5 Cool Social Chat Tools For Your Site
The concept of chatting may not be new these days, but it’s still one of the best ways to connect with others and share information. If you are a webmaster for a popular website, there is no reason not to offer your readers the chance to chat with you once in a while. Besides, you can always provide you readers with the tools and let them go from there.
Social chatting is quite popular these days. That’s essentially chatting for Twitter and Facebook users. There are many tools that can add such functionality to your website. The nice thing about social chat websites is that they make it so easy to integrate chat rooms into any site. They are easy to set up too.
Those of you interested in adding chat functionality to your website should check these 5 social chat services out:
Tinychat: a light-weight and fun chat platform that lets your visitors connect with you using their social credentials. Supports video chats too.
Nurph: a cool social chat service that lets you start a chat room on Twitter. It allows you to add it to your website and share your chat room with the world. Takes just a couple of minutes to set up.
Donut Chat: a freemium service that can be used to set up chat rooms easily. If you are willing to pay a bit, you can host your chat rooms at a URL of your own choosing. Supports media sharing and third-party app integration too. (more…)
5 Killer Twitter Tools for Social Media Addicts
There are plenty of people who spend hours of their time on Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis. Add to that hundreds of useful tools that are available for these networks, and you may end up spending all your days on these sites. There are plenty of Twitter tools that can help you get the most out of this social network. Some can help you increase your followers while some others can keep track of your favorite topic. You are never going to be out of options.
If you are struggling to feed your Twitter addiction, here are 5 tools that could help:
Twalkin: a very cool service that lets you connect and start talking with your Twitter friends. If you want to have a private chat with your friends or announce something to a selection of your followers, Twalkin is must try.
Tweeterview: a great tool to interview people on Twitter with and watch other people’s interviews. Helps keep things organized while you interview other people.
Klout: an all powerful tool that dissects your profile and lets you know whether you are making a difference on Twitter. It can show you what areas you need to work on to take your Twitter to the next level.
Share Your Feeds With the World with Aggregator Theme
Unless you have been completely ignoring what’s going on in the social media, you have probably heard of AllTop and PopURL. These are great places that you can find new RSS feeds and top blogs about almost any topic. Trying to clone such services is not as easy as it looks, but you can always start your own site sharing feeds that matter to you the most. If you are a blogger or a niche portal owner, you can use such feature to provide more value to your visitors. Thanks to Aggregator theme for WordPress, you can start sharing your favorite feeds with the world without spending too much money.
Aggregator theme is a widget based theme. Users can add all kinds of feeds and as many of them as they prefer. While you don’t want to add too many feeds to this theme, it should work for most people. You can add video, blog, and photo feeds to your widgets. So you have the opportunity to build a content heavy Aggregator without doing too much.
Sociable for iPad: Your Mobile Social Media Center
Everybody who has tried iPad in the past is familiar with its lacking multi-tasking capability. If you want to be on Twitter and keep an eye on your Facebook updates on your iPad, you are going to have to keep opening and closing apps. That’s where Sociable for iPad comes into play. It’s a social media center for your iPad, giving users the opportunity to keep track of developments on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and Flickr.
Sociable is really 6 apps fit into one. For starters, it enables users to read and update their Facebook status on iPad. Writing on walls and commenting on photos is possible too.
Sociable supports Twitter too. It lets iPad owners manage multiple Twitter accounts, post tweets, retweet, and even view tweets on a map. Support for Digg, Flickr, and Reddit is nice to have too.
Follow Your Favorite Blog with Favit
There is no question that Google Reader is the best feed reader around today. It offers a ton of features and makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs. That does not mean there are other solutions out there for RSS junkies. Favit is an exciting service that brings a more social aspect to your reading experience. The service connects you with your friends and lets you share connect with them and discover what their likes too.
Favit feels like a hybrid Twitter/RSS-reader. It not only gives you all the tools you need to follow your favorite blog, share your top stories, and get in touch with friends, it keeps track of your activities too. Your stream shows your followers what you have been doing, where you have left comment, and what items you have shared.
Visualize Information with Spicynodes
Those of you who have been blogging for a while know the importance of using visuals to get your point across in your posts. Spicynodes is a cool visualizer that lets you demonstrate what you have in mind to your readers in a more dynamic fashion. All you have to do is break down your thoughts and put it all in nodes.
Spicynodes is free to sign up for and quite easy to work. Once you have developed an outline or have the concept you want to demonstrate to others broken down, you can use this service to present your ideas in a more dynamic fashion. You can add and customize nodes easily. You can change the style of your nodemap easily.
Intense Debate: Take Your Blog To The Next Level
The first step to get involved in social media is by starting your very own blog. Everybody has something to share with the world (not talking about your lunch adventures though). After all, you don’t want to participate on Twitter and Facebook without having a plan .When you have a blog, you can use your social profiles to drive traffic to your blog and solidify your community.
Every blogger would tell you that getting people to comment on posts can be challenging. Top bloggers have mastered this art. Those bloggers who do not get a lot of traffic on their website, will have a tough time getting people to participate. The best way to do it is by making it easy for visitors to comment on each post, add their own content, and rate what others have to say. That’s where Intense Debate comes in. It’s a powerful comment management system by the people behind WordPress that turns your comment system into a powerful community tool for your readers.
Intense Debate is very easy to install and adds a whole other dimension to your blog. It lets your visitors to comment on your blog by using their Twitter, Facebook, or Intense Debate account. Of course, they can do it the good old way (with a name and URL). Since Intense Debate is compatible with Akismet, you can deal with spam comments more effectively as well.
AppsFire: iPhone Apps Meet Social Media
Apple iPhone may be based on a closed system, but it has a huge fan base. Lots of people have bought into iPhone’s promise and have gotten on board with the platform. Not everyone uses the same types of apps on their devices. That’s why sharing your lists with others and looking at their list can be a useful way to provide value. Thanks to AppsFire, we all can share our favorite apps with the world and help others discover new apps.
The service is quite easy to get to work. All you have to do is download AppsFire’s iPhone application and import your apps. You can then share them with the world. It’s also possible to go over what others have had to share on their pages as well. Best of all, you can send a link to your very own apps page from Facebook or Twitter. (more…)
The Early Edition: Ultimate Feed Reader for iPad
It is quite funny how many people claim to be social media experts these days. You can’t call yourself an expert when your industry is changing by the day. One might know a lot about Twitter or Facebook, but that’s different than being an “experts.” If you want to among the top players in your industry, you need to stay 0n the top of what goes on in your industry at all times. There are plenty of blogs and forums that one can keep track of to learn new things, come up with new ideas, and even find partners to work with in the future.
Google Reader is a nice feed reader, but sometimes you need a feed reader that does more than just organizing your feeds. The Early Edition is an innovative feed reader for iPad that not only fetches the latest posts from your favorite RSS feeds, it also turns them into a virtual newspaper. So instead of you having to go through a list of feeds, you can see a snapshot of what’s going on in your world.
The Early Edition is pretty easy to work with. All you have to do is add your favorite feeds to it, and it does the rest for you. It may not have fancy features that you see in top feed readers such as Google Reader. But it does make it much easier to read your feeds like a newspaper. Depending on the number of feeds that you add to this app, you are going to get more pages in your newspaper. The slider at the bottom enables you to skip pages and go through your feeds more conveniently. (more…)
Facebook Social Plugins: Why You Should Add Them Now
Facebook has been on a mission to challenge Google and go beyond what many thought impossible in generating more traffic than any other web property on the Internet. With its latest plugins, Facebook may be well on its way. Facebook’s social plugins bring a whole new dimension to promoting content on Facebook. In just a matter of few days, thousands of websites have already implemented Facebook social plugins. Considering that implementing these tools takes only a few minutes, there is no reason not to try.
Facebook Like Button is already getting a lot of love from bloggers. It gives Facebook users an easy way to give some love to articles that they like the most. For bloggers, it’s a win win situation. The plugin brings Facebook to their community and helps spread the word around their top blog posts. The Recommendations plugin is another exciting tool that makes it easier for your Facebook visitors to find out about your top posts.
