The New IM Frontier: Get Out Of The Sandbox and Other Applications of Social Networking
The Internet offers a new frontier for marketing with a tool
that has been around for awhile, but is gaining in popularity,
social bookmarking. A web-based service, social bookmarking is
where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are
grouped together. And applications for this service are growing
almost daily.
“Social bookmarks can help you get out of the sandbox,” posted
Ignat, of Honolulu, Hawaii, on social networking forum. In other
words, social bookmarking sites host an audience of ‘link-hungry
bloggers’ that continually refer to the site for news they can
publish on their blogs. “So if you have a sandboxed site, what's
better than a few hundred of incoming links to help Google boost
your relevance?”
And that’s just one application of social networking!
Originally developed in April 1996 with the launch of itList.com
as a means of organizing content using tags, social bookmarking
sites are a popular way to group like searches, placing items in
a category, ranking their popularity and sharing the information
as an online resource service. Growth in only three years
resulted in many venture-backed companies, many of which lacked
ROI (return on investment), stunting industry growth until
recently with the launch of the web site del.icio.us, in
September of 2003.
While improvements still need made with social bookmarking, like
a lack of structure and standardization; for example, with
spelling and capitalization, for tags and keywords, there are
plenty of positive applications. Top ones include:
- The stored resource lists are publicly accessible, great for
online research and linking / book marking for repeat use and
referrals.
- Social bookmarking software / scripts are based on a different
technology than search engines, offering a wider range of search
and classification possibilities.
- People can subscribe to bookmarks to get helpful automatic
updates.
SB Service
Service is available now for webmasters and others interested in
setting up their own social bookmarking sites or communities.
Hot off the press is The Viral Socializer. With absolutely no
experience necessary, a person can have their very own social
book-marking & tagging service, all setup and ready to go in
about 10-20 minutes.
“I think the main interest is for webmasters to grow their
community, or to start niche social bookmarking,” said JP
Schoeffel, creator of The Viral Socializer.
The script is written in php (4.3 is enough) and MySQL. It is
packaged with a year of free hosting plus complimentary
installation and maintenance on hosted servers of The Viral
Socializer, an Install and user's guide with plenty of helpful
screenshots. And all the sections of the sites (user's part and
admin's part) are fully explained.
“Of course there are already a lot of these sites (social
bookmarking services),” explained Schoeffel. “But the future of
social bookmarking is in "Niche Social bookmarking" : be the
first to build your Niche Social bookmarking service for your
community. And this is the first complete script that will let
you run your own social bookmarking service like technorati or
del.icio.us.”
For more information, visit: http://viralsocializer.com . And
explore the new frontier of online social bookmarking
communities!
Related keywords for this page:
php,programming,application
