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It seems that these days people are actively packing up their facebook account over to google+. Different reasons aside, google+ is making a huge splash in the social scene.

One thing that I have noticed is from my personal experience, of how I deal with my online social interaction.

I have always used my on social verbs based on the actual social interaction I perform with these people.. on twitter and google.

Connect
Converse
Learn
Read
Inspire

and other sub circles/groups for specific topics such as #ux and location specific. To me, this makes much more sense, especially that I use these social tools to share and to receive information.

I have always found the default social verbs to be awkward…

Follow

when someone follows you on twitter, you don’t necessary have to follow back. The word “follow” does not commit to such deep relationships. What if the social verb on …

Facebook has just announced its new search ability.

What does this mean to the end-users

How to create a “tweet this” button for your blog post in WordPress? You have many options.

Twitter has become a social network sharing system and you should always provide an easy call-to-action for your readers to share your posts. Also, don’t forget to shorten your URL.

The TinyURL Way

There’s a great tutorial on Smashing Magazine. However, the specific code I am providing is modified to work with MediaTemple since MediaTemple doesn’t support file_get_contents. If you use the code on smashing magazine you will get a Warning: file_get_contents() …

Put this code in your function.php file

// Create TinyURL for post to Twitter
function getTinyUrl($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=’.$url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$tinyurl = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $tinyurl;
}

and in your single.php or wherever you want your “Tweet this” button to show up, put in this code:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading%20@yourusername%20′<?php _e(urlencode(the_title_attribute(‘echo=0′))); ?>’%20@%20<?php …

I was in Seattle for Yaris works which was hosted to promote Toyota’s Yaris. We had a Podcast Clinic session. We had a good time. (check out some pix I took) The guys from bands for fans were there and giving lots of feedback. We ended up having lunch together. Awesome peeps. Brent dropped by and gave us support as well. Thanks B.

Designing for Social Sharing

Thursday, July 20, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Category: Design

In recent months, a term that has become increasingly popular is “social search”. In this talk, I will argue that we should be designing for social sharing instead of for social search. In order for Page-Rank based search to work, we need people to create hyperlinks to web documents that they feel like linking to. Similarly, in order for social search to work, we need people to share their information, media, opinions and preferences. I will discuss tagging systems such as Flickr & del.icio.us, and media sharing sites such as YouTube as models for the design of participatory systems.

I will discuss three trends that designers working with such systems should think about. First of all the web has evolved from its geeky roots and become a social sphere for …