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 The New IM Frontier: Get Out Of The Sandbox and  Other Applications of Social Networking
 
 
   The Internet offers a new frontier for marketing with a toolthat has been around for awhile, but is gaining in popularity,
 social bookmarking. A web-based service, social bookmarking is
 where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are
 grouped together. And applications for this service are growing
 almost daily.
 
 “Social bookmarks can help you get out of the sandbox,” posted
 Ignat, of Honolulu, Hawaii, on social networking forum. In other
 words, social bookmarking sites host an audience of ‘link-hungry
 bloggers’ that continually refer to the site for news they can
 publish on their blogs. “So if you have a sandboxed site, what's
 better than a few hundred of incoming links to help Google boost
 your relevance?”
 
 And that’s just one application of social networking!
 
 Originally developed in April 1996 with the launch of itList.com
 as a means of organizing content using tags, social bookmarking
 sites are a popular way to group like searches, placing items in
 a category, ranking their popularity and sharing the information
 as an online resource service. Growth in only three years
 resulted in many venture-backed companies, many of which lacked
 ROI (return on investment), stunting industry growth until
 recently with the launch of the web site del.icio.us, in
 September of 2003.
 
 While improvements still need made with social bookmarking, like
 a lack of structure and standardization; for example, with
 spelling and capitalization, for tags and keywords, there are
 plenty of positive applications. Top ones include:
 
 -	The stored resource lists are publicly accessible, great for
 online research  and linking / book marking for repeat use and
 referrals.
 -	Social bookmarking software / scripts are based on a different
 technology than search engines, offering a wider range of search
 and classification possibilities.
 -	People can subscribe to bookmarks to get helpful automatic
 updates.
 
 SB Service
 
 Service is available now for webmasters and others interested in
 setting up their own social bookmarking sites or communities.
 Hot off the press is The Viral Socializer. With absolutely no
 experience necessary, a person can have their very own social
 book-marking & tagging service, all setup and ready to go in
 about 10-20 minutes.
 
 “I think the main interest is for webmasters to grow their
 community, or to start niche social bookmarking,” said JP
 Schoeffel, creator of The Viral Socializer.
 
 The script is written in php (4.3 is enough) and MySQL. It is
 packaged with a year of free hosting plus complimentary
 installation and maintenance on hosted servers of The Viral
 Socializer, an Install and user's guide with plenty of helpful
 screenshots. And all the sections of the sites (user's part and
 admin's part) are fully explained.
 
 “Of course there are already a lot of these sites (social
 bookmarking services),” explained Schoeffel. “But the future of
 social bookmarking is in "Niche Social bookmarking" : be the
 first to build your Niche Social bookmarking service for your
 community. And this is the first complete script that will let
 you run your own social bookmarking service like technorati or
 del.icio.us.”
 
 For more information, visit: http://viralsocializer.com . And
 explore the new frontier of online social bookmarking
 communities!
 
 
About the Author:   By Diana Barnum, president of http://MovingAheadCommunications.comGrab freebies, tips and help at http://www.OhioHelpGroup.com or call:
 (614) 529-9459. Freebies section at http://presssuccess.com/bookstore
 
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