Getting Sociable

Until now, I had been using the Tweet This! and Share This! plug-ins to encourage sharing of posts, and I’m working on getting the Facebook “Like” button installed, so I might switch my Facebook Connect plug-in, too.

This morning I stumbled across a sharing plug-in that I like a lot more than the other two, and I think it makes for a nicer look. It’s called Sociable, and while it supposedly hasn’t been tested for the latest version of WordPress, it seems to be working well.

I like that it lets me choose from among 99 different sharing sites and methods (including email) in one toolbar, and that you can customize both the heading (so I could call out Twitter, Facebook and E-Mail among the options) and the order of the icons.

Here’s a screen shot of all 99 services (click to enlarge):

The ability to customize your blog with plug-ins like this is one of the main advantages of a self-hosted WordPress blog, as opposed to using WordPress.com. Still, WordPress.com is a great way to get your blog started quickly, and you can use domain mapping on WordPress.com to ensure continuity, so that if you decide later to move to self-hosted (as I did with SMUG), you don’t lose your external links.

If you’re using self-hosted WordPress, you might want to get Sociable too…and use the buttons below to share this post with your friends.

Is SxSW Swamping TwitPic? Or is TwitPic just Unreliable?

Until yesterday, my experience with TwitPic had been quite good. If you’re not familiar, TwitPic is a utility that lets you upload pictures from your iPhone (if it’s available for Blackberry, please let me know) to Twitter using clients like Twitterific or Twittelator, and publish a link to the photo as part of your tweet. TwitPic was profiled in Twitter 121.

For example, it worked well on Saturday when I attended the Austin boys’ section semifinal basketball game at Rochester’s Mayo Civic Center, and uploaded a picture just after the game started. Here was my tweet:

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And the photo was just as I had expected.

But yesterday I experienced something, as Monty Python would say, “completely different.”

I snapped a picture of a slide from presentation I was watching, and uploaded it with this tweet:

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Let’s just say the photo my Tweeps saw when they clicked the link wasn’t what I had uploaded.  (The second time it worked.)

A similar thing happened a bit later when I took a photo of a a former colleague during our dinner:

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Here was the photo that showed up:

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That picture doesn’t look anything like Chris! And it gives the impression that he was having digestive difficulties. 😉

I’ve heard that all the iPhone users at South by Southwest (SxSW) 2009 have overwhelmed the network capacity at the location with their TweetingDo you think this might have had anything to do with the TwitPic failures I experienced yesterday? That maybe lots of pictures were being uploaded at once, and somehow the links got switched? Have you had any problems with TwitPic?

I know that based on this experience I’m going to be extremely reluctant to upload work-related photos to TwitPic, until I find out what caused this problem and what has been done to resolve it. If you can’t trust that the photo you’re uploading will be the one linked in your Tweet, how can you use TwitPic?

TwitPic = FAIL

Facebook 107: Sharing Web Pages with Friends

Part of the power of Facebook is that it makes sharing information with your friends extremely easy. Within Facebook, for example, you can use the Chat feature for instant messaging, and the “Send a Message” function is a lot like a web-based e-mail service.

But there’s an even better feature that let’s you easily share anything on the Web (as long as it has a unique URL), with any of your Facebook friends.

And you can do it either actively or passively.

Say, for instance, you think the 10 Steps to Your Own Free Podcast program is the most wonderful way to learn about podcasting. Or you have a friend who is interested in trying scleral contact lenses so you want to send her a video.

You could copy the URL and paste it into an e-mail message. Or in the case of the YouTube video, you can share it by entering a friend’s e-mail address (or if you have an account, it you can save those addresses in your YouTube or Gmail address book.)

But with Facebook, sharing is simple – no matter what kind of page it is. Here are the steps:

Continue reading “Facebook 107: Sharing Web Pages with Friends”