Around the Office: Free plugins pay off, App shows nearby pics, FTP war, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.

Wayne did some sleuthing this week to find out why someone would create a website widget for free. The reason: inbound links.

A great number of the inbound links to Ignite Social Media‘s website, for instance, come from the download page for its “Follow Me” plugin, according to data from Yahoo Site Explorer. The “Follow Me” plugin, in fact, does so well that it generates upwards of 1.15 million inbound links from a broad range of pages worldwide. The costs of developing a free widget, Wayne found, can be more than offset by the value of inbound links.

Brent has been hearing a lot about Color, a mobile photo sharing app with a twist. It lets you see photos taken by friends and strangers near your location. While comparisons have been drawn to random video chat application Chatroulette, Brent thinks it’s more like a marriage of dailybooth and geolocation. Color’s very hip and easy to use, and he thinks many small businesses should jump right in. A store, for instance, can take pictures of their products using Color, and anyone close to the store will see what’s in stock.

Eva has also been thinking about color – with a small “c”. She’s been salivating over Felissimo’s set of 500 coloured pencils, which are as suitable to display as they are for art. The company offers some beautiful acyclic display cases, and you can have 25 pencils delivered per month for a constantly changing display that will gradually take over a wall.

Daveed has been echoing the battle charge against FTP, a worn-out network protocol. In the manifesto, “FTP Must Die”, the argument against FTP is clear: “FTP is an outdated, insecure, slow and unfriendly pig of a protocol. It has no business being on the Internet in the 21st century.” Daveed is calling on those frustrated with FTP to put an end to it, or at least join in and make their frustrations heard.