Is the social bookmarking scene slowly going to turn on OnlyWire? Don't look now, folks, but the days of automated social bookmarking are numbered (if not practically over). Linkatopia has practically declared war on OnlyWire or other third party apps which people have been using to automatically bookmark web sites.

Have you used OnlyWire in the past? Here's how to protect yourself from the backlash...

As a background, OnlyWire is a service that allows you to log into bookmarking sites such as BlinkList, del.icio.us, Simpy and automatically bookmark your favorite sites. The goal years ago was to quickly create pages which listed your web sites. The problem is, since OnlyWire "knows" your username and password, that will allow them to bookmark whatever site they choose via you account.

Yes, it's in the terms.

And although it looks like they only use that once, social bookmarking sites have grown increasingly averse towards such types of automation. Even if you use the OnlyWire tool responsibly (by bookmarking useful sites), moderators have and will flag your accounts once they detect that you've used automated tools.

In the case of Linkatopia, they have even posted a warning. Now if you (or your automated bot gone haywire) continue posting to their site, they will mark the sites you've saved in a spam database which they will share with various online communities.

For OnlyWire Users:

  1. Log in and check which social bookmarking sites you've listed or enrolled in.
  2. Log into those sites and change your password.
  3. Go back to OnlyWire and delete the username/password combinations you've listed there.

I wonder how this will affect the future of third party applications which automate your social bookmarking activities. For example, what's going to happen now to Bookmarking Demon? And what about the 100 BANS Sites project which uses BMD as a way of driving traffic to the various sites?

Well... you do realize that the only thing that's constant, is CHANGE.

As automated social bookmarking loses its ability to drive traffic to your web site, you'll need to start looking at or revisiting the good old manual ways to gaining more visitors. ;-)

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"OnlyWire Bites The Dust?"
First Posted: May 4, 2008 | Filed in: Web Traffic

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