John Koetsier for VentureBeat:

As we reported before, Zynga executives and investors, including CEO Marc Pincus, sold over $500 million in stock just three months before. Pincus sold $200 million of Zynga stock, chief operating officer John Schappert sold $3.9 million, and chief financial officer David Wehner sold stock worth $4.6 million.

Unsurprising.

Every time Zynga’s execs open their mouths, they come off as jackasses. Part of the suit alleges that they basically burned their own employees on the IPO.

Classy.

There’s lots of talk going on early this week about Twitter and their intentions towards third-party clients. Will they permit them? Will Tweetbot still be around in six months? How am I going to connect with other people if Twitter goes the Facebook route and makes me use official clients that aren’t as nice as the third-party ones I have now?

I was going to write a bunch of words about this, but in the end it comes down to something very simple.

Your blog has always loved you. Open—or at least agreed-upon and widely used—standards are not going to magically grow walls and keep you or others out.

WordPress. RSS. Comments. Pingbacks.

Digging deeper: PHP. MySQL. Apache/Nginx. Linux.

These things don’t belong to someone else. They don’t belong to a company that needs to please its investors. They don’t have reasons to keep you out or to stop you from doing what you want.

They belong to you. You use them to make great things. You contribute to them and make not only your stuff, but other people’s stuff, better. You use them to read others’ content and to enter the discussion. If your blog hasn’t been the center of your digital presence, why not?

Your blog has always loved you.

Chris Carter at Destructoid:

In a bizarre twist of events, Final Fantasy XIII-2 is getting Facebook support. By inputting your social network credentials in the game’s settings, you’ll be able to update your friends on your party structure, story progress, and other useless statistics.

Does anyone else think this is kind of backwards?

Wrong question. Look at this screenshot that accompanies the article:

The correct question is what is up with that dog in the lower-right?

There’s been so much discussion on Color that there are even posts talking about how much discussion there has been. Regardless of this, I am going to tell you what I think of it and why I think it’s a poor concept and why it won’t fly—at least with me. I’d love to be proven wrong (and I think Sequoia would love for me to be proven wrong as well, with a pre-launch $41 million round that’s the talk of the town), but let’s roll with this.

Continue reading “Color”

UPDATED 3/16/14: I’ve closed comments on this post; most services that aren’t in this list don’t support this kind of connection. I hope you find the instructions and examples here helpful regardless.

UPDATED 3/26/11: Sharedaddy is now distributed as part of Jetpack, so I’m taking the opportunity to add some additional services to this list. Please continue to contribute if you have any other services that you’d like to see on this post.

In my previous post, I described in detail the process necessary to add a sharing service to the WordPress.com Sharing tools (also known to self-hosted WordPress users as the Sharedaddy plugin). Even if your favorite social network or sharing site isn’t available, odds are likely that you can find a method to add that service as a custom sharing button.

For the tutorial, I used Delicious as an example service because it’s a service I’ve used in the past, had a good URL structure that’s easy to demonstrate, and had nice screens that helped my instructions to be easier to follow. (It also had a nice site-provided 16×16 icon that we could use to mark the sharing service.)

This is a collection of various common sharing services that aren’t included in the Sharing tools defaults. It provides the necessary information so you can plug them in to your Sharing options. Remember, the three things you need to define a sharing service are:

  • A name for the sharing service (used for the text label)
  • The URL needed to send a link to the sharing service, which can use up to five variables, which are:
    • %post_tags%
    • %post_title%
    • %post_full_url%
    • %post_url%
    • %post_excerpt%
  • And the URL of a 16×16 icon that can be used for the service.

(If you need a refresher on how to add custom sharing services, please see the previous article.)

I’ll provide the Sharing URL format—including the variable placement—and a 16×16 button icon you can use for the service. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to pull the icon from the sharing service itself to avoid any licensing issues. This means some of the icons are ugly. If you would rather, are there a few very nice sharing service icon collections available, but you’ll have to credit the author if you use them.

Since a good number of WordPress.com blogs have used GetSocialLive in the past, I think that’s as good a place to start as any. I’m only going to include those for version one of this post; if you would like another service or you have one that should be added to this list, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to include it in a revision. I’d like this post be be a kind of “encyclopedia” of these services for people who are using ShareDaddy.

Filling Out the GetSocialLive Services

Of the services included in the GetSocialLive tool, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Twitter are already provided for use in Sharing Settings—so you won’t have to worry about those. As for the rest:

Delicious

http://delicious.com/save?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Blinklist

http://blinklist.com/blink?u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

Technorati

http://technorati.com/faves?add=%post_url%

Yahoo! Buzz

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzz?targetUrl=%post_url%&headline=%post_title%

Newsvine

http://newsvine.com/_wine/save?u=%post_url%&h=%post_title%

Services I Use, So They Get Preferential Treatment and Are Higher on the List

Evernote

http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Hacker News

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

Instapaper

http://www.instapaper.com/hello2?url=%post_full_url%&title=%post_title%

Other Services

Do melhor

http://domelhor.net/submit.php?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

FARK.com

http://www.fark.com/cgi/farkit.pl?u=%post_url%&h=%post_title%

Google Buzz

http://www.google.com/buzz/post?message=%post_title%&url=%post_url%

Menéame

http://meneame.net/submit.php?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

MySpace

http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?u=%post_url%

Orkut

http://promote.orkut.com/preview?nt=orkut.com&du=%post_url%&tt=%post_title%

Pinboard

http://pinboard.in/add?showtags=yes&url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Posterous

http://posterous.com/share?linkto=%post_url%

Tumblr

http://www.tumblr.com/share?v=3&u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

But Wait; There’s More

If you have a sharing service you either want to add to Sharedaddy’s custom option, or have added and already know how it works, please feel free to leave a comment on this post and I can get it added to this list.

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity.

A great essay and a look into why so many of the people on your Facebook friends list are playing a game they will never win that intrudes upon their real life and isn’t even fun.

(via Cultivated Play: Farmville | MediaCommons.)