Almighty Link

I recently ran across a shortened bit.ly URL that was customized to read “leaveFB,” as in “leave Facebook.” After reading that post, I decided to dig up some other URLs that express how some people feel about Facebook.

• bit.ly/likefacebook (has been clicked 371 times): Privacy concerns started surfacing immediately after Facebook’s announcements at their f8 conference, as implied in the title of this Wall Street Journal article: “Facebook Wants to Know More Than Just Who Your Friends Are.”
• bit.ly/ilovefacebook (301 clicks): Heather Hopkins at Hitwise found that Facebook users return to news sites more than visitors from Google News.
• bit.ly/leaveFB (226 clicks): Ted Nguyen (@TedNguyen) asks why social media experts are quitting Facebook, after he interviews Adriel Hampton (@AdrielHampton) of Gov 2.0 Radio. Hampton explains why he recently closed his Facebook account.
• bit.ly/hatefacebook (198 clicks): A few expletives are sprinkled throughout this video, in which rapper and popular YouTuber Timothy DeLaGhetto (@traphik) declares his hatred for Facebook, affection for MySpace … and somehow ties it to Subway and Quiznos sandwiches.
• bit.ly/hatefb (26 clicks): Last year, blogger Joe Spaghettio’s Facebook account was closed because the network didn’t believe he was using his real identity. This is his blog post about that experience.
• bit.ly/fuckfb (15 clicks): An April blog post explains how Facebook forced users to choose to connect their profile information to Facebook pages or opt for completely blank sections of their profiles.
• bit.ly/leavefb (9 clicks): On this PledgeBank page, Free Press‘ online campaign manager Josh Levy (@levjoy) promises to delete his Facebook account if 10,000 other users do the same. Read more on Levy’s blog post.

If you’re looking to customize a shortened URL for your Facebook linking, these bit.ly options are still available: bit.ly/admirefb, bit.ly/adorefb, bit.ly/enjoyfb, bit.ly/fbrules, bit.ly/ihatefb, bit.ly/ilikefb, bit.ly/ilovefb<

This morning, Twitter’s Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) shared a “hack” that takes the web address of a specific tweet and spits out HTML code to present that tweet on a web page. The name of the tool is Blackbird Pie and you can find it at media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie. Let’s give it a quick try.

First here is a snapshot of my original tweet:

Here is a snapshot of the  preview provided by Blackbird Pie.

Finally, here is the tweet coded by Blackbird pie.

For comparison, here is that same tweet coded by QuoteURL. It’s a great tool, but designed for more than one tweet.

1. 
   kessler Tomorrow @Twitter will allow you to add any tweet to your site with a snippet of code. Example: – http://bit.ly/9csalG 03 May 2010 from Echofon
2. 
   ksablan Let’s see how Blackbird Pie turns a twitter URL into a tweet in a WordPress blog. 05 May 2010 from web

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

If you don’t like that strip of social tools that appears when you click on http://ow.ly links, then you’ll be happy to know that Hootsuite, the Twitter client that produces those URLs, has removed its “social bar” from ow.ly links.

Why was that social bar included in the first place? Hootsuite says that it provides “easy Re-Tweets, instant links ratings, and quick access to submit links to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook, etc.” If those features are important to you , Hootsuite still provides that social bar with its new http://ht.ly shortening service.

For more information, you can read Hootsuite’s blog post without the bar at http://ow.ly/1DCSw, or with the bar at http://ht.ly/1DCTs.

Based on Facebook’s big announcements at yesterday’s F8 conference, I’ve decided to add a few of Facebook’s social plugins to Almighty Link. In particular, you can now “recommend” any post using the button at the bottom of the post, and you can see the “activity feed” of your Facebook friends who may have liked other items on Almighty Link.

In my opinion, this is a good example of an independent blogger with very limited development resource and very little time just hacking together a rudimentary implementation.

So poke around and see if this thing works for you. Tell your friends to come and recommend some posts. See how that shows up on posts and in the activity stream. Let me know if this is a good or bad idea.

Oh, I have to thank Andreas Jacob (@Cordobo) for a timely post that showed how to add Facebook’s “like” button into WordPress posts.