We're taking down the downloadable list of 2,162 social bookmarking and networking sites and replacing it with an interactive analytical tool that gives you a lot more information and display control. It will let you see the heartbeat for any social bookmarking or networking site. Thus, in a fit of imagination, we called this the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™.

(Plus it is much much cooler than a google doc and you can get the list directly as a "csv" file.)

Things you can find out

We've built some controls around a grid so that you can filter the list of 2,000 plus social bookmarking and social networking sites down into the sublist you're probably most interested in. By my watch it is between 30% to 70% faster than google docs. (Attention google: my technical staff is better than yours!)

We added the kinds of controls that will help you find something specific:

• You want PR5 or better Live Sites? No problem, there are 534 of them.
• Sites that are live but between PR2 and PR4 with >1,000 pages indexed in google? 403 of them.
• Insert your question here....

But most importantly, we introduced the idea of a heartbeat for each site.

Heartbeat?

It's great to have a big list, and it's even handy to have a "Live" indicator so that you know that sometime in the last two months I was able to use the site in an appropriate fashion (create user, login, post). But we're including what we call heartbeat information:

• Pages indexed in Yahoo/MSN and what-is-their-name, oh, yeah, Google
• Backlink count for Yahoo/MSN/Google
• Load time

We'll be keeping this information on a weekly basis for each site so that you can track a site over time. And, because we really believe in making this information widely useful, you'll be able to download the performance over time.

Made for Custom Analysis

For example, Mixx is getting huge buzz right now in the SEO community and has 133K pages indexed in google. Does anyone (outside Mixx) have any idea what that was last week? You'll know in a week if you come back.

To put it even more in perspective, Digg has 9.8M pages indexed and Dogster has 134K pages. Dogster? Yep, it's exactly what you think it is. But both Dogster and Mixx are PR6 sites with similar google love. Where should you be putting your funny dog stories? (Trick question, the answer is both digg and dogster, wtih mixx in third place if you have time!)

Do you find that your stories do better on PR4 sites or PR8 sites? Do you want traffic or links? Now you have to consider.....

Tribal Knowledge vs. Experimentation

Well, we know all about long tail search and long tail e-tailing and long tail PPC campaigns, etc, etc. And there are even a few of us talking about niche sites versus huge volume general sites (ex: Digg vs. VOIPigg) but you know, it's all been logic, supposition, and educated guesses.

At Promote-My-Site we've written about getting a diversified portfolio of social bookmarking and social networking sites. So we started thinking about analyzing sites - how many backlinks, what is their PageRank, what is the change over time, etc. It's all obvious stuff to want to know, but except for traffic share changes for the "big 10" you can't really get any of that. For free anyway. And you certainly won't get that easily downloadable.

No longer. Now you can experiment using our Social Heartbeat Monitor ™. Find sites that are in your specialty, look at smaller but still high value sites (there are a ton), re-post some of your greatest hits. Once you find a combination that works and gives you good ROI, find more sites like it using our filters.

Calling All New Sites

We spend an astounding number of hours pulling lists from the internet and came up with 2,000 to look at. Yesterday I got emails about three new ones. We'll be constantly adding things to the list and we'll give you a way to find "what's new." You can also easily suggest new sites right from the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page.

Time Will Tell

We believe that a social bookmark and network heartbeat will be a valuable tool for looking at the change over time of a social networking or social bookmarking site. We think you'll enjoy it and find it useful to build a portfolio of performing social network and bookmarking sites.

Presented entirely without comment or format changes, this digg shout from stejules :

Hello fan
Become a good digger, you must be first a good user on your machine, (handle the Beast)
no prob 200 manualy shouts and you are a profi and in the front, hey stay, not huzzling away,
you could USE the right tools, then it "could" (hehe) come automatically to automatism. (Robo01 to Robo02)

Stop and think shortly about all that

Look at this picture it is amazing crazy bad, and I think I will also have a digg camp with you as recruits.
http://twitxr.com/image/17344/

Here my help for you, to become a digger like me, if you want, if not please unfriend me, thanx.
Friends who aren't active at my account will be kicked off, without talking,
because of I have to handle a lot of friends, you understand.

WATCH OUT:

1. Use Mozilla Firefox 2.0.*.
--with Mozilla Firefox you have the most social bookmarking tools available (plugins) (digg/ facebook/ stumbleupon/gspace/flickr/ lots more) UC
-- important use the tabs inside the browser
2. Read this Monster Digg and bookmark it or digg it or both.
http://digg.com/tech_news/10_Killer_Firefox_Extens ...
At the end I will tell you which of these tools I really use.

3. Have a special LOOK for "Snap Links" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433 ...
-- opens all links with one click and move twenty diggs in a minute opened for reading and checking out.
4.HOT Google + Microsoft + Yahoo

5.HOT flickr Pics digg a cool one and make other happy

6. HOT Youtube, Hulu, Metacafe,

7. HOT Urban Art Graffiti, Events, Pictures

HAVE A LOOK FOR YOUR NICHE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Help me to become a top digger and I will help you, too.
Below you see the links, for which I beg you to digg, these are a lot but
you have now SnapLinks and can learn with my duggs!

Please digg, share, or commen, commenter are also needed, really commenting is very important,
but please you are here at my home, be nice lol

Watch out the headlines of these links follow them and have a look to the content.
These are the topics what I am looking for right now (HOT means itis only for me interesting)

http://digg.com/world_news/Stand_with_Tibet_Suppor ...
http://digg.com/hardware/The_worst_server_room_dec ...
http://digg.com/political_opinion/tibetan_monk_FRE ...
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Iraqi_cop_rides_motorcyc ...
http://digg.com/software/Social_Bookmarking_2_0_Di ...
http://digg.com/tech_news/Pulver_Launches_An_Onlin ...
http://digg.com/tech_news/Last_fm_Widget_Now_on_ev ...
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Now_I_find_him_B ...
http://digg.com/tech_news/Mashable_DiggSuggest_Is_ ...
http://digg.com/software/Filter_Your_FriendFeed_Se ...
http://digg.com/programming/Semantify_Automate_You ...
http://digg.com/tech_news/Vidoop_Kevin_Fox_Scott_K ...
http://digg.com/world_news/Cyber_Crime_Cops_Get_Or ...
watch this out learn more about web 2.0
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/What_Is_Web_2_0_by_Tim_O ...
Something color war 2008 thing green tagging war in the internet, more later!
http://digg.com/movies/Watch_out_Gary_Vay_Ner_Chuk ...
Wanna read more check this!

Watch out the headlines of these links follow them and have a look to the content.
These are the topics what I am looking for right now (HOT means it for me interesting
only for mw, but I will update it this day and post for you like a dashboard.

1. HOT: Mac and Apple specially iPhone SDK dev crap [Industrial News] - [Hack Videos]
-- my first Made Popular Monster digg I think i will never have a one like this Dudes, it was a lucky punch, but it has motivated me!
-- http://digg.com/videos/apple

DID YOU SEE THE QUEUE video-apple (Questions 2.0)

2. Japan Culture, Science, technology, Cars, GREEN (Germany, Denmark, ...) and have a watch to the
b.Chinese Copy and Paste will gone! ;D, Human rights, ART Artists they have great artists
c.India
3. HOT: BitTorrent articles, specially with TV Broadcasting, and further Internet Law Bittorrent (please read good)
-- paradise for all torrentfreaks toorentfreak.com ?????? use it as start and find more trustful and interesting torrent blogger, or become oe ;D!
4.HOT:World News Specially China - Tibet Conflict, Olympic Games 2008 Beijing - Peking China, Iran, United Kingdom, Great Britain
5.HOT: Sport Football European Championships in CH/ A, English Premiere League, Spain , Italy Primera Division, Brasil, Argentine,Mexiko

Digg is a very hard business, if you wanna be the best.
I must organize so many things, for example finding good and trustfull friends, that is not easy by 500+ increasing
please understand that it takes so long time for adding you to my my mutual friends.
Believe me shout to 500 fans [manually] is not fun it is hard work.

I open the Shout GOAL forever!

Now there are different ways for me to grab you

1. You can be lucky that I pick you up @ my queue and digg your Dugg.
BE SURE I will be there. I need Information [Nr. 5: "Input, input, inout] you C

2.You are a good submitter I see one or maybe more articles and check you out,
if your dugg is what I like you will be mine, for the motorcycle ride, you know.

3. i like your profile and the message from it.

;D
Greetinx
Ste
Sign the Petition and help Tibet
http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/22. ...
Carthago delenda est!

I stand (well, sit in my post-dot-com boom Aeron chair) awed.

In my last article about Google possibly punishing Digg I contrasted Digg versus a niche pligg site, VOIPigg. And I noted that you might too casually dismiss VOIPigg:

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or VOIPigg?

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit to both Digg and VOIPigg, so obviously Digg is a better use of your time.

I should have been clearer - it was meant sarcastically. You have to do both.

Traffic versus Readers

Look, because Digg gets an order of magnitude more traffic than VOIPigg doesn't mean you wouldn't be better off at the niche social networking site.

Of the 100 people showing up every day on VOIPigg approximately how many are there to read VOIP articles? Right, 100%.

Of the bazillion people at Digg how many are there to read VOIP? And how will they easily find your content?

Digg Friend Finder

Well, you could use our Digg Friend Finder and find the (currently) 158 people who have submitted on VOIP. And friend them. And then find the people voting on those stories and friend them too.

But, really, you should do both, if you want a diversified portfolio of readers and a diversified reputation.

In one of this week's hottest Sphinn stories, Google to punish pagerank for Digg stories, it is clear that people are really focused on the readers, links, and prestige of Digg and the other top-tier social networking and social bookmarking sties.

Which is fine but the level of upset makes it clear that a lot of people don't have any real diversified portfolio of links and readership. Nothing wrong with making buggy whips, but you gotta watch out for changes in consumer taste.

Let's take a look at what Google (supposedly, it was taken down) said:

We are working on strategies to level the playing field, effectively bringing back natural search patterns enjoyed in the pre-social bookmarking days. For webmasters who use social media responsibly, this is nothing to worry about - we will be targeting mainly a small minority of prolific bookmarkers with a new algorithm that looks at linking patterns over time.

Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008, and we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites to find a solution that will have no detrimental effect on the average internet user.

Let me translate from google-ish

• "level the playing field" means: Make more money over here and get our stock back up from 430 to $700+.
• "pre social bookmarking" means: We used to be able to control what was hot, not Digg
• "use social media responsibly" means: Guess what we mean else we'll make your website disappear
• "new algorithm" means: Anuj and Prakash are going to be busy in Bangalore
• "will likely see a drop in pagerank" means: Let the rending and wailing begin

What will be the most interesting to me will be to see if breaking cover and running to cover your tracks is better than just freezing until the predator flies over.

The Key Phrase Is....

Kind of buried at the end: "we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites." Two. Let me repeat: Two. We took all the lists that we could find on the internet and spent months combing through all 2,162 Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites to see who was alive and who was dead. (And, yes, you can download the list at that link!) We currently have a sublist of over 400 sites where you can create a login, actually login, and post a bookmark or story.

Automation

Really, you're going to need to automate some of your manual habits if you branch out from the tippy top tier players. We've reviewed a lot of the social networking automation options out there for you. It's not really going to be fun - life is easier if you use one or two sites rather than a dozen or more. But if people were using multiple sites then there'd less hyperventilating about this vague but important threat from google.

And if your (natural) competitors are going to have a problem, then that is really signaling an opportunity for you, isn't it?

Bear Stearns Closes at 30

And sells the next day at 2. Bam! Billions of shareholder equity lost. A year ago this would have been unimaginable.

Let's have a though experiment.... Eccentric Saudi Prince buys Digg for $750M, bans all content not involving funny Kitty Pix, Digg'ers flee to Mixx, Prince shuts down site in a huff.

What if all your links were from Digg? Or if all your readers were from Digg? Or if all your reputation in the social media world were resident in Digg.

Oops.

Do Nothing

Two words: Buggy Whip.

If you just keep on using one or two sites and your competitors diversify, then you will lose in the SERPS, all other things being equal. They will have a more diversified and stable reputation base, get readers who never see your stuff, etc.

Find the Niche Sites

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or Voipigg? Who? Voipigg. It's a niche pligg site with good content control. Low volume, like most niche sites, but the 100 or so people who show up regularly are all looking for VOIP related stories.

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit both sites, so obviously digg is a better use of your time.

Think Risk Aversity

Really? Think about what started this whole discussion - threat of wholesale stripping of pagerank for heavy Digg users.

I think the mindset of "only have time for one" is a false dichotomy and that in today's competitive environment you have to make the time to develop and implment a diversified social networking strategy.

[Ok, read this post, it's a doozy, but before you go download this list, you should check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor . Look left. Yep, there it is. You might also want to read this article on why we built it to replace the file discussed here.]

About six months ago we started looking at social networks. Not just the top tier sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc, but the second and third tiers as well. There are a truly huge number of social network sites out there. Almost every niche has at least one if not many sites devoted to it.

For example, take Memeza. It's a Pligg site for Zambian news. You might think that's pretty small and insignificant, but if you've got a story that would be of interest to Zambians it only takes 2 votes to get to the top page.

It's PR 4. Think of how that might be useful.

A lot of Sites Out There

There seem to be lots of different lists of of social network sites. The lists usually have numbers of sites in double digits. We've scoured the web for everything we could find. Every time we found an article along the lines of "Here are 18 social networking sites you should know about" we added those sites to our list.

We've researched 2,162 social nework sites. Here's how they break down:

A Present For You

We've put the entire list up on Google Docs as the Promote My Site Social Network and Bookmark MegaList V18. Here's a snapshot of the first few rows to entice you to go download the document.

More than just a list of names of social network sites, we've also included the URL and Domain so you can dedupe it against your own lists, as well as a status as of last week and our comments. If we get enough interest we'll put together an application so that people can query the database.

We thought about making this premium content, but compared to the stuff we're working on for premium, a raw list of social networking sites just doesn't cut it. We hope you'll keep an eye on us for when we start releasing the premium tools.

[Remember, check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor. and this article to explain why we built it.]

Phone number portability has been a boon to consumers and the mobile industry, so why will OpenID be a total disaster for social networking and social bookmarking if anyone is stupid enough to use it?

This Woke Me Up

We got a LOT of hits on an article via this Russian scuttle-based bookmarking site. So I was poking around to see if there were any smart ideas we could use and I ran across their registration page.

Tell me, and nothing against the folks running this site, because I wouldn't know them from Adam's housecat, but if you thought about it for 10 seconds, would you use your OpenID there?

Controls

When you switch your phone number from Verizon to Sprint there are elaborate checks and balances. Plus you know that the call center person isn't writing down your phone number so they can call the Maldives or something.

And if you use OpenID to move between your MyYahoo and Gmail accounts, that is probably ok. Because those guys have lots of corporate controls in place.

You can read this excellent Wikipedia Article to understand the types of technology controls built into OpenID (geek warning!).

Trust

At the end of the day you can really only use a site if you trust it. On Amazon many of us have our credit cards stored and one-click buying turned on. I use Overstock a lot, but I don't keep a credit card on file there. When I buy stuff from some smaller retailers I go get a one-use credit card number from my bank.

And you can only use OpenID as a single signon across sites if you trust it.

Single Signon Works in Corporations

Yes, we have it in our office too. But that is a trusted environment. How many of the websites that you regularly use are ones you would really trust? I say that because....

Accidents and Theft Will Happen

What happens when one of the issuing authorities has an, er, well, minor problem?

Like losing the tax records for the UK last November:

Britain's Revenue and Customs department is scrambling to find two discs that contained data on 25 million people.

How about if someone in a trusted position just steals it all. Never happen? Let me remind you of a story from a few years ago:

An engineer working for America Online was arrested yesterday and charged with stealing 92 million e-mail addresses of AOL customers and selling them to spammers that were peddling penis enlargement pills and online gambling sites.

Let's all remember that AOL lost all that before you could buy an 8G memory stick for $40 at Office-Stuff-R-Us.

Phishing is Easy

I get those so-called MasterCard or eBay emails all the time. Sometimes, if they look really good, I go visit to see what I can see. I got one from Malaysia the other day and their site had more than 100 pages that looked EXACTLY like the ones at Citibank.

Wow.

They do, and if you google around a bit you'll find excellent articles like Radar's. And I think that the idea of putting lots of pieces of security (a picture you should see every time, etc) is good. It's like airport security - a hundred little barriers and places to make a mistake and get caught.

Some differences:

• You have to, as a user, be paying attention to see and use the security measures.
• The guy caught sneaking onto a plane with box cutters last week was risking physical detention. How you going to catch some guy living in his mom's basement stealing OpenID's via a phony soccer survey site?

What Would Your Momma Do?

Let's say your mom uses OpenId on LOLCats (it is embarassing but true!) and one day she clicks on a banner ad for some site importing French cheese. They ask her to login using her OpenId so she can fill out a "short" five minute survey and earn a free pound of brie. While there they ask her to "update" some of her OpenID details.

Did she notice and use the security features? Or did she just help someone order a dozen Garmin GPS units from Amazon using her one-click account?

Remember what I said above, OpenID's security only works if you're paying attention. And if nobody steals or loses the information at a trusted center.

I am obviously going to give this a "pass" and I think you should too. I don't share passwords across sites so that I'm insulated from just the kind of problems that are bound to occur with a system like OpenID.

I'm just wondering how long until the first big security breach happens.

Well, Digg Friend Finder has really made a lot of people happy and has taught us quite a bit about launching SEO/SEM Tools.

Of course it had to go into a top 10 list.....

1: People Don't Read Directions

The ratio of people using the tool to reading the directions is around 15:1. Or vice versa, I couldn't get that right in 5th grade either.

2: Free Products Need Support

Not surprising, but at least the questions are easy to answer.

3: Half the Traffic is SEO

At least judging by the queries. I'm not sure if I expected more or less.

4: Threads Are Confusing

Digg Friend Finder uses our distributed SEO architecture to run the queries against Yahoo and Digg in an Ajax app running in your browser. And because of technical limitations and API functionality we can't really know how many digg friend we can find until a bunch of threaded processes finish running against the digg api. So after you hit "find" it take 10 seconds or two minutes to have the friends come back.

People find this very confusing.

5: Everything is Black Hat

Sigh. No, man, this is about being efficient in your digg friending. It's not black hat - we're within the API, the TOS, and, I wouldn't be ashamed to have my mom find out.

6: NO MAN YOU ARE A #$**&^^%% SPAMMER!!!!!

Well, gee, all caps, I'll take that seriously.

7: Users Click on Ads Even When They're Clumsy

Frankly we did not prioritize ad layout (we stink at that anyway) because we decided that we had other priorities during launch. But a lot of people clicked ads. A lot.

8: People Like Working Tools

We got a fair number of emails saying, in effect, "Thanks for making something that works." Yeah, well, we have a very large list of SEO tools we've looked at and a fair number of them simply don't work reliably. Which is very frustrating.

9: You Can Watch The World Wake Up

If you set the sitemeter geographic display on a refreshing page on Mozilla then you watch people in India, Oz, China and other strange countries (ex: San Francisco!) wake up and bookmark over to your site. Pretty neat.

10: You Learn Something New Every Day

There are 384 posters in digg with HAMSTER and there are 213 with GERBIL. I'd have thought that hamsters were a lot more popular, but then I'd have never thought to look for either. Digg is a biiiiig community.

We've talked a lot about SEO Tools and I have been fairly critical of their ROI. You'll notice that most of them are not in the sweet part of the grid (hint: upper right is better!):

You can see that we liked iMacro (which is why we coded the Ping utility in that on the client side.

What Makes ROI?

I think you have to consider the value of what you get from your labor inputs. In this case you've got both sunk investment and ongoing costs in Digg because you

• Craft stories (linkbait)
• Friend other diggers
• Vote
• Shout

Now, the question is, can you do something that increases the value of your assets and spend? That leverage comes from Digg Friend Finder. As you increase your use of Digg Friend Finder you get more and more friends for the specific content you create or submit. And it gets more popular, etc, etc.

Simple - high return.

What Makes it Actionable?

This is even simpler: you get a list of targeted potential friends in seconds and you just have to click and analyze. That is actionable. And easy.

Latest SEO Capability Grid

Hey, we're not neutral, but I think it is undeniable that the Digg Friend Finder gives you capability you can't find anywhere else and it is high value. So we put it into the juicy quadrant.

Honestly, there are people who would yell at a Scout for helping a little old lady cross the street. We built the free social networking tool, Digg Friend Finder, to help people use digg more effectively. We used Digg's API. We followed their TOS. Heck, they could build this functionality into the product if they wanted to, though I am sure they won't.

Black Hat? Who, us?

The very first email (of many) that we received asked us to help them use PHP and curl to pull the results off the page and auto-friend everyone listed.

Uh, dude, if we wanted to help people do that we we would - it is technically very feasable. Simple even. But it would violate Digg's TOS, so we don't do that.

Later in the day we saw a bunch of huge queries running from one IP. Some guy was trying to get large lists of digg users (we think) around unrelated keywords.

Ok, so no TOS violation there, but, silly rabbit, too many friends do not help you use Digg better. If you're reading this, go to my article on Promoting Your Site Through Efficient Friending.

User Your Powers for Good Not Evil

We're happy that so many people are using and liking our Digg Friend Finder, and it looks like most of them are using it with well targeted keywords. So they'll get some great ROI from using our tools.

We all know that efficient and wide ranging friending on Digg is a critical success factor (CSF) for digg story promotion. Yes, yes, I know, first you have to write the worlds most awesome link bait. But you still have to be able to get enough people to vote in the beginning to get it above the crowd.

I was gonna write something clever, but that picture just makes me clench, so let's go straight into.....

Finding People Who Post Your Kind of Story

You could go into digg, search, poke around, and try to find people who post stories about "SEO TOOLS." Or you could do it the easy way and just go to Promote My Site and click on the link for the Digg Friend Finder.

Once again, screen grabs and annotations are via Fireshot - awesome and free.

When you get to the Digg Friend Finder page you'll see some explanatory text and some ads (this is ad supported freeware after all), but most of us, let's face it, do not read directions, so your attention will be drawn to:

It's simple enough - just add in some keywords and hit the Search button:

What you can see is that 100 different articles were found with BOTH the keywords "SEO" and "Tools" and that part is 100% complete. This is all through the Digg API so parts are fast and other parts are not so fast. In fact, what you'd see if you kept watching would be:

You'll notice that it continues to find friends - it went from 9 to 78. This is because the actual part of finding the people via the Digg API is very slow. Go figure.

At any point in this process you can click the Show Friends button and get a display of your potential friends:

Neat. So, if you're an SEO and you're posting to digg on SEO topics, why aren't those people your friends?

One last feature: the radio button toggle between profile pages and submissions

just changes the links so that they either go to the person's profile page or the page with all their submissions. A minor feature, true, but if you want to look at all 78 people above then it will definitely save you some time.

What Happens When They Block This?

They can't. Well, they could, by changing their API and TOS, but they won't do that. You can read all about Architecting SEO Apps for Digg if you want more info.

Closing Comments

This service went sailing through our beta/QA process - people just seemed to get it. If you have any questions just contact us at help@promote-my-site.com, leave a blog comment, or you can also find/PM us at SEOMoz and Sphinn .