We have a surprise for you! We have a packed release with a number of goodies which will delight you and we just can’t stop talking about it. Before we begin on that, here’s something important. We decided to rename our products and make them more purpose-driven:

• TAF Standard becomes TAF4 Blogs (this is the free one)
• TAF Branded becomes TAF4 Branding
• TAF Context becomes TAF4 Commerce
• TAF Incentive becomes TAF4 Rewards

Ok, now for the really interesting stuff. Here are the big highlights of this release which went live today.

Tell-a-Friend fans from around the world have been waiting for something - an international widget! Tell-a-Friend is multi-lingual now. The widget supports French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish. Soon we’ll also support Armenian. Go local - enable these languages in your widget and let your brand/blog content reach many more people.

Your Tell-a-Friend account now can have more than one widget. Some of our large corporate customers and even some bloggers who have more than one blog wanted to own and manage multiple widgets under a single account. They can do that now. Login and create as many widgets you want. You can see the consolidated statistics on your account dashboard and you can easily switch between widgets to manage them.

The new Tell-a-Friend supports much greater services control than before. You now have the power to fully configure the services of your widget. You can change the order of the tabs in the widget, change the order of the services in each tab, and selectively switch off any service including the numerous Bookmarking services.

With the addition of all the above features, it was only natural that we improved the SocialTwist Admin UI. We have gone for a full revamp with better navigation and a more intuitive user experience. Login and try it out. We are eagerly waiting for you to tell us how you find it.

Premium customers are going to love this new release even more. There are so many reasons for that. First, based on our market research we have gone for a new premium pricing model where you have full control on your word of mouth expenses. The new premium pricing enables you to monitor and cap your expenses. You can find the new pricing under each product of our new website.

Next, as a Premium user, you can fully manage the premium features of the widget. You can do self-branding with our premium designer features - design the widget theme, upload own button, and design email template.

Premium users can also Export to Excel the Share Log and see Top 10 Shared resources of their site. It is a marketer’s dream to get more visibility into the word of mouth campaign.

Upgrading to a Premium widget is now so easy. You can instantly do so from the ‘Upgrade’ page of your widget. Choose a Premium product and pay by credit card. You can then immediately start enjoying the benefits of your Premium product.

We can go on telling you about more features. But we’ll stop now and let you discover some. Do give us plenty of feedback and help us improve things for you. We want this to really undeniably be the best word of mouth marketing widget ever.

In our last update we mentioned that we are working on adding more bookmarks. It’s live now! We have a whopping 56 bookmarks for you to use. Now, if you still find that less, we sure would like to know.

Some of the other things we did include making Bookmarks the first tab. So you launch into the world of bookmarks if you directly click the Tell-a-Friend button. This was done since so many of you see bookmarks as an important way to share content.

For Digg lovers, we also give you the count of Diggs for that site. And just so you don’t get lost in the numerous bookmark icons, we have an alphabetically sorted text view (notice the small view icons on the top right of the bookmark tab) with which you can locate your favorite bookmarking service with ease.

So go ahead, bookmark your favorite sites and spread the word. That’s Tell-a-Friend’s New Year gift to its users!

We have been appreciated for bringing personal referrals to various websites and blogs through Tell-a-Friend. That’s not just known from the emails we receive but also the millions of announcement that happen through Tell-a-Friend.

At the same time, we got many requests to support social bookmarks too. We learnt that users want to be able to provide personal referrals, that are direct and one-to-one in nature, as well as social bookmarks to indirectly influence many. Most of our users prefer to have a single button to address all their word of mouth needs. And that’s what Tell-a-Friend has become now.

Currently we support these bookmarking services: Del.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot, Technorati, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, Google, Blinklist, Facebook, Newsvine, Furl, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Propeller.

Now we are getting requests to add more bookmarks. Pretty soon, in our next update, you would find us have many more bookmarks – giving you enough reason to retire those numerous share buttons on your sites. Tell-a-Friend would empower your users to share your content not just via social bookmarks but also via email, IM, blogs, and lifestreams.

But the world of social bookmarks is only growing and as we support more, more new ones turn up. We hope our new supported list of bookmarking services should satisfy most users. Let us know, if that is not the case.

Some users on Pligg, the open source content management system, had requested for the SocialTwist tell a friend service being available as a module for them. And lo! we just did that for them and posted it in the Pligg Forum.

We just delivered a major upgrade! Among other things (which we shall blog about soon), you can now use Tell-a-Friend to publish to several new providers. Your users have added power to announce your content in many more networks. That should positively impact the viral possibilities of spreading your content. The new providers your users can publish to are:

Blogs/CMS: Joomla, Moveable Type, Xanga, Expression Engine

Social Networks: FriendFeed, Identi.ca

This can’t end here as there are several more networks to reach out to. We would love to hear from you which other Social Networks or Email/IM providers you consider important for us to add.

BTW, do you notice any difference in the speed of the widget?

You already know that Tell-a-Friend is available for WordPress blog platform since so many of you already use it. For those who are not aware, we have provided two ways to enable Tell a Friend for the WordPress platform i.e. those who have the WordPress engine running on their own server:

• Tell-a-Friend plugin for WordPress engine – easy and hassle-free
  Just download the plugin (from the SocialTwist site or from plugins at WordPress.org), install and activate it, just like any other WordPress plugin. Easy! The plugin will attach a Tell-a-Friend button on the bottom left corner of each post in a new line.
• Tell-a-Friend WordPress snippet – for the power blogger
  Some of you would prefer to exercise greater control on the positioning of the button. For example, you may want it in the same line as some other buttons at the end of your blog posts or you may want it on the right hand side instead of the left. For such requirements, pasting the snippet at the right place in your WordPress template will do the job.

Tell-a-Friend specially for WordPress.com
We received a lot of requests from people who have their blog hosted on WordPress.com. Now, WordPress.com allows only adding HTML to the template. Javascript is not allowed. So our usual widget code can’t be embedded in it. We now have a new feature in which we embed an HTML button on the WordPress.com sidebar and have the announcements happen in another window.

Source: http://utmattress.wordpress.com/

The user sees the screen below when he clicks on the Tell-a-Friend button. He can either announce the blog or any one of the specific posts in it. Just clicking one of the posts on the left frame refreshes the widget with the contents of that post and the announcement can be made.

So all you WordPress.com users out there, this could be a really unique way to get your blog posts promoted. Try it and let us know!

SocialTwist plans to deliver a series of widget applications that add social elements to web and enterprise business applications. Tell-a-Friend happens to be the first of such widgets under SocialTwist Web, the widget set targeted at websites and blogs. The next few months will see rapid releases of new features, connectors, multi-lingual support on Tell-a-Friend, before the launch of the next widget in the series.

For over a year, SocialTwist Enterprise product has been under parallel development although it shares with SocialTwist Web, the highly scalable widget engine and SAAS delivery infrastructure. SocialTwist Enterprise brings an entirely unique approach to Enterprise 2.0, with its pluggable widgets. A suite of collaboration and productivity widgets that are Enterprise Ready and carry a Social Design. A separate blog would cover SocialTwist Enterprise and provide early information on this product very soon.

Meanwhile, the coverage at:

We are happy to announce some fixes and some new features in our new build that went live today. Check it out!

We support Google Chrome

Yes, the much awaited Tell-a-Friend widget support for the new Google Chrome browser is here. Thanks for being so patient.

TypePad users – you can now use Tell A Friend!

Tell-a-Friend can now be embedded in TypePad Pro and Premium blogs. If TypePad Plus and Basic support template modifications, we willl have Tell-a-Friend for them too.

Fixes done for IE6

Tell-a-Friend widget now works fine on IE6. We thank all our users, especially Steve Bonneau, who mentioned in detail the compatibility issues related to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Those fixes are done. Phew!

Fixed the Rich Text Editor for Firefox 3

The rich text editor of the widget wasn’t working in Firefox 3. That works well now.

Button loads now “zippingly” fast

We already use gzipping of scripts for the widget. Now we also gzip scripts that load with Tell-a-Friend button. This should increase the performance of the page that embeds Tell-a-Friend. Now we only load 6.5KB of Javascript the first time the button loads. And that will reload only if there is a new version of the Javascript.

Configurable providers list

In the Tell-a-Friend wizard, you can now switch off providers that are not relevant for your users. So you can now turn on or off, say AIM from the the list of Instant Messengers that your users see.

We love to hear from you. So try the new version of Tell-a-Friend and keep the feedback coming!!