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

Several weeks ago, Digg made online headlines when it banned several dozen of its users, some of which were among its most highly ranked contributors (including Reg “Zaibatsu” Saddler, who by some metrics was the #3 Digg user of all time). On Digg’s blog, the company explained that the bannings were a result of script abuse, although some observers found this explanation to be unconvincing.

Shortly afterwards, Digg announced that it had raised $28.7 million in a new round of venture funding. And in the last few days, Digg jettisoned more members of its community with another fresh round of bannings, again including many high profile users. A separate Digg blog post patiently re-iterated Digg’s justifications for these actions.

A palpable level of online controversy has ensued as banned users have cried foul, while other users have applauded Digg’s actions. For anyone who is actively involved in online community-building, whether through a blog, a website, or a social network, examining the events of the past few weeks quickly reveals several important lessons about how Digg has handled the establishment and growth of its community. But perhaps more importantly, the way that Digg has gutted user morale and shown itself willing to cast off those that have been so crucial to its success also reveals the limits of its core crowdsourcing model.

Building a Flawed System

Kevin Rose demos Digg in 2004

Before we can get into all of that, let’s take a moment and revisit the past. Recall that Digg launched in December of 2004. At the time, Digg was regarded as a direct competitor to Slashdot due to its focus on tech stories. In a 2006 interview with ZDNet, Digg founder Rose proclaimed the site’s raison d’etre, saying:

[Digg] was just a side project of mine and something that we wanted to try out by giving power and control back to the masses. Typically with technology news sites a handful of editors choose which stories are relevant and which they believe the audience would like to read about. This was the first time that anyone experimented with allowing the general mass audience to decide what they believed to be the most important topic of the day.

At a time when the idea of Web 2.0 was just beginning to take hold and millennials were chafing under the constraints of receiving their news through the mainstream media, Digg offered the promise of news that was determined for the people, by the people. The fundamental assumption behind the site was similar to that of any crowdsourcing model: The wisdom of the masses will provide news stories that are more relevant, interesting, or informative than anything chosen by a select few.

Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out that way.

In order to understand why, it’s important to know the difference between Digg’s website (i.e. the nuts and bolts of how it functions) vs. Digg’s business (i.e. as a potentially money-making Silicon Valley startup). Both of these elements play important but distinct roles that led to the unmaking of Digg’s purported mission.

The Website

For those who are unfamiliar, Digg’s basic website functionality was as follows: Users found links they wanted to share from across the Internet and submitted them to Digg, where they were automatically entered into an “Upcoming Section.” Users could vote or “digg” up stories if they enjoyed them and if they received enough diggs, based on Digg’s proprietary algorithm, the story would be promoted to the front page. In theory, the Upcoming Section could be a thriving area of the site, where stories were discussed and voted upon, but as the site grew larger and the rate of submissions accelerated, it quickly became useless to check this section, due to the sheer volume of information (As of October 2008, roughly 10,000 to 15,000 stories are submitted to Digg per day. That is about one story every 7-10 seconds).

But Digg also had other features as well. Specifically, it allowed you to 1) Have your own profile page, and 2) Follow people by making them your “Friend.” Initially, profile pages displayed user stats, such as the number of stories submitted and the percentage of those stories promoted to front page (later, they would also display personal information such as photos and links to other social networking sites). Making someone a “Friend” allowed users to follow that person’s actions, including stories submitted and dugg.

Users quickly realized that one way to get diggs for their submitted stories was to make someone your Friend and consistently digg that person’s stories. Reciprocal diggs would usually follow. Using this process to find interesting stories, and to find online friends who would digg your own stories, was considerably easier than wading through the morass of thousands of stories submitted daily in the Upcoming Section.

As a result of all of these elements, the system favored stories submitted by users who had a combination of the following attributes:

• The time and the inclination to find interesting stories

• The time to digg their friend’s stories

• The will to both digg and submit stories consistently over a long period of time

Users who had these attributes naturally saw a large percentage of their stories get promoted to the front page. This was what led to the concept of “top users” or “power users,” a notion that was, in some ways, antithetical to the idea of democracy (and that’s completely leaving out the fact that the site needs editors to supplement the efforts of its users).

Why should a really fascinating or interesting story have a higher chance of getting promoted to the front page if it was submitted by a top user than a newcomer? Indeed, today still, a story submitted by a top user will instantly garner a significant number of diggs from followers, often regardless of the story’s quality. While Digg’s algorithm was theoretically supposed to correct for this, page after page of front page stories submitted by the same few individuals demonstrated that Digg was not doing its stated job very well. At one point, Digg’s top 100 users were responsible for over 50% of Digg’s front page stories.

This was Digg’s fundamental problem, although it didn’t have to be: It was an attribute shared by many other Web 2.0 companies. Only a small fraction of the total number of users contributed substantially to the site. According to recent Quantcast statistics, 1% of the Digg’s users are contributing 32% of the site’s visits. But this is no different than a company like Wikipedia, which clocks in billions of pageviews every month, yet whose articles and infrastructure are mostly maintained by a few thousand enthusiasts. While Wikipedia and similar sites have found ways to recognize and reward their active participants, Digg, as we’ll see, has constantly tried to shake the image that it is controlled by a select few.

The Business

From the business end, Digg has acted in ways to consistently grow its page views and expand its audience in the three and half years since its founding. About a year ago, Digg changed its interface to make friends’ stories significantly less accessible and to require more clickthroughs, a move that was widely decried by power users and which inadvertently led to the script situation that it is currently caught up in.

In a stunning analysis by ReadWriteWeb, the site also began dramatically expanding the variety of its front-page topics, focusing less and less on technology as the years went on (in other words, while the proportion of tech stories to all stories submitted remained roughly the same, the proportion of tech stories promoted to the front page went down dramatically). The implications of this were more troubling: Digg was actively manipulating the distribution of front page stories. Combined, these moves showed that Digg was becoming ever-more conscious of its need to appease investors as time went on. Despite a lucrative ad deal with Microsoft in 2007, social networks like Digg remained (and still remain) notoriously difficult to create a business model around.

Digg has also struggled to contain the influence of its top users throughout its existence. Far from acknowledging their contributions, Digg has constantly denied their key role its growth. On an episode of Diggnation, Rose even claimed that he didn’t know who the top users were, saying, “I don’t pay attention to who might be considered a top Digger, or who’s not.” In early 2007, Digg stopped hosting a public list recognizing users that were getting the most front page stories. According to Digg, this move was to prevent them from being harassed, although the list has since moved elsewhere with few complaints of any such trouble.

More recently, Digg has shown its independence by banning dozens of high-activity users, allegedly due to script use. Some of the scripts employed actually allowed users to digg their friend’s stories more easily, giving Digg pre-2008 levels of functionality. Digg’s recent actions are objectionable and suspect for a number of reasons. First of all, several of the banned users have complained there was no warning given and that the decision was irreversible. But most importantly, while many relative new users were swept up in the mix, top users such as “CosmicDebris” and several others were also eliminated.

These users have helped Digg to deliver dozens of millions of page views and clicks to sites across the Internet. It is not an exaggeration to say that they have helped to make Digg the popular site that it is today. For Digg to cast off these users like so much dead weight, rather than work with them constructively, is an indictment of Digg’s recklessness with its devoted community. It has also brought to light the tension between Digg and those users that have climbed their way to the top by learning Digg’s system. As a result, several other top users have expressed fear that their accounts, which they have poured hundreds of hours of time into, will be next on the chopping block.

Recent events have given hints about Digg’s upcoming trajectory. This past summer, Digg rolled out its Recommendation Engine, allowing users a new way to find interesting stories and taking some focus and dependency off of its top users. In July, Google allegedly and mysteriously walked away from a deal to buy Digg, amidst longstanding rumors that the cofounders have been intent on a sale. And earlier this month, Digg recently reported a new round of venture funding and declared it would be expanding worldwide. Put all of these together and you get the picture of an organization that is trying to establish it is not dependent on the efforts of a few dedicated and unpaid volunteers (i.e. its top users) to keep its website interesting and thriving.

But what has it sacrificed in its attempt to prove this?

Lessons Learned

The way that Digg has handled its growth reveals important lessons, both for competing social news sites and for social media companies looking to build thriving communities:

True Democratization of News is Difficult – Rose and his crew are undoubtedly a talented group of programmers, but even their Digg algorithm has had compensating for the flaws inherent in Digg’s system. In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories. The Web is still struggling to come up with a news model that can efficiently crowdsource its editorial process, although sites that automate the process (e.g. Techmeme) or sites that rely on editors (e.g. Fark, Slashdot) are at least more transparent with their advantages and failings.

Recognition is a Key Motivator – Social networks typically have a tangible way for users to track their notoriety. MySpace has “Friends,” Youtube has “Number of Times Viewed,” and Twitter has “Followers.” Digg has “Stories Made Popular.” Top users often pointed to this number with pride, a reminder of the thrill of seeing one’s submission spread to thousands of eager readers. Digg, however, has done nothing to acknowledge their contributions and with its recent bannings, it has indicated it doesn’t believe it needs them at all.

While Digg’s growth may not be adversely affected by the accounts gone missing, it seems that when Time named “You” the Person of the Year in 2006, they were actually on to something more meta than originally thought: People like being recognized for contributions and the potential for Internet fame that may follow. Social networks that have gone on to insanely high valuations or become profit-making ventures have recognized this fundamental fact of Web 2.0. Digg has not.

Communities Require Nurturing – The way that Digg has treated it users has not been with the committed touch of a benign leader, but of a dictator that assumes its actions (or lack thereof) will be consistently met with the assent of its followers. Its town halls have been little more than PR exercises, and user-requested features like the Recommendation Engine have taken years to roll out, while others (e.g. forums) have yet to be implemented at all.

A comparison between Digg and Mixx quickly shows that while the former’s traffic still trounces the latter’s, Mixx’s founders and employees have been open about how they are fostering the growth of their website. Anecdotal comparisons between, say, “The Drill Down” podcast (which covers tech news as well as social news sites like Digg) and Mixx’s unofficial podcast, “Social Blend,” starkly contrast how each company has dealt with its fanbase. While Digg and its policies are frequently an object of criticism on “The Drill Down,” “Social Blend’s” contributors typically have nothing but kind things to say about their digital overlords.

Conclusions

Kevin Rose recently claimed that his primary goal in the most recent round of bannings was to enforce the TOS and make the site easier to use. According to Rose, the bannings are only a response to people trying to subvert the system:

What happens is that some people try and get around [Digg’s algorithm], and they try different ways of doing this. One of these methods is called script digging…and they go and they will digg their friend’s stories, in order to help propagate those stories on the recommendation engine, or to help promote them to the front page. They use automated methods…sometimes it’s very apparent…We have ways of telling how they do it. And so what’s going on is that these people are abusing the system, they are using extra resources and when they throw that many diggs at the system at once it sets our database slaves a little bit off kilter and they will have to readjust everything. We’re talking about, not damaging, but definitely causing a spike in usage and slowing down the site for other users, especially when multiple people are using it, or hundreds of people, whatever it may be. And so what we do is we always give people a second chance. We’ll stop them from doing this, we’ll put limitations on it. Oftentimes, and I hate to say it, but these people are trying to game the system…

There are users that are on the site that will come out on their blog and swear that we have blocked them and that Digg is turning on their users…I can assure you, there’s no reason for us to do that. The thing we want more than anything else is a healthy, accurate community. We don’t want people to game the system, we want it to be fair to everyone. So, we’ve started banning people. If people are abusing us multiple times, I don’t care if they’re the number 1 digger or the number 5 millionth digger. We’ll ban them, because it’s B.S. It doesn’t matter how popular you are. I don’t care which user it is, if they are gaming the system, they are going to get banned. And we’ll be able to tell, we’ll be able to detect that.

If Digg’s management responds to this article they will undoubtedly re-iterate this and say that they are simply trying to protect the community (e.g. by enforcing the TOS equally). For the moment, let’s put aside whether or not it’s plausible that a few hundred people using the alleged scripts can significantly affect Digg’s formidable servers. What I have tried to establish is that Digg is giving you an incomplete story. To prove to its investors that its democratization model is functional, Digg has decided that it has a vested interest in getting rid of its top users. In its misguided efforts, it has destroyed the community that it sought to create.

While antagonizing and banning its most active contributors may be expedient, Digg will only ensure a new group of followers will similarly rise up over time, forcing the exact same measures down the line. This will continue until Digg solves the fundamental issue with its site: That those that are most committed will always have the most control. Digg may continue to grow in traffic and size, but with every controversial move like the recent banning measures, it will irritate a continually growing contingent of its most ardent supporters. Unless Digg can find a way to embrace its fans rather than eliminate them, it will find its brand promise as the leader of news democratization fading fast.

[Disclosure: I am Digg user whose account has not been banned…yet.]

David Chen is a writer/blogger/podcaster based in Boston, MA. You can e-mail him at davechensemail (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow him on Twitter.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Digg Adds New Features to APIDigg Launches Digg WidgetsVideos Posted Of Tibetan Protest Drive China To Block YouTubeDigg Goes With DataPortabilityMetacafe Adds Digg SectionPownce Co-Founder Upset Over New Digg FeaturesYouTube Banned in Beijing

GoodReads, a social network for book lovers, is adding the increasingly ubiquitous status update feature to its site. Taking a page out of Twitter’s book, GoodReads asks not “What are you doing,” but rather, “What page are you on?” Once you’ve answered that question, you can also input your current thoughts on a given book in 140 characters or less.

Status updates will be displayed throughout GoodReads, which in turn serves as both a way to read microreviews and also discover other people who are reading the same things as you. For instance, each book’s page will feature recent status updates from members, with the homepage featuring a Facebook News Feed-like display showing recent activities of your GoodReads friends, including their latest status updates.

GoodReads has been on a healthy growth trajectory since launching in early 2007. The site now has more than 1.5 million users who have added more than 30 million books – up significantly from the 5 million books users had added around this time last year. Unique visitors are also up sharply according to data from Compete:

So are microreviews likely to be the next big little thing on niche social networks? The GoodReads integration certainly makes a lot of sense, and given the number of Tweets declaring that “Tropic Thunder was hilarious!” or “the new Zune is sooooo cool” (ok I made that one up) there would certainly seem to be an opportunity to increase engagement by adding targeted status update features.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:GoodReads Hits 5 Million Books & Launches Interactive WidgetFacebook Removing “is” from Status UpdatesFacebook Status Updates: The “is” is No MoreGoodReads Social Networking Site Well On Its Way To 1M UsersTwitter Updates Now Connected to Facebook StatusThe Daily Poll: How Often Do You Broadcast Your Status?Facebook for BlackBerry Drops The “Is” From Your Friend’s Status Updates

Source:Mashable!

If you want to share a webpage with one or more people, you might use a social bookmarking service such as Delicious or Faviki. But if you want to highlight a particular section of a page, or a sentence or two within a paragraph, you may have relatively inelegant solutions to do so.

The old copy-paste thing might do the trick, or you might direct friends to search for a particular phrase via a browser’s built-in finder utility. But if the process becomes routine and cumbersome, you might prefer a browser plugin or extension to take as much tedium out of the process as possible. That’s where Reframe It comes into play.

Reframe It can perhaps best be described as a hybrid. One part Delicious, another part Awesome Highlighter, plus some commentary, arranged in a way that essentially pays homage to your run-of-the-mill word processor.

It does take a bit of a leap to get involved with. An extension is needed (options are available for Firefox and Internet Explorer users), and you’ll have to convince anyone not registered with the service who you intend to share material with to sign up as well. (Gmail imports and quick invitations are both possible.)

Once you complete these steps, however, the outcome is pretty remarkable. The concept is like that of Bubble Comment in that your objective is typically to direct the recipient of a message in one fashion or another. Except that Reframe It is entirely text-based, and is exclusive to members.

The comment options available within Reframe It are fairly noteworthy. You can specify your message as a ‘General Comment,’ ‘Question,’ ‘Counter Argument,’ ‘Supporting Argument,’ which gives perspective to particularly busy pages. Furthermore, you can specify whether you only wish to share a comment with contacts within a group of users or the entire Reframe It membership. As you might suspect, this is quite useful, particularly if you happen to converse with multiple groups.

The only gripe I can muster with the Reframe It service is the fact that the plugin, fixed to the right-hand margin of your browser, shows no quick way to minimize the software from view. You’re required to click a button labeled ‘Margin’ and from the drop-down menu choose ‘close margin.’ If you’re in no rush, this isn’t such an annoyance. But do it once, twice, ten times or more and you’ll recognize this as the unnecessary two-step that it is. (Here’s a tip: When the margin is expanded, place your cursor on the leftmost edge of the plugin, click and drag it to the right of the screen.)

You’ll also have to take a positive approach to the presence of a vertical blue bar in your browser (which seems to slow down Firefox’s performance by a very slight amount), but that’s pretty much a make or break point for prospective users. If you don’t mind it, all will be well. If not, then… not.

As a Web service plus utility, Reframe It is a commendable piece of work. You’ll need a few minutes to familiarize yourself with it, and you’ll have to appreciate the way it lives within Firefox and IE. But once you do, its value becomes quite clear and in fact grows the more it is used.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Twenty People Save 20% at SF NewTech

Peter Gabriel and other backers of the free-streaming, ad-supported, as well as paid-for download service We7 already convinced Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI to provide some of their respective catalogues to the effort. Now the service has signed The Orchard, an international distributor with connections to more than 14,000 artists and over 1.3 million tracks.

The way in which tracks are being issued through We7 is not certain. Immediate availability of content is definitely not proving to be the case at present, as a quick search for material listed among The Orchard’s repertoire of artists shows a great number of absences. The same goes for the major companies noted earlier.

But if We7 co-founder and CEO Steve Purdham’s assessment of additions soon to be made is any indication, the service’s full launch is expected occur “in the coming months,” ensuring that the future will look richer than today. Probably, anyway. The wait will either be treacherous or easygoing, depending on one’s current assessment of the We7 business model.

Seeing as how We7 offers music rights holders the ability to offer streaming music as well as free (ad-supported) and paid-for downloads, one might think it to be striving to be a come-one-come-all type venue. Whatever fashion the consumer wants their music, in other words. But the availability of content is far from thorough, and the somewhat strange juxtaposition of paid and ad-supported downloads might make for an uneven experience.

Then again, if it is payment for songs that you wish to avoid, We7 can provide for such demand. Granted, the amount of popular content needs to be dramatically increased if We7 is to have any chance at amassing a substantial audience, but if one is to take the company’s abovementioned statement into account, that objective will eventually be realized.

When all is said and done, if we’re to draw any comparisons with the most recent free music newsmaker (MySpace), We7 will be something that resembles the social network’s opposite. Meaning music will be the primary attention getter, with friendly features tagging alongside.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Pump Audio Hooks Up with Redeye DistributionMySpace, Snocap Strike Deal with The Orchard, CD Baby and MoreWOW: CBS Acquires Last.fm for $280 MillionLast.fm Partners with The Orchard…Mashable Readers Fall AsleepSellaBand Signs New Partners for Worldwide Concert TourZune.net Goes Live, Wants To Make Music SocialCDBaby, Snocap to Sell Music on MySpace

Source:Mashable!

Clearspring, a fairly well-financed widget platform and advertising network has announced today the purchase of AddThis, the producer of one of the most popular widgets for allowing Web content to be easily shared on a variety of services like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Facebook. The terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed.

Clearspring’s mission is naturally to serve as large an audience as possible, and the acquisition of AddThis certainly helps to expand the purview of its newfound parent and proprietor. AddThis is a bookmarking and sharing utility that has been adopted by a range of third parties, including media outlets such as Time, Fox, ABC, and CBS. MySpace is also listed as a client, making its reach quite notable indeed.

Of course, in buying AddThis, Clearspring itself now faces the competition of ShareThis, a service with a similarly broad base of use. And, as Kara Swisher of BoomTown notes, the fact that neither Clearspring, with a claimed $10 million in annual sales, nor AddThis, with “negligible revenue,” together make a profitable collection of services, it’s not yet certain where where their businesses stand.

Market share is clearly the key pursuit at the moment, with hopes that advertising revenue, grouped with data gleaned from interaction with Clearspring’s widgets and the AddThis component, will follow in kind.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Clearspring Adds Facebook to Widget Distribution OptionsClearspring Opens Community Platform for DevelopersClearspring Desktop Widgets Now LiveClearspring Launches Mobile Syndication WidgetsClearspring Gets $10M More for WidgetsClearspring Partners with PointRoll for Ads on your WidgetsClearspring’s New Widget Ads

Company Name

Faviki

20-word Description

Faviki is a semantic bookmarking tool which allows people to organize bookmarks using Wikipedia concepts as tags.

CEO’s Pitch

Faviki is a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It allows you to tag webpages with Wikipedia concepts, categorizing them automatically. This solves the problem of having different tags for the same concept and makes your tags better organized. Faviki is powered by DBpedia, which extracts structured information from Wikipedia. It also uses the Zemanta API for automatic tag suggestions, and mashes it with Google AJAX Language API to make multilingual semantic tagging possible. There are currently 5.6 million tags you can choose from - 2.7 million English and 2.9 million tags from 13 other languages.

Mashable’s Take

The main aspects of the Faviki utility have already been written out by the company’s founder, Vuk Milicic. So rather than get deep into detail about the Zemanta and Google AJAX Language APIs, let’s explore what Faviki can be to the average user as the social bookmarking tool it is designed to be.

The connection made between bookmarking and Wikipedia might be lost on some, and perhaps a bit purposeless for the diverse number of reasons people interact with websites and their individual pages. Not all subjects have ample representation within Wikipedia. But the suggestions made via the tags provided through Faviki can be helpful at times. And users can always add their own tags if need be. As with most bookmarking services, it can keep your list of bookmarks better sorted for future reference if you’re collecting items to group closely together. And the ability to share links with friends and view topics that Faviki finds applicable to one or more bookmarks is an intelligent way to manage information.

Much of its effectiveness of course depends on how extensively you use the service. The quick transfers of a bookmarklet in your browser’s standard toolbar facilitates the process considerably. Plugin installations in Firefox, for instance, can be a hurdle some don’t wish to jump past. With Faviki, you don’t have to.

Another great item in Faviki’s arsenal is the ability to present notes along with a bookmark. Tagging is a useful search feature, for sure. No question about that. But to have the option to tell friends or the entire membership at large what it is exactly you’ve bookmarked or why you’ve chosen to share it can bring a superb level of guidance into the system.

Sign-up is as easy as you’d like it to be. Enter an email address, choose an account name and password choice, plus a language specification (15 in all), and you’re set. If you’d like to make a change to your username, time zone, or determine whether or not you want to be sent a newsletter, you can do so simply by clicking the ‘edit profile’ setting in the top right section of the page.

Is Faviki a smarter engine than, say, the newly revised Delicious? I have no reservations in thinking that many won’t convert, if only for the very sensible reason that they’re already well-invested and attuned to the ways of the sector’s benchmark. Others will enjoy this beta more than the Yahoo-owned favorite, though. If you’re willing to try something different, or have never fallen under the Delicious spell, Faviki is quite good. Simple and powerful are two elements it exhibits, and the smart design can grow on the user rather quickly. Altogether, Faviki is impressive. For a social bookmarking service, that’s certainly saying a lot.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

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.

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MicasaStyle is a social network for home owners and interior design aficionados who like to share information about their personal taste. Emerging from its beta test period this week, the idea behind MicasaStyle is to create a space that inspires others when it’s time to decorate their homes, along the same lines as other networks like Curbly.

This happens through a series of users that take the time to share images of their space and tag items in these photos. Think of the Facebook image-tagging capability that allows you to outline additional details in a given photo, providing viewers more data to work with beyond the actual image itself. In fact, MicasaStyle likens its service to a Facebook for room interiors, and its photo-tagging feature is central to its overall service offerings.

There’s a rather involved upload and tagging process that you go through in order to share images of your own space, layering in additional information like the budget of the room, what type of room you’re sharing, and descriptive tag words that will help others find your space. And since MicasaStyle is so apt to become like a Facebook for home owners, I’d actually love to see some image import options from existing photo albums across the Web, like Facebook and Flickr, so that this sharing process can be simplified a bit for users.

One good thing about the tagging process on MicasaStyle is the fact that retailers you add to your shared space will be auto-completed by MicasaStyle, providing links to that retailer so others can visit their site. What’s missing from this particular portion of the sharing process is the ability to add in a retailer’s link on your own, so if a particular retailer isn’t in MicasaStyle’s database yet, there won’t be a link readily available for other users. Additionally, links created by MicasaStyle’s auto-completion feature redirect to the retailer’s main website, not the page with details on the particular object that’s been tagged.

Having a bookmarking tool for MicasaStyle users could help with specific information-sharing on this end, but it would also veer away from the room-specific way in which personal taste is shared on MicasaStyle’s network. To this end, I’d say that the approach MicasaStyle is taking with this site is very niche, as it limits its users to share photos from their own homes, and relies on a pretty good memory for a home owner, based on price, retailer and retailer information for any given piece on their home.

I know that many home owners do in fact remember most of the information about the pieces in their home, but converting all of that into a cohesive, heavily-tagged network for sharing inspiration is a time commitment for participating users, and MicasaStyle would do well to diversify the type of users it attracts as it moves forward.

Source:Mashable!

Most Twitter and blog integration tools aggregate all tweets to a blog and post them exactly as they are, verbatim, which can produce less than desirable results. TweetRemote is a new open source way to integrate Twitter with blogging platforms that aims to give bloggers more control over this process. You can pick and choose which tweets to publish to your blog and how they will look. It accomplishes this by only posting relevant tweets and formats them in a blog-friendly format.

How does it do that?

TweetRemote is able to do this by recognizing hashtags in tweets such as #text, #link, and #image, then pulls those tweets into separate RSS-style feeds and then formats them accordingly. Thus, everything appears on your blog in a more aesthetically pleasing format. The other key ingredient is the use of an RSS aggregator of choice such as FeedWordPress. Here’s the full installation documentation.

At what cost?

There might be a small price to pay for this benefit. In order to make your blog prettier it requires making your twitter stream a little uglier. For example, if you wanted to send a nicely formatted hyperlink to your blog via twitter with TweetRemote then you would have to send the following tweet: #link http://tweetremote.com Cool new twitter/blog integration tool! While the end result will look good on your blog, you might lose some followers on twitter because of what some call Tweet stream pollution. Quite simply, there are many people on Twitter that just don’t like hashtags and the way they look. So, it’s your decision if it’s worth potentially losing a few followers or not.

Conclusion

TweetRemote is intended only for bloggers that host their own blogs because it requires uploading files and some manual configuration. That means bloggers on free services like Worldpress.com and Blogger are out of luck at this point in time. Still, even if TweetRemote doesn’t accomplish this in the easiest manner, it has developed a better mousetrap for this process. Ultimately, that’s a good sign for things to come for anyone that wants to integrate Twitter with their blog.

Source:Mashable!

There has been a lot of brouhaha over Ma.gnolia going open source and I’m not sure most of it is justified. There are certainly features that work to Ma.gnolia’s advantage, but even though embracing open source and data portability (among other features) improve the service, they are unlikely to make it competitive.

Not only is Ma.gnolia minuscule compared to Yahoo’s Delicious (recently relaunched to version 2.0), but compared to Yahoo’s Buzz and Digg, even Delicious itself is minuscule and that’s not about to change.

The times, they’re a-changin’

The launch of Yahoo’s Buzz was a somewhat controversial move on the company’s part. First, many thought that it would cannibalize the Delicious user base (which I’m now sure it will to an extent), second, it launched with an incredibly exclusive beta and several severe limitations in social capabilities (most of which still exist today), and third, it was yet another large corporation taking a shot at the house that Digg built.

Regardless, it was also a brilliant move and not just for the reasons I’ve mentioned before. Traffic figures and user acceptance have been excellent, (already surpassing Digg by some measures), and recent reviews have been generally positive. Apart from displaying Yahoo’s ability to enter and dominate a space within a matter o