For those of you unfamiliar with what Snap or Snap-shots is, it’s a bit of javascript that you can place above the closing </body> tag which allows your visitors to see a visual preview of a site that a link is linking to when they hover over said link. Additionally, you can go to the Snap website and perform a classic, enhanced, or image search. Classic being what you think a classic search would look like, aesthetically like Google, Yahoo, or MSN serps, enhanced allows you to search visually which essentially converts the serps into website snapshots, and the image search is exactly what it sounds like.

Snap is brought to us by Bill Gross of Idealab in Pasadena, California which has been creating technology companies since 1996. Bill is responsible for companies such as City Search, Commission Junction, Overture (GoTo.com), and Picassa. With Snap they’re saying, ” those of us at Snap have come here to build the next great search engine.” Quite a claim but more power to them. Personally I feel that the Snap-shot javascript functionality is neat but that’s pretty much where it’s usefulness seems to end. On the search side, searching visually via website snapshots is not something that is useful. A website displays a graphic arrangement of imagery and text which can be read and digested only at it’s proper scale. This formatted means of communication gets nullified when you present a small snapshot of the displayed information. A small visual representation of a website doesn’t really tell me anything nor does it assist in my search. It’s an interesting idea but not really helpful.

You can view the javascript in action over at ping-o-matic’s blog.

Sun Rocket, the much loved VoIP service has closed it’s doors. I first caught wind of this happening from GigaOM on the 12th. Customers wanting the service were being turned down via the non-working customer service hot line. Then on the 13th, again GigaOM found out that massive, unforeseen layoffs had happened, including the release of 25 senior managers. Then today it seemed to be less speculative, sites (GigaOM, Webware, Techmeme, DSLreports) are reporting that Sun Rocket has officially malfunctioned and there is no turning back.

Sun Rocket provided a great service but apparently, due to dot.com vs telecom politics, the system went awry.

With the fall of Sun Rocket, many customers are wondering who to go to. I’ve been hearing a lot about ViaTalk. I don’t know much about these guys but I’m going to learn more. They seem pretty comparable to Sun Rocket. Hopefully without the volatility.

Ah Digg you’ve been great…I mean, we still love you, no hard feelings or anything but every time we try to talk about what’s important to us, it’s like it doesn’t even matter. I think this will be better for all of us. This way you can do your thing with your categories and us with ours. I just don’t think we’re compatible, ya know? I’ll come visit from time to time, I mean, we can still be friends right? Anyway, you’re the best Digg. Thank you for being so understanding.

Congrats Danny on Sphinn! It’s a much needed search marketing version of Digg. We know how much they love search marketing material over there so Sphinn is quite nice. Many folks are using the Share This WordPress plugin created by Alex King. If you’re not familiar with it you can see it in action on my site and over at Mashable. With this plugin you can add and subtract bookmarking capabilities and I figured we’d need one for Sphinn. To add Sphinn to Share This in WordPress, go to Plugins > Plugin Editor > and click on the share-this.php file. Towards the top of the code is where you can add new bookmarking sites.

Add this code, you should be able to see where it belongs:

, 'sphinn' => array(
'name' => 'Sphinn'
, 'url' => 'http://sphinn.com/submit.php?url={url}&title={title}'
)

click ‘Update File’.

Now, right click the Sphinn graphic displayed here and save the file to your desktop. Upload this file to your Share This Word Press Plugins folder at:

wp-content/plugins/share-this/

You’re done! You can now bookmark to Sphinn with your Share This WordPress plugin!

If I hear anything more about Facebook I just might jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Of course my death may be updated on the Bridge’s Facebook profile, Twitter, and Pownce. Like with any bubble, the social networking craze has it’s phases and is in mid-stage. It started with Friendster, became a teenager with MySpace, and is now a college grad with Facebook. Everyone wants a piece of the action but no one knows if they should make a Facebook app, a networking site, or both and integrate the two. Now that we’ve reached a point in this vertical that’s becoming highly competitive, let’s go back to the tech history books to find out what entrepreneurs did during times likes this. We remember the buzz word ‘long tail’ right? Gross, I know, but what was the whole premise around long tail keyword phrases? That if we focused search marketing efforts on keyword phrases that were less competitive, less searched for, but had high conversion potential, that the aggregate results would lead to profits. Guess what? The same principal applies to social networks. Those who build highly targeted social networks will have the best chance at gaining the most.

Take the wedding networking site TheKnot.com for example. This network is specifically targeted towards couples who are “seeking information and services to help plan their weddings and their future lives together.” On TheKnot.com you can create your profile, invite your friends, post to your blog, etc. According to their site they receive 3.2 million visitors per month and 3,000 new members per day. Another example would be a site like Dogster where you can create a profile for your pooch and connect with other doggies that you think your dog would be friends with. The stats for Dogster? They have 302,974 dog profiles on there. 302,974 DOG profiles!

Since Facebook is the new social networking gorilla in the room, you’ll have to build a niche site in order to get to the bananas. Then you can build a Facebook app and advertise with the new Facebook ad-network Lookery or monetize your app with a text-link ad service from fbExchange.

Most people out there know about the nifty little SocialPoster website. If not, hit the link and you’ll get it pretty quickly. This contraption is great for socially bookmarking your clients but what happens when you’ve bookmarked all your clients in each of your social bookmarking accounts? You could continue bookmarking your client’s site using a different URL each time (kinda spammy) or you could create multiple Firefox profiles, multiple gmail accounts for each profile, and bookmark until you’re blue in the face! Yes, it’s still spammy but at least it doesn’t look like it is. Hence, gray hat.

Sidenote: When using SocialPoster, make sure that each title and description are different for each bookmarking site. Otherwise Google will place your efforts in supplemental.

I have a client that is very successful within their online retail niche. They do just about everything right as far as SEM is concerned. They started their site years ago, before such a thing as CMS’es so they hand code each and every page. Tedious but Google really, really, loves’em. When I encounter a client that seems to be ranking well for everything, I have to be very creative to find alternative means of online exposure. For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out how to integrate an old, static website with an RSS feed. Not so much a blog but something simple that would be a little more manual. Today it seems like any time I think of problem like this, someone has already made a widget or software app to solve it. I came across a nifty little program the other day that lets you create an RSS feed for anything! There’s a little setup that’s involved (RSS link rel in the header) but that’s about it. In the program, you have to create your feed and then enter the consecutive ‘titles’ which essentially would be you blog posts. You can save you feed and continually add to it just as you would a normal blog. This is especially good if your client has loads of content (articles or press releases) that have just been published to the site without ever being syndicated.

FeedForAll
Trail version: Free
Full version: $39.99