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Facebook is Sticking it to Digg with Link Sharing Analytics

Jason Barry — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:29:05 -0500

Facebook has taken a pot shot at Digg’s URL popularity service. The social networking giant has upgraded its Share button to display sharing statistics.

The Share button has been around for quite some time and was one of the first Facebook Connect features. It has had overwhelming success in turning Facebook into one of the best to share popular internet content—effectively making services like Digg obsolete.

Facebook also opened all of the analytics associated with the sharing habits of its Facebook users. Inevitably, this will change the way advertisers and media publishers tailor their content to fit the interests of their respective demographics. “We hope you’ll create tools to help analyze and understand how users interact with your content on Facebook,” said Mark Kinsey on the Facebook developer blog about the new analytics.

This is yet one more step Facebook as taken to continue its headstrong effort on becoming the all-in-one solution to the internet. Do you use Facebook Share? Do you (or did you) use Digg?

Digg’s New User-Supported Ad Model is Raking in the Dough

Jason Barry — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:54:23 -0500

The New York Times got a chance to sit down with Chief Strategy Officer at Digg, Mike Maser, to discuss the overall success of the special ad-serving engine it integrated into its web service earlier this summer.

They worked on integrating their “social voting” mechanism into sponsored ad placement to provide sponsors and users with a better advertising experience. The users can digg specific ads allowing them to travel up the flow of diggs. Each ad’s cost-per-click is adjusted based upon its number of diggs—higher cost for lesser (buried) diggs. The idea is to encourage advertisers to create ads that are worthwhile to the user, if the ad gets buried, it gets expensive, urging the sponsor to pull the ad down.

Maser boasted that the new platform proved effective, “so far we’ve already tripled our revenue forecast from this initiative.” An Intel sponsored blog earned a 2.2 percent click-through-rate, others earning close to 3 percent, compared with the average regular display ad on Digg earning about .08 percent.

Have you noticed the ads? Have you clicked on any, or Dugg any? Considering the web will likely always have ad sponsorship, what do you think of the new model?

uSocial Now Offering Bogus Facebook Friends by the Thousands

Pulkit Chandna — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:04:50 -0500

After enraging social web luminaries Twitter and Digg, dissident marketing company uSocial has now set its sights on Facebook. It has launched a new service allowing Facebook friends and fans to be bought by the thousands. Facebook buddies are available in multiples of thousand, with the minimum being 1,000 friends and the maximum being 5,000. If it is fans that you are looking to buy, the company can provide up to 10,000 fans.

uSocial is currently offering all the friends/fans packages at introductory prices. While 1,000 Facebook friends or fans can be bought for $177.30, the price for 5,000 friends is $654.30. The current cost of adding 10,000 fans is $1167.30. Although many doubt the worth of buying friends, uSocial founder Leon Hill claims his company delivers targeted friends. "We are getting, basically, targeted friends and fans who are saying, 'Yes, I want information on this,” he told the Associated Press in a phone interview.

He said that friends are added manually by accessing the client’s Facebook profile and sending friendship requests. Facebook is not too pleased by the prospect of users sharing their login information with others.

"Buying and selling of actions that are supposed to be taken by a user are certainly, we would argue, not authentic," said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.

Image Credit: uSocial

Twitter Followers & Digg Votes for Sale – The Ugly Side of Social Networks

Justin Kerr — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:24:23 -0500

How much is a Twitter account or Digg vote worth? uSocial.net thinks they have the answer to that question with a recently announced new service that will sell social media accounts or votes to companies or individuals having trouble doing it the old fashioned way. $87 USD buys you (or your company) 1,000 followers added over 7 days, or as many as 100,000 over a one year period for $3,479. It turns out money really can make you popular both online, and in real life.

I have to admit however, I find it somewhat doubtful that companies would find these “purchased masses” very responsive, and in fact, uSocial itself claims “we'll Tweet our followers three times a day, every day for a month to go and check out links directly to the content that you'd like promoted.” This type of ad spam would have any normal user searching frantically for the unfollow button, but it certainly points out how modern social media is just as vulnerable to abuse as telephones, or the post office.

uSocial.net is also responsible for launching a program last year that allowed companies to buy votes on Digg and StumbleUpon. Both companies have issued cease-and-desist orders to uSocial, which according to a statement from Digg, have been ignored.

Is this the ugly side of social networking? Let us know what you think.

Digg to Bring Its Own Special Variety of Democracy to Advertising

Paul Lilly — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:30:00 -0500

Social news website Digg announced plans to take its news ranking system and apply the same concept to a new advertising platform. Called Digg Ads, you, the reader, will have greater control over which ads are displayed and which ones gets buried, the site says.

"The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay," Digg wrote in a blog. "Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system."

Digg says the new ad platform will initially debut as a pilot program later this summer. The ads will appear next to stories in the river, with sponsored content taking on a similar look and feel to regular stories. However, the site says advertisements will be "clearly marked as sponsored."

According to Digg, this system represents a win-win proposition for both readers and advertisers, giving the former a way to control what content appears, and the latter real-time input on whether or not their products are relevant to the readership.

Image Credit: Digg

Windows Live Gets More Social with Facebook, Digg, and Other Connections

Mark Edward Soper — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:34:13 -0500

Trying to describe Microsoft's Windows Live family of web-enabled tools for Windows has been a bit like the parable of the blind men describing the elephant.

Is Windows Live a photo sharing service? A file sharing service? An email service? An IM service? With the news that Windows Live is adding connections next week to many other popular Web 2.0 social networks, it's easier now to say, as ArsTechnica puts it, that Microsoft wants to:

[T]urn Windows Live into the average netcitizen's main hub for his or her social life, or at the very least to turn Windows Live into a social network.

Microsoft's teaming up with lots of social-networking partners around the world. US-based companies becoming BFFs with Windows Live include MSN, Digg, Facebook, SmugMug, and MySpace (see the full list of 31 current and new partners here).

Digg Addressing DiggBar Complaints

Andy Salisbury — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:31:50 -0500

While there is a large group of people that are enjoying the perks of Digg’s new DiggBar, there’s also an overwhelmingly vocal majority that are not fans of the new URL shortening, webpage-framing addition to the popular social bookmarking site.

Over the course of next week, Digg will be turning off the bar for all of the site’s unregistered users, who will be sent directly to the website they desire, sans the shortened link. And, for those that are registered, there will be a new option that allows users to turn the bar on and off.

Though, as loud as people are about their DiggBar hate, there’s no denying numbers. In fact, according to Digg’s Vice President of Engineering, John Quinn, “roughly 45 percent of all Digging activity is now happening on the DiggBar.” So, for all intents and purposes, it would seem like the bar is doing a pretty swell job at allowing users to see just what they’re digging before they make the decision to click.

Image Credit: Digg

Study: Malware Writers Rickrolling on Digg

Pulkit Chandna — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:15:16 -0600

Online beguilers are leaving no stone unturned in propagating malware. They have shown remarkable pliancy in adapting themselves to the ever-evolving cyber landscape. They have realized that the best places to ply their diabolical trade are the ones with massive traffic. As nothing rivals social websites in popularity, such cyber haunts have endeared themselves to malware authors.

According to PandaLabs Security’s Sean-Paul Correll, malware writers are increasingly using popular social news aggregator Digg to their advantage. They either submit erroneous stories that sound sensational or post ostensibly relevant links when commenting on a popular story. This trick is sufficient to bamboozle gullible internet users, who unsuspectingly end up on websites fraught with malware.

The malware files are mostly disguised as video codecs and anti-spyware downloads. Correll has been able to identify 52 Digg accounts being operated by malware peddlers.

Image Credit: Gawker