It is usually a good practice to enable users to sign-in/sign-up using popular social service accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Google or OpenID.

Such an alternative not only fastens the process (no approval e-mails required, fewer form fields to fill, etc.) but also a "one less password to remember" from the user's perspective.

There are many social authentication providers besides the ones counted above including LinkedIn, Hotmail or Yahoo and integrating each can be a headache. Also, such codes may require to-be-updated from time-to-time to reflect any changes applied to them.

OneAll is a web service easing this process by providing a single API for using APIs of ~20 social services.

With the help of a "Social Login plugin", a widget that can be inserted to web pages with a copy-paste, users can be powered with an option to login with their social IDs.

A "Social Share plugin" empowers users to share their comments, purchases, reviews or other activities directly from the website with their friends on multiple social networks.

And, every action performed using OneAll (sign-in, sign-up, repeating visits, etc.) can be viewed in detail from its analytics interface.

It is hard to find such a service for free, however, OneAll is currently in beta (in-search of testers) and free during that period. Also, there will be a free plan once it is out-of-beta.

Update (18 Nov 2011) – There is now a WordPress plugin for the service which allows visitors to comment and login with social networks.

Today's internet user interacts with others using many different services like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Friendika, an open source PHP/MySQL application, integrates with such services and allows you to control your social networking stream from a single interface.

The supported services include Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Blogger, Identi.ca, RSS feeds, e-mail integration and more.

Friendika is actually much more than that, it is a distributed social-network which doesn't require any 3rd party services and has its own Facebook-like features including, status updates, photo sharing/tagging, like/dislike, creating groups/fan pages or location sharing/geotagging.

And, the best part is; every Friendika user can connect with any other Friendika user on any installation without limits.

Oxwall is an open source application, built with PHP-MySQL for creating a full-featured social network.

It enables users to create groups, events, blogs or forums, upload photos and videos, comment or tag any content and much more.

With the plugin support, the functionality can be extended easily and thanks to its theming capabilities, the look and feel can be totally customized.

Oxwall comes with a powerful admin panel to control users and every content, see the stats, manage the ads and configure any other detail.

The application is multilingual and well-documented.

If you're using Twitter frequently, it is possible that you may have found yourself several times on searching for an older tweet.

However, Twitter usually doesn't archive tweets older than 2 weeks and the info shared/conversations become unreachable.

Tweet Nest is an open source PHP application that automatically archives your tweets and offers you an easy-to-use interface for browsing through them.

It can display the new-style retweets, geographic places and links to original tweets + includes thumbnails of media like photos hosted on common providers like TwitPic.

Tweets are categorized in months and a good looking yet simple bar chart shows the amount of tweets, retweets and replies you've sent every day.

Diaspora is an open source social networking application that is considered to be a Facebook alternative by many sources.

It includes most of the features to be expected like friendships, status messages, photos, etc.

The application's most original part is the way the user-data and so the privacy is handled: all personal data is stored wherever you want like on an hosting account or on your personal computer.

And, considering it is open source, users will be able to attach their profiles (including all personal data) to a network built with the system.

Diaspora is built with Ruby and still in the early development phase. However, seems like we'll be hearing more about it in the near future.

At WRD, the previous tweet button for sharing stories was the cool Easy Retweet Button by John Resig. However, it was not perfect as, sometimes, it was unable to communicate with the URL shortener service and the tweet links were appearing buggy.

In search for a better one, I tested few others including the official tweet button. They were loading the links ok but had other issues like "loading slow", "blocking pages on load", etc.

And, for a button that is clicked by -maybe- 1/100 of the visitors, loading the scripts and making requests for every visitor didn't look like the smartest choice.

Here is another method, that is actually used at WRD now which loads very fast for everyone and almost fault-proof.

How it works?

First of all, the button is hosted locally and it does not make any requests until it is clicked.

• A link with the querystring that includes URL and the title of the web page is created, pointed to a server-side file (to be presented later in this article) and attached to any custom button we design.
• Once clicked, it sends the URL and title to the server-side file which creates the tweet link and redirects to Twitter with the tweet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, if not over-promoted, sharing your social activity or the content you generate in various ways is a good method to gain exposure.

WiseStamp is an add-on, with versions for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Flock and Thunderbird, for  auto-inserting content from various resources to e-mail signatures.

Besides Thunderbird, it is compatible with the popular e-mail services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL.

The content inserted can be grabbed from a RSS feed, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious or almost any other social network account.

The add-on is multilingual and already has support for 10+ languages.

So So Social is a jQuery plugin which parses RSS feeds from your various social networks and displays them as an "activity feed".

Thanks to YQL, it doesn't require any server-side scripts and can be completely customized with the help of CSS + JS settings.

By default, the plugin supports Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.FM, Delicious and Flickr.

In order to add more services, just digging the code and extending it with the same methodology will be enough.

ThinkUp is an open source web application that helps you analyze your activities and friends better in Twitter and Facebook (more networks to come).

It can display you all replies to a message, a stream of all photos posted or links tweeted by friends (by expanding the short URLs).

ThinkTank enables you to get detailed statistics about your activity, such as your average replies per day or how often you update.

Also, it provides insights about your followers and friends, like who's most popular or who updates least often.

Another great feature is the ability to backup all your activities and even publish a presentable list of replies to one of your questions (including integration with blogging tools like WordPress).

OpenLike is a fresh and open source social bookmarking widget which is simple-yet-functional.

Similar to professional services like AddThis or ShareThis, but much simpler, you can add social bookmarking options to any website by simply inserting a JavaScript file.

By default, the widget supports StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook Like and Hutch (the ones to be displayed can be customized).

However, as you can get the source, adding new ones is very easy by simply defining them to the JavaScript array, the CSS file and the sprite image.