with it but changing the way the information is displayed was a bold move, and ultimately the right one. The new layout performs exactly as expected. The timeline scrolls left to right, with the most recent data at the left. You can control the timeline using the trackpad or the arrow keys. Since the messages are arranged in chronological order, and because sometimes people send messages at the same time, this view also let's you easily read a large number of messages at the same time.

2. The One Line Messages

Just like the timeline view, the one line message layout is such a simple idea that at first it's very easy to not even notice it. But take a second and you'll notice that Plurk displays the avatar, a qualifier, a message snippet, and the number of replies for the message, all on one line. Again this allows you to easily read or ignore a large number of messages based on who posted the message, what qualifier the user used, and how many responses the message already has. This way you can skip between messages as you deem important, rather than looking at conversations from a top-down view (like on Twitter).

3. The Red Flag Replies and Update Boxes

The best part of Plurk is the constant chatter. Once you log in and add some friends, it's hard to get away. The reason for this is the way Plurk announces new activity to you. Unlike other services where you have to go looking for replies, on Plurk, every reply sticks out like a red flag. Every time someone posts a message you can see how many people replied to it, and with one click, read all the replies like a threaded conversation.

First, because the replies clearly stick out, you are bound to check them fairly quickly after they are posted, and second, because every Plurk message that is posted gets it's own conversation page (where all the replies are threaded and easy to follow), more people are likely to reply to a message and start conversations. Finally, because your Plurk page isn't static, and tells you every time you have new replies or your friends post a new message, you are more likely to check out what other people are up to (although at times of high activity this can feel like a nag screen).

4. The Inline Attachments

This one is a twofer. It is a user interface improvement but it's also a feature. Unlike Twitter where you can just post link to media, on Plurk, whenever you link to a picture, song, or video, the media is immediately visible/playable from within the message and you can double click it to get to the original source.

5. And Everything Else

Finally, another great Plurk feature that most people forget about is that the design offers so much information but is never overwhelming or confusing to navigate. All the chatting and microblogging activity takes place above the scroll to encourage maximum engagement, while everything else (like user info and activity stats, friends and fans, and mobile links) is below the scroll and out of the way (I sometimes forget all that stuff is there).

Conclusion

That said, the problem Plurk faces is the exact same problem that Mixx faces. Though the site has a better service, they can't match the same number of registrations or activity as market leaders simply because of the first mover advantage. People either find it too complicated (it's not) or are too lazy (they definitely are) to transfer their entire network over to a new service. The problem is that no one wants to move to a new site unless their entire network of friends moves too. This means unless there is a mass migration, a majority of the people (though they are definitely testing it) won't stay with the service in the long term.

In fact, even though I really like Plurk, I don't use it as frequently as Twitter simply because all my friends are using Twitter more frequently.

You can friend me on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Here's a look at why the idea of a social news site front page that is newspaper-like and presents information in reverse chronological presentation has to change - and how Reddit is flirting with the answer.

Let's firstly review the current state of content promotion on social news sites. The best site to use as an example of why the current system may be failing us, is Digg. This is because not only is Digg the biggest and most active social news sites, it's the site that has most rigidly stuck with the current formula. Also by looking at Digg we can see what unique problems other sites are going to have when they try to scale their platform to meet the demands of their ever growing communities.

The Social Hodgepodge

Almost all social news sites that exist today have a nearly-identical foundation. People submit, vote, and comment on stories, the ones that are the most active, get promoted to the site's front-page. This process repeats itself and newer stories get promoted to the site's front page and older ones get pushed down. Over time old stories get pushed deeper and deeper in to the archives and newer stories (presumably more timely and relevant) replace them. The most popular sites that follow this as a basic formula are Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Mixx, and even the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us.

This kind of a system is great if you have a small and homogenous community. For example, this worked great on Digg about 2 years ago when the site was one-tenth the size and focused heavily on technology. As these sites grow, the problems with this kind of a system become apparent. First, as communities grow , more gets submitted to the social news sites, and secondly, the content being submitted gets more and more diverse. A single, all-important front page, as you will just see, doesn't scale well, and doesn't function well under a diverse community.

When the front page is the part of the news site that has all the new and fresh content, that is the part of the news site that gets the most traffic, that is where all the content producers want to be, and that is the place everyone links to. But there is only so much content you can feature on this page.

Even if you assume that one article is promoted every 5 minutes and there are a total of 15 slots on a news site's front page. That means that at any given time, the oldest story on the front page will be no older than 1 hours and 25 minutes old. Sounds about accurate, the Digg home page as of this writing shows the oldest story, the 15th one to be 1 hour and 36 minutes old. This also means that at this rate, and assuming that stories are promoted at a constant pace, only 288 stories will be promoted to the front page per day. These stories are divided over 60 different subcategories and three types of media (text, pictures, and videos).

Furthermore, based on the current front page a story gets 1 hour and 25 minutes on the front page before it is deemed practically irrelevant. The amount of people that go to the second page after the front page are about 30% of overall front page traffic, and in comparison an insignificant number of people go from the second to the third page. What this means is that if a story is not viewed by someone within the first 75 minutes, 2 in 3 readers wont see it, and if no one sees the story in the first 3 hours, almost no one will see the story. Of course some people will check it out from the Digg RSS feed, but compared to the power of the site, that is insignificant.

At the same time however, there is an exponentially greater amount of content created everyday and much faster than older content is deemed expired or irrelevant.

So the problem, basically is that there is more viable content created everyday than can be shown and would actually be seen by a large number of people on the site (based on the current front page). And the content that does make it through, isn't on the front page nearly long enough to make a significant impact. On average, 300 stories a day get about 1 hour and 25 minutes to get the bulk of attention, after which they are gone from human eyes forever.

The Newspaper That Works

The answer to the problem is quite simple. In fact the right answer has been around for quite a while and it's called StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has pages akin to the traditional social news sites' front pages, but for a majority of the users, StumbleUpon is not a destination site. You install a browser toolbar, select your preferences, and you never have to visit the actual site ever again (unless you want to change settings or post to your blog). The toolbar sends you directly to pages that match your preferences and your voting habits. The more you use it, the better the pages you get.

At the same time, however, there is no time-stamp on articles that are submitted to StumbleUpon. You may be shown an article from 5 minutes ago, or an article from 5 years ago - just depends on if it matches your (and your friends') preferences and voting habits. This ensures that every piece of content submitted to the site will get a shot at being judged by the community and that there is no limit to how much exposure something can get. In the process, StumbleUpon has also certainly diminished potential information cascades based on what seems like social proof (e.g. people vote on some stories simply because they already have votes, but you can beg, borrow, and pay for those initial votes), and they have also reduced blind voting because StumbleUpon sends you to a website before you vote on it.

The problem with this system, however, is that because it works so efficiently, and because the user experience is so genuine, intuitive, and non-intrusive, only a fraction of the community using the toolbar ever has to interact with StumbleUpon as a destination site. Therefore, it is very hard to monetize the system based on current (ad based) business models. Even though StumbleUpon has a business model that seems to be working, it's doubtful that (superior as it is) the site can be more profitable than Digg. At $0.05 per visitor, StumbleUpon asks for $50 CPM. Even for the best monetized blogs that traffic isn't worth the cost.

The Newspaper That Will Have To Suffice

From a business perspective, the idea of a monetized destination site, at least in the current Web 2.0 economy, seems to be the right answer, so let's go with that. They can't copy StumbleUpon so that's out. They don't want to move away from a destination-site business model so an off-site mechanism is also out. What if, we crossbred the two ideas?

For example, Reddit already has a StumbleUpon-like toolbar. The only difference is that this toolbar only allows shows up when you visit the Reddit front page and then click an external link from there. And the toolbar only allows you to vote on the story. If you want to do anything else, back to the Reddit front page you go.

Reddit already has a 'recommended' page so we can effectively emulate the StumbleUpon experience by using a combination of the recommendations and the toolbar, we only need to make sure that all users use the toolbar rather than voting directly from the Reddit submission page. Perhaps move voting completely to the toolbar while maintaining story rankings on the front page? The only part we're left with is the 24-hour restriction.

For that we can use an interesting new feature that Reddit recently implemented. If you go to the front page, you'll see a module at the top that rotates between some of the stories from the upcoming section, allowing you to vote on them directly from the front page (the most heavily trafficked section of the site.

What if we rethink the previous two features and reuse the module so it shows 5 random recommendations for you (regardless of upcoming or promoted, just based on your preferences and whether you've already read them or not? That way, the module can cycle between old and new, promoted and still in the queue, and you don't have to worry about missing any good stories on your favorite social newspaper. As for the final problem of scaling with diversity, Reddit solved this problem a few months ago when they introduced normalization to their front page through their unique use of subreddits.

The future of content consumption on the social web is entirely based in personalized recommendations, and this re-conceptualization of Reddit creates a better environment for fighting information cascades and blind voting, and ensures that you will see the content most relevant to you regardless of votes or time-stamps. Recommended stories are only removed once you have either read them or discarded them and content has an infinite lifespan. By integrating the model into a destination site, it also remains an easily monetizable venture.

Reddit has all the pieces to the puzzle, they just haven't figured out how to fit them together.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Anton Talks About The Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Not all the users have these features enabled yet, but those of you who do can check by going to upcoming and checking for a red BETA label. The new upcoming system has three ways to sort it and the third option in the list, Most Diggs, is the one you're used to seeing, where all stories are presented in order of decreasing Diggs.

The first new option, Most Matches, looks at your history of Digging, compares it with other community members, and shows the stories in order of number of matches. In the case of the first story, you see the expanded view of the 'Recommendations via' list, and in the case of the second story, you see it in the compact version, not showing the user names and percentages, rather only the total number. For example:

The second new option, Most Recent, shows you the stories recommended by community members compatible with you, in reverse chronological order. You can also see why a story was recommended to you (via user name and percentage of compatibility with that user).

A new section in the sidebar, entitled 'Diggers Like You' shows you Diggers that are most like you in their Digging and submitting habits.

And finally, you can click on a user and compare exactly how much you overlap. In the screenshot you see below you can see the overlap between my profile and thediggboss's profile. In total we had 3864 overlapping Diggs in the past 30 days, which means our compatibility score over all our Digg activity is 38%.

Overall the design is great and there is a decent feature set. As far as what it is designed to do, it seems to function well. At the same time however, whether the engine will help content submitted by a fairly obscure user, remains to be seen. In the beginning, all your compatibilities are going to be with the people that you have been Digging and the people that have been Digging you back, i.e. your friends. It will require widespread use of the feature 'Diggers Like You' to help more obscure submissions travel to a lot of people.

It is also important to note that the recommendation engine will be a boon to advertisers as well (and of course Digg). By sending the most relevant links to the most relevant people, you can also send the most relevant advertisements to the right people (and ensure high-quality clickthroughs). Users get good content and related, hopefully non-intrusive ads, advertisers get the right potential customers, and Digg gets the money.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Special thanks to thediggboss for providing the images.

There are two basic principles involved in Collaborative Filtering.

1. The Wisdom of Crowds and Law of Large Numbers suggest that as communities grow, not only does a large (diverse, independent, etc.) community make better decisions than a handful of editors, but the larger a community gets, the better its decisions will be. Therefore, we can hypothetically create a Collaboratively Filtered newspaper, television channel, radio station, etc., which would be better (for the community) rather than any other arbitrarily selected medium. In fact, as we will see, services like Digg, YouTube, and Last.fm, are trying to do exactly that - (CF) based media outlets.

2. The second principle of Collaborative Filtering suggests that in any such large community, with enough data on individual participants and on how the individual participants collaborate or correlate with each other, we can make predictions about what these users will like in the future based on what their tastes have been in the past, i.e. develop a collaboratively filtered recommendation engine. This, of course, relies on the fact that people's interests, preferences, and ideologies don't change too drastically over time.

The two aspects of the (CF) system result in two very different and important results.

The first gives you new, interesting, entertaining, and newsworthy information as judged by the community (in a way this is content that is the average of the interests of the entire community) and a good example of this is Digg's front page. Not all the content will be directly relevant to your tastes and in fact some of it will be completely irrelevant to you. However, as the community grows and becomes more diverse and independent, the average news story promoted to the front page will be of interest to the average community member. Not satisfied with averages? This is where the second aspect comes into place.

The second aspect of the (CF) system collects information on what kind of content and commentary you like and dislike, and based on your submission and voting habits, it does user-data-profiling. This user profile helps the site recommend content that has been submitted by users (or from sources) you generally agree with and find interesting, as well as topics that you usually vote up and tend to comment on. What this means is that by collecting enough information on how you interact with the site and with other users, the (CF) system can recommend content to you. The system finds the content and deliver it to you rather than it requiring you to scout for it. Furthermore, the more you use the recommendation system and vote up or down, the better it becomes with its recommendations.

The important thing, one that not many social sites realize, is that a (CF) system that doesn't automatically match content to your preferences, is inherently flawed. The reason for this is simple: Unless you can achieve perfect diversity and independence of opinion, one point of view will always dominate another on a particular platform. The dominant point of view on the social web is a left-leaning one, and without the ability to get the most appropriate pieces of content to the people that care most about them, the right-wing point of view gets buried almost every time.

A perfect example of this was the Ron Paul supporters and the ease with which they were able to manipulate the social news sites. Now if you could match the right-wing viewpoint to the right-wingers, and the left-wing viewpoint to the left-wingers, and get both points of views across to people that are interested in healthy debate rather than partisan politics, you're getting closer to the ideal system. A filtering system with preference-based recommendations, in essence, is the future of the social web.

Who is using what system?

The (CF) system is without a doubt the lifeblood of the social web. Even though different platforms apply it to varying extents, the system is still there at the core, and the social web would look more like rush hour in downtown Lahore if the community wasn't actively policing the traffic.

Social News

In the social news space, Digg and Propeller just use the system insofar as the front page is concerned (although Digg is set to release their recommendation engine this week). Once the content is promoted to the front page, the system's job is done. The system works in that you get rid of spam and unoriginal thought, but it isn't the best because it relies on averages rather than direct preferences of each participant. While these sites try to catch up and develop recommendation engines of their own, Reddit and StumbleUpon have leapfrogged them for a while now by having recommendation engines in place. These two sites also have similar concepts of a community front page (based on the average interests of the average community member) but they enhance your experience and incentivize increased participation by using your history of likes and dislikes to deliver the most high-quality and most relevant content to you. Furthermore, the normalization of Reddit's front page shown how a one-front-page-for-all approach forces conformity and dilutes the individual experience, whereas normalization ensures that each user controls how content is distributed to him or her.

Ultimately, even though there are some sites with little or no filtering (Slashdot, Fark, etc.), sites that use their (CF) based recommendation engines will continue to diminish the importance of active filtering from upcoming submission queues and improve the quality of user experience on an individual level.

Video Streaming and Sharing

Online video sites hosting and sharing sites are not much different. Site's like YouTube have multiple filtering mechanisms that often perform the same functions without requiring votes per se. Viewability, for example, is determined by:

1. Number of people currently watching a video

2. Number of comments on a video

3. User ratings and favorites.

The problem with impressions-based system (like the one used by now understandably dead content aggregator Spotplex) is that just because you viewed something or commented on something doesn't mean that it's good. In fact, there are dozens of YouTube videos that I click on, don't like them and then close the window (I see other people writing negative comments in poor English but I doubt that helps either). Some other sites like Break and Funny or Die use a StumbleUpon-like up/down voting system to determine what gets promoted to the front page. Again, while there are options to view similar/related videos and more videos from a user you like, there is no recommendation system using your rating and favoriting habits (and tags you like).

Blogging and Microblogging

For the most part, blogs use a combination of most viewed, most linked, most commented, and highest rated, as mechanisms for displaying content that you might like. While this is a better idea than letting people go through trial and error, it doesn't ensure that every visitor will be happy with what they see. For example, two very different posts on two entirely different topics can be the most viewed posts on your blog, and I might like one and not like another. At the same time, one has to wonder, at what point is it economical or time-efficient to start monitoring each individual user?

StumbleUpon solves this problem for the 'big guys' by letting you StumbleThru one site for the content that you might like the most. The feature, however, is not available for all sites yet.

Most Microblogging sites, unfortunately, have no filtering system at all. The signal to noise ratio debate rages on with respect to Twitter and its ilk. FriendFeed, however, launched a rudimentary recommendation feature that simple displays the top 'liked' and commented links.

Photo Hosting and Sharing

When I was thinking about the concept of (CF) systems, photo-sites like Flickr and Photobucket weren't even on my radar. Part of the reason for this is how most people I know use these sites, i.e., primarily for hosting and sometimes for finding creative commons images for embedding on their sites. I was, however, quite pleasantly surprised to see that Flickr has gone a long way to help people explore and discover excellent photography.

The feature that most people are probably familiar with is Interestingness. The feature is quite robust. It takes into account things like where the referral traffic to the image is coming from, who is commenting on it and when, who marks it as a favorite and how many people like it, among other more nuanced things. But in addition to that, the site also has other great features such as exploring based on geotagging on a map of the world, popular tags, subject-based and quality-based groups, camera finder, and most recent uploads.

The only thing left to add is a 'photos you might like' based on photos you have liked and commented on.

Music Streaming and Discovery

The best implementations of a Collaborative Filtering (CF) system along with a preference based recommendation/discovery system that I have seen are always on music streaming and discovery sites. The implementation on Last.fm for example, is almost perfect in my opinion. First of all, whether you use their online streaming widget or use their desktop software, they monitor every single song you listen to and aggregate that data. They also track how artists jump on and fall off your radar on a week to week basis. They use that data to make specific recommendations and automatically create a radio station for you that plays Last.fm's recommendations for you based on what you like.

While that in itself is more than enough, they don't stop there. They have another radio station for you that plays songs you usually like to listen, they show you what the entire Last.fm community is generally listening to, what your friends are listening to, and what your friends are recommending. It is a very robust system for aggregation, filtering, and recommendation. Here's how the recommendation engine works:

As you can see, they look at the musicians I listen to a lot and then recommend people that are either similar in sound or people who were influencers of or influenced by my favorites. These are followed by recommendations from friends and music-based groups on the site.

So, collaboratively filter and recommend or die?

These are only some of the major players that have embraced (CF) and personalized recommendations - Netflix and Amazon come to mind among others. As you can see from above, it is certainly possible to have a good collaborative filtering system without a recommendation engine (as seen in Flickr). It is optimal, however, for the users (because their experience is better) and your site (because users will participate more often and generally be happy with your product) if you throw in some recommendation system a-la Last.fm, the most robust of the lot by far.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

However with the introductions of Rooms, FriendFeed is no longer a lifestream aggregator anymore - it is the perfect platform for sharing and discussing content with groups focused on a specific topic.

Up till that moment of conversion, my problem with Friendfeed was that it fragmented conversations. Socialthing! on the other hand, is similar to FriendFeed in aggregating lifestreams, but when you reply to someone using Socialthing!, you're not replying within Socialthing!, rather your reply goes back to the original platform.

On May 22nd FriendFeed announced a new feature - rooms.

The concept isn't new. Forums and Google Groups are supposed to serve the same purpose. FriendFeed's implementation, however, is simple and easy to use, and robust at the same time. And overnight, my opinion of FriendFeed changed completely, largely because the function of FriendFeed changed for me. And I'm not alone, there has been a huge influx of new users, as well as increased activity from old users, just because of Rooms. I still ignore people's comments on my general lifestream, but I have created a social media room and everything I share there, along with everything the 800+ other members share there is up for debate and conversation.

FriendFeed is not a lifestream aggregator anymore (at least to me and hundreds of others), it is the perfect platform for sharing and discussing content with groups focused on a specific topic. It is Forums 2.0, if you will and it is precisely what the social web, even with gods like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and Flickr, are severely lacking. FriendFeed solves problems by scaling conversations between large groups of people and allowing people to control those conversations. You can automatically seed rooms with content using feeds, the community can share and re-share content, and you can search specific topics you're interested in. You can also assign multiple administrators to moderate the conversation and remove spam (sound familiar?)

This experience from hating FriendFeed to evangelizing FriendFeed was an interesting one because it shows the power that a single feature has to push your product over the edge and into the mainstream (or at least much larger acceptance). As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his books, The Tipping Point, little changes sometimes have big effects. It seems that FriendFeed made the right little change. They didn't stop there either.

Two weeks after announcing rooms, they added personalized recommendations. This new feature allows you to log into your FriendFeed network and sort everything that anyone from your circle of friends has shared in order of popularity over a day, week, or month. Some people have argued that this feature will decrease the incentive to hunt for hidden gems and people will migrate to conversations made popular by other users. The reality is that every social or collaborative community will have a core membership that shares and comments, and then have a passive community that just sorts by popularity and consumes. This new system just rewards the people who share good content by making it more accessible and makes it easier for passive users to find this good content and if they wish, participate in the conversation with just one click

What the past 3 months have shown is that FriendFeed is evolving. This is a good thing because it differentiates it from other services that do virtually everything FriendFeed did at its core. It is also a good thing because the service has morphed into something truly useful and the community is responding appropriately. The new features have almost made FriendFeed a better Digg. One that doesn't judge content by vote popularity, but on the basis of conversation and actual sharing of the content. Finally, it shows that it's not the sheer number of features and tools you have (i.e. Digg with all its useless visualization tools), rather it is what nuanced changes you make and the small features you add that enhance the user experience - and FriendFeed seems to understand that nuance very well.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb integrated FriendFeed comments into our own RWW comments. So you can now comment on one of our posts in FriendFeed and it will show up here on RWW! But wait, there's more... you can also push your RWW comments into FriendFeed. So this is a two-way process. (Richard)

A great byproduct of the demographic of these social news sites (many of the users are content producers themselves or own/run popular blogs) is that once content is promoted to the front page, it is usually written up about and commented on by hundreds of other bloggers who link to the initially promoted page. The end result is that not only do you get that initial burst of tens of thousands visitors but, because of all the other people linking to you, you fare prominently in search engines and get more long-tail traffic as well. The second reason is why some search engines are presumably, but not necessarily rationally, irked.

However, this isn't about Google's apparent plan to penalize sites that frequent the front-pages of social news sites and how any decisions to lay such a penalty would diminish everyone's experience (good content is good content). This article is about how the next evolution of social news sites needs to be a much more important role for and much more deeply integrated search functionality, and why traditional search engines need to understand this role of socially driven content sites and work with them not against them.

Every single social news site not only needs to integrate with search engines (like StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us do) but also needs itself to be a social search engine. Similar to social search engines like Searchles (that uses tags and saves much like Del.icio.us) and a multitude of others, but with robust social networking features and the ability to catalog all the most popular content and make it searchable (and contextually retrievable) based on user submitting/voting/commenting habits as well as relationships within the system. Not to mention an emphasis on the two different actions, "bookmarking" for future reference and long-tail importance as well as "voting" for real-time relevance but not necessarily long-term value.Let me explain.

Google determines the importance of a page based on it's associated PageRank.

PageRank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using its vast link structure as an organizational tool. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.

Similarly, social news sites function when "people" (rather than pages) are voting for pages using "actual votes" (by whatever name) rather than using links as other web pages do. Though they may not use the term PageRank for this process, all social news sites they have their own algorithm they use to determine the importance of a page and whether or not to promote it on the front page (and once on the front page, whether it is important enough to be a top story of the day). In effect, search engines as well as social news sites are both markets for the most important and most relevant information on topics, whether you are searching based on key terms or general categories - although the latter tend to be more transient and the former tend not to have a community or a "popular-now" aspect to them.

Ultimately, however, what differentiates social news sites from search engines is that even though they are both routinely indexing information and the goal of both is to show the best information first (based on PageRank or algorithms), social news sites focus too much on present-day and do an incredibly poor job of indexing information for future retrieval. You can see that in practice if you look at traffic statistics for any story made popular on one of these sites. You will see a massive spike that diminishes by 50% every page you move forward, but is essentially 0 as soon as you're 3-4 pages deep. And search is generally so poorly implemented (for example, you can only search by title, summary, or url, and guesswork is usually futile) and search algorithms are nearly useless in performing in any way intelligently, that the general user mentality is to check a few pages deep and what's not there is irrelevant.

Now, think for a second about a social news site and its entire index of popular content (as well as not-so-popular content) along with a search feature that works. What you get is a social news site becoming a smaller, but much more focused, search engine of its own. And why shouldn't it be? It's a search engine that only returns the best results (as determined by you, the community, based on one user one vote), can return them based on time frames (popular right now versus popular-when?), can easily filter between trusted and not-trusted sources (based on popularity and how many times the community has buried content), and completely behaviorally-target your results and make superior recommendations (based on your past submitting, voting, commenting, and searching habits) all from the same place.

The expectation of the socially driven content sites has evolved in terms of what people want to use them for, but the sites themselves haven't evolved fast enough to provide usable infrastructures to allow this kind of interaction. These sites aren't just for bookmarking information or just for breaking news stories anymore. Social news sites are decision markets for determining what content (audio, video, pictures, or text) is good (based on popularity, an unfair measure of quality) and bringing that information to the masses not just as a one-time thing , but to highlight good content above all in an index of it's own (imagine Digg Content Search, with its own refined index). In fact most of the content on these sites nowadays isn't actually news, it's rich media or commentary that isn't time-sensitive and certainly deserves to be archived for easy future retrieval.

Of course it would be foolish to think that implementing search will fix all the problems on social news sites, but it is one of the more important things that needs to be implemented (along with recommendation engines) if the socially driven content experience is to be progressed further. An addition of robust searching methods would actually solve numerous issues on the site as well. For example, there doesn't need to be a 24-hour limit on content shelf-life. StumbleUpon does a good job of maintaining attention towards good content but even then problems with searching (the StumbleUpon index, not StumbleUpon results in Google) persist. If at any point enough people are searching for and voting on a specific piece it can be promoted. Also, if search on these sites is fixed, the duplicate content problem can virtually be eliminated, all the votes can be aggregated to one source and the right content can be made popular. Finally, good search ensures that stories are linked well together and related content or related recommendations can be easier to find (or people can browse content based on current interests of the community as shown in search, almost like a combination of Stack and Swarm but actually useful).

Conclusion

Social search is the future. And socially driven content sites - with their massive indexes of websites, huge communities and decent social networking features, and ample information on user habits and preferences (based on past behavior) - are in the best position to take the lead. Ultimately, imagine a combination of Digg, Google, Facebook, and Techmeme. To the minute, timely content, large index and approximately 20,000 or more new submissions indexed per day (this works fine for a smaller, Mahalo-level search engine), the best content is promoted to the top by an active community of millions of networked users, and conversation-mapping based on content promotion, comments, and search habits on the site.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

If there is one thing to love about the site even before you try it is that the service's name, which at first glance sounds stupidly web 2.0, makes perfect sense once you know what it stands for (one of the very few web 2.0 names that do). In fact, when I first heard the name I was ready to hate it, but after reading their explanation I couldn't help but love it.

• "Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk = Plurk
• Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
• Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
• Verb potential: "Oh I googled this -> Oh I plurked it" Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it's catchy, snippy and sweet."

How can you not love it?

As far as essentials are concerned, Plurk has all the bases covered. The service allows you to display 'events' in your life and follow other people's events by sending and receiving messages called Plurks.

These Plurks are almost identical in nature to Tweets (on Twitter). They are limited to 140 characters, they cover what is going on in your life (lifestreaming) and can be shared with others using a web or mobile interface or SMS (text-messaging). The difference, however, is the approach to sharing. While Twitter asks "What are you doing?", Plurk gives you some preset qualifiers to plurk with. These qualifiers include: loves, likes, shares, gives, hates, wants, wishes, has, will, ask, was, feels, thinks, says, is, and in addition to that you can free-style plurk (i.e., use it identically to Twitter, without qualifiers). These qualifiers are both a good thing and a bad thing. First, they are good because you are able to sort by qualifiers if you're looking for only one type of expressions from your network (for example, what have your friends liked in the past week, what have they hated, what are they doing right now?), but they are bad because they force you to write in third person, which I personally find quite annoying -- reminiscent of the old Facebook status format.

The User Interface and Experience

Signing up and using Plurk literally takes less than a minute (including registration and the starting guide). And once you start using it, some very interesting differences compare to other lifestreaming services start to become apparent. Right off the bat, the first thing you'll probably notice is that the UI is very pretty. In fact, the UI is absolutely brilliant, and you can't appreciate how great it is compared to other competing services until you add a dozen or so active friends and see how easily and quickly you can absorb all their activity (something that is rather clunky on other sites).

Plurk's use of the horizontally scrolling time-line to manage lifestreams (versus virtually every other service's vertical layout) is so smart that it feels like second nature and will make it difficult to go back to other less intuitive layouts. Furthermore, anyone who frequently lament Twitter's lack of threading and has found some comfort in FriendFeed, is going to love the threading mechanism on Plurk. You can look at any Plurk and immediately see how many replies it has gotten, thanks to a number at the end of each message. You can see all these replies and add your own (threaded chronologically) simply by clicking on that number. You can also scroll to the bottom of the floating message window and click the Plurk page link, which takes you to the full conversation page for that message and allows you to add your reply.

To add to the comprehensive user experience, Plurk allows you to customize your "Plurksperience" by adding a custom lifestream title and theme, post links, photos, and videos, has a mobile version of their site (not as pretty, but it works), and an embeddable lifestream widget.

Lifestream Networking and Network Management

The networking options on Plurk are enough to accommodate most people (in theory... in practice I couldn't import a friend list using any of the mechanisms, but it appeared to be a local problem). You can use email contact lists as well as instant messaging contact lists to import or invite friends. Once imported and after they have accepted your requests, you (and they) can determine different levels of access to your lifestream using the simple Plurk versus advanced Plurk options. Simple Plurks can be shared with everyone, your friends, friends of friends, or kept private (only you can see them) and advanced Plurks allow you to segment your friend list into different groups and Plurk by clique.

Other Interesting Twists

One of the things that is severely lacking on the social web is genuine appreciation of the communities that help the products or services succeed. While Plurk doesn't do anything significant in that department, it does give its users various levels of stars depending on how many friends they have recruited. This potentially serves as both a way for Plurk to show their appreciation, and give you an incentive to recruit more people (so that you can be seen with a star around your avatar).

The service also carries over a (perhaps outdated) concept of karma. The more active you and your friends are on the site, the more karma you accumulate. As you build karma, exclusive features become available to you.

Conclusion

When I first heard about Plurk I was ready to hate it. But after using the site and comprehensively going over the feature set and its implementation I am thoroughly impressed. Ultimately, I think Plurk is an amazing evolution over the previous generation of lifestreaming services that does almost everything you'd expect to find and does it better, while adding unique and interesting features of its own. Perhaps the only quibble I have with the service right now is that when I reply to someone else's Plurk that reply is restricted to that person's Plurk and doesn't show up in my lifestream otherwise.

You can friend me on Twitter, Friendfeed, and now Plurk.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

No, I don't mean my idea personally (although I do have some ideas for the company), but rather the collective ideas of every Starbucks loyalist, hopped up on caffeine. Simply put, My Starbucks Idea is a socially driven marketplace for Starbucks-related ideas that will help the company reinvent itself.

You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple -- we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen. Let’s get started.

All you need to do to participate is sign up on the site using a username, password, and an email address. Once you're logged in, you can post your idea in one of 13 categories:

Every posted idea immediately shows up in the recent ideas queue, where it is voted on in a Digg-style manner. If it gets enough votes, it gets 'promoted' to the popular ideas list and top all-time list, from which Starbucks employees and management pick the best ideas to actually implement in stores. If your idea catches someone's eye, it will be labeled as **under review**, and if they actually decide to implement it, you will see a **coming soon** tag next to the idea.

A complete list of ideas that are going to be implemented can be found in the ideas in action section of the site.

Overall, the site is an absolutely great idea. In many ways it is very similar to Dell's IdeaStorm which I similarly praised. Every company could benefit from its own implementation of a socially driven marketplace for ideas, especially major consumer brands such as Starbucks and Apple, which have developed an incredibly loyal core following. Such marketplaces can help companies capitalize on the passions of their their most important fans and deliver on the promises of the next big thing without huge research budgets.

My Starbucks Idea has been a huge success so far, just like Dell's IdeaStorm before it. Approximately a month after launching, the site has gotten a plethora of great idea submissions from Starbucks-lovers, and the most popular submissions have gotten tens of thousands of points (votes) and hundreds of comments. As long as Starbucks keeps letting the community freely voice its opinion and keeps implementing the crème de la crème of the community's ideas, the company has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Disclaimer: I own Starbucks stock.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

How would you describe Socialthing! in simple terms?

Socialthing!'s goal is to be what we call a "digital life manager". It's a place that you will see the things that you and your friends are doing, interact with them (while those interactions publish to the originator of the content) and also be able to create content from the interface while it publishes to all the networks you might be a part of)

Many people see FriendFeed and Socialthing! as serving a very similar purpose. Do you think Socialthing! is in competition with FriendFeed or do you feel that they are two separate audiences and the services can coexist? If so, how do you see each being used simultaneously? If not why or how do you think Socialthing! is better than FriendFeed or Ping.fm?

I think that Socialthing! and FriendFeed are two very different things. Socialthing! is a digital life manager, a single place that you will go to manage the networks that you're a part of elsewhere. FriendFeed is a place that you go to create meaningful conversation around content. The aggregation of the content means that everything that's in there can be conversed around. The conversation stays inside of FriendFeed for good reason, because elsewhere, it may be out of context.

Socialthing! isn't necessarily better or worse than FriendFeed, just different. They're two very different value propositions, and it just depends on how you want to interact with your networks, and whether or not you think adding another network into the confusion is a good/bad thing. As for distinctions with Ping.fm, they are just simply a publisher of status, much like Profilactic's 155+ isn't only because of our lack of the time that we've been on the market, and us being in private beta. It's because the services do very different things with those services. One is that we don't just aggregate a feed, but rather, aggregate your feed, all of your friends, and all of the things that they've been doing on those services. This is an incredible amount of more work. This means that there has to be a solid UI to support it, especially considering information overload. It also means that there has to be a scalable way to be able to fetch so many friends at once. One thing that's also very different about our infrastructure is that we do live calls to the sites when the user comes to our site, so that for certain services that make more sense to have it, the information is fresh, rather than 20+ minutes old. For sites like Twitter, this is of utmost importance.

Now, going forward we do intend on adding services at a very rapid pace, but we are also letting our community vote on these services. Since helping manage peoples' digital lives is our game, we need to make sure we have all of the most important services implemented, so we're including a Digg-like voting mechanism soon that will take care of this and let us know which services are most important to our users.

We're also planning on going far beyond just doing basic social services that have explicit content being generated, but we'll be elaborating more on this later.

As for the profile page, we'll be implementing this soon, and we'll have more details on it also when it's released.

When I wrote my review of the two services, the reason that I chose Socialthing! over FriendFeed was because Socialthing! sends all user activity out to the external sites whereas FriendFeed keeps everything internal as FriendFeed comments. This essentially makes FriendFeed a social network of social networks while Socialthing! is (currently) an aggregator for social networks. In fact, I feel that FriendFeed is adding to my information overload whereas Socialthing! currently helps me receive a lot of information and deal with it efficiently. Do you see that changing and Socialthing! becoming a network of sorts or was that an intentional decision?

I don't see us changing in that manner. We don't want to be a social network on our own. One distinction between us and all of our "competitors" is that there is actually no concept of "friend" on our site. If you're friends with somewhere on the social web, then you're friends on our site. The idea behind this was that there's just simply too much "friending" that exists on the web right now, and going and searching for your friends with every single new service that pops up is annoying and repetitive, so not requiring the user to do that was of utmost importance.

As for the commenting and things like that, it's likely that in the future, FriendFeed will do whatever they can to push those comments outside of the FriendFeed architecture, but it's also going to be difficult. Currently they don't work with any APIs, and even when they do, pushing back comments is not exactly the easiest thing to do, especially with the context that they're providing. But they're smart, and they'll get it done. The question for the consumer at that point is whether they want to have another place to have a conversation or something to simply sift through all of the unmanageable streams of activities.

Is there a plan to release a public API, embeddable widgets, or other ways to export the aggregated data out of Socialthing!?

We have a very solid API roadmap currently in the plans. The API will allow most all of the functionality of the existing website to be put elsewhere. Our thought is that people will build desktop apps, mobile apps and other mashups so that the information that we're aggregating/displaying can be consumed in interesting ways.

We will provide a few of our own things, however, things like Javascript widgets and the like. But at the same time, we've seen an incredible success by companies building things like desktop applications built on Twitter that Twitter didn't have to spend any time on at all. We like this and will likely be hoping for a similar result.

How do you think you are improving or plan to improve or innovate the concept of lifestreaming? And finally, what do you think is Socialthing!'s killer app? What is the one feature that will set it apart from the competition and hopefully help it gain greater market share?

The concept of Lifestreaming is very new, and I guarantee you that if you were to ask the average Facebook user what a Lifestream is they would have absolutely no idea. But they know what their NewsFeed is for sure. So that's what we want to innovate on. Bringing Lifestreaming to the masses with a very simple, easy to use interface where there is hardly any onboarding process required.

As for our killer app? I think it's simply just being able to see what all of your friends on all of your networks are doing without ever having to add them, and then being able to communicate with them, all without ever leaving the same site. Imagine Meebo, or Trillian for social networks.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

The reasoning is simple enough: While unique visits and page views are useful in measuring how much incoming traffic a site has, it isn't exactly a good or accurate way of measuring impact or even engagement. You could have high incoming traffic (for example, any site that is hugely successful on social sites) but if there is an incredibly high exit rate and only 30 seconds to a minute spent on the site, the traffic numbers don't mean much (i.e. not all traffic is created equal). Furthermore, the rise of new web technologies such as AJAX which don't require page reloads to refresh elements or modules in a page, or video embeds (such as from YouTube) that allow you to watch a video and then browse related videos without ever refreshing the page, are making page views a mostly inaccurate measure and rendering it largely irrelevant.

While most people agree that page views are becoming irrelevant, the same people are uncertain about the future. For example, many agree that attention-based metrics are the future. Attention metrics calculate the total time spent on a site or interacting with a page (or element on a page in the case of Facebook applications) as a percentage of total time that people spend online, to measure a site's relative importance on the web. However, there are many others, like the Tel Aviv-based Nuconomy Studio and even Yahoo's Buzz, that believe using factors like comments on posts, ratings from users, number of times something is shared, and clicks on ads as a measure of how popular something is is a better/more accurate metric.

The problem it seems, arises because there is a disconnect between the advertising industry and the publishing industry. The reason why there is an eternal quest for traffic, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also maximizing page views per visitor, is because advertising networks let you in on the basis of how much traffic you're generating, and your eventual income is based on the number of impressions (and clicks). While it is true that the page view as a metric is on it's way out, this isn't going to happen unless a new metric comes from within the advertising industry, which, with over $20 billion at stake, has the most to gain from a more accurate way of determining where to spend their money.

But it's not that simple either. As Scott Ross explains, different web technologies and applications have unique effects on different sites. What technologies you use and how they effect engagement and interaction on your site may depend on the size of your site, the niche you operate in, and a host of other factors. In fact, the metric that is most applicable could even change from page to page depending on the content on those pages. That being the case, perhaps one metric that is applied to everyone is just not enough and just not practical/efficient. As web technologies evolve, the page view is bound to die as a metric, but unless the advertising industry can get it's act together and work alongside the publishing industry, a good set of new metrics that would be widely adopted is not imminent.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

I also understand why people might think that this launch is a competitor to Yahoo!'s own Del.icio.us, but I think that notion is a little mistaken. While socially driven news is ultimately an evolution of social bookmarking, the latter has evolved to the point where the two concepts can live largely independent of each other. For example, I use multiple social news sites, but use them predominantly to submit for and share with large groups of people (whom I don't even know in most cases, hence socially driven news). At the same time, I use Del.icio.us (and Instapaper more recently) to specifically bookmark a piece of information that I will have to recall later (or want to save for the long run), or that I want to share with a small, relatively defined circle of people. As long as Yahoo! can make the distinction between bookmarking information (long-term, more intimate) and driving news (more current, for the mass audience), I think both products can peacefully coexist.

Yahoo! is moving in the right direction, and a very exciting one for all parties involved, and here's why.

Why Yahoo! Has Me Buzzing

1. Integrating Search

Anyone who has ever used Google Zeitgeist knows how interesting and useful search statistics can be for determining what's hot and capturing people's imagination right now (i.e. Hot Trends that update throughout the day) as well as what people are interested in over the long-term and depending on the season (i.e. Trends). Now imagine the same principle being applied to social news. If people are searching for what is important and relevant to them (and often looking for more information on breaking news or other events that are happening at the moment) using that as one of the many 'popularity factors' ensures that the content is always generally popular and relatively current. Of course, that is just one of the many factors they take into account, but for now, this is a factor that is unique to Yahoo! Buzz.

2. It's Still Social

Too many people have unfairly characterized Yahoo! Buzz as not being social. A more fair characterization would be to argue that Yahoo! Buzz is not as democratic as some of its competitors, but it's still very social. First, the fact that user search patterns is one of the 'popularity factors' means that Yahoo! Buzz content is being dictated by its audience, not to mention that people can still buzz (vote for) stories they like, from the pool that has been preselected for them. Additionally, people can still share stories directly with their friends/contacts and further socialize the content by posting it to other social sites (which are all factors taken into account when measuring an article's popularity). While users aren't allowed to submit content and some advanced features, such as user groups, don't exist in the current build, the site is a solid half-way point between traditional media and new media. The sources are limited and largely mainstream, but what's popular is in the hands of the people.

3. Only Publishers Need Apply

There have been two major problems that people have had with Yahoo! Buzz. The first, as discussed above, is the users' inability to submit stories, and the second is the limited sources from which the information is taken. Yahoo! Buzz only allows sites that are a part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network (i.e. sites that run Yahoo! text ads alongside their content) to be included in the index of content users can vote on. Honestly, I think this is the smartest move Yahoo! could have made for itself. However, does this mean that we won't get all the niche content that we have learned to love? Let me put it this way, in case you didn't read the fine print:

"Every day, a few of the top Buzz articles will be bumped onto the Yahoo.com main page, giving the story potentially the widest audience possible on the internet. Reports suggest that, in tests, links to Wired.com received over 2 million unique hits in 2 hours."*

* Note: Yahoo! says that they are able to rotate coverage on the main page for smaller sites unable to keep up with the traffic.

Now let me ask you, have you gotten your Digg fix today?

I agree that the limited selection is off-putting, but being realistic, I don't see this as a problem at all. With the prospect of being featured on the Yahoo! main page, or even being featured among the top stories on Yahoo! Buzz (which I think will have no trouble building traffic) is an incredibly lucrative proposition that no one in my mind would decline just because it requires you to be a part of YPN. As soon as the site is taking applications (I'm not sure how the inclusion process will end up working), you can bet that every site out there will want a piece of the Buzz and niche content wont be hard to find at all.

More generally, with social news, it's always a chicken and egg game. You need a community to get good content, you need good content to build a community, but that community won't come if there is no good content, content that they are supposed to provide. Well here's where Yahoo! gets lucky. Yahoo! already has millions of registered users and millions of people visiting the site daily that can actively be converted to Buzz participants by either driving traffic or integrating the new site with search and news features on the portal. Just as important, Yahoo! doesn't immediately need a large user base (for submissions) because the content (from pre-approved publishers) is automatically indexed on the site and users can browse and vote it up.

Why Yahoo! Should Be All Abuzz

Yahoo! Buzz is a great proposition for everyone but the most active and most passionate participants of socially driven news sites (all 1,000 of us). Without making this too long, Yahoo! is giving you, as a publisher, the opportunity to reach fairly good circulation directly through the Buzz site, and a chance at fulfilling your yearly traffic and exposure quota and all you have to do is three things. First, make sure that you are a member of the Yahoo Publisher Network, second, join Yahoo! Buzz, third, create relevant and quality content that people want to read. And as a reader or member of the social news community, Buzz gives you the quality and breadth of Yahoo! News and, as of now, 100 other high quality publishers from across the web (likely to increase massively), while at the same time letting you have some say in what gets exposure and experiment with social news elements.

This is an excellent move for Yahoo! in many ways. This is the easiest way to explain what Yahoo! is about to create: Imagine if Digg had 10 times the incoming traffic, and got a percentage of ad-revenue from each of the sites that were promoted to the front page. Yahoo! Buzz does essentially that. The site, combined with the possibility of being featured on the Yahoo! main page, comprises of tens of millions of potential page views and because you have to be a member of the Yahoo Publishing Network, whenever content is promoted and trafficked by the Yahoo! audience, Yahoo! gets a piece of the advertising revenue pie. Not only does this increase the conversions for Yahoo! Publisher Network, but it also increases the revenue per conversion for Yahoo!. In essence, they're getting their ads on the sites and then creating traffic for the same sites.

Ultimately, Buzz is very much a beta product - but it has massive potential. The site should certainly allow user submissions (though I think it's okay to require sites to be a part of YPN), and is missing a host of other features. But even in its current state, I think everyone wins - Yahoo!, the content producers/publishers, and even most of the readers.

Even though I enjoyed participating in them, until recently I hadn't really thought about what makes them compelling - beyond their premise (i.e. the product they are based around).

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

Essential Elements of an ARG

Here are few of the 'must have' elements for a successful Alternate Reality Game:

1. Storytelling or narrative

Every ARG should have a captivating story to tell that extends beyond the product. For example, the Halo 3 guerrilla marketing campaign revealed specific elements of the third installment in the series, which would be interesting for people that are already fans of the game. These 'games' often serve as prologues for the product or event that they are ultimately marketing. Unlike with traditional advertising, these stories make the product/event more dynamic and more appealing.

Although ARGs are mostly used to market products that have found a loyal online fan base (e.g. video games, movies, music, and television), they can be used to market almost anything - as long as you have a story to tell. We saw this in Audi's "The Art of the Heist" ARG, which was made specifically to market the Audi A3, and Coca-Cola's "Zero will give you life as it should be" campaign for Coke Zero in Europe.

2. Discovery/deciphering and documentation elements

Any well-executed ARG will play its cards close to its chest and reveal information slowly, sporadically, using different outlets/ mediums, and over an extended period of time. The narrative should be broken into smaller pieces, often obscured or coded in some way, so that not only do they need to be found but also deciphered into something intelligible. As such, the discovery and deciphering elements allow different people/sources to 'discover' new information and forces them to work together as a collective to help the story progress.

While most people will be interested in closely following the story, to try and be the first to discover the next step (for fame/glory or just out of curiosity) there will be others that will play along just so they can document the game, analyze the marketing strategy, and learn from it.

3. Cross-medium interactivity

For an ARG to be successful, it has to use multiple mediums. It has to be pervasive and must be available and accessible on as many different mediums as possible. These mediums may include, but are not limited to:

• Articles or bits of information seeded online on blogs and news outlets
• Videos (clips, trailers, commentary)
• Print ads in magazines and newspapers
• Billboards
• Posters in shops
• People with placards on the streets
• Phone calls
• Radio or online audio broadcasts
• Email and snail mail

The more mediums you use, the more personal it becomes and the closer it gets to reality. Furthermore, with each medium you tap a potentially unique audience that you may not be able to tap into using other mediums (e.g. online/email versus offline/snail-mail).

4. Blurring the lines between reality and fiction

Because ARGs allow you as an individual and community (working together) to make decisions that have visible and often instantaneous results, or at least give the appearance of interactivity, they help blur the lines between reality and fiction.

For example, for the Halo 3 campaign, real people took to the streets and babbled indecipherable gibberish for days on end. Similarly, the Harvey Dent campaign was made to look like a real political campaign and at the same time required a 'grassroots' collective effort to unveil what was actually going on. When you walk into a store and are faced with a vandalized display and a floor littered with "The Joker" playing cards, in a sense you step out of theatrics and into an alternate reality.

Image from destructoid.com

Things ARGs Should Avoid

Just as there are some elements that any good alternate reality game must possess to engage an audience, there are other things that can completely turn an audience off. Here's a look at some of the elements that ARGs must absolutely stay away from.

1. Lack of interactivity, too linear

Too many ARGs give the appearance of interactivity and though it seems like the end result depends on your participation, the games are actually linear 'journeys' from point A to point B. No one wants to put hours into a puzzle when they know that their individual effort doesn't really affect the outcome.

2. Lack of a reward

People enjoy participating in ARGs because each puzzle you unlock gives you a new piece of information and helps progress a story. As I mentioned earlier, these games most often serve the purpose of a prologue. No one wants to participate if the reward is not tantalizing enough or there is no reward. The Coca-Cola Coke Zero campaign had this problem, because the participants ultimately realized that the campaign was merely for another flavor of Coke - information that in itself isn't 'virally appealing'.

3. No instant gratification

Just as important as having a reward is allowing readers to access it right away. We are living in a Web-enabled world where instant gratification is key and delayed gratification is like no gratification at all.

4. Too difficult

You don't want to just throw away the prize, but you also don't want to make getting to the prize so difficult that nobody wants to participate. There have been ARGs where I tried for a half an hour and then gave up, thinking that I would wait for someone else to solve the puzzle and just enjoy the findings; or I didn't bother going back out of sheer frustration. Finding the appropriate level of challenge can be one of the more difficult parts of any ARG-based marketing effort.

5. Same old game, different name

The ARGs that everyone talks about were successful because they innovated and came up with ideas and ways to engage that no one had used before. If your game is still using the same old tactics to market a different product, it's not going to work. Try to come up with something new, because the novelty value alone will be enough to draw in some people.

6. Too scripted, too commercial

An ARG by its very nature has to appear to be unscripted and non-commercial to succeed. Otherwise it just becomes an advertisement that people have to work for to see.

You have to keep in mind that on a very basic level, you must have a premise that people are interested in - or they could be interested in. Making an alternate reality game around cats will be difficult to market. It's much easier to follow the 4 steps above and avoid the 6 pitfalls mentioned, to take your good idea and make it a great success through ARG-based viral marketing.

ilove bees image from mitchrukat.com

Many people argue that the social web is actually destroying offline relationships and that relationships built through online social networking sites are nothing more than "superficial acquaintances." For brothers Hank and John, however, Brotherhood 2.0 has not only strengthened their bond but it has also allowed them to affect the lives of thousands of other less fortunate people through their "Nerdfighter Power Project for Awesome."

Hank, who is an environmentalist and the chief geek at EcoGeek, and John, who writes for young adults and is the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katharines, and the upcoming Paper Towns (September 2008), decided that they were going to go 365 days with only textless communication (which means no email, no instant messaging, no texting, but very infrequent phone calls for logistical purposes) by using their video blog, Brotherhood 2.0, and posting videos back and forth. 11 months and 18 days into their experience, they launched their "Project for Awesome."

We have more to talk about, we know more about eachother. We laugh about our past and share current successes. It's a very unique online relationship, but it's been a very powerful and exciting one.

Opening YouTube's Most Discussed Videos page today, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the "secret project" had taken over not only the top 5 spots for the most discussed videos, but as I scrolled through the subsequent 5 pages, the project had effectively taken over most of YouTube.

To help shed some light on the project and how the Nerdfighters took over the 4th most popular destination on the web and the number one site for video hosting and sharing, I had a chat with Hank, one of the orchestrators of the coup.

Hank, could you begin by telling us more about the Nerdfighter Power Project for Awesome?

The Nerdfighter Power Project for Awesome was an attempt to take over the most discussed page of YouTube with videos that all had the same thumbnail image. Each of the videos promotes a different, worthy charity. It worked.

Before I ask you how you pulled this off, can you tell us which charities were promoted as a result of this?

There were more than 400 videos posted, but several people focused on humanitarian organizations in Darfur, UNICEF, Autism Speaks, The Humane Society, Toys for Tots, World Wildlife Fund, I'm proud to say that it's a very long list.

So, how'd you guys pull off this crazy stunt?

The project itself was the result of one crazy idea and a lot of planning. John said to me one day, "Wouldn't it be cool if the thumbnail for every video on the most discussed page of YouTube was the same image," and I agreed that that would, indeed, be cool. The most discussed page is one of the central ways for finding what's happening on YT, and PopURLs pulls from it for it's YouTube section. So, after a lot of discussion with people who are really involved in the YouTube community, and who know how this kind of thing works, we came up with a plan.

We messaged a bunch of high-profile YouTubers that we know (people who's videos regularly get more than 1M views per week), and we asked them if they wanted to be involved in a project that was designed to reduce "world suck" and we got a lot of interested replies. So we then took the idea to our audience and asked folks to sign up for a mailing list if they wanted to be involved in a "secret project." About 4,000 people signed up in the first week. We then designed a thumbnail graphic (thanks to FallofAutumnDistro for that) and distributed it to the top YouTubers and to our fans and asked everyone to spotlight a charity that they believe in because, y'know, it's Christmas, and one of the central themes of Brotherhood 2.0 has always been "reducing world suck." We asked everyone to upload their video exactly at 12 noon EST, and they did, even in Australia, where it was like 4 am!

Then we sent out messages to those 4,000 nerdfighters asking them to comment, rate and favorite the videos that were exceptional. And, in less than 24 hours we'd taken over the whole page.

That's great, because it's all for many good causes. I know it's a little early to tell, but if you can tell us, what effect has this project had on Brotherhood 2.0, and how successful do you think it is (or will be) in spreading awareness about and actually leading to results for the charities that the videos promote?

As far as Brotherhood 2.0 is concerned, our YouTube subscribers have gone from 11,000 to 12,000, which is a big jump for one day. Furthermore, the video that we made is now our second most viewed video ever with 90,000 views. As for the charities, I've received several messages from people saying that they have given to charities profiled. But I imagine I'm not getting an email from every single person who donates. There's no reporting mechanism, but anecdotal evidence is promising.

There you have it. It's Christmas time and the Nerdfighters are doing their part to help the less fortunate. Join the Nerdfighters at Brotherhood 2.0 and spread the love.

Digg.com recently had a survey pinned to the top of the site's front page, that hints at some of the new features we can expect from the next iteration of Digg. Let's take a more in-depth look at these features and how we would like them to be implemented.

Feature: Digg Groups

This feature is clearly something that they are looking to bring over from Pownce but the implementation will be altered to suit the dynamic of the Digg community, and may end up being similar to the groups feature on StumbleUpon. On Pownce, you can make groups based on the different social and professional circles you have (for example "Digg friends", "Bloggers", "Family"), and organize people from within your network into these different groups. On Digg, however, people will be able to create groups on different topics of interest (for example "Firefox", "Apple", "Nintendo"), and other people will be able to join groups that interest them. Rather than Pownce groups, which are used to limit who you send a specific message to, these groups will be more like topical forums where people can have conversations on topics related to the group.

Feature: Customizable Alerts

Digg already has the initial setup for an alerts system. By going to email settings from your profile preferences you can opt-in to get email alerts for the following actions:

1. When you receive a shout
2. When someone requests to become your friend
3. When a friend of yours accepts mutual friendship
4. When a story you've submitted becomes popular
5. When Digg has new feature announcements and other news

The expanded feature-set will include the option to get more information (i.e. more stats on submissions, a digest of relevant content that you might like but may have missed, etc,) and more customizable alerts on a daily and weekly basis. I have been using the current iteration of email alerts but for some reason I don't get an alert when a story I've submitted becomes popular.

Feature: NSFW Filter

Digg already has a profanity filter (which I am very happy for and have been using ever since it was implemented) and a filter for content that is not safe for work, will be a welcome addition, not only for people who are slacking off at work but also for Digg's younger audience.

Digg's Privacy Policy states:

You must be 13 years and older to register to use the Digg website. As a result, Digg does not specifically collect information about children. If we learn that Digg has collected information from a child under the age of 13, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. We recommend that minors between the ages of 13 and 18 ask and receive their parents' permission before using Digg or sending information about themselves or anyone else over the Internet.

And while a majority of the content on Digg is safe for most audiences, a filter indicating NSFW content will help us all out. It seems that the option will let users show or hide such content, however, a better option may be to allows users to highlight NSFW content, so that people can look at the title and summary of the submission and decide if they want to click-through or not.

Feature: Digg Achievements

When Digg removed the top Diggers list from the site, many people were unhappy about it but many more were glad because they didn't agree with absolute numbers and ratios as the right metric to use for judging the best community members on Digg. Hopefully the new achievements system will give out "awards" or "merit badges" in your profile based on metrics that everyone can achieve even without having been a member of Digg for a long time. Such metrics could include the following and others:

1. Highest-voted (or otherwise good comment[s]) for the week.
2. Highest-voted (or commented-on) story of the week.
3. Most bizarre, unique, funny (etc.) submission or comment of the week.
4. Most friends invited to Digg.

These can be used as balancing factors to the more traditional metrics of most number of promoted submissions, best weekly promotion ratio, and so on.

Feature: Recommendation Engine

This has to be the single most anticipated feature on Digg since the Images section. The recommendation engine promises to do what the fundamentally useless Digg visualization tools pretend to be doing, i.e., help users find interesting stories that are directly relevant to them and will be interesting for them based on their Submissions and Digging/Burying history on the site. The feature promises to be the killer app of Digg, that will really help take the socially driven aspect of filtering good content from bad content and algorithmically match it for relevance to bring you the best in social news.

Feature: Customize Digg

This is a feature that I personally think is a definite step in the opposite direction. The customize feature lets you filter content based on urls, and for example, lets you see the most popular stories from one site, i.e. the New York Times and so on. This pretty much defeats the purpose of social news and will probably get dropped from the upcoming features. Almost everyone I talked to, who has taken the survey, voted against this feature. [Ed: Unless you plan to filter for RWW content... kidding, kidding.]

Feature: Remote Digg

Remote Digg will be one of the most innovative new features on Digg. The feature aims to extend your Digging experience to other sites that you frequent that you wouldn't ordinarily think about in "Diggable" terms. You will be able to Digg everything from restaurants, to books, causes, services, i.e. everything. Think of this as Digg meets Facebook meets Amazon reviews meets Yelp. And all this information will be aggregated in your Digg profile.

With all the things that we can expect in the next few months, I can really say I haven't been this excited to see the next phase of Digg in a long-time. Especially considering that they are reaching out to the community at large to get feedback (usually they get feedback from limited focus groups).

Which new feature are you most looking forward to?

We have been hearing about an upcoming new way to discover content on Digg for quite a while now. The new Digg 'recommendation engine' will purportedly look at your past submissions, Digging, and burying activity - and from all that recommend other stories that you might like. This system won't be much different from how Reddit's 'recommended' page works, or how StumbleUpon generally functions. While we wait for the Digg recommendation engine, which is perpetually 'coming soon', one enterprising Digg user has taken the initiative and built one himself. After putting in 200 hours of his own time, Dmytro Mulyava has come up with Digg Filter, an API based Digg story recommender.

We had the chance to talk to Dmytro and ask him some questions about Digg Filter.

Before we begin, can you tell our readers a little more about yourself. Who are you, what you do, and how you got involved with Digg?

Sure, I am student at a business school here in Toronto and I am really passionate about the Internet and the things that it allows people to do around the world. I first heard about Digg through an article in Business Week in August of 2006 and thought to myself “Hey, that’s a pretty neat idea!”. Since then I have found Digg to be a great source for things that wouldn’t be broadcasted by other media sources.

How active are you on Digg and what is your opinion on how the site has evolved since when you first joined and started participating in late 2006?

I lurk Digg a few hours a week and Digg some stories here and there, based on the content I find to be interesting. I am certainly not a power user – I never submit stories because I know my stuff is never going to make it to the front page. I love the comments – the top 5 (sorted by Diggs) for any story can be downright hilarious! Digg has been is growing at a very fast pace. While some feel that this is “bad” because content quality is declining as the user base expands, I haven't actually noticed this.

Digg has many different visualizations and ways to discover new content. Which would you say is your favorite?

I like Digg Spy. It is simple yet useful. There is something addicting about watching the stories scroll through and see how users are interacting with them (submitting, Digging, burying, and commenting).

But even given all these tools, you felt that there was something missing in the features Digg has and you decided to make a service of your own called Digg Filter. Tell us a little about this service and how you envision it being used.

The idea behind Digg Filter is very simple. I want to help people discover content based on their past preferences. Digg Filter looks at users’ Digging patterns and tries to “guess” what fresh content they will enjoy.

There are many, many stories submitted to Digg on a daily basis, more than anyone could ever sift through. Most of these stories never make it to the front page – and as such are undiscovered by the majority of the people. Hopefully the tool will help users find these “hidden gems” that the majority of the community moderated so they couldn't be promoted, but may be of interest to you.

I see the service being used by Diggers who are in a rush to find “the stories that matter” without flipping through many pages in the “Upcoming” section or relying completely on the front page of Digg.

Could you give us an idea of how these results are formulated? What specific data are you taking into account?

Digg Filter looks at pretty much everything. (grin)

There are a couple of things that worry me about the site though. First of all, you use Digg in the url and the name of your site, something that could get you a cease and desist from Digg, and second, Kevin Rose has already mentioned that an official Digg recommendation engine is coming soon. What impact do you think these two things may have on your service?

Those are two very valid concerns! If the folks at Digg want me to shut down the service, so be it. It (Digg.com) is their site and their trademark. I am obviously using their API to piece this together. They can unplug me at any minute and I understand that and hope that they will be a little more reasonable about it.

As far as the official Digg recommendation engine is concerned, I started work on my recommendation algorithm before I found out that their recommendation engine was in the works. When I did find out about their engine, my first instinct was “Oh damn, I've wasted so much time for something that will end up being useless!” [However] I decided to finish DiggFilter and put it online regardless.

How much time would you say you've spent on making this service?

Approximately 200 hours, give or take a few.

We think that the service is a great one, and we hope that Digg gives you some support and at least thanks you for your efforts. Thank you Dmytro for taking the time to answer our questions.

By now most of you have probably seen the site 'Why Digg is Blocked'. For those that haven't come across it, the site is on a mission to convince webmasters and content producers to reject social media traffic. Here's a look at the incredibly flawed logic the site uses to justify its purpose.

1. The Ad-Block Plus Argument

The first argument that the site makes is that social media sites endorse the use of ad-blocking software which allegedly infringes on the rights of site-owners.This argument is flawed for several reasons. First, none of these sites endorses the use of ad-blocking software. Yes, there was a time when Digg used to be technology-centric and a majority of its user-base was tech-savvy enough to use ad-blocking software to improve their online experience. However, as the site has grown, and as social media sites in general (i.e. Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon and so on) continued to grow and develop a more mainstream acceptance, the demographic has expanded to the point where it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that a majority of the traffic from the sites is not actively blocking advertisements.

Without any hard numbers, I would guess that the ratio of ad-blocking to non-ad-blocking users from these sites follows the 80-20 rule. The 20% of users that are actively engaged in finding, submitting, commenting on, and promoting the content to these site's 'popular' pages probably have ad-blocking software installed, whereas the 80% that are simply browsing these sites for interesting content to read (or reading front-page news via RSS), have no such software enabled.

2. The Insignificance Argument

This argument really does more to hurt the author's case than any of the other ones (though I'm not saying the others are any less stupid). The author argues that the social media demographic is an insignificant percentage of the internet and an even smaller percentage in terms of online spending, so blocking them shouldn't matter to site-owners. But then the author goes on to argue that "users who don't click on these ads are stealing bandwidth without paying for it". Well, if the demographic is so insignificant, why block them at all? It's not as if you're losing much in the way of ad impressions or clicks, right?

Furthermore, as you will see in the next section, this 'insignificant' traffic is what actually helps put most unknown sites on the map and helps them develop any significant kind of Google traffic to begin with. Oh, and how much bandwidth are these users really stealing? At my old blog, i got dugg 7 times in a month and got 250,000+ visitors that month, while the entire bandwidth cost was just $20.00 (Media Temple + WP-Cache). So no matter how small the scale on which you're operating, as long as you're smart about your operation, social media traffic should be a godsend, not something to complain about.

3. The Low Click Through Rate Argument

The final argument the site employs is that according to a sitepoint.com survey, Digg users are 3 times less likely to click on an advertisement. What this site and Sitepoint both fail to factor in, is that even in the best case scenario (for search) Digg traffic usually comes in numbers 80-90 times more than Google traffic to the same content. Once you consider those numbers, even at 1/3 the CTR, the total number of clicks you get are still 30 times as many as you would get from Google traffic.

Furthermore, where social media sites really shine is in giving increased visibility and otherwise unattainable exposure to relatively unknown sites. For a site that is generally unknown, has little or no PageRank and no inbound links or RSS subscribers, you may be lucky to get 10-20 Google visitors a day. Once you get submitted to social news sites, however, not only can you expect tens of thousands of visitors in the next 24 hours from those sites, but your average long-term search traffic and visibility will increase dramatically. So even if you completely discount the social media traffic and the low CTR there, the fact that your Google traffic may quadruple following social media success, is alone worth the effort.

For more discussion, don't forget to follow the topic at Reddit (here) and Digg (here).