Publishers and bloggers who have had the experience of having their content “Dugg”, “Scaped”, or featured prominently on any other social news or bookmarking sites have seen the short traffic spikes that tend to occur from this experience. Many have commented that beyond those huge traffic spikes there isn’t much long term value from having your content featured, and why submit to them at all if your content isn’t going to make the front page when the traffic spike occurs?
A recent experience with organic search results and some research has caused me to believe that the long term value proposition is changing and will get even better. It also sheds some light on which social sites may grow in traffic, and which of the three major search engines indexes them the best.
The Initial Query
My parents have an ecommerce site primarily selling an ergonomic stool called the Swopper Chair. I provide some technical consulting for them and I needed to look up some PHP shopping carts. So I did a Google search for “best php shopping cart”.
I started reading through the results, and noticed the result from Digg half way down. Knowing what Digg is, I figured it’d be a good recommendation and probably have some comments and additional links that might help me out. I read through the comments and ended up clicking through to both the Dugg URL and some of the URLs in the comments.
This made me wonder if there is potential for organic search results for social news and bookmarking sites to drive long tail traffic to your site, maybe even if your article never got many votes and never made the front page of the site.
The Tests
It was time to start picking some search queries and see what kind of results appear from social sites and what about those sites makes that happen. I’ll link to the query along with what social sites have results and where the original article ends up in the results.
Test 1: john battelle keynote
This was a search term from the post I made from John Battelle’s keynote at the Blog Business Summit last week that did not get many votes on the social sites, and got a few links to my post from the blogosphere.
The result of that is if I hadn’t submitted my article to Netscape and Digg I’d have no chance of getting any visitors who didn’t pass the first results page. Of course, the visitor has to click through Netscape/Digg to get to my actual article, but the chances of that are decent based on how those sites are structured.
Interesting that Digg was not here at all when Netscape was listed.
Summary: Google provided the best and the most beneficial results for using social news to get higher rankings for an article than I could get on my own without submitting it.
Test 2: yahoo invests
This term is from the title of a more popular article than our first test. This one is from SmartMoney.com to the tune of 137 Diggs that was on the Business and Finance front section on Digg, and I also made a blog post with the same phrase in the title.
5th – Searchmob (A Digg like site from John Battelle about the search industry)
6th – SmartMoney.com Article (Actual article that was Dugg)
7th – ConversionRater blog post
Solid results, and the presence of social sites and linking between them and my blog post allowed this one story to take 7 of the top 10 search results, even though Yahoo has invested in many, many things over the years. This provides a lesson that sites like Digg hold a huge page rank and authority now that it ranks higher than most media outlet sites that have reported on Yahoo investing in various things.
23rd – DuggMirror (site that mirrors popular articles on Digg)
So where the heck is Digg? They haven’t been on either test so far. Does Yahoo not index Digg? Now that Searchmob has shown up on two engines, maybe it’s an important site to add to the submission mix even though it’s not as well known as others. This is the only story I’ve ever submitted there, so that looks promising. Yahoo also had much more varying results instead of just the Right Media investment story, so perhaps Google’s top results are more time-sensitive.
11th – SmartMoney.com article that was Dugg heavily
17th – Digg
19th – SearchMob
Live Search likes my blog the best which is great, but also interesting to see SearchMob popping up again in the top 20.
Summary: Google’s results make Digg and Searchmob look especially important to get higher rankings. It doesn’t look like social sites matter to Yahoo, and MSN results are mixed.
Test 3: toyota logo
A few weeks ago my friend Mike Rundle had a little run in with Toyota based on a company working for them taking the 9rules leaf logo and barely changing it for a site they were running. I figured this search query might be a bit harder to rank high on, so it’d be interesting to see if the social networks helped out.
Not bad, but the social sites might not help all that much as the original post would probably get clicked on more. It is interesting to see our first sighting of Reddit.
The Digg listing is a big help here at potentially getting more search traffic.
Summary of Tests
Even though it was a pretty quick test, and the search terms I tested aren’t that competitive, it’s clear that submitting your site to the social news services can help drive more traffic to your site through organic search.
I think we can also see that Google seems to embrace fresh content and the social news sites more than Yahoo and MSN, and Yahoo definitely isn’t a big fan. This is probably not a big deal as most publishers are primarily concerned with Google traffic anyway.
What does this tell us about the social sites?
Digg and Netscape were definitely the most commonly found sites, and I ran some more additional quick tests and found that Netscape seems to also show up ahead of Digg in many cases. I had an extremely hard time finding Reddit or del.icio.us in any results. Why is this? Let’s take a look at why each of these sites may or may not rank highly:
Digg:
Lots of link popularity and authority. 8/10 Google Page Rank (if that means anything).
Uses title of article in the page title well.
Article title in an h3 tag.
Uses title in search-friendly URL.
Community comments make the page have more text and makes the Digg listing page like an article itself. It can provide more keywords and variety.
They provide incentive to blog about their stories (and thus get more link popularity) by listing the Digg users who blogged about the story with a link back to their blog.
There are sites like Duggmirror and blogs that basically just republish Digg listings and content so it drives more links.
Netscape:
Even more link popularity than Digg, but this is a benefit of Netscape.com’s long time place on the web. 9/10 in Google page rank. This could account for why Netscape sometimes comes up ahead of Digg for the same stories.
Uses title of article in the page title well.
Article title in an h3 tag.
Uses title in search-friendly URL.
Community comments make the page have more text, but usually not as many comments as Digg.
Didn’t see any incentive to blog the stories.
Probably not as many mirrors or sites republishing their content as Digg.
Reddit:
Decent link popularity at 7/10 Page Rank, but not as good as Digg and Netscape.
Uses title of article in the page title well.
No header tag around article title (ouch).
Does not use the article title in the URL.
Community comments make the page have more text.
Didn’t see any incentive to blog the stories.
Probably not as many mirrors or sites republishing their content as Digg.
del.icio.us:
Link popularity is good and similar to Digg at 8/10 Page Rank.
Does not use title of the article as the title of the page.
Uses h4 tag for article headline.
Does not use the title of the article in the URL.
Instead of it really being comments and a discussion, users leave notes about the bookmark. They are usually very similar notes.
No incentive to blog the stories.
I’ve actually heard before that del.icio.us blocks search engines from indexing it with their robots.txt file. I haven’t researched if that’s true, but judging from how they have their bookmark pages set up it does not appear that they are trying to get good organic search results. I did find their tag pages listed in some search results however.
Searchmob:
Low link popularity, currently showing a 0/10 in Page Rank. The root domain of battellemedia.com does have an 8/10 though, so that probably carries over.
Uses title of article in the page title well.
Article title in an h4 tag.
Uses title in search-friendly URL.
There is the potential for comments, but since it gets less traffic there aren’t many comments.
It does take trackbacks which can encourage blogging the stories. Didn’t look too common though.
Social Site Summary
Based on looking at how they have set things up, Digg and Netscape are positioned the best to continue to grow from organic search results. This will be a key to break out of the tech audience and into the mainstream web userbase. If users find Digg through Google results they may be inclined to stick around. Also, as publishers learn about the value they can get from having their articles submitted to these sites, Digg and Netscape will get more submissions while other sites won’t.
It seems to me like Reddit and del.icio.us are missing the boat here and not doing some very easy things they could do in order to get their pages show up more in organic search. Do they not want traffic?
I’ve posted numerous times about niche or vertical social networks, and how I think that Myspace and Facebook will lose traffic to them over time.
The WSJ has a story today talking about a slowdown in traffic for these two combined with anecdotal stories of problems and negative experiences. Essentially those problems boil down to it being too popular, too much spam, too much advertising, and “creepy experiences”.
Beyond these, I think that these sites still lack some utility for a large percentage of the population. As a married guy approaching 30, the only real use I have for Myspace is really to maybe find some old friends and send messages there instead of email. However, this doesn’t mean I’m a boring guy without any interests, it’s just that Myspace is so vast and large that really finding and interacting with my core interests while I’m in the mood to do so doesn’t happen.
Instead, I still find myself visiting community and content sites that are specifically focused to my interests. Most of these sites still operate in the older web model of content and comments or content and forums, but I’m already starting to see the shift towards making these sites into niche social networks.
Is it a pain to participate in numerous social networks instead of one or two big ones? Not really, think of all the various accounts we already all have at numerous sites. So instead of idling around Myspace, I can participate in a basketball social network, wakeboarding social network, or whatever else my interest at the moment may be. This is far more compelling to me, and I think we’ll see a shift towards people fragmenting their networks in this way. There’s a reason these niche sites exist in the first place, and it’s because an all-encompassing website can’t service every content area. The same holds true for social networking, Myspace can’t be all things for all people.
If I’m right this doesn’t mean Myspace and Facebook will die, far from it. I think we’ll just see their growth and influence slow and perhaps decline into a phase of maturity.
Jason Calacanis of Netscape/Weblogs Inc./AOL just kicked off the day at the Blog Business Summit here in lovely and cloudy Seattle. The topic of the keynote was “Maintaining Authenticity and Integrity Within Commercial Social Media”.
Calacanis does have good experience in this area from being open about much of what was going on at Weblogs Inc. in terms of statistics and operations before their AOL purchase, and he’s defininitely honest and open about much of what’s going on at Netscape. However, his talk wasn’t really much about that, it was more of a history of his experience with blogging mixed in with interesting anecdotes. I have to hand it to Calacanis, he’s not afraid to speak his mind, which is refreshing and interesting to watch. I’ll try and give an overview here….
He led off with a history of blogging, which was actually pretty interesting as I’ve been on the web since 1994 but hadn’t heard who people really credit with “inventing” blogging. Calacanis talked about Justin Hall, a kid who started publishing information about his personal life in 1995 while the web was still very focused on business and education purposes, and Hall started traveling to schools teaching kids how to blog. Apparently there is a movie called Homepage that was made about Hall.
While running Silicon Alley Reporter Calacanis worked with Rafat Ali who started PaidContent.org, and he thought it was no big deal Rafat was working on a blog because he didn’t think it would amount to anything. Then he heard he was pulling in 60k from his blog working a few spare hours a day, and he started to realize there may be something to it. He also was putting together conferences with Xeni Jardin, who was working with BoingBoing and started getting a ton of publicity and success with that. He began to wonder if he was holding people back as a manager because they started to gain success on their own through blogging. That’s when he realized there may be something to it.
He was already working with Brian Alvey, who later became a partner in the company to create Weblogs Inc. They decided at a Knicks game to try and make a blog, and realized that one blog alone wouldn’t be a big business. But what if they made 500 blogs and a platform to run those?
He then started working on it with the idea that each blog should be a subdomain of weblogsinc.com, and set up a lunch with Nick Denton who was already running Gawker Media. He told Nick that he was going to start getting into blogging as a business, and Nick tried to talk him out of it and told him there was no money or future in blogging, it was just a small lifestyle business. He asked Nick to keep it between them. Then shortly thereafter when Calacanis publicly announced Weblogs Inc., Denton posted on his blog that the “Dot-Com Bubble Boy was going to ruin the blogosphere.” Calacanis being a competitive guy, decided he wanted to put the hurt on Denton. He determined his strategy and best way to hurt him was to take his most talented people.
He used more pay and equity in Weblogs Inc. to lure Peter Rojas who was running Gizmodo to run WeblogsInc’s Engadget. This moment led him to realize they needed to brand their blogs individually instead of as a subdomain.
Calacanis learned another lesson when he wanted to hire an editor for WeblogsInc, and Judith Meskill applied for it, and he told her he didn’t really have any magazine qualifications. She pointed out to him that you don’t actually edit bloggers, so as an organized blogger she had the qualifications he needed. She was right.
Jason also knew Mark Cuban from the earlier days of the web, and at a SXSW conference Cuban told Jason he wanted to blog. Jason said they’d set one up for him, so Brian Alvey was a little hesitant, and Jason pointed out that when a billionaire asks for a favor, you do it. So Alvey stayed up all night creating a blog for Cuban. Shortly thereafter, Jason asked Cuban for a little investment, and Cuban agreed right away. Easiest investment Jason had ever received.
He then spoke about starting to talk to AOL and other media companies, and how Nick Denton had also been talking to them, although Denton claimed publicly that he’d never sell Gawker and it wasn’t for sale. He then proceeded with some funny Denton impersonations, but pointed out that he and Denton are now good friends so he feels okay giving him a hard time.
Calcanis wasn’t so sure he wanted to sell to AOL at first because the company was so young, and that he told AOL that they’d want to edit the bloggers, and that just wasn’t okay. He pointed out that the Weblogsinc team worked for the bloggers, not the other way around.
He also pointed out how bloggers are generally misfits and outsiders, and pointed to Robert Scoble in the audience and pointed out that he was about the 59,000th most important employee at Microsoft and was basically a company outsider, then blogging vaulted him to be their #1 communicator. A powerful medium indeed.
Calacanis then went into a tirade that was quite amusing about “A-list blogging” and the complaints from people about how it’s bad for the blogosphere. He said all you have to do is look at the top stories on TechMeme, say something intelligent about the story, link to the other five top bloggers talking about it, and do that for 30 days straight, then you’ll be an A-list blogger. Those that write one post a week, and hope to achieve something, frankly just suck. Then people complain to him that Engadget and Gizmodo “control” the gadget blog world, but if your gadget blog is ranked #67 in gadgets, there’s probably a reason. Your gadget blog sucks.
His point is that it’s the most open, free, and competitive medium there is right now. If you have talent and a little effort, you can make it in the blog world.
This led into complaints about PayPerPost, who he thinks is bad for the blogosphere. He compared blogging to a beautiful Main St. that we’ve all built, and PayPerPost is coming in and pissing on our street. An interesting visual. The point was that they are covert and he believes that authenticity is important for the blogosphere.
This led to calling out Tim Draper, who led a $3 million investment in PayPerPost. He said “I realize a video of this speech will show up on the web right after I’m done, but I don’t care.” He’s called out Draper on his blog as well, and said he hasn’t heard a response about why someone who supports the blogosphere can support PayPerPost.
Next up on Calacanis’ discussion list was to talk about podcasting. He said two years ago he said podcasting wouldn’t work, and again admitted he was wrong. He realized he’s now listening to more “radio” then ever, but he’s not turning on the actual radio, he’s just listening to podcasts. So, he’s announcing today that PodTech.net and GoDaddy will sponsor his new “CalacanisCast” podcast. They’re paying $100,000 in total to sponsor his podcast and the money will be donated to a private school in Brooklyn to put two kids on scholarship who couldn’t afford it.
He then finished by answering some questions about Netscape, PayPerPost, and a few other issues.
Overall, an intersting talk with some funny anecdotes and refreshing honesty.
Update:
Pro PR from Thorney Fallis has a nice post with some pictures and direct quotes.
A couple of weeks ago Facebook faced a user uprising when it added a new “News Feed” feature which broadcasted the actions of all your friends on your main Facebook page. After improving the privacy and control, the user uprising seems to have died down.
Not one to remain content though, Mediaweek is reporting that Facebook will be adding ads to the news alerts about your friends. Apparently the ads will be the third item in the feed, and may be a text link or video clip. The Mediaweek article reports that if a user interacts with the ad, all their friends will be alerted of that and offered the opportunity to interact as well. But the Techcrunch article seems to have updated information saying the Mediaweek article was incorrect in that regard.
Either way, like the Techmeme twist on syndicated advertising spots, I like seeing publishers getting innovative with what kind of advertising they offer up.
I do think Facebook will see some hurdles here though. First, you need advertisers willing to pay and go through the work of creating these custom ads. It’s much easier to work with an ad network or another party to get a wide range of advertising in standard ad sizes.
Second, Facebook’s audience is still very broad, so they may not be able to sell as much high quality advertising as they’re hoping for.
Third, advertisers will also have to put in some additional special work to create ads for Facebook that may be different than all the ads they’re creating for other sites.
And lastly, users may hate the ads being integrated with the news alerts.
Those reasons lead me to think this isn’t a slam dunk for Facebook, but it’s good to see they’re making an effort to innovate with advertising.
Facebook announced that they have opened up their site to anyone. Previously you had to be a student at a college or high school, or be an employee of a few large select companies in order to be able to register.
This is an interesting move from Facebook. Many people have attributed their success to being the more school-focused and exclusive social network in comparison to Myspace and others. By opening up to everyone, they are stepping in to the ring with Myspace as well as getting rid of their exclusivity that made them cool.
I’m not so sure I agree. Usually I tend to fall on the side of focusing on your niche and maximizing it instead of trying to be the solution for everyone. It’s obvious that Facebook is going to gain users and an immediate increase in traffic from this. The question is whether those new users stick around, and whether the long-time users continue to stick around and use it as vigilantly as they did when it was exclusive to students.
As I set up my profile on Facebook last night to check it out, I was impressed with the experience compared to Myspace. It’s still far from great, but I thought the setup, the ability to more easily become a part of relevant “networks” to me, and the consistent look and feel made it an experience I’d much rather have versus Myspace.
I understand that the craziness of Myspace and ability to customize things is what’s so attractive to much of the Myspace generation, but I feel like Facebook has a real shot at growth by being the school/work/professional social network.
In this case, I don’t think it’s a mistake. They may lose some users who really care about the coolness and exclusivity of it, but I think they’ll gain more users like me who prefer the experience over Myspace and other social networks.
As 2006 began I made a set of predictions for what I thought would happen related to web applications, comipanies, and “Web 2.0”.
We’re two-thirds through 2006, so I figured it was a good time to revisit how many of them have come true, and if any are still likely to occur in the rest of 2006.
1. RSS will become two-way with the help of 175.entry”>Simple Sharing Extensions.
Hmm, well, this is slowly improving, but I don’t think I really nailed this one. Hopefully we’ll see more of this in the future but the buzz around it seems to have died down or just moved behind the scenes.
2. Social news site Digg will expand into other content areas and media types and then will be acquired.
I was half right on this one. Digg did indeed expand into other content areas and media types, but no acquisition has occurred. Will that still happen? There hasn’t been any buzz around it lately, and Digg has gone through some recent problems as bloggers have noticed that Digg might not be as democratic as we thought, and they’ve lost some top users to Netscape’s offer to pay top social news finders.
Digg also faces competition from other social news services like Reddit, Newsvine, and Netscape, and while none of them has gotten to Digg’s level, it’s still early in the social news race. There are also numerous sites launching all the time which work just like Digg but are focused on specific verticals. It may be that what they’re doing isn’t unique enough now to really warrant someone wanting to acquire them that badly.
3. Web 2.0 will be looked down upon as a buzzword, and it’s usage will drop off dramatically.
This has definitely occurred, and more people seem to be moving past the term into just accepting things as new web applications. We’re also hearing “social web” or “social media” for a lot of Web 2.0 applications.
4. Face-recognition photo application Riya will be acquired by a major player.
Oops, didn’t happen yet either. Riya switched up their model a bit and are taking on an even bigger challenge of web image search with their facial recognition technology being a big part of that mix. I’d say at this point an acquisition in 2006 is unlikely, but I wouldn’t rule it out in the long term.
5. Some ecommerce shopping applications using the more recent advancements in social web technologies will be developed and will succeed.
Web shopping seems to move a little slower than other applications, but we have seen some cool new shopping applications. Jellyfish probably has made the most noise this year with their Value Per Action advertising model, but taking a look at this Alexa graph it doesn’t look they’ve had much traffic uptake from consumers. Of course, don’t always trust Alexa, I think Jellyfish is compelling although not revolutionary, but has a long way to go before it’s a major player.
6. Google Analytics will again drop the hammer on the web analytics industry.
Another one I missed, there hasn’t been much out of Google Analytics besides finally opening up to the public. Google may be spread too thin in this case, or maybe they have no new analytics ideas, but they haven’t done anything special with it since launching it.
7. A forward thinking company will build technology to support transparency, efficiency, and relationships in the online advertising business.
Hey, what do you know, Right Media is doing this. Okay, I’ll admit this was a loaded prediction when I knew it was happening. Still, I think we’ve made great progress in 2006 thus far, and the rest of the year and 2007 could be really special.
8. Microsoft will launch a contextual advertising network that will either be huge, or fail miserably.
They have started issuing beta invites for advertisers to particiate in their content ad network. So we don’t really know yet if it will be a success or not. There hasn’t even been much detail yet on what the service will consist of, but if Adcenter is any indication it could have some interesting features, but be very IE-specific and bug heavy.
9. Two to three new startups will be so cool and successful they will make the heroes of 2005 like Flickr and del.icio.us seem small and insignificant.
I think YouTube makes a strong case for this being a correct prediction, and Digg has also been pretty cool and successful, although neither of them have been acquired like Flickr or Delicious. Of course, let’s recall that those two were not acquired for huge amounts of money though.
10. The venture capital investments and acquisition bubble will heat up even more, then deflate in the 2nd half of 2006 after a number of companies fail..
It seems as if things have cooled a bit in the 2nd half of 2006. Rojo was recently acquired by Six Apart, and there have been some recent venture capital investments but nothing too crazy.
Overall
Not bad, but I think I can do better with future predictions. I think I’m just early on a few of them, and maybe flat out wrong on one or two.
Ross Mayfield wants MeMeme, the idea of a social news application that’s not just based on the wisdom of the crowds like Digg or TechMeme, but based on what’s popular with his friends/colleagues/what he reads.
As he mentions in his post, there’s a few different companies working on such a solution, and another that I didn’t see mentioned was Megite. You’ll see in the right sidebar they have a “My Megite” which appears to work like TechMeme except with the RSS feeds you provide to them. I know that Megite has had this feature for quite a while, it’d be interesting to find out if those who have one created find it useful.
Personally I’m not so sure that’s the complete answer for me, as most of the time it’s only a portion of the content in my RSS feeds that really interests me, and what’s “popular” with the blog crowd through their linking (how TechMeme and Megite gauge importance) isn’t always what’s most important to me.
What’s most important to me is what my friends and colleagues KNOW I’ll be interested in. It’s a blog post a co-worker sends me relating to what we’re working on, or an interesting article on a subject I like a friend sends me. But, I’d also still like to go a bit beyond that as my friends and co-workers isn’t quite a big enough social network to find me all the important things I should be reading. I want something that caters to both.
Apparently Peter Chernin, the President and COO of News Corp, said at a recent conference that they were looking at various ad serving technologies to help them find ways to make money off all that MySpace traffic. They are the #2 property on the web in page views, but WAY down the list in amount of revenue generated.
Since advertising is an obvious way to generate revenue, it seems like a natural fit for them to own or work closely with various ad technologies to make the best of it. It’s interesting to note that they are #6 in search engine market share, even though they aren’t a search engine. Obviously there is revenue to be made there, which is why they’re talking to Google and MSN about it, and potentially even auctioning off the right to serve search ads to that traffic. Do you think they’ll get a pretty good revenue share on that?
Umair is right. I’ve been using LinkedIn since it’s inception but I’ve always felt it’s so limiting I can’t find many useful purposes for it. The only things I’ve ever heard are that people have found past co-workers they knew, or the occasional hire is found through it. That’s okay I guess, but is it good enough?
I’m a strong believer in simplicity, so I’m glad they don’t cram it with useless features, but at the same time there needs to be more freedom and useful features. Umair makes the comparison to Friendster and how it has struggled by being too limiting. On the flip side many think Myspace has done well because it allows much more control and interaction. Obviously LinkedIn’s audience is different and can’t spend their whole hour of lunch time during school customizing their profile, but I think Umair’s right in that there needs to be more interaction to truly make it useful to more people.
LinkedIn is positioned well for it since they have the userbase already, so will they execute or will a startup beat them to the punch?
As Myspace has grown to be a 800 pound internet gorilla the web business world has been trying to figure out why it’s successful and perhaps more importantly how to take advantage of it and market to it’s user gigantic user base. I’ve seen many people talk about using Myspace to market their business, but I’ve seen very few examples of it being done successfully besides the music industry.
I was made aware of RollerWarehouse and the success they’ve had by creating a news ticker of their rollerskating-focused blog posts for people to put on their Myspace profile pages. Here’s an example profile with it going, and here’s the ticker in action:
The kicker is that by running this on your Myspace page (or any other web page for that matter), you can get 5% off any order you place with RollerWarehouse. So, if you’re into rollerskating, you can put news on your Myspace page to make it cooler, and you can get 5% off your orders. Not bad.
So how has this worked out for RollerWarehouse?
In it’s first two weeks of action RollerWarehouse.com went from a Google Pagerank of 0 to a 6, sales for March were up about 10% over 2005’s sales which was their first increase in 4 years. The program has a viral effect as other Myspacers see it on pages and add it to their’s, so the link benefit is just growing, as well as the number of customers taking advantage of the 5% off. They currently estimate that 50-75 new news tickers are being placed today for a total somewhere between 750-1000 total tickers running on people’s pages.
Why is that Google Pagerank important? Well, now everytime they highlight a product on their blog, they get great natural search results in Google for that search term. For example, they went from nowhere to being ranked #1 in Google results for “aggressive skates”, and are currently sitting at #2. That is one of the top search terms for their industry.
How much work was this for RollerWarehouse? Not much, simply creating the news ticker and getting it adopted by the first few users.
What a simple and great way to market their ecommerce business and blog.
A couple of weeks ago Facebook faced a user uprising when it added a new “News Feed” feature which broadcasted the actions of all your friends on your main Facebook page. After improving the privacy and control, the user uprising seems to have died down.
