Propeller.com No longer!

[angolanmade]

http://mashable.com/2010/09/24/propeller-dead/

[Nick]

I think that Facebook and Twitter are killing these link submission sites because it's so easy to share a link with an existing audience on those big social networks. I notice it on my own site. A lot of users who live on Facebook or Twitter aren't motivated to leave their comfort zones to share stuff elsewhere. They can simply share content with their followers right from FB and Twitter.

Sure you can create niche sites with bookmarking software, but aren't your followers on FB and Twitter already people who share the same interests as you? Right. So why bother?

Seems to me that the only reason to set up a self-hosted bookmarking site is for monetary gain, but that's getting harder for the above reasons.

[angolanmade]

Hey Nick,

Interesting commentary. I would have to agree that the big social networks like twitter, facebook etc are making it extremely difficult to gain interactivity and growth on niche social bookmarking sites. At first, I wanted a social bookmarking site because I essentially didn't have much time to create content therefore this type of platform made sense, it also allowed the opportunity to monetize but as you mentioned that's becoming more and more challenging.

Fortunately, Hotaru CMS offers the ability to run a standard site or a bookmarking platform.

What can we do to try to improve usability on our niche sites?

Has anybody thought of an closed social bookmarking community?

[yes]

Why can't hotaru integrate with facebook and twitter without RPX?

[Nick]

Has anybody thought of an closed social bookmarking community?

There are two plugins for that: Walled Garden and High Walls. The first redirects all non-members to the login page. The latter doesn't allow open registration at all.


Why can't hotaru integrate with facebook and twitter without RPX?

We have RPX, Facebook Open Graph, Tweet This! and a couple of other Twitter plugins that need updating to use OAuth. If you want more integration, you just have to write more plugins to do it. There's nothing in Hotaru that prevents such integration.

[mabujo]

I'd be tempted to write a plugin for more Facebook integration, except:

1) RPX and Facebook Opengraph plugins do most of what I require.

2) Facebook keep changing their APIs and there is very little documentation for the new ones, they keep changing stuff that breaks old apps e.t.c.