jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Detailed Look at Reasons People Visit Various Social Sites

As with traditional media, it’s different strokes for different folks on social media sites.  And knowing your audience’s needs and preferences is just as valid in PR today as it ever was. According to an analysis of social sites by online advertising network Chikita published by Mashable, people go to Twitter for news, MySpace for games and entertainment, Facebook for news and community...

Big Changes on the Horizon for Digg

Digg Founder Kevin Rose did an interview with The UK’s Telegraph, and revealed that Digg has some big and "drastic" plans for redesigning the Digg experience. A couple of quotes from the piece: "We’re making some drastic changes, but they’re much-needed drastic changes," he told The Telegraph. "People are going to be shocked at some of the directions we’re...

Digg Launches New Extensions for Firefox and Chrome

Digg has launched new extensions for the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers. "A month ago, we announced new capabilities that let developers create writable applications with the Digg API," says Dig’s Chris Howard. "We decided to put this to work ourselves and update our original Firefox Extension and also create a new Google Chrome extension at the same time. In both...

What’s Happened in Social Media Over the Year

As we did last year, we have gone back through our archives and picked out some of the most noteworthy social media items we have covered since 2009 began. Now that 2009 is almost over, it was worth going  back and seeing what all has happened. If you come across missing items, please feel free to share them in the comments. January In January, Twitter announced that it hired Kevin Thau as...

War Rages On!

Ncomment is back with his second installment of his WAR series. Reddit has invaded the world of Digg and sent Diggers into hiding to plan a revolution against the alien and robotic army of Reddit invaders. With division of Diggers at an all time high, the Reddit army was able to invade the Digg city and bring it to its knees in a single day. Ncomment has been able to perfectly capture the political...

Digg’s New API Allows Digging of Stories and Comments

Digg released a new version of the Digg API today, which lets developers write and contribute data via OAuth. This API supports the digging and burying of both stories and comments. "In addition to the revamped API, we focused extensively on usability and have included an updated API documentation section on Digg with more detail on each API method including code and response examples,"...

Important Product Director Moving From Google To Digg

When Google’s current director of product management arrived at his desk this morning, he did so for the last time, according to a new report.  Keval Desai is supposed to be leaving Google in order to start a position at Digg. Desai – who’s been with Google for about six and a half years – didn’t exactly do unimportant work.  In fact, he led the development of...

Social Media Rigor Mortis: How Behavior Kills Value

We’ve all seen it. What once worked in social media six months ago doesn’t work now. Why, for instance, does a large following on Twitter no longer indicate influence? Or why is blogging no longer as impressive as it was in 2003? Both these examples follow a predictable economic formula: As “x” social behaviour multiplies, its social value approaches zero. Let me break that...

The Art of Social Media War

As a known Social Media enthusiast, I’m privy to a ton of information. I stand on the sidelines of various Social Media realms and watch as drama unfolds. I find that it’s usually the best thing to do when two opposing forces in Social Media go head to head. It’s not that I’m disloyal, don’t get me wrong, but rather that I prefer to not get involved.  “Jay not...

More Stories Get a Shot at the Digg Home Page

Digg has launched a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends. The feature will promote "certain highly active stories" as they are trending, not unlike Twitter’s trending topics. The feature could give stories a better chance of getting more exposure when they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily made it to the front page. Digg’s Kurt Wilms explains: Digg Trends identifies...

Digg to Get All Twitter This Year?

Update: Kevin Rose is now saying that his WeFollow Twitter directory will now be "more closely linked" with Digg as they "experiment with user influence as it applies to the Twitter universe." In a company blog post, he writes: Over the last four years we’ve been continually evolving our (real-time) user influence calculations at Digg. Behind the scenes we track the...

Digg Does it Again with Advertising

Digg has launched a new kind of ad called "Digg Content Ads," which the company describes as widgets that contain previous Digg homepage stories that are relevant to the industry or company being advertised. To illustrate how this works, Digg provides an example of Adobe testing the concept with banners that utilize popular government-technology stories from Digg’s archive. This is...

The Most Loyal Traffic Comes from Facebook

There’s no question that search engines can be a tremendous source of traffic. Social networks are also proving to be big traffic generators for a lot of content producers, and Twitter is one of the big ones. However, it is Facebook and Digg that are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. Traffic is great, but traffic that returns is even...

Twitter Hires User Experience Architect From Digg

People who have been complaining that Twitter’s site needs an overhaul should pay attention.  Twitter’s added someone to its design team, and Mark Trammell, who will start one week from today, hails most recently from Digg. Some of you may not be jumping up and down right now; it’s true that Digg, while functional, isn’t exactly a thing of beauty.  So here’s...

Digg Nofollow Links: Matt Cutts Approved

Yesterday, Digg announced that it was changing the way it handles some links with regards to the nofollow attribute. The point of the changes is to cut down on Digg spam. Digg is now adding rel="nofollow" to any external link that they aren’t sure they can "vouch for." This means:     – External links from comments     – External links...