There is a site called MyLot that allows you to socialize with others and pays you for discussions and referrals. Although the pay isn’t very much, it does add up over time if you use it. At the time of this writing there are only 108,000 MyLot members. I thought for sure there would be a lot more.

The interface of MyLot is a bit confusing at first. Their “wizard” is so simplistic that it is difficult to find what you need. Instead of using pictures and basic text categories for your interests they should add a search feature. I haven’t added any categories yet because finding what I’m interested in would take way more time than I have at the moment.

Of course my account is new so I can’t tell you about the earnings yet. I know a few people do claim they make a bundle so only time will tell. You can help me earn more money by signing up for MyLot and making some posts. You will also earn money for it. The company pays via PayPal and has a minimum $10.00 payout.

There are different ways to post information on MyLot. The tasks area seems to be a Get Paid To program where you get paid cash to signup for different programs. If you enjoy spending money to make money or make money by reviewing ads for companies then this is a great way to earn grocery cash. Others claim to make a good income by doing Get Paid To programs.

You can add your blog feed to MyLot. They seem to discourage family blogs and lean toward information blogs. This would be my profile and blog feed on my myLot User Profile

SocialLinks doesn’t seem to have a social link icon in their widget for MyLot. I suppose I could check it out and see if a new version does. It would be nice to add it to the widget.

What is great is that you can add photos, messages, forum posts, and so much more. Even better– you can make money doing it.

Come join me on MyLot and let’s have some fun

Putting your email address out there for the world to see is risky business. We can all benefit from a great service such as gmail that has an incredible SPAM filter, but it doesn’t always catch everything. Just the other day I had a nasty porn message come through on one of my email accounts on google and it was from one that is not protected with a form. A SPAM filter is only as good as the latest techniques.

So how does a social networking pro with a website protect her email? The answer is the same as it has always been in the past: use a form. There are quite a few plugins for email forms. The one I enjoy using is Contact Form 7. The simplicity of the form is almost unbelievable.

With Contact Form 7 all you need to do is put it into your plugins folder and then activate it. Visit the plugin from your admin page and give the form parameters for the desired fields. The format is basic HTML so the options are limited to what you can put in an HTML form. If you’re really concerned then you can add a CAPTCHA tag by utilizing the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin.

Once the code is generated then simply name the form and then add the code to the HTML side of your WordPress post.

Simple. Easy. I’ve added it to the Contact Page of this site

I’ve been trying to use QuickPing on the iPhone to update ping.fm and have been having some issues. First, copying and pasting the mobile PIN was a pain because of my lack of knowledge on copying and pasting on the iPhone. Excuse me, I’ve had it a few days and I have clumsy thumbs. So I went to the web and entered the code from the web into the iPhone manually. Perhaps this was my original problem, I have no idea.

I suppose I will play with the app later when I get to my new place in a few weeks. I did pay 99 cents for it so I would like to know that it is going to work for me or at least those who will use it. If you’ve been successful then I would love to hear about it and please tell me what I’m doing wrong before I have to figure it out

Toodles.

Now that I am obsessed with ping.fm I just had to find a nifty plugin to use from my WordPress Blog. This post is actually a test to see if I can post from WordPress to ping.fm and when I do ping.fm will hit all of my different social networking sites I have setup through ping.fm.

It’s pretty easy to setup. All I needed to do was install it in the plugin folder and then activate it. I obtained the ping.fm application key from http://www.ping.fm/key and then saved. I made a few changes to the obnoxiously long title the plugin wanted me to use and then I allowed all categories to post and changed a few of the other options.

So let’s see what happens. I’m going to press publish to make this article live and then it should update twitter, tumblr, myspace, facebook, and the other ones I use. I will comment back to show you what happened.

Toodles.

If you’re like me then you have a ton of sites to update with just one post. While searching for something that updated many different sites a friend of mine told me about ping.fm.

ping.fm allows you to enter your content and then it will update up to 40 different social networking sites. It makes life real easy when you’re shooting pictures with the iPhone. I was successfully able to take a picture and have it show up on several different social networking sites.

With this tool you can also create different groups so if you post just pictures then you can pick flickr or radar.net and maybe blogger–essentially any site that allows you to post pictures. There are groups for microblogging and regular blogging as well.

My only two concerns are copied content and the ability to only have one account of each social networking site. I know that copied content can be a big issue with the search engines so it might be best to just use ping.fm with microblogging and photos. The other issue is that you cannot have multiple accounts of the different sites which would be really handy if you have different work and personal accounts.

I must admit that I’m obsessed with my new iPhone. My friends were truly amazed that it took me this long to get an iPhone but I had contracts with other companies. I would have been testing the iPhone if I hadn’t left Apple back in 98.

It isn’t surprising to me that radar.net has an easy to use iPhone app available for iPhone addicts like me. The app is free and easy to use. Once you install it all you need to do is enter your radar.net name and password and then away you go.

Click on My Radar
Click on the little camera icon in the upper left corner
Click on Take Photo
Aim and shoot
Click on Use if you want to keep the photo
Or, click on Retake to do it again.
Enter a title
Select Post to Radar. I haven’t figured out the Flickr compatibility yet.
Select your privacy options.
Click Upload (you will need to do this twice if the privacy options change)
If it is successful then a window will popup telling you so.

Wait for a few minutes and then check the site.

The one I did for this example is posted here:

radar.net, a cell phone picture social networking site, now has an application on facebook that you can use to update a radar box on your wall or profile. I added mine to my profile as a side bar application. It comes out a little big, but it is really neat.

I also told the application to update my wall, which it did yet not in the way I expected it to. I wanted it to put my status in and post the picture but instead it simply tells people that I’ve added a picture to radar.net with the links. For now that is okay, but I would like to see it update the “What’s on your mind?” status bar.

In either case, radar.net is way cool and I can’t wait to see it grow into something bigger. Go radar and have some fun. Get those cell phone pics out there for the world to see. KEEP THEM CLEAN! It’s a family friendly site only.

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.

You’ve seen the social image sites such as Flickr, but have you seen one that is geared more toward cell phone pictures and social networking? The San Francisco company Tiny PIctures, Inc. has created a company that uses uploaded cell phone pictures as a method of social networking.

The idea is that you take a cool picture with your phone and you want to tell your friends about it. Instead of sending to 50 different friends texting and using up all your credits you can send it to your Radar account and the same 50 people can see it on the website. Even people without camera phones can use the site. Just send a picture with your email client to the site and it will post to your account. Once a picture is posted then your friends on the site can make comments.

Friends are made the same way as with MySpace and FaceBook: People see your link and add you as a friend and you either accept or deny their friendship. Pictures can be made public or private. The pics can also be posted to your blog as a single photo or as a ‘latest picture’ widget in your blog or website as shown below:

I haven’t seen too many widgets similar to Sociable or Social Links that have the Radar code yet. It would be nice if they would add the code so we can add the link to the page. It’s not exactly as the same kind of marketing, but if someone does come up with a great picture I’m sure that the masses would like to know about it.

If you’re proud of the number of Twitter friends you have then you might want to consider adding a widget called TwitterCounter to your blog or webpage.

TwitterCounter keeps track of the amount of friends following you on Twitter.

There are two different ways to add TwitterCounter to your site. The smallest and least obtrusive is the badge. While you can modify the look of the badge, it still remains small enough to not take over the whole look and feel of your site. An example of the badge is shown below:

Unfortunately, you cannot change the colors of the small badge and people have claimed that updates to the amount of followers does not always update right away. I have found this is true. TwitterCounter responded by telling members they do update every 24 hours, however there are millions of follows are it might not always happen for everyone. At the time of this writing I had 712 followers and my TwitterCounter gave me a count of 672. I believe that was the count for the day before.

The next option is the Twitter Remote widget. By adding this to your site your visitors can see who the lastest members are that follow you. As you can see in the example below it is quite large and may not fit all blogs.

With this tool you can modify the colors and personalize the look and feel a little bit more than the badge.

There is also a TwitterCounter plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you options for either the badge or the remote widget to act like the originals yet they give you more options for design and make it easier for those who prefer to use widgets instead of code to add to their WordPress blog.

You can add your own code. The bit of code below just gives my follower count. If I felt like updating the HTML around it I could make it look really pretty.

The last option is a very basic Twitter badge with a bird and the follower count. It is the least configurable and probably the easiest to deal with:

Will TwitterCounter help you get more members to your Tweets? It is possible. If people click on the badge to see what it is then they might find your Twitter account on the list.