There are so many social bookmarking services and communities out there, why do you have to choose one to focus on? Now you don’t have to choose. Mahalo Follow 3 Beta is a Firefox extension that allows you to submit a webpage to multiple social bookmarking sites with a single click, literally.
It is different from the many “multi-submit” sites out there, like Social Poster and Post Toaster, that facilitate submissions to multiple bookmarking sites by generating URLs to load the submission pages and fill in the forms automatically. These shortcuts still require you to load each social bookmarking site and click submit for each. With Mahalo Follow, submitting to multiple sites is exactly the same as submitting to one site. Brilliant!
Unless I’m sadly out of touch, I believe Mahalo Follow is the first tool/service with this true multi-submit feature. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
As of this post, Mahalo Follow supports submissions to delicious, twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Pownce, Faves, magnolia, tumblr, Google Bookmarks, Jaiku. This list is nowhere near the list of social sites Social Poster and Post Toaster support, but I’m sure other services will be added down the road. In fact, I hope Mahalo focuses on improving the reliability and performance of this tool rather than trying to support every social site under the sun.
The following are some feature requests, bug reports, and annoyances from using Mahalo Follow 3 Beta for a day. I hope they are useful to the developers at Mahalo.
- StumbleUpon submission seems to be funky. Sometimes submission doesn’t appear to work at all. When it does work, it seems that the tags I inputted are not passed along to StumbleUpon, so the page appears to be submitted without any category or tagging information.
- Would it be possible to configure what buttons/text/elements appear on the Mahalo toolbar? I really like how I can choose the elements I want to display in StumbleUpon’s toolbar, so I can make it very minimalistic to save space.
- Can the Mahalo toolbar be moved around like a Firefox button, instead of taking up a full toolbar? Again, I like how StumbleUpon allows me drag and drop the toolbar; I can fit the SU bar into other existing Firefox UI bars, like the empty space next to the File/Edit/View… menus.
- When submitting a page with Mahalo, the page submission window stays open after I click submit, presumably to confirm that the submission was successful. Can you make the window go away as soon as I click submit and perform the submission in the background? The few seconds saved will make the process seem a lot quicker.
- After installing Mahalo Follow, in the wizard that prompts the user for his account info for the various bookmarking services, the user has no way of skipping over a particular service without returning to the first page and unchecking an unwanted service. Ex. I checked all the available services, but realized I didn’t have an account on one in the middle of the process. Maybe put a “skip” button on each step of the wizard?
Thanks again to Mahalo for this great tool!
P.S. It appears that the Mahalo Follow Beta install link actually installs v3.1 Beta 4 even though it reads Beta 5. So Faves support is actually not found in the latest installable version.
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Hi, I’m the Mahalo developer responsible for Mahalo Follow. I’d like to address the issues you brought up.
1. The next release will have a more robust system for re-submitting when services are down or unreachable due to network conditions. I’ll check out the StumbleUpon tagging issue as well.
2, 3. Interesting ideas; I’ll look into what it would take to implement them. Obviously, giving more power to users to customize their experience is a Good Thing.
4. This is tricky and would require a retooling of the server-side components of submission, but I can definitely see the value in speeding up the process.
5. Beta 5 is available at the website now (with Faves support), and it includes a “Skip this account” button in the setup wizard; you aren’t the only one who wanted that
@Christopher
I’m impressed to see your response so quickly to this post. This is something that’s great about new web 2.0 software development. Even though everything these days seems to be in Beta, there seems to be a lot more conversations with many more people participating then in years past. The irony is that with the ability to share links and sites so easily, (thanks to tools like Mahalo Follow) and have them propagate across the web very rapidly, many more people are drawn into these conversations.
Keep up the good work with Mahalo Follow.
@Christopher: Thanks for the quick response. I’m very much looking forward to future developments with Mahalo Follow.
@Cory: Agreed! Thanks for your comments.
Only Wire at onlywire.com has this functionality, but with more sites. However, I like Mahalo’s Follow better since they have stumbleupon while onlywire doesn’t.