Reddit’s developers have been busy adding a bunch of new features to the site. One of them is a neat Firefox plugin that brings a lot of Reddit’s functionality directly to the browser. Let’s take a look at what’s available out there if you want to socialize from within Firefox.

Reddit - over the weekend, Reddit launched and tweaked many of its features, most noticeably the layout of subreddits which are now displayed in a thin bar on the top of the page. Other features include a slightly different design for various subreddits and different positioning of the search form.

Furthermore, toolbar lovers will be happy to know that there’s a Firefox extension called Socialite which brings many of Reddit’s features into the browser. Click on a Reddit link, and the toolbar will show up; you can now vote, save, and hide links. If you like, you can open the toolbar manually by clicking on the little Reddit icon in the Firefox address bar; now, you can use it to submit links to Reddit as you browse the Web.

Most other popular social bookmarking sites have some version of a Firefox toolbar, too. Here’s a quick reminder:

Digg - this toolbar gives you access to main features of Digg like submitting new stories and checking out the “best of” selection of stories. It also adds a Google-powered search box to the mix.

Delicious - this plugin is more than just a toolbar; it basically replaces (it’s reversible, don’t worry) your Firefox bookmarking system with that of Delicious. A must have for frequent users of this social bookmarking site.

StumbleUpon - If there’s one social bookmarking toolbar you need to install, get this one. StumbleUpon’s simple concept of stumbling onto popular websites works even better if you do it through a toolbar. If you don’t want to clutter your Firefox, though, you can use the latest StumbleUpon feature: the Web toolbar.

Firevine: This toolbar is no longer a toolbar; the developer of the plugin decided it’s better to integrate everything directly into Firefox. It features an automatically updated watchlist, a seed status checker, context menu and more.

Still need more social stuff for your favorite Web browser? Be sure to check out 15+ social surfing tools for Firefox, as well as 30+ Firefox Tools for Bookmarking & Search.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Be a Digg Rockstar with Social Media Firefox ExtensionSocialMarker Is a One-Stop-Shop Bookmarking SiteSocialPoster Is a One-Stop Bookmarking ToolShareaholic Upgrade Supports Firefox3, Adds More SitesFirefox 2 Security Fixes ReleasedFirefox Campus Edition LaunchesTrailfire Launches Advanced Social Bookmarking Tool

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

In the 24 hours since launching The Open Web Awards, we’ve already had more than 2000 nominations, which include hundreds of different sites and services. Keep ‘em coming and don’t forget to promote your favorites!

One of our more hotly contest categories is likely to be social news, where leaders like Digg, NowPublic, and Reddit are continually challenged by new upstarts like Socialmedian, Mixx, and a new heavyweight - Yahoo Buzz. This year, social news even crossed into the mainstream a bit, with Digg being featured in CurrentTV’s election coverage. Whose crowd did the best job of filtering the news? Make your nominations in the widget below and support your candidate in the comments!

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—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Propeller: Netscape Digg Clone is LiveLook Out Digg: Mixx Public Beta Coming on TuesdayPropeller: The New Name for Netscape’s Digg CloneNBC.com Social NetworkMySpace News: The Digg Killer?RiverWired Receives $1.5 Million For Being GreenFacebook to Launch Advertising Through News Feed - WTH?

Coming out of a suburb of Sydney, Australia, SportsPassion is a networking service designed to provide sports teams of all sorts with tools to stay organized in season and out.

Eminently free to use, SportsPassion is built upon an athletic-minded platform by the name of 3eep, which lists sites such as Freemyteam, Sportsplay, and Sportexx. Sportsplay, interestingly enough, appears to operate in all but parallel fashion to SportsPassion. The most outstanding differences are a slightly altered presentation and more generic dot-com domain for SportsPassion. The latter is naturally intended to attract a broader, more international audience.

Leaving aside the matter of structural duplication, SportsPassion seems reasonably well equipped to serve its intended audience. It is unlikely that sport teams and groups of the extracurricular sort will require extensive features. The basics will presumably do for most users. Someplace to keep track of scheduling, changes, hasty and impromptu gatherings, celebrations and so forth. The usual stuff, really. Share documents, photos, and videos. Converse in a group forum. Etcetera, etcetera. Completing its list of uses, the service offers teams a unique RSS subscription for simple tracking when logged off.

As for formatting, SportsPassion can be thought to be appropriately elementary. On the one hand, if a team page is barren, it’s noticeably so. The busier the better it seems. Which is pretty much how it usually goes in the networking world. It’s about what you do with the tools you’re given. In that sense, SportsPassion seems up to the task.

Source:Mashable!

ProofHQ launches today as a Web-based solution for sharing, managing, and approving creative documents amongst team members and clients. In a few words, ProofHQ offers a way to get creatives approved more efficiently. How does a service set out to do this?

For starters, ProofHQ offers a robust uploading tool that allows you to send large files to whomever you need. The ProofHQ Uploadr tool even lets you drag’n’drop files up to 75 MB directly from your desktop. From here, you can manage the files you’ve uploaded and determine who gets to see what. Other team members can review creatives from here, add their mark-ups and notes, participate in a real time discussion taking others’ feedback into consideration, and compare the many versions of that creative document that have been uploaded to your ProofHQ account.

Similar in concept to services like cozimo, ProofHQ allows for visual markups of documents within its application, minimizing the need for every team member to have the correct software on the computer they’re currently using, and eliminating the need for constant file transfers. As far as accessibility goes, ProofHQ offers a number of ways in which you can share your uploaded documents, including integration with other professional project management tools like Basecamp. ProofHQ also has a Miniproof, which is a widget that can be embeded into blogs and websites.

This could be used on third party sites that you and your team members often use (i.e. a private network that’s not included in ProofHQ’s existing integration options), or for a public voting option of sorts, where members of the community at large can voice their opinions on a given design. There are even branded options for a company or freelancer to use ProofHQ for their own purposes, with billing management options included. So far I like the fact that ProofHQ has set out to provide a set of tools that work with a group’s existing structure, and the fact that it’s leveraging the Web’s capabilities for automating much of the sharing, revision and communication necessities of any group project revolving around visual material.

Source:Mashable!

Is the future of social news distributed? That certainly seems to be the thinking at a number of leading names in the space, with Reddit today announcing that their feature for creating your own version of the site is being extended to let you host it under your own domain and fully customize the look and feel. The move follows news last week that Ma.gnolia was going open source, and word earlier this summer that Digg is working on their own offering to let users create their own custom social news sites.

While Reddit has offered an installable open source version (akin to Ma.gnolia’s offering) of its software since June, the create-your-own Reddit offering - originally launched in January - is a hosted solution. You setup your site by simply filling out a form and determining if your Reddit will be public, private, or restricted. Mashable’s Mark Hopkins and Steven Hodson are active participants in a custom Reddit that you can find here.

With today’s additions, you can now use CSS to edit the stylesheet for your site, and setup a custom CNAME through your domain registrar to host your Reddit at a URL of your choice. Essentially, this gives you some of the flexibility of the open source solution, but without the complexity or technical know-how required to set it up.

So why are all of the social news sites moving in this direction? In case you missed it, Muhammad Saleem had an excellent post yesterday arguing that bookmarking is dying. While that may or may not be the case – yet – it would certainly seem there may be a limit as to how much these sites can grow on their own as destination sites, especially with Yahoo Buzz now vying for mainstream users. Expanding into the business of powering other social bookmarking sites offers a new way for sites like Digg, Reddit, and Ma.gnolia to grow – even if it’s likely the same power users who ultimately create the niche communities.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Reddit Hacked, FixedReddit in Spanish, and More.Reddit Media - More Proof that Digg Needs a Picture SectionReddit River - A Lighter Version of Reddit for MobilesReddit Elevates Custom Reddits; L33t Crowd 3lat3dRIAA.com Down For The CountSlate Reddit Released

Tonight is the first ever Mashable Monthly SF with Pete Cashmore and the Mashers, the blogger lounge and San Francisco’s tech crowd. Are you like me and can’t make the event? No problem. Check out the live stream from our video partner Stickam. They’re conducting interviews throughout the night and reporting on the happenings at the event.

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—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Qik Mobile Live Streaming Straight to Mashable Events PagesSwarmcast Moves Into Live StreamingMadonna Concert Live on MSNMashable Monthly San FranciscoAnnouncing Mashable’s Monthly San Francisco (Call for Sponsors)Mashable’s WordCamp Man-CrushWindows Live Spaces Takes on Evite

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Microsoft is ready to dive into the social bookmarking arena. After previewing a version of its own Delicious competitor back in May, the company is now set to launch Microsoft Social Bookmarks next month, an effort that will initially focus on techies by offering versions of the site on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression.

The site has been in testing with what evangelist John Martin calls “thousands of technical professionals,” and the results so far speak for themselves, as the popular tags on Social Bookmarks include topics like .net, SQL, and visual basic.

In preparation for the official launch, the site is adding a few features, like the ability to subscribe to tags via RSS, import your bookmarks from other services, and a widget so bloggers can offer their readers a way to bookmark articles to Microsoft Social Bookmarks. These build on top of very basic existing bookmarking features that include a browser bookmarklet that saves web pages to your account.

While none of these features make Microsoft’s product stand out from the competition, it could potentially have appeal to certain Digg, Delicious, and Reddit users who yearn for the days when those sites featured almost exclusively tech news and links. And by rolling it out to users of Microsoft’s popular tech sites first, they are likely to be able to seed the site with the type of content that developers crave. A preview of the site is available here.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Microsoft Jumping Into Social BookmarkingFungow - Social Bookmarking RebootedLookLater - Instant Searchable BookmarksHYPERiGo Offers Inefficient (and Non-Social) Bookmarking SiteMultiply to Announce Social Bookmarking ToolJigJak Doesn’t Do JackMicrosoft’s Financial MySpace

Yesterday Techcrunch Editor Erick Schonfeld wrote a review of a new service called JustHackIt. Schonfeld called JustHackIt, "a dating site for hackers". Basically it’s a classifieds board for hackers and developers to easily post openings and have developers submit interest in those openings.

Less than 24 hours later, the JustHackIt service is now up for sale on Sitepoint. The current auction price is $20. In the 24 hours post launch the company reports the following stats:

• 18,258 pageviews
• 8,580 unique visitors
• Main traffic sources: TechCrunch, news.ycombinator.com, Reddit and Netvibes

The description notes the reason for the quick sale, "I launched JustHackIt.com last night. I’m really enjoying managing the site but didn’t expect the huge amount of traffic and don’t quite know how to manage a community site like this. I’m doing my best with it, but thought I’d post it on Sitepoint to see if someone is looking for this type of opportunity." They claim that they will have 600,000 pageviews this month - of course that doesn’t take into account that any blogger buzz dies off within a few days max.

Anyway, if you are interested in a cheap dat(ing) site for hackers and developers, JustHackIt is the one for you. And upon purchase you can tell VCs and friends, "I was on Techcrunch". Here’s their pageviews chart - note that this is by the hour not by the day, week, month or year.

More CN Coverage:
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