Some will remember back in October when Google engineer, Steve Yegge posted on his Google+ public page, a really, really long rant about his former employer, Amazon.com and his current employer, Google. He says a week or so later, "It somehow went viral, which is nothing short of stupefying given that it was a massive Wall of Text."
If you read this rant back in October, you will recall that Yegge really tore into his employer for having very little understanding of platforms/services vs. products. He really trashed Google+ in his rant and in the end, the reason this rant became a viral embarrassment to the company was because of how cumbersome the Google+ UI actually is. A Google employee didn't even know how to use it correctly. It was meant to be a post to his internal network, not the world.
Why am I bringing up this rant? Well, it brought a lot of attention to what a poor "platform" Google+ was and was a bit of an eye-opener for the web giant, Google. They have since been offering users incentives for using the platform (they'll do just about anything to get users onto Google+). That being said, Google's eagerness to recruit new users has lead them to provide incentives for people to use the network. It's integrated the Google+ network into it's search network allowing unique and very valuable opportunities for businesses to gain search ranking performance and drive more traffic to their websites.
Can your business afford not to use Google+?
Do you really want to find out?
I think possibly the coolest feature that Google has rolled out is the ability to add an Author tag and for that tag to show up in search results. The Google+ Author tag requires that bloggers setup a Google+ profile and then link back to their Google+ profile within the article. The end result is when results are delivered on a google search, the author of the pages Google+ profile photo and name appear in the search results, meta description. Now that's pretty cool and would help any author stand out from a crowd. Nice going Google!
Because Google now considers Google+ network in their page ranking and relevance, that little +1 at the top of your blog articles plays another big factor in the search ranking game. The more +1's an article has, the more valuable Google considers the content. Again, clever! This helps the blog author gain better search ranking and also ensures that the author will add the +1 to their articles. The more users +1 the article, the more links back to Google+ and the more inbound links Google gets.
ah... see where this is going? It's all about competing with Facebook, right? Well, I think Google is smarter than that. You don't compete with facebook – you innovate, you create a platform that users have to participate in and then you integrate it within your products. Google+ will become a social and marketing tool for businesses while facebook will remain what it has always been; social.
Installing Livefyre commenting platform in Joomla
To find our more about why you want to use livefyre as your commenting platform for Joomla, you can read our Livefyre blog post.
Once you register your free account at livefyre they provide the code to be inserted in your page template but if you don't want commenting enabled on all the pages in your joomla site, the easiest way to use the platform is to install the code inside a module. You can even control the look of the commenting module by then adjusting your moduletable css.
We used flexi custom code module which can be found in the joomla extensions library. It's free and easy to configure. We set the title to "do not show" and then we assigned a position to the module. In our case we assigned an existing position at the bottom of the page. You can put this module into any existing positions within your template but generally below the article is going to be the best location.
Once you've assigned a position, copy your code from livefyre and insert it into the custom code box within your module manager. We found the best settings to be everything to yes. You will see how we've set it up in this screen shot.
If you have different module class settings in your css you could use the advanced settings tab to assign a module class and change the look of the commenting box.
Next, make sure your module is enabled and that's it. Please feel free to share experiences in our comments below. We were really excited to get this commenting platform up and running so we chose the first solution that came to mind. If anyone figures out a better solution for using livefyre with joomla, we'd love to hear about it.
What is it?
Livefyre is a real-time conversation platform that allows your users to comment on your blog post and have the conversation posted to facebook and/or twitter at the same time. Your websites community can tag their friends on facebook or twitter recruiting them to the conversation that is happening right on your website. Users can easily (with just one click) share other users comments with their friends on their social network.
What about comment quality and spam?
Livefyre has a centralized dashboard that allows the website owner to track and monitor all the interactions on the website from one central location. It offers multiple ways to moderate and filter. Livefyre also includes real-time spam filtering using machine-learning protection from Impermium to keep comments spam-free.
How to implement Livefyre on your website
Installing livefyre is pretty straight forward on most platforms like blogger or wordpress. The installation on Joomla is a little bit more difficult but still only takes a few minutes. Go to http://www.livefyre.com/ to sign up for free and grab the code to insert on the pages you want comments enabled.
How to clean up your Facebook profile and get it ready for Timeline.
Have you ever forgotten something that you or a friend posted on Facebook and months later wished you could find it? You knew it was, say 3 months ago but it is just impossible to go back in time in Facebook. Well Facebooks biggest change in the user interface since "the wall" makes it much easier to go back in time (in seconds). So while we all hate change at least Facebook made it optional for the first couple months. But alas, in the next couple weeks Facebook will force the change on all users whether you've had time to clean up those old (and I mean before your most recent relationship old) posts/photos/comments, etc…
We will all no doubt a year from now not even remember what Facebook was like before timeline so let's go ahead and make sure to make it through the transition with as little embarrassment as possible.
following are some screenshots and tips to make it easier to clean up before the change is forced on our personal profiles.
1. How to switch to timeline now instead of waiting for it to just appear?
Go to: www.facebook.com/about/timeline scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Get Timline". Don't worry! Once you get timeline you will have 7 days before your actual profile switches in which to clean things up a bit.
Note: The new timeline is very much like a scrapbook or magazine layout. You will likely want to feature some posts as well as hiding others.
2. Feature or hide posts
To feature something on your timeline, click the star and it will be expanded to 2 columns. To remove a story from the timeline, just click the pencil and either Hide from Timeline or Delete the post altogether.
3. Set privacy controls for posts on the timeline
You can use the privacy drop down to adjust who can see individual posts. A kind of cool feature is that you can select "only me" to keep things as your own keepsake but not allow anyone else to view.
4. You can view your activity log and make changes directly from their to the sharing settings
from your timeline homepage you can select "Activity Log" which will take you to a user interface that allows you to adjust the privacy settings for a post. You can also determine whether or not that post appears on your timeline. You can feature, hide or delete any of your posts. This is a good tool to use moving forward as your friends tag you in posts.
You can sort these results as well. For example you can choose; only photos.
5. Last step
when you think you have it all cleaned up and dialed in to your liking, you can publish now to avoid waiting the 7 days.
Happy Facebooking!