The Social Swiss Army Knife for Websites
I’ve just installed a new widget on my blog, as you may be able to tell on the bottom right of the screen. This widget will provide my blog with social features (interacting more with my visitors), aggregating my identities (identities are other areas of the web that I “own” such as my Flickr account), and finally, a way for me to easily exchange traffic with websites that have relationships with this blog (through the Partners dialog box).
As you can tell from my blog right now, there aren’t too many articles. One of my main goals for setting up this domain was to aggregate all of my identities. For example, when you look at the top, you see my links to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Disqus profiles. However, I’ve noticed several shortcomings with this. First, the links are static. There’s no way to see what’s going on with those links without individually clicking and going towards the site. Second, the way to monitor incoming/outgoing traffic flow is primitive. Lastly, there’s no consistency. Although there are limitations, I want to give all of the sites I own a level of consistency (common information). This can be done with the widget. In any site that supports Javascript, I can bring my latest feeds and identities to it, as well as centralizing my identity.
For the social features, you can choose to follow me and all of my identities. When you follow a site, you are able to keep up with that identity’s latest activities. There’s a messaging system built in as well as some other features that are going to be implemented really soon.
When this website was created, I mainly wanted the domain to be found on Google, so whoever is looking me up will see this website. It looks like I was able to do that somehow, even though I barely wrote any articles up to this point. I’ve never posted this blog anywhere except for my Twitter account, since I don’t really use it, but now I may. And if I choose to do that, I can try to get more relevant traffic by choosing to become Partners with anyone who has also installed the widget. It’s in my best interest to get others to install this, so I can get a much better way to trade visitors. No blogger would want no visitors to their blog, and this way, I can “network” my site up. This is what I think “website networking” could be. A visitor to one website may be interested in the Partners because they may have directly similar and relevant content. If that’s true, then this could be really exciting. I look forward to seeing how this experiment will turn out.
