aTokens from Entrecard - a new currency platform

A few days ago I remembered that there once a website/service on the Internet that got a lot of attention in the past. I remember every single blogger talked about it and everyone thought it was such a great service. Important players on the "make money online" sector made it really popular and people flooded in. It was called, and still is, Entrecard.

Both praises and critics emerged in regard to that service. Some people, including me, thought it is in no way beneficial to building a community. All it did was attract mass droppers and that's about it. Contests were held and prizes were given. It was a really agitated time for Entrecard. And then nobody seemed to pay attention to it anymore.

By accident I stumbled on a Entrecard drop box about a week ago and I remembered all about it. So I created a new account just to see what else is happening with it. Apparently the community, even if it's not that active anymore, is partly still there. The large players have left. But new people still join.

But this post is not about Entrecard, but rather about a new service they are promoting: aTokens. It seems it's yet another virtual currency platform, but aimed at the social networking area this time. aTokens stand for (a)ppreciation tokens and it's meant to be a way to show your appreciation towards someone. I still don't know what that means in the real world.

The creation of the account is rather simple and it allows you to connect your account with your existing Twitter account, for faster registration. It even has a built-in messaging system similar to the one Twitter has.

To fuel your account you can purchase aTokens through PayPal at a price of $4.99 for 100 tokens. The tokens can latter be transferred between users or can be redeemed for cash or coupons. The main advantage I'm seeing with the redeeming part is the fact that it will attract a lot of people and that's a good thing for a website like this. For any website for that matter. The good part is that aTokens don't just sprout out from the ground. They are created only in exchange of real cash. I guess that creates a stable economy.

Even if it sounds pretty good now i doubt it will last. The thing I suspect will happen is a lot of dead accounts will populate aTokens and it will soon roll over and die. Unless some real hot-shot from the high players makes it popular and some high-traffic online shop adopts it as a form of payment. I hope I'm wrong.

In any case, head on over to aTokens and give it a try. And hey, if you found this post useful I don't mind if you send a few aTokens my way :)

Social Share 2.0 Widget for Blogger

The latest and probably last version of the Social Sharing Widget for Blogger is here. Now at version 2.0, for no particular reason.

The generator has been simplified, no more height/width adjustments. It just fills the space it has. The icons have been changed with the Aquaticus.Social pack from jwloh. A few icons have been created following the same template since there were not in that pack.

In total I have added 11 new social networking sites: Friendfeed, Newsvine, Mixx, SurfPeople, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster and Diigo. There are a lot more out there, but these should be enough. If you have anything else that you would like to see added, just leave a comment below and I'll think about it.

So just select the ones you like, change the order as you please and enjoy!

Select items Select below the items you want to appear in your widget. Make sure you select at least one. An empty widget serves no purpose. You can also drag them to specify the order you would like them to have.

If you have already installed the previous version, make sure you remove it if you plan to use this one. I doesn't matter if you remove it before or after you install this version.