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.

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.

For anyone willing to share tweets when they are not online, various web services exist to accomplish this task (I had also built an open source app: Scheduled Tweets -not updated anymore-).

Tampon is a free and open source alternative (that is inspired from Buffer) that schedules tweets.

It is a Backbone.js application that uses MongoDB for storing the data and has a PHP-based REST API.

The application allows creating a schedule with multiple entries and auto-sends your tweets at those periods.

Tweets entered can be re-ordered with drag 'n' drops or, optionally tweeted instantly.

Considering it is open sourced, Tampon can also be a good starting point for creating a feature-rich, customized version.

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.

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.

shareNice is an open source social sharing widget -similar to AddThis or ShareThis- for adding sharing features to any website easily.

It focuses on the privacy of users, doesn't place any cookies or share any information with 3rd party services.

There is built-in support for most of the popular social websites (Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc.) and, considering the source is available, new ones can be added (or removed).

It is possible to customize the services to be displayed, color-scheme, icon sizes and the label ("share" by default).

P.S. shareNice is also available as a free-to-use service.

Twitter Bootstrap is a beautiful "web design kit" for creating cross browser, consistent and good looking interfaces.

With a flexible and well-thought HTML/CSS/Javascript structure, it offers many of the popular UI components, a grid system and JavaScript plugins for common scenarios.

And, it seems to be rocking the web design community as there are lots of websites already built and being built with it (it is also the most watched/forked repository in GitHub).

Twitter Bootstrap is already powerful enough to empower any web interface. In order to make more use of it and/or ease the development process, there are various tools/resources that complement it.

These include Bootstrap themed vector UI images, WordPress themes, web-based Bootstrap customizers and more. Here they are:

jQuery UI Bootstrap

This is an awesome resource for jQuery and Twitter Bootstrap users that combines the power of both.

It is a jQuery UI theme that not only brings Bootstrap-themed widgets but also enables us to use (most) of Twitter Bootstrap side-by-wide without any components being broken visually.

Bootstrap Image Gallery

This is an extension for the "Modal dialog" of Twitter Bootstrap toolkit for simplifying the navigation through a set of images.

It has features like mouse + keyboard navigation, transition effects, fullscreen mode and slideshow.

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Hovercard is a jQuery plugin that eases displaying information with style when an HTML element of our choice is hovered.

The information box appears with a smooth fading effect and accepts any HTML markup to be used as the content.

It is very useful for enabling users to reach micro info quickly (like a short bio, price of an item, an image, etc.) and comes with built-in Facebook + Twitter integration. Simply, it can display the details of a Facebook page or Twitter user nicely.

There are options for defining its width, position, background color and more.

Also, callback functions exist when hovering in and out from a Hovercard item.