gestaltware

Social networks are one of the salient characteristics of Web 2.0. Social bookmarking services like del.icio.us and digg allow members to save and share their site findings, which when aggregated over a large number of users, creates a "wisdom of the crowds" effect. Think these services are only for bloggers? Guess again... even staid business-oriented sites like Business Week provide tags to these web services within their articles. Providing links to these services is easily enabled on a Drupal site with a contributed module.

Service Links makes it drop-dead simple to add support for any number of the most popular social bookmarking services (11 as of this posting, though it is still missing Slashdot, Windows Live, and StumbleUpon). Simply install the module, select which services you want links for, and where you would like to place the icons. All that is left is to create interesting content that others will enjoy.

Despite it's ease of use, the configuration options could be expanded slightly. From a display perspective, it would be nice to provide the option to reorder the links or have a single link popup all of the service icons. Contributed module Share attempts to tackle the latter issue, but is still a work heavily in-progress.

Service Links provides no administrative reporting, which could come in handy to determine how much social bookmarking activity is happening on your site. Another contributed module, Social Statistics, can retrieve and display information from del.icio.us, digg and ma.gnolia on your site as a badge of popularity, though I am thinking it would be more straightforward to track the link clicks and redirect. Similarly, it would be useful to track which site users are your greatest advocates, and link pages they shared directly from their user profile. I may take on these modifications as time permits.