Tool Review: Tell-A-Friend from SocialTwist
Internet company SocialTwist recently released “Tell-a-Friend”, a useful tool to share hot news, deals and other bits of information with your friends over instant messenger, email, blogs and social networks, all from a unified interface. While there already is a number of similar tools that get the job done, Tell-a-Friend is notable for both ease of use and number of social networks supported, and can be easily installed on WordPress, Joomla! and Pligg websites in a matter of minutes.
When hovering the mouse on the small widget, the tool reveals a dropdown menu through which users can choose which way they want to spread the word about the content they just stumbled upon: you can send emails by logging into your Yahoo!, Gmail or Windows Live account, or even compose and send a custom email to up to ten friends directly from a small popup window featuring a WYSIWYG editor.
Tell-a-Friend blog publishing interface
As for instant messaging platforms, you can also log into your Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live, Google Talk and AIM accounts to display a list of your contacts and choose which one(s) to notify.
Tell-a-Friend also lets you login directly to your CMS of choice and publish a post or article on the content you just came across: supported platforms include WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, MoveableType, Xanga, Joomla! and even ExpressionEngine.
Finally, the tool also lets you make use of social bookmarking tools such as FaceBook, Twitter and FriendFeed.
Whenever dealing with software like this, a note on security is imperative: when using tools such as Tell-a-Friend, which allow you to login to third-party platforms by asking you for their username and passwords, users should always be very aware of the risks that this process involves.
A widget like this one could in fact potentially be used to fish for user/password combinations and store them in a remote server, although nothing in this specific case leads to believe this hypothesis true. In any case, most publishing platforms (including WordPress) simply don’t allow for third-party access unless the site administrator hasn’t explicitly allowed it.
In the case of WordPress blogs, in order for Tell-a-Friend to work properly and be able to publish a blog post from it, the site administrator needs to enable the remote publishing capabilities, and in particular the XML-RPC protocol, which is also used on the MovableType, MetaWeblog and Blogger publishing platforms.
To enable the XML-RPC protocol on your WordPress site, log in as administrator and click on the “Settings” tab, then tick “XML-RPC” under the “Remote Publishing” voice. The option is unselected by default for security reasons, but it will do no harm as long as you trust the third-party application not to be a malicious one.
When it comes to sensitive data issues, trust does indeed play a dominant role in the process. For this reason Vivek Lakshman, SocialTwist director, told us that Tell-a-Friend is in the process of getting certified by a third party to confirm that the application doesn’t store sensitive user data on their servers, which should give both users and webmasters one more reason to keep using this tool with confidence.
On our side, all we can say that an analysis of the packets sent and received to and from SocialTwist’s servers revealed the data exchanged between the local computer and the remote SocialTwist server is fairly limited, which makes a phishing attempt a bit less likely.
To download and install Tell-a-Friend on your site, simply go here, choose the widget you want to display and copy the HTML code, pasting it in your style sheet (e.g. in the “/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/single.php” file, below the post content, for WordPress sites) to see the widget displayed on every post and allow your visitors to make use of this very versatile, fast and easy-to-use tool.
If you also wish to be able to take a look at usage statistics, a larger selection of buttons and color themes and personalize the custom email and IM messages to be sent though the platform, you can simply sign up for free with your site URL and start personalizing this tool immediately.
Tags: Blogger, Expression Engine, Joomla!, LiveJournal, MoveableType, SocialTwist, Tell a Friend, TypePad, WordPress, Xanga
Dario Borghino
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's
Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related
articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such
as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com. You can visit his personal Web site here.
More posts by Dario Borghino
