If you’re the type that waits with bated breath as your Facebook homepage loads in hopes that you’ll be greeted with some new notifications but sadly are met with a dearth of notices, Dr. Benjamin Grosser has got the cure for your social network malady.

Actually, he’s not really a doctor (as far as I know). He’s just an astute software developer with a mind for how we interact with software and the emotional effect it has on us.

Grosser has developed a plug-in for Facebook called Reload The Love!, a new application that will automatically inflate the amount of notifications you see when you log in to your Facebook account. Tired of seeing zero notifications? Reload The Love! will make sure you see plenty the next time you reload the page or log in. If you should receive any real notifications after Reload The Love! has inflated them, the count will automatically revert to the actual values. If you start feeling the tug of loneliness due to no new notifications after that, you can re-inflate them anytime by reloading the page to Reload The Love!

The project is equal parts social psychology experiment and software development ingenuity as it cleverly explores the value social networks have on a person’s self-esteem and how something as seemingly minuscule as red word bubble notifications can impact a person’s mood.

“Reload The Love! is first and foremost an art project for me,” Grosser told WebProNews, “so I do consider it within that context. As such, one of its purposes is to get people thinking about how Facebook’s notification icons function in their daily lives. How many times do you check those icons, hoping to find a new friend or message? How do those icons make you feel?”

The marketing value of such information, which Facebook is undoubtedly tracking, isn’t lost on Grosser, either, who has worked on other software systems for Facebook and Google. “It’s important to remember that Facebook’s value as a company is in the breadth of its data,” he said. “The source of that data is unwaged free labor contributed by us, their users. How do those icons prod us to keep generating more of that free data? As you mentioned, are we feeling happier when we see everyone else’s activities, or does it make us sad when we inevitably compare them to our own?”

Grosser’s Reload The Love! application turns the value of those notifications on its ear as it “nullifies those icons by turning them into a perpetual positive indicator.” So far, the response has been well received although, although since the application is very new it’s only been installed 366 times (wink, wink, hint). “When I show it or talk about it with people I get a variety of reactions,” Grosser said. “The first is humor – many people find it quite funny. But others find it sad and talk about their own emotional connection and/or reliance on those icons.”

And there’s the rub: people experiencing emotional distress over lack of attention and involvement on Facebook. Has social networking really moved beyond a fun pastime distraction to being a legitimate utility in our everyday lives? That’s one of the complexities that Reload The Love! exposes to ourselves – but not to Grosser. Yes, rest assured, he has zero ways of tracking any of your information through the use of this application and he was delightfully up-front in stating he wouldn’t want to even if that was a possibility. “I wouldn’t want to invade anyone’s privacy with that,” he said. “The source code is freely viewable so that users can verify for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on.”

Take that, Facebook.

But back to the existential question that Reload The Love! points at us: are we really that reliant on being noticed on Facebook? Maybe. Grosser admits that such questions are what drive his interest in software. “I am obsessed with how software functions to force us into certain types of behaviors or to see the world in certain ways.” He adds, “Software is a designed object, and even though we can’t hold it in our hands or pack it in a box, it has a profound effect on our daily life. These are the interests that led me to create Reload The Love!”

Reload The Love! isn’t a Facebook app that works within the Facebook UI itself but rather must be installed as a plug-in on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari browsers (don’t worry, it’s a piece of cake to install). You will need to get an extension for Firefox (Greasemonkey) and Safari (Ninjakit) but Chrome runs the app on a native browser extension. Installation is very user-friendly and you can find instructions on how to integrate Reload The Love! on your Facebook account here. If you’re so inclined to give Reload The Love! a try, let us know what you think in the comment section below.

Chrome users can use Greasemonkey, which is a Firefox extension that allows developers to customize web pages using javascript, to install any user script with a single click.

"Ever since the beginning of the Chromium project, friends and coworkers have been asking me to add support for user scripts in Google Chrome," says software engineer Aaron Boodman. "I’m happy to report that as of the last Google Chrome release, you can install any user script with a single click. So, now you can use emoticons on blogger. Or, you can browse Google Image Search with a fancy lightbox. In fact, there’s over 40,000 scripts on userscripts.org alone."

"Installation is quick and easy, just like installing an extension," adds Boodman. "That’s because under the covers, the user script is actually converted into an extension. This means that management tasks like disabling and uninstalling work just like they do with extensions."

Boodman notes that scripts have full access to private data on sites, so you would want to be careful about what you install, and use caution when trusting them. Not all of the scripts work with Chrome yet (Boodman estimates 15% – 25%).

According to data from NetMarketShare, Chrome made market share gains in January, taking share away from both IE and Firefox. The browser gained .6% for the month. 

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> Chrome Cruises By Safari

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> Digg Launches New Extensions for Firefox and Chrome

It started partly at Hack Day, Kremer and Yahoo Developer Network leader Chad Dickerson told WebProNews in a conversation ahead of the formal debut of the Yahoo Mail SOAP web service.

Attendees at that event got to see a preview of the API, leading to a nifty hack created by Leah Culver.

Details behind her hack, featuring Flickr, Greasemonkey, and Yahoo Mail have been posted as a video slideshow.

She built a Flickr Postcard, which takes the text entered in a form for the postcard, and finds an image on Flickr to match it. Then the postcard goes through the Yahoo Mail service to its recipient.

(If anyone’s curious about when the next Hack Day will be held at Yahoo, well, we don’t know either. We asked, and another one hasn’t been planned yet. Dickerson said a lot of people have been asking that question.)

Kremer clarified how developer usage of the API will differ between Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Mail Plus, the premium version of the email product.

Developers will be able to create mail preview utilities for the free version of Yahoo Mail.

Applications with richer features can be built for Yahoo Mail Plus users; those apps could be ones that list inbox contents, do scheduled email backups, or enable the user to create and send an email as in the Flickr example.

There’s a little something extra on the table for application developers.

Approved developers who refer new people to become premium Yahoo Mail Plus account holders will earn a commission of $10 per referral during a trial period.

Another slideshow available from Yahoo provides a walkthrough of the Yahoo Mail API. Ryan Kennedy, known for his role as Yahoo Mail evangelist, narrated the 12-minute presentation.

As with other Yahoo web services, developers can make their work part of Yahoo’s Application Gallery.

The broad reach of Yahoo’s mail service should encourage clever designers; a truly great mashup could end up attracting a lot of attention from that sizable email userbase.

Joost has written GWT External Links++, which are scripts on top of the popular Greasemonkey Firefox extension. After you’ve installed both whenever you check your links at Webmaster Tools you’ll gain some extra information beyond what Google gives. The script will take a few seconds to start showing the extra data and how many links you have will determine how long it takes finish.

What extra data can you expect to see?

• The PR of the page sending the link
• The anchor text of the link
• If the link has nofollow applied
• If the link isn’t found
• If the link is an image and the alt text on the image

I gave it a test drive and Joost’s scripts work exactly as advertised. The only problem I noticed was that some links the script claims it couldn’t find were indeed there, but that’s a small problem for all the extra data you get. I particularly like being able to see the anchor text on the links. It’s also interesting to see the nofollow on some links as it shows that Google does crawl nofollow links.

You will need a Firefox browser with the Greasmonkey extension installed before the GWT External Links++ scripts will work. For those of you not familiar with Greasemonkey, the extension allows you to alter the appearance and functionality of web sites and pages by writing simple and complex JavaScript to alter the page before it fully loads in your browser. userscripts.org has many sripts you can download for popular sites.

Check out Joost’s page for the GWT External Links++ script for a screen shot of what the extra data will look like and give the script a try.

Thanks to Barry Schwartz and Search Engine Roundtable for calling my attention to the script and thanks to Joost for creating a nice addon to the link data from Google Webmaster Tools.

Comments

SocialMonkey 1.0 Features

For each story on reddit it shows:

• Number of diggs the story has received
• Number of people that bookmarked it on del.icio.us
• Number of links to the story according to technorati

If a story has 0 or less votes, this is showed (also for recent stories, for wich reddit does not shows the points received!)

Get SocialMonkey

SocialMonkey – GreaseMonkey version (you need to get GreaseMonkey first)

SocialMonkey – Standard Firefox Extension if it does not install automatically, save it on your dektop and open it from Firefox (file > open File)

Screenshot

In story number one SocialMonkey has been launched, and displays the number of Del.icio.us link, of Technorati citations and of Diggs for this story, in story number two the plugin is ready to be launched.

Feedback and Feature requests

Please, give me your feedback, and post bugs or feature requests in the comment section!

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Francesco is an Italian software engineer currently working on Java mobile applications. He is a passionate blogger, you can read his thoughts about SEO, technology and www social trends at www.mapelli.info or add his feed to your feedreader.

I then contacted the developer team and got a great fast response from Ian Kallen, and we’ve been looking together at a way to get this to work without bashing the hell (my words) out of their servers. Up till now that didn’t work, and they have asked me to remove the script for now.

The official statement: “The query pattern and absence of caching exhibits an operational pattern that we can’t presently support. However, we’re happy to work with you in the days ahead to provide a scalable interface to support this functionality.”

Let’s see what comes of that! For now, I’m taking the script down.

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Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

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Joost de Valk is an SEO from Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works for Onetomarket, an online marketing company. He has experience as a sales manager for several IT companies, is involved in open source projects like WebKit and Mozilla, and is the creator of the biggest online resource on CSS3. Joost blogs about web design and SEO, and writes all sorts of scripts for webmasters.

Wikipedia describes an API as: An application programming interface (API) is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for services to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them.

Now these API’s are super useful, I use them in several of my scripts and have great fun with them. I used the Technorati API, for instance, in the first version of the Technorati rank and link count Greasemonkey script I wrote. This was fast, and worked quite well for a while, so I was very happy. After a few hours of browsing though, it stopped working. The error I got was You have used up your daily allotment of Technorati API queries.

Now I can’t understand why they’d want to limit use of the API like that. Why not? Well, now that I have decided to not use the API (after all how much is 500 queries when you distribute this script to 100+ people?), I’m left with no other choice but to scrape the content of their normal site. This costs them way and way more bandwidth, and it’s significantly slower. That’s not much of a service is it? Remember: I do want to use their services! I want to know the Technorati rank for each page I’m visiting, that’s a good sign for them, isn’t it?

So, please Technorati: get rid of that maximum number of queries. Oh and Google and Yahoo!, if you’re listening? Do the same, please!

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Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Joost de Valk is an SEO from Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works for Onetomarket, an online marketing company. He has experience as a sales manager for several IT companies, is involved in open source projects like WebKit and Mozilla, and is the creator of the biggest online resource on CSS3. Joost blogs about web design and SEO, and writes all sorts of scripts for webmasters.

Parparita took a moment to explain his creation’s background and future. “Greasemonkey lets you experiment with UI concepts with minimal effort necessary,” he wrote. “I can’t really say what, if any, our integration plans are, but enough users have asked for something like this that I thought writing the script was the most expedient way to provide this (unofficial) feature.”

“Reader is in Google Labs,” Parparita noted, “and that puts it in the throw it against the wall and see what sticks’ product family . . . . To stretch this metaphor further, if the spaghetti starts to slide off, engineers (and UI designers, and product managers, and others) will study the problem and figure out how to increase its coefficient of friction.”

Parparita’s spaghetti has already passed a few taste tests, and earned the (informal) endorsement of Garett Rogers. “I’m happy he decided to experiment by giving Gmail tighter integration with Reader, as it’s something I have often wished existed,” Rogers posted in the Googling Google blog.

Jason Clarke of the Download Squad also approved of the Greasemonkey script, writing, “It’s very nice to have Google Reader content just a click away in my Gmail. Hopefully this becomes a full-blown integration sooner rather than later.”

The original announcement on persistent.info has already attracted forty-nine responses, most of which are extremely positive. Because of them, an official integration may well be on the way – Parparita wrote that “it’s been great to get direct, concrete indicators for what we should work on next.”

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Here’s the basic Gmail interface with chat being used:

You can see the quick contacts list on the left, the IM overlay in the lower right. You’ve got most of the options you’d get normally in Google Talk, and a very similar interface. If you minimize the chat overlay, it becomes nice and tidy, getting the hell out of your way when you have work to do (this is an email program, after all):

Here’s the Quick Contacts list up close:

Contacts are ordered by how often you talk and email them, although you can pin specific contacts to always be there, and you can determine how many are shown in total in the preferences. If you don’t use Gmail often, you might see people in your contact list you only spoke to once, ever, like I did. You can also set your status and status message. And, of course, you can see who’s online and who isn’t.

In IM windows, you can select the option to go “off the record” and disable logging of the chat in both yours and your friends’ account, and to block your non-friends:

One new feature some people are already getting annoyed about is the contact card you see every time you run the mouse over someone’s name:

Philipp notes that there’s a Greasemonkey extension to get rid of it. I don’t mind it, but Google should make it optional. This sort of thing does feel a bit like interface bloat.

Here are the preferences:

Besides turning on/off chat history, you can determine the number of contacts displayed, slightly reorder the position of the contacts box, and determine who can see that they can chat with you.

This seems like a new feature, although I might have just missed it:

For each person, you get a page listing every email and chat you’ve had with that person. I really like this. Its accessible from the contact card.

I’ve had Gmail Chat for how long?

And I’m already seeing that?

Also, since you can “unpin” the IM window, that is make it its own browser window, I tried that without disabling the popup blocker, and saw this:

Gmail’s angry at me for not thinking ahead. I would suggest against clicking the information bar to turn off popups, since it crashed my browser every time. Rather, I found manually white-listing the domain to be more effective.

Here’s what it looks like:

That crappy view isn’t Gmail’s fault. Something in IE7 leaves me with ugly-looking mini IE windows.

Okay, enjoy your Gmail Chat when you get it!

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.

My part of the panel was spent talking about Firefox extensions. Here’s an audio recording that Kevin Marks did. Huh? Hey, I’m interested in the topic and wanna know which Firefox extensions people find useful. Face-to-face with 100+ geeks you learn a lot that you can’t learn by reading random blogs. Mack Male took notes. “some of which include: Session Saver, Fangs, PDF Download, Download Status, Signature, Fasterfox, Web Developer, Firebug, etc.”

My favorites? Greasemonkey (lets you add all sorts of new behaviors, required for the cocomment greasemonkey script), IE Tab (lets you put IE inside Firefox), Performancing (lets you blog pages you visit), and Del.icio.us (lets you tag your pages and add them to Del.icio.us)

What are your favorite Firefox extensions? Here’s a list of the most popular ones.

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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