Though the most popular example is MySpace.com, social networking pages can be anything from a “my favorite movies” list to a display section for family recipes. It is a way of classifying and sharing list of bookmarks and through these lists the contents that they point toward. With a social network, the host site allows sharing content lists with other users through links or email.

In a social network, users create lists of Internet bookmarks that they find interesting or useful. Bookmarks are generally categorized or associated with given tags so that they can be searched and sorted. Other people can access their lists and often rank the usefulness of the link or the list itself. Often, these lists of bookmarks are published as an RSS feed so that interested parties can view the latest bookmarks for a given list.

Joomla’s article structure makes it a perfect host for content that can be linked to by others. Several exten- sions provide interfaces to the various social networking sites so that a user needs only to click on an icon to add an article on your site to a bookmark list. One of the most popular social networking extensions for Joomla is SocialBookmarkerBot.

SocialBookmarkerBot  v1.3.2
To encourage social linking to content on a Joomla site, you can add the SocialBookmarkerBot extension, which creates a row of buttons at the bottom of each page of content. These buttons provide support for social bookmarking through sites such as BlinkBits, Blinklist, Blogmarks, BlogMemes, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, FeedMeLinks, Furl, Google Bookmarks, Ma.gnolia, Netscape, Netvouz, Newsline, PlugIM, RawSugar, Reddit, Shadows, Simpy, Slashdot, Smarking, Spurl, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Tailrank and linkaGoGo, Technorati, Windows Live, Wists, and Yahoo! Bookmarks.

Advanced smart buttons for the sites Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit can be displayed at the top-right or top-left of each article. The buttons may be set to appear when a user is viewing the full article or only when displaying the summary. The display panel can be configured to appear at the top, bottom, or both sides; show all buttons; or show no buttons. The extension also shaves off any user ID information and display location information for links submitted by the buttons so that the hyperlinks are “permalink” URLs (that is, URLs that remain valid regardless of whether the article is shown on the front page or elsewhere on the site).

The Digg button displayed on the right side of the article only functions if the Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs option is enabled on the Global Configuration screen of the Joomla system. An error is generated by JavaScript code retrieved from the Digg.com server if the SEF option is not turned on.

You can download SocialBookmarkerBot at the following URL:   www.patrickswesey.com/applications/socialbookmarkerbot

Install this plug-in through the Extension Manager and publish it. Once published, the button panel will automatically display on all articles on the site. Use the Plugin Manager in the Joomla Administrator interface to configure the button display options.