24.com are now partners with BWCOM. Mybroadband published the scoop – you can catch it here

This is huge for BWCOM and we look forward to collaborating with 24.

Some quotes from the scoop

24.com CEO Russel Hanley says that the acquisition gives the company access to both Blueworld’s established online community and their social networking technology.

Hanley highlighted the fact that Blueworld Communities’ audience is complimentary to the 24.com audience and they will definitely look at synergies in future. The 24.com CEO further pointed out that the Blueworld Communities technology will enable them to target certain niche social media markets in future.

“We are very excited to be a part of the 24.com family and look forward to leveraging their assets to further expand our social network’s market reach.,” said Charl Norman from Blueworld Communities.

“We also have a very strong youth demographic which compliments 24.com’s older user base. We are very proud of the social media platform we have built and look forward to exploring synergies between our technology and existing 24.com brands to further expand our niche social network strategy.”

I can’t say much but watch this space !

Some tips and info on how to go about getting your blog posts featured on the Digg homepage

• Digg’s algorithm accounts for recent participation rank of user and followers.
• Frequent success makes subsequent success more difficult. Take a few days off sometimes.
• Get a quick succession of diggs from “high-value” users.
• The number of diggs needed to reach the homepage correlates to the number of diggs being cast at any given time, and how your story compares to the average.
• Competition in categories Technology, World and Business is fiercer than in Sports or Entertainment. 50 diggs will get a story promoted if it is tops in its category.
• The faster a story gets votes, the lower the vote count has to be at which it is promoted. But diversity is important. Stories dugg by “voting rings” will sit at the top of the queue for hours.
• Too many buries and your story will be removed from the queue.
• Comments can help push a story over the edge. Not fake ones, though.
• Wrong: An absolute number of votes is required.
• Wrong: You’re doomed if your story isn’t submitted by a top user.
• Wrong: Number of friends is important. Digg looks for is diversity in the Diggs a story receives.
• Wrong: There is a 24-hour window for success.

[Via: Valleywag]

Myspace has been a source of traffic for various social start ups such as Photobucket, Slide and even Youtube. The video sharing site gained millions of visitors from their embeded videos on Myspace’s user profiles. If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace.

The most recent high profile ‘ban’ is Photobucket, the image hosting site that has turned itself into a social community on the back of the wave of Web 2.0 buzzz. News.com reports

Social-networking giant MySpace.com on Wednesday blocked Photobucket videos and photo slideshows from being uploaded to its pages.

MySpace will no longer let users post such content from Photobucket in their profiles, blogs or comments section. MySpace said Photobucket had violated MySpace’s terms by encouraging users to post advertisements–specifically to an ad campaign for the upcoming feature film Spider-Man 3–in their videos. MySpace forbids third-party vendors from advertising on its site.

We spoke to the company about their actions, but they refused to respect our community’s terms,” MySpace said in a statement. “We had no choice but to disable their service.”

Myspace published their third party terms of service recently which in one point stated no third party widget or video provider can sell adspace through their network. This resulted in many start ups being blocked by the social gaint and in some cases resulting in the fall of that busines. Stick to their rules, after all its their traffic, and find other ways to monetize your service.

Traffic Gain:

How Photobucket stacks up against the other social powers. Note Youtube’s growth in the last year, thank you Myspace.