Most of the websites include social networking widgets like Facebook “Like” or Twitter’s “tweet” buttons that ease sharing of the content.

The major drawback with the widgets is the performance loss due to the multiple requests made and files loaded.

SocialCount, a jQuery plugin, with only ~3kb in size (minified-gzipped) and provides a much lighter solution for them.

It has support for Facebook, Twitter and Google+, doesn’t auto-load the widgets and only loads them when user hovers the related widget which ends up in lots of performance and speed gain.

In total, the plugin makes 1 JS request, 1 CSS request, 1 optional request for icons and 1 optional AJAX request for counts (compared to 25 total requests for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus widgets)

SocialCount works with mouse, touchscreen or keyboard and comes in multiple sizes.

CometChat is a Facebook-like chat application (which was featured before at WRD) with many features.

They are running a huge Black Friday Sale and also giving away 3 Basic licenses to WRD readers.

The application is built with PHP, sits in the footer of the websites and allows users/visitors to interact with each other via text or video chat.

It integrates tightly into many popular applications (WordPress, Joomla, vBulletin, phpFox, SocialEngine, etc.) and can be easily setup to work with custom websites.

Besides chatting with website users, it also supports Facebook + Google Talk and can display friends from them as well.

CometChat users can also make file transfers between each other, share each others screens and even play lots of games.

Also, a recently released version adds a mobile interface to all the functionality, moderation support for chatrooms, chat history and 10000+ games.

The Black Friday Sale

They are running an exciting sale until Sunday where Platinum Edition + Desktop Messenger is offered for $449 (one time) rather than $699.

For anyone willing to get CometChat, this may be a good opportunity.

The giveaway

CometChat is giving away 3 Basic licenses to WRD readers. In order join the giveaway:

• share your thoughts on “which CometChat feature you liked the most” as comments

and the winners will be selected randomly 1 week later (30 November 2012) with the query below:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=3358 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck to all.

The winners

Here they are:

• der_robert (comment #863417)
• Faiban Bitter (comment #864523)
• Priyank (comment #863678)

Congratulations and thanks to everyone for joining the giveaway.

In order to simplify sign-in/sign-up processes and reach user data instantly, authenticating + authorizing users through social networks is a highly-used.

Social Auth is an open source and free PHP library that handles this process very easily.

It has support for 3 major networks: Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

The library is not limited to registration + login but can also pull user data where supported.

Today, almost everyone is active on multiple social networks and displaying social streams is a widely-implemented when creating websites.

jQuery Socialist is a plugin which can aggregate activity from multiple networks and display it as a single feed.

It can get the contents from Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, RSS and many others with ease.

The plugin can present the combined stream as a Pinterest-like responsive layout or any other custom one you can design (multiple ready-to-use themes exist).

P.S. A WordPress plugin for Socialist is also under development.

In-page/floating chat systems always existed but it was Facebook who made the experience slicker and really functional.

Using ArrowChat, a jQuery and PHP-powered chat application, it is possible to bring this functionality to any website easily.

Similar to Facebook chat, ArrowChat sits in the footer of the web pages, displays the other users online and allows each user to communicate with each other.

Besides 1-to-1 chats, chatrooms exist too and anyone can create new chatrooms (with passwords, moderators, kicking, etc.). There is also a pop-out option for chatting while browsing.

And, optionally, you can activate video chats as well. With a Flash-powered interface, users with webcams can video-chat instantly.

The system notifies users visually and with sound when a new request (chat, friend, private message..) is received. Also, it has an "announcement" feature where we can send a mass announcement to users and they will again be informed from the same notification interface.

ArrowChat bar can be extended with other apps like games, social links, translation shortcuts and much more. A store exists for getting such apps and more themes to change the design of the bar.

There is a powerful admin panel for controlling all the aspects of the application like managing users, themes and features.

In case you a re willing to use ArrowChat with a CMS, it is integrated with almost all of them (WordPress, Joomla, vBulletin, phpBB, etc.).

And, yes, mobile support exists too. The chat app works well on mobile devices.

The discount

ArrowChat is offering a 10% discount for all WRD readers who use the coupon code "WRDREADERS" and this is only available when checking out with credit/debit card.

P.S. The coupon code is valid until 31 October 2012.

For anyone or company who receives lots of support requests, just the e-mail is not enough to handle them successfully.

Users want to track their support requests, support team needs an interface to work collaboratively and the management should easily see "how the support is performing".

That's where the Freshdesk comes in. It is a full-featured and hosted help desk application which can automatically convert emails, Twitter mentions and comments on Facebook pages into support tickets.

The application smartly categorizes, prioritizes and assigns each request to the right support agent so that the support team saves a lot of time. Also, it is possible to create scenarios which can automatically perform the defined actions to the tickets that match the scenario.

There are many other features that empower the support team like canned responses, auto-recommendations from the built-in knowledgebase, splitting/merging tickets, transferring them to other agents and more.

Freshdesk is not all about support tickets, it also allows us to create a customer support portal with a knowledgebase to minimize the support requests. And, if they can't find the answer, they can still open a ticket via the portal and e-mail (or Twitter and Facebook).

We can also include the community to the support cycle by creating forums powered by Freshdesk so that they can ask question and get replies from other users (or the support team).

And, all these public pages can be branded to reflect you product or company, Freshdesk stays invisible in all the process.

A Freshdesk account can be set to support multiple products (depending on the plan), any number of agents can be added and it has a multilingual interface (perfect for distributed support teams).

The application provides many stats to quickly see the performance of each agent, department and product. Also, you can generate custom reports.

To sum up, Freshdesk is a robust solution to provide support via multiple channels and keep everything under control.

Sidetap is a simple and lightweight (2kb minified, gzipped) framework for creating mobile web apps.

The framework actually focuses on providing a flexible side-navigation similar to the one we know from Facebook's mobile app, and, once the navigation part is solved, it is pretty easy to build a simple mobile web app.

It works by telling Sidetap "the content element to be animated". It takes care of clearing the stage using whatever animation is appropriate for the situation.

There are 4 animations offered for displaying the sidebar: upfrombottom, downfromtop, infromright, infromleft. Also, a callback istriggered when the switch is complete.

Previously, WRD had shared Pubwich, an open source application that can fetch data from different sources.

It is not updated since 2010 and there is a regularly updated fork named PubwichFork.

To remind, the application can aggregate any published data from multiple sources including websites + social networks and display them in a single-page.

The sources supported include Atom, RSS, Delicious, Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr, Last.fm and more.

PubwichFork is built with PHP and it is a handy project for quickly having a personal website that you almost do nothing to update but manages to keep fresh.

Socialite.js is a JavaScript library for having more control over social sharing buttons.

The library is lightweight (2kb minified-gzipped), standalone and helps the social widgets to load when you want them or only when needed/requested to speed up web pages.

It has support for the major players: Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Spotify. There is no need to install the widget codes for each library as Socialite.js does that for you.

And, the library is extensible, any new social networks can be added with ease.

ArrowChat is a jQuery-powered, PHP/MySQL (or MSSQL) application for quickly adding chat support to any website so that visitors/members can easily communicate with each other.

The application features a Facebook-like chat system which sits in the footer of websites, presents the online users and allows them to chat instantly.

Users can choose to chat in private or inside full-featured chatrooms (which can be password-protected with moderators, kicking, etc.). And, they are instantly notified about new messages or friend requests.

ArrowChat also has video chat which is Flash-based and works smoothly. This is specially great for social networking websites.

It has a set of integrated applications from games to social sharing or instant web page translation to offer more features to users.

The application is also great for sending announcements as they are sent in real-time and you feel sure that each user logging in sees them.

Managing the application is easy for both the end users and the system admin as users get an options panel to customize everything and admins have an admin panel to control each and every feature.

It is possible to customize the look and feel of the application with theming support and also customize/improve the functionality as ArrowChat is fully open sourced.

And, best of all, ArrowChat has integrations for many popular apps including forum softwares, social networking softwares and others like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. Once installed, the system works with existing users, avatars and profiles.

P.S. The system works with all major browsers including mobile.

The discount

ArrowChat provides 10% discount to all WRD readers who use the coupon code "WRD" (the coupon will expire on 5/31/2012 and Credit/Debit Card must be selected at checkout to use the code -PayPal can still be used with this method-).

How to join the giveaway?

ArrowChat is giving away 3 KickStarter Licenses ($45/each) to WRD readers.

If you want to join the giveaway, you can choose one of the methods below or do both to increase your chances:

• comment to this post
• tweet this post (click to tweet easily)

Winners will be selected randomly on 12 April 2012 (1 week later). Good luck to all.

The winners

Here are the winners:

• @ian_chan
• Jason (comment #557436)
• k19s (comment #553902)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining.