Above is a screenshot of multiple toolbars being used here that I pulled from an experiment at Rev2.org.  It includes a web toolbar from Krumlr, Ow.ly, Digg, and Facebook.  When I see a screenshot like this, I cannot help but think how this reminds me of GeoCities circa 1990’s when there was that stupid web banner that dragged up and down as you scrolled through content pages.  That banner alone helped contribute to the downfall of GeoCities.

The first one to come up with the toolbar out of all of the Web 2.0 companies was StumbleUpon.  Their web toolbar was just an alternative to the Firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar.  StumbleUpon just made it easier to use the service for those who did not have access to their own computers with the toolbar already installed.

But then Digg decided to replicate StumbleUpon’s web toolbar even though it was not necessary whatsoever.  The community was much better off without the Digg toolbar.  Given Kevin Rose is such an avid Twitter user and Digg wanted more traffic, this is why they created the toolbar and shortened the links for Digg.com URLs.

It didn’t stop at Digg.  Facebook decided to get into the web toolbar game by creating that feature for shared links on the social network.

All of these web toolbars are doing something worse than what the GeoCities banners were doing back in the 90’s.  These web toolbars are absorbing more traffic since it is their domain names being used but loading the content owner’s website in an iFrame.

By not getting the traffic that other websites are taking from you and if for some reason you aren’t getting the link-bank credit, then you could be potentially losing traffic.  Fortunately for Pulse2.com, our main traffic sources are not from these content-stealing web toolbars.  This is why I personally don’t mind it as much as many others.

For those of you out there that are using Wordpress, there are some plugins available that automatically kill off the web toolbars.  One of them is called “Frame Breaker, aka Die Digg-bar die!“

Last week Digg introduced the DiggBar, a web-based toolbar where anyone can see the number of Diggs a story received, the number of comments, etc. There is also a random button that shows stories that have received over 2,000 Diggs.

The DiggBar also has a built-in URL shortening feature so that it makes it easier to share stories on Digg through Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Some of the critics believe that the toolbar makes the original website look ugly. This is because when clicking on an external website through Digg.com, the toolbar appears with a frame of the original website below it. The original website still gets the page views, but Digg gets some extra page views too.

Some clever guy put together a reason why the DiggBar sucks by redirecting a DiggBar.com URL to another DiggBar.com URL four times. Below is a screen shot of what it looks like:

Another DiggBar critic John Gruber and writer of the DaringFireball blog created a custom website for anyone that arrives on his website from Digg.com. It reads “Dear Digg, Go f**k yourself. Your pal, JG.”

Several other critics are comparing the DiggBar to the design of websites from the 1990’s. Frames have no longer become acceptable in web design because of cross-compatibility issues. The DiggBar can be removed altogether by turning it off in the user preferences.

StumbleUpon also recently created a web-based toolbar of their own for those who don’t have access to their StumbleUpon toolbar plugin.

[via Wired]

Once upon a time it was every blogger’s dream to see one of their posts make it to the Digg.com homepage.  That is up until other social media websites started making Digg.com irrelevant such as Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, etc.  I’ve seen the benefits of becoming popular on StumbleUpon a few times and have al seen the benefits of becoming popular on Digg several times.

Personally I prefer becoming popular on StumbleUpon since the traffic slows down after a few days, but it never goes away.  Even after becoming popular on StumbleUpon several months ago, you’ll still get thousands of hits every month from StumbleUpon.  Digg popularity just stays for a couple days and the traffic just goes away.

Late last month, I wrote about how Digg was secretly developing a web toolbar of their own to emulate the success of StumbleUpon and TinyURL.  In an interview with Wired, Digg executives Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson acknowledged the development of the DiggBar. When Wired asked Rose to explain the DiggBar, here is how he responded:

It’s not out yet, but it’s coming soon. Basically, it’s a small, framed bar, it’s not software you install.

It turns Digg into a short URL provider, so now all of our links will be, for example digg.com/8357. When you go to one of these shortened URLs, it draws a really thin bar across the top.

You get the full destination site underneath it, but you also get this thin bar at the top that allows you to Digg it, to see the hot comments on that story, to see related content to the article you’re viewing beneath it. There’s also a “random” button that gives you Stumble Upon-type functionality that takes you to random sites around the web.

If you want to create a Diggbar, just go into your browser’s address bar. Leave the full URL in there for the site you’re currently browsing, and just type “digg.com/” in front of that and hit Enter. We take that entire URL, process it, turn it into a short URL, then bring you back to the page with the Diggbar and the full original site beneath it.

You get redirected to the short URL, so you can grab it and copy it. We also have icons on the Diggbar to post to Facebook and Twitter. It’s just a great way to spread our content to the most popular microblogging services.

I think that this toolbar would actually be a value-add to Digg.com if only they could solve the bias that they have towards certain websites.  In the middle of last month I did a 7-day study on which sites appear the most on Digg.com’s technology section.  It turned out that 8 websites control over 30% of Digg’s technology section.

Soshable.com did a similar study yesterday.  It turns out that they found out that 46% of the Digg front page is controlled by 50 websites.  Below is a list of the top 30 “whitelisted” sites that become popular on Digg on a regular basis.

“In many ways, Digg has become the personal RSS feed for sites like TorrentFreak, xkcd, and Cracked as the vast majority of submissions from these and other sites will hit the front page regardless of the submitter,” stated the Soshable editor that put together the study.

As every day passes I become less interested in Digg and more interested in StumbleUpon.  What are your thoughts?  Leave a comment.

[via Wired]