// Internet Duct Tape

Delicious Stumbles - Post to Delicious and StumbleUpon at the same time

Posted in Becoming a Better Blogger, Delicious, IDT Labs Software Development, StumbleUpon, Technology by engtech on September 14th, 2007

Social Bookmarking and Social Voting

Delicious and StumbleUpon are two different social networks that let you save websites you like. Delicious Stumbles is a time saving tool for the Firefox web browser that will let you update your StumbleUpon account easily when you bookmark pages on delicious.

This video explains social bookmarking using delicious.

Yesterday Muhammad Saleem announced the Social Media extension for Firefox that lets you quickly browse how a site is saved between delicious/digg/reddit/stumbleupon. I’ve been hitting the same problem from another angle — how to quickly submit from one social bookmarking site to another.

I’m a hardcore delicious user. I use it to save everything. That’s how I build those “Best of Feeds” posts on Saturday. One problem with being a hardcore delicious user is that it means I’m not as active on other social networking sites. If I like something I save it to delicious and then get back to whatever I was doing.

I find delicious to be the quickest site for tagging and the easiest site for searching through pages I’ve bookmarked before. The problem is that I also wanted to submit my saved sites to StumbleUpon. As a blogger, StumbleUpon is a great source of traffic — not to mention a great way to find interesting sites to share and find people who have similar interests. Dosh Dosh has a great post on why StumbleUpon isn’t just a source of traffic — it’s a great tool for anyone. By crossposting the sites I find interesting to StumbleUpon as well as delicious I improve StumbleUpon’s ability to find pages I like.

Delicious Stumbles

With Delicious Stumbles I get all of the super-useful features I like about delicious (speed, recommended tags) but I also teach StumbleUpon more about what I like without having to spend all that time cutting-and-pasting between two accounts.

  • Submit a page you’ve saved to delicious to StumbleUpon using the same URL, title, tags and description
  • Use delicious’ super-quick tagging features instead of StumbleUpon’s really slow tagging
  • Stumble any of your existing bookmarks
  • Stumble a page while you’re saving it to delicious

How to Install

Delicious Stumbles works best with the “old” Delicious extension.

Show Me How It Works

Save a page how you normally would on delicious. But before you click Save, click on the Submit to Stumbleupon link.

delicious stumbles submit to stumbleupon from within the delicious extension

This will open up a new tab to submit on StumbleUpon with all of the information already prefilled.

delcious stumbles stumbleupon submission

You can even go back to any pages you have saved before on delicious and quickly stumble them.

delicious stumbles submit to stumbleupon from within the delicious extension

What Are You Waiting For?

If you use both delicious and StumbleUpon then this script can save you at least a minute every time you submit a site. How many sites do you submit a week? Install it now.

Related Posts

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Be My Friend (on social network sites)

Posted in Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0 and Social Media, Yahoo Pipes by engtech on July 10th, 2007

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand (or *gasp* you aren’t obsessed with Internet culture), then you’ve noticed that we’re seeing more and more web service startups over the past few years. Last year I flamed the Bubble 2.0 soundly in “Web Too.Many.” Earlier this year I tried to get an idea of what websites people actually use by starting the What’s Your Web 2.0? meme.I think I’m past breaking when it comes to my attention span and the number of services that I use. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some I heartily recommend. If you use some of these services as well, then please go ahead and “friend” me. And yes, there is a Facebook account in the list.

Active

Software Hosting

Autopilot

  • Twitter - sharing, republishing
  • Tumblr - aggregating my online presence
  • Jaiku - sharing, republishing

Deadpool

These are sites that I used to use often, but I’ve given up on:

  • MyBlogLog - too much spam
  • Flickr - it’s easier to share photos with friends on Facebook
  • RottenTomatoes - it’s easier to share movie reviews with friends on Facebook
  • Technorati - never indexes me properly
  • Blogcritics - got some books, but they aren’t a very good source of traffic
  • LinkedIn - until the next time I’m looking for work
  • … more than I can possibly remember.

What got me thinking about this is trying out Pownce for the first time and seeing how horrible it is at re-discovering my friends.

I just sent out some invites to Kevin Rose’s Pownce to my FeedBurner subscribers. (Thanks for hooking me up, Adam)

Pownce First Impression

I’ve seen other complaints that the biggest problem of Pownce is “what do I do with it?” It’s probably the most powerful web-based instant messaging client out there.

I was very surprised that they Pownce doesn’t have an “import contacts from address book” feature. That is rapidly becoming the only way to easily import the list of your friends from one web app to another. I was trying out Blue Swarm the other day and they are using a very slick widget from Plaxo that does easy address book imports. All web startups should use this, since email address contacts are the only universal data format for identifying your friends on the web.

This is a perfect example of why the Facebook application experience is so powerful… signing up and maintaining a user account is the major barrier that prevents most web startups from gaining a massive user base. “Social” web sites have an even bigger barrier in that you have to move or re-find your network. Facebook apps allow for any application to have the same user account and social network.

Obviously I think it would be pretty awesome if that Plaxo contact importer also supported Facebook as well as Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.

What Others Have to Say

Scoble: “I see many of the same people in my friends list on Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce. Pownce is growing faster than the other ones right now, though. 728 people have already added me on Pownce. I can’t take many more social networks.“

Memoirs of a Bystander: “My question is this: Is there any value actually garnered from adding an obscenely large amount of random people as your friend on various social sites? Honestly, if a social networking site it meant to enhance you life through discovery of new interests, music, recommendations, etc…, is that easily done by wading through thousands of people?”

Mashable: “And it is this: on Pownce, you can send a message, or a file, or a song, or an event, to one person; or three of your friends; or only your family; or everyone.”

SocialHam: “Now more than ever Email seems to becoming a dead medium so can micro blogging sites fill in the gaps?”

JetPacked: “Can’t decide between pownce and twitter? This should help. Here’s how to post your pownces to twitter.”

Daily Grumble: “Social networking is a very difficult area for a new service to break into. How on earth are you going to persuade users of other, more established social networks to come to your service?”

Greg Verdino: “Are social media mavens living inside a bubble of our own making, artificially inflating the impact that most of these nascent technologies are having on the population in general, and ultimately getting our companies and our clients riled up over something that will, over time, turn out to be, well um, nothing?”

17 comments

StumbleUpon Help: I Can’t Submit a Site or Page

Posted in StumbleUpon, Technology by engtech on February 20th, 2007

stumble upon addict addiction stumbleit
(photo by kosmar)

I’m a big fan of StumbleUpon. If you’ve never tried it out it can be described as “channel surfing for the Internet” (especially their video-only version). You stumble to a random page on the Internet, mark that you like or don’t like it and then it will bring you to other pages based on what other people with the same interests like. It’s very cool. I try to get people to use it all the time.

Several of my friends are using it, but a couple of them have given it up because of problems where they can’t submit sites or “Thumbs Up” pages any more. I didn’t know how to fix their problem until recently when it started happening to me.

stumble upon problem can't stumble pages anymore

The problem is all in the toolbar. StumbleUpon has a toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer and every now and then they update it with a new version. Unfortunately, the toolbar doesn’t always auto-update immediately (or at all). When your toolbar is out of date you can’t submit new pages and sometimes you can’t vote on pages.

The fix is quite simple. Whenever you notice that you can’t submit pages anymore click on this link and it will prompt you to re-install the toolbar.

Problem solved!

4 comments

It’s official: StumbleUpon Video rocks

Posted in StumbleUpon, Technology by engtech on December 15th, 2006

I’m not a big fan of YouTube, because the signal to noise ratio is so high. I am a fan of StumbleUpon. It is a quick way to find interesting and useful websites. They’ve released a new service for videos only, and it’s great. I was immediately getting relevant results because I am already a Stumble Upon user. The results speak for themselves

Stumble #1: A song I like.

Stumble #2: A guy who hooked up his synth to a tesla coil.

Stumble #3: A monkey giving a dog a hand job.

Stumble #4: Leonard Nemoy singing the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.

(more…)

6 comments