Even search engines are getting into the social networking action. Scour is more than just a search engine. Instead of showing its own results for websites, scour shows the results for three of the main search engines including the ranking of the site.

Not only does scour allow you to make money by searching for websites, you can also sign people up for scour and make money off of their searches. When these people sign up you can send them email if they choose to receive mail from other members and see who their friends are.

Another social aspect of Scour is the commenting and rating of sites. Each member is allowed to make a comment about an entry and give it a thumbs up or down. Each time a member marks a site or makes a comment, he earns points toward a shopping card.

If you want to find other members with similar interests then do a search for what you’re looking for and check the comments. You can then click on the profile of the member and get information the member has chosen to share with you. The member can also enter their pages for Twitter, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Pownce.

Once you earn enough points searching, voting and signing up other friends you can cash in on a Visa card that can be used anywhere that Visa is accepted. At the time of this post you need 6,500 points to redeem one $25.00 card. That may seem like a lot, but if you do a lot of research on the web then it can add up. Even better, you can see different links from different search engines which can be beneficial to any research need.

Are you still copying and pasting URLs to Twitter for social marketing because you can’t find the plugin that you want? If you own your own WordPress blog on your own domain there really is no reason to duplicate the efforts of your blog.

The WordPress plugin Socialite will help you get the traffic from the three major social networking sites by posting your latest blog updates automatically to Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook. You will no longer need to maintain three individual plugs or do the posting manually.

Not only can you post your latest post, but you have the ability to tell others when your posts are edited. What I did not see that other similar plugs have is the ability to tell readers when you are writing a draft. For my needs that is fine because I scrap a lot of articles that my audience never sees.

What I would like to see form Socialite is the ability to update more than one Twitter, FaceBook and MySpace account. I would love to see this posted to the Twitter account for this blog and to my main blog account at geekmom. I am sure I have readers on geekmom that are not interested in Social Networking and SEO but would still like to update different Twitter accounts from one blog.

You can download Socialite at www.gilfether.com/socialite. It takes a few moments to setup as there are a few options, but ultimately it will run smoothly in the end and give you the ability to update the main social networking sites.

I can’t wait until they add more.

Added Note: One thing about Socialite that I wish I could change is the linking. Since Twitter only allows for 160 characters anything over a certain amount is redirected to another service such as tinyurl. I don’t want to show tinyurl links on my posts because people might think it is a worm or some other type of post and not go there. I’m hoping there is a change or some sort of work around similar to Akra’s Shorter Links modification. I’ll keep you updated if it works.

We’ve all heard about people who get their pages banned or deleted on MySpace, but why does this happen?

There are many different reasons for it, and some of them go unanswered, but one of the most important issue with social networking is the amount of people you’re inviting to be your friend. I’ve seen adds where people promise the world and tell others they can get 1,000,000 friends within a month and then less than a month later the client is complaining because the account is banned. Why is that?
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If you own a MySpace page and you want a lot of friends then I recommend making it easier for people to find the Add Friend button. By default the Add Friend button is on the left side of the page down toward the middle. This is where people will automatically look to add you. If the button is not there then you might be losing customers.

If you do design your page differently than the default and you move the Add Friend then make sure it can be easily found. The most obvious place will be somewhere near the original Add Friend button. The next best place is somewhere at the top. As most menu items are on the left side it would make more sense to place it on the left. I have seen it on the right with some templates, but it still took longer to find.

You also want to make sure that your design is easy to see. I’ve come across backgrounds and contact tables that make it horrible to find any text or buttons at all. If your page is too busy then people will be distracted by all the junk and quickly move away before they find your Add Friend button.

Make your design quick to load. Things that will make your site slow to load are too many images or images that are too large and poorly designed, images that are hosted offsite, a lot of widgets and other items–especially those that load offsite. If people need to wait to load all your items before they can even click on the Add Friend button they’re going to move on elsewhere rather quickly.

Your design should be compatible with all browsers. I can’t stress this enough. Windows and Internet Explorer are thankfully not the only options in the world. People use Mac OS, Linux, and other operating systems as well as FireFox, Safari, Gnome, and many others. Most of the others are based on Mozilla but you will still see some differences. If you do not have a machine that can run different operating systems, or it is a hassle to do so, you can check your page on a site like browsershots.org.