I have a problem with this. A change, even one so deceptively small as this, can drastically alter how a social networking site is used.

Look at Facebook, for example. I don’t know about you, but my feed is an endless sea of images, with a rare plain-text status. It’s gotten to the point where if you want to say something and be heard, you have to set your text on a picture. Otherwise people will just scroll right past it, the visual noise drowning out the text. Photos, image macros and paragraphs of (frequently trite) text needlessly pasted into graphics that add next to nothing to the message.

Google+ has been even worse of late. If you join any of the “communities” Google recommends to you, even seemingly professional ones such as those for programming topics, you’re going to be seeing a lot of animated GIFs and image macros. (Or “internet cancer,” as I’ve heard them described: low-effort content that spreads across the Web, choking off interesting, insightful and informative content.)

I love words. I use Twitter because I want two things:

1. A compact and scannable feed of short messages. The “stream of consciousness” that Twitter is famous for. Interesting things that don’t quite merit their own full-length blog posts.
2. Links to long form articles recommended by the people I follow.

The addition of embedded media will be to the detriment of Twitter. It will encourage more image links and, potentially, tweets that solely consist of an image.

The change is already starting. On day one, I saw this:

I don’t even follow @HarperCollinsUK, it was retweeted, and I’m certainly not a C. S. Lewis fan. But here’s the same kind of junk, straight out of Facebook, showing up already. I guess it’s time to brace yourselves, because the image macros are coming.

• Every API endpoint will require authentication, through OAth
• Rate limiting is done per endpoint
• The revised display guidelines will be more actively enforced. They want a more uniform style.
• Developers will have to “work with Twitter” if they have more than an arbitrary number of users. As an app developer, you will need “[Twitter’s] permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.” Applications that already have over 100,000 tokens will have their fuzzy limit set at 200% of their current token count.

The last point, especially, has been controversial, as it seems suspiciously like a ploy to disadvantage third-party Twitter clients and push users toward the official app. Whether that is the case or not, it could conceivably inconvenience the developers of popular apps like Tweetbot and Echofon.

The sky is not falling, I’d obviously prefer that there wasn’t any cap, but the current cap is pretty huge and we aren’t going anywhere.

— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) August 16, 2012

Hopefully things will work out okay. Twitter’s own app is utterly mediocre in comparison to the better third-party clients, chiefly Tweetbot. Twitter would be shooting themselves in the foot if they put the kibosh on the software that some of the more influential users prefer. Third-party clients are what made Twitter what it is today, after all.

Before, Digg followed the simple paradigm of “sort user-submitted links by the number of votes they receive.” Now, it’s trying to be something more like a cross between Slashdot and Techmeme, with a little bit of inspiration from The Verge’s design.

Stories are now ranked not just by votes, but also by the number of times they’re shared on social networking sites. If you share or like a link on Facebook, Digg considers it to be a vote. If you retweet a link on Twitter, Digg counts it as a vote. Placement on the page is determined not only by a ranking formula, though, but also by manual moderation.

The first segment of the Digg front page is made up of the highlighted stories, with their large images, but down the page you find the “Popular” and “Upcoming” sections, which will seem familiar to those who remember the old Digg. “Popular” contains the top stories by natural votes, rather than being singled-out by them moderators. Below that, the Upcoming section shows the recently submitted links.

As it stands, the new Digg isn’t a bad start. It’s less automated and democratic than a site purely driven by user votes, but the new direction may lead to better content and less image macros. One thing it’s majorly missing, however, is an RSS feed. User comments aren’t a huge deal, in fact, they were one of the worst parts of the previous incarnations of Digg.

Blogs can do everything Facebook or Twitter can do, though they lack the centralization. You have to manually go out and visit them to see what’s new, or use RSS, which isn’t exactly intuitive to less technical users. Blogs are, in their barest form, a reverse-chronological listing of postings. Those posts can be of any length, and contain any type of information. Plain text, images, audio, video, etc.. Some platforms, like WordPress and Tumblr, even offer features to differentiate between types of posts. Photo galleries? You can even do that if you set it up right. Profiles? That’s what About pages are for.

The only thing that’s missing is a standardized federation API that broadcasts information about a blog, linking them together so you can have user-friendly news feeds like Facebook or Twitter. The API would include basic profile information, such as your name and the URL of your chosen avatar, the URL of the blog, and anything else that a social networking would need to query.

Using that information, a user could skim through their friends’ latest updates from a convenient dashboard. It would pull in information from the federation API and aggregate public posts.

WordPress.com is already doing something along these lines, only it’s internal to their hosted service. You can “follow” a WordPress.com blog, and its posts end up in a news feed of sorts. Imagine if it became a part of the open source WordPress project as well, and any WordPress blog could be followed in the same way. And if it was later opened up and inter-operated with other platforms as well. You could even follow non-personal sites such as Smashing Magazine, much like you would a “fan page” on Facebook.

Just add remote replies, so you can comment on a post without traipsing over to the other user’s site, and you’ve got a social network. You could even have mobile apps. WordPress and Blogger have had XML-RPC APIs for a long time, and the WordPress team even made an iPhone app for on-the-go posting an comment moderation. Add the aggregation into the mix, and you basically have Twitter or Tumblr, but more open.

Given the extensibility of the more popular blogging platforms, WordPress especially, it wouldn’t be out of the question to handle it as a downloadable plugin. The idea would probably gain more traction if the Automattic team was on board, though, and integrated it with WordPress.com.

Forget Google Plus or Diaspora, the future is going to be even more open.

The first change that irks me is the new Connect screen, which replaces the Mentions tab. Instead of getting a listing of replies or tweets mentioning your username, you get something closer to a Facebook feed. The stream is cluttered with messages along the lines of “Mr. Follower and 6 others are now following you. Isn’t that great?” Oh, and anytime someone retweets one of your updates, it goes in there too. You can still get to the Mentions timeline, but it requires a second click. I imagine it’s even more “useful” if you have a half million followers.

I’m still not sure where they buried the Direct Messages page. I know it must be around here somewhere…

Next on the list is “Brand Pages.” Now the Twitter profiles for large brands get a few extra features that, while I’m sure they find useful, kind of detract from the Twitter experience and remind me of Myspace. (Remember them?)

Brand pages get to have a graphical banner on their profile, right above the timeline. They also get to make a featured tweet “sticky” and pin it to the top of their timeline. Oh, and did I mention any linked photos or videos in those sticky tweets get auto-expanded?

Now for the icing on the cake. Remember Loren Brichter’s excellent iOS app? Formerly known as Tweetie, it won an Apple design award before Twitter bought it and made it the official app. Well, Twitter has completely scrapped that codebase and replaced it with something that reminds me of Facebook’s kludgy app. It’s missing many of the great features of the old app, and feels very watered down in comparison. But it looks and acts more or less the same on Android, which is…good for Android users, I guess.

Gruber nailed it in his review.

…today’s new Twitter, is something else. It’s an attempt at a best way to do Twitter that is as consistent as possible across multiple platforms, ranging from the iPhone to Android to the mobile and desktop web. I don’t want an iPhone app that’s constrained by the restrictions of a mobile web app. The whole reason I prefer native apps is that I like experiences that far exceed what can be done in a web app. This is a native app that looks and feels like it was designed and polished according to the norms of web apps, not other native iPhone apps.

It looks to me like #NewNewTwitter is the new #Dickbar. Fortunately, there are still plenty of third-party apps, which have had an increase in sales since the update. (Tweetbot and Twittelator Neue are a couple of good ones.)

Starting in October, the +1 button will begin to appear on display ads on your site. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections.  We believe that these recommendations could lead your readers to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

Clicks on the +1 button will not count as ad clicks, and publishers will not receive revenue for them, but should help increase CTR. (People are more inclined to click ads that are recommended by people they know.)

+1: Now making Display ads more relevant [Inside Adsense Blog]

How do you make one of those?

If you don’t mind making your own from scratch, Michael from Pro Blog Design has a great tutorial. His floating box looks nice, moves smoothly and is very customizable, since you’re adding it directly to your theme.

If you need a plugin, Sharebar and Digg Digg both create a similar result with much less effort, but they don’t look quite as nice.

When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day. Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes. This explosion in traffic created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains.

Oh, and kn0thing (a co-founder of the site) is coming back as a board member.

Independence [blog.reddit]

There’s probably sufficient documentation on how to implement this sort of thing with Twitter, so let’s try something a bit different. How about those new Google +1 buttons?

The +1 button has a convenient JavaScript callback that could be used for all sorts of fun things, such as un-hiding content on the page.

First, you need to put the button markup on your page, as well as the content you wish to hide until said button is clicked. The DIV holding the content should of course be hidden by default. Be sure to set the callback parameter of the button.

<div id="plusonebutton">
 <g:plusone callback="plusone_callback" href="http://www.webmaster-source.com"></g:plusone>
</div>

<div id="plusonecontent" style="display:none">
 <p><strong>The user has clicked the +1 button.</strong> Here's some content that was not previously visible. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>
</div>

Next, you want to include the +1 script and jQuery in your page header. After you’ve taken care of that, you need to write your callback function. The function fires when the button is clicked (assuming the name matches the one specified in the button parameter) and passes a JSON object containing the button state, among other things.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
 function plusone_callback(response) {
 if (response.state == 'on') {
 $("#plusonecontent").fadeIn();
 $("#plusonebutton").fadeOut();
 }
 }
</script>

The callback should check the JSON object to see whether the state is set to “on” rather than “off,” and replace the button with your hidden content if that is the case.

You can see a demo of the finished page here.

I don’t know whether Google frowns upon this sort of thing or not, but it would be a great way to provide a surprise bonus (e.g. an ebook or song download) when someone likes one of your pages. So, just don’t use it for anything spammy or deceptive and you should probably be fine.

Update: It has come to my attention that this could be used in many crappy ways, such as those irritating people who force you to Like a video on Facebook before they let you watch it. (Which is completely against the spirit of the concept, as well as social media.) Don’t do stuff like that. Seriously.

Joost de Valk has put together a good tutorial on how to fix that issue. It features code snippets that will load the widget JavaScript asynchronously, keeping the buttons from holding up the page loading. Also, it even adds Google Analytics and Clicky tracking so you can tell if people are actually using your buttons.

When Google released +1, I quickly identified how to track interaction with that button. The obvious “follow up” was questions from people on how to track interaction with other buttons. Not for each of these social buttons tracking of interaction is actually possible. It depends on how the button was designed whether this will work or not. I got it working for Twitter and Facebook, so I’ll share the code for tracking interaction with their respective social buttons below.

Social Buttons: Adding them to your site & Tracking them [Yoast]