Shared by eszpee
zseniális! totally white-hat!
One of the great things about the web is the relative ease with which one can set up a new service. In social bookmarking alone with have Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, Mister-Wong, Newsvine, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon, to name a few. That’s great for competition, and that’s great for users, but it’s not so good for bloggers and content creators.
What are you to do if you want readers to promote your content? Kevin Rose, of Digg, put it succinctly: “Encourage your visitors to submit their favorite stories directly to Digg [with a Digg badge].” Not everyone uses Digg. You have to decide on which bookmarking site, if any, to dedicate your precious screen real-estate. It’s a hard choice. If you choose poorly your reader won’t vote—it’s not a single click coupled and out-of-sight means out-of-mind—and your content losses its chance to make it big. You have to choose your horse wisely.
On the other hand, if you take the bird-shot approach, it overloads your reader with branded badge after branded badge. It turns your page into the village bicycle. Not pretty.
Nobody seems to have solved the problem yet. Lifehacker, for instance, uses a single Digg badge on their long articles, but they also list a couple of the top social bookmarking sites on every post. Wired takes the total shotgun approach, and they own Reddit.
There has to be a better way.
If you could detect which social bookmarking sites your reader uses, on a per-reader basis, you could display only the badges they care about. But you can’t know that because the browser secures the user’s history, right?
Wrong.
I know that you visit: . It’s a bit scary, I know. I’ll come back to how I know in a second. We can use this information to only display one or two badges that we know the reader uses. It solves the which-badges-to-display problem.
SocialHistory.js
Today I’m releasing SocialHistory.js, code which enables you to detect which social bookmarking sites your visitors use. Here’s an example of how to use it:
<script src="http://aza.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/SocialHistory/SocialHistory.js"></script>
<script>
user = SocialHistory();
var visitsDigg = user.doesVisit("Digg");
var visitsSlashdot = user.doesVisit("Slashdot");
var listOfVisitedSites = user.visitedSites();
</script>
SocialHistory.js cannot enable you to see all of the user’s history. It has to ask, 20-questions style, if the user has been to a particular URL: It’s hit or miss. SocialHistory.js has a big list of the most popular social bookmarking sites which it checks against. To see the list of sites, you can do:
user.checkedSites()
SocialHistory.js can also check other sites. For instance, if you want to see if your reader has visited any of the blogs I write, you’d do the following:
moreSites =
{
"Aza": ["http://humanized.com/weblog", "http://azarask.in/blog"]
};
user = SocialHistory( moreSites );
alert( user.doesVisit("Aza") );
How Does It Work?
How does SocialHistory.js know? By using a cute information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. It’s not perfect (which, from a privacy perspective, is at least a little comforting) but it does get you 80% of the way there. The best/worst part is that this information leak probably won’t be plugged because it’s a fundamental feature of the browser.
Vote For Me, Where You Care
Enjoy cleaner, more aware pages. Gone are the medieval days of badge spamming!
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