Socialthing For Websites: The Next Big Thing In Social Networking?

Socialthing has been quiet for quite a while with no new developments. But until recently, Socialthing has launched a new services called Socialthing for Websites which is supposed to be an “advanced suite of social networking services” that enable site owners to connect with the readers. Basically, it just means that website owners can just now interact with their readers through social networking- and all that in real-time. All the readers have to do is to sign in with their AIM username and password and gain access to other social services like Twitter and Flickr through AOL’s Open Authentication API as  well as chat with one another through the chat: all of these in a neat toolbar at the bottom of the site. Meanwhile, The Boot is using this service on which you can use it to go for a quick trial. Socialthing for Websites looks highly functional and impressive but it is still in beta to allow more testing and better improvements. Could Socialthing be the next big thing to overtake Facebook Connect in the area of social networking integration? We will let you know once Socialthing for Websites gets out of beta.

EPIC WIN OR FAIL: Time Magazine Names 4Chan Founder Moot As Most Influential Person

4Chan is at it again. The infamous forum behind some of the most odd and funny memes on the web such as rickrollling and lolcats have successfully hacked the poll on Time to push Christopher Poole, also known as moot by his online alias, the founder of 4chan to the top of the list. Based on the list, moot has almost effortlessly cliched the top of the list with an impressive average rating of 90 and 16,794,368 votes. In comparison, the second person on the list, Anwar Ibrahim only has an average rating of 47 and 2,316,378 votes.

Although Time seems to deny of any hacking involved, we suspect there is a high chance of foul play. What exactly does the words from the first letters of the names in the poll, “MARBLECAKE ALSO THE GAME” sounds like to you? A pure coincidence? And from the look of Time’s post, it seems like the list is already official and moot is now the most influential person. 4Chan has yet again succeed in a massive but well-planned meme campaign against Time and we know that such memes will keep surfacing out for years to come. Epic win or fail? You decide.

YouTube RealTime: FriendFeed-Style Notifications All In Real Time [Do You Have An Invite?]

Youtube has always been one of the biggest video sharing and streaming site but the interactions among its users has always been quite limited but YouTube RealTime might be what users need. YouTube RealTime is a new add-on to YouTube in the form of a toolbar that notifies you on what your friends are doing on YouTube that was launched just 3 days ago. This include new features like letting you see who is currently online as well as what they are doing plus invite them to watch a video that you are currently watching, all in real-time, hence allowing for great interaction among YouTube users. Here is what YouTube has to say about this:

YouTube RealTime is a new way to interact with your friends on the site. You can:

• See a list of friends currently online and what they are watching
• See a history of friends’ recent activities
• Receive real-time notifications when friends perform an activity on the site (such as comment, favorite, etc.)

Currently, YouTube RealTime is still in an invitation-only beta stage and we have been trying hard to get an invite but have not done so successfully, so if you have an invite, please copy the link from YouTube Peeps and comment it here so that we can get an invite and give YouTube RealTime a try. If you want to get an invite, you might want to try going on Twitter Search for the invite link and click the most recent link that  to see if it works. Other than that, YouTube RealTime seems like a great idea and we would love to try it out as soon as possible. Check out TechCrunch’s article on YouTube RealTime for a more in-depth review about it if you are interested.

What’s Popular: New Social Bookmarking News Widget From Google

Originally spotted by Micro Persuasion, Google has apparently launched a new iGoogle widget called What’s Popular that is quite similar to Digg and Reddit in which users can submit and vote an article by voting it up or down and the more popular articles are decided by a special algorithm and the stories with the most ‘pops’ in a short period of time are more likely to rise to the top. Here is quick description from the Google Labs to tell you what it is all about:

The What’s Popular gadget by Google helps you discover interesting items from all over the Internet.

How we find interesting stuff

What’s Popular uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader.

Ratings

You can rate items that you like or dislike by clicking the ratings buttons next to each item. If you change your mind, you can change your rating at anytime. The What’s Popular gadget looks at what users liked or disliked to improve its ranking of interesting items.

Add a URL

Tell What’s Popular about interesting items you have found! If they become popular, they may rise to the top of our list! You can submit an item with or without attribution to yourself and preview your submission before you post. If you decide to associate your username with your submission you’ll be able to edit its title and description. The items you submitted can be found in the “My adds” area, where you can remove your name if you change your mind.

Terms of Service and Privacy

What’s Popular is governed by the Google Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Users who repeatedly submit bad content to What’s Popular may have their rating and adding privileges temporarily suspended. Please go here for issues relating to copyright. All other violations of our terms of use can be reported through the report abuse links.

As of now, there are only about 1500 users but we are already seeing how popular it can get. Apparently, What’s Popular is quite transparent and you won’t know what submitted so which article so it is up to you to vote for the article based on your preferences as well as its quality. What’s Popular is simple to use and its interface is compact and neat but its features are also quite limited as a result and this the the closest Google can come to a social bookmarking news app. Do you like the new widget? Comment and let us know what you think

Malaria No More: Do Your Part To Donate And Tweet To Beat Malaria

It its World Malaria Day today and the oranization behind this, Malaria No More is using Twitter and other social networking services to reach out to the masses. Apparently, they are asking for donations to help support their fight against malaria. So please donate as generously as you can to help beat malaria. Otherwise you can help to support this campaign by following malarianomore on Twitter and retweet their message and inform your friends on Twitter. It seems like Kevin Rose, Mashable and Ashton Kutcher are doing their part as well by tweeting out to their followers on Twitter so what are you waiting for? You can also keep updated through Malaria No More’s Facebook page, MySpace account or its blog. Here is a video that we got from the Twitter blog to show you what it is all about.

Goodbye GeoCitites: Yahoo Closing GeoCities This Year

Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service that has been around for a very long time now since it was created in the 90′s. After being popular for quite a long while from the late 1990s to the 20′s for almost a decade, Yahoo! GeoCities has been declining ever since with the advent of Web 2.0 and the use of blogging and social networking. Finally, it seems like Yahoo is putting an end to Yahoo! GeoCities and we will miss it. Yahoo! GeoCities was among the pioneer for making the web what it was today and helped to build community around people.

If you are a user of Yahoo! GeoCities, be sure to check out their Q & A for help if you want to know more about how to save your site data. It seems like all GeoCities accounts and web sites will be shutdown later this year and one great web service will then cease to exist. Comment and let us know what you think of this.