I just installed the Adaptive Blue Smartlinks. My first comment is that they are not so smart. It is not clear to me how they are enabled. My guess is that they ONLY work if you link to a site that supports the Smartlinks concept but the Adaptive Blue people completely skipped over that part. Guys...you need to put yourself in the shoes of a brand new user that doesn't have a clue about your technology. It is too confusing and I am technology guy. Make it simpler!
So here I am testing to see how this works. I read through your help files and see that you only "support" certain sites. So I put a link to a site that only Adaptive Blue supports like...hmmm....ok how about I put a link to Malcom Gladwell's new book Outliers
Save, launch and ......it works. So it appears it only works for sites that they have relationships with. But what about sites that don't.
Continuing to dig through FAQs and help files....this is too hard guys. 30 minutes later....
Oh wait...I just found a link to a FAQ that says that I can add Smartlinks to any link by adding special HTML code(i.e. a tag) to my link. WTF? Isn't there some type of button you can add into the blog tool to make this more point and click. Adding HTML code? Isn't this 2008...or almost 2009?
Ok so here I go....I am going to link to a site that I am positive is not a Smartlink friendly site. How about the Environment Canada weather site with the latest Vancouver weather. After pasting in that link I had to go into the href and add the smartlink="yes" tag. Well it worked but a pain in the ass I think.
The best part is that I added a link back to the Adaptive Blue website and it didn't even create an automatic smartlink!!! Guys....what is up?
Interesting idea...I will keep playing with it but...too hard. Dumb it down.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Adaptive Blue Smartlinks
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1 comments:
Hi Mark,
We've tried to make it as easy as possible for categories that we recognize and support.
When you link to a book, movie, music album, stock, restaurant, etc. on popular sites a SmartLink is automatically inserted in your blog post. You can see currently supported sites and categories on this page: http://www.adaptiveblue.com/smartlinks_sites.html
For other sites that aren't currently supported it isn't too easy. This is an advanced feature for power users and rather than making this step easier we're working hard to build out the categories and sites that we support.
Have you checked out Glue? It's our new service that we recently launched which is very simple and straight forward. www.getglue.com
Best,
Fraser
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