Home > News > Updated Squidoo social toolbar on lenses

Later today we’ll be releasing a few updates to the title bar and social toolbar at the top of all lenses.

You’ll notice that the social tools are better organized for your readers and handsomely designed in a clean row right beneath the lens title. This redesign also shaves approximately 30 pixels off the height of the title bar, which is always a popular option for the sake of getting more meaty content above the fold.

Click the preview for a larger view:

New Feature # 1) The Squidoo thumbs up button.  This button is replacing our old star rating system. Instead of giving 4 or 5 stars to a lens you enjoy and want to praise, now you can just give it a thumbs up. If you don’t like a lens, ignore it. Every thumbs up your lens gets is counted in your LensRank score. Just as star ratings did before them, thumbs ups count for a very small number in LensRank, but in aggregate they get powerful enough.

We’re launching the thumbs up button using historical data from the Squidoo star rating system. We’re going to look at all existing 4 and 5 star ratings and count those as thumbs ups. That means any 1, 2 or 3 star ratings the lens had received aren’t included as thumbs ups.

As with the star rating system, readers will have to be logged in to Squidoo in order to thumbs up your lens.

New Feature # 2) The Facebook Like button. The Facebook Like button is integrated directly with Facebook. This means that if someone is logged in to Facebook, he can Like your lens, comment on it and share it with his friends there.  As we’ve always done with all our “social clickouts” we will be counting Facebook Likes in our LensRank algorithm, weighted as a small factor out of several factors.

This Like button replaces the Facebook Share feature we were using before.

New Feature #3) You’ll also see that this redesigned toolbar is now repeated at the bottom of the lens as well, with a more robust Facebook Liking option there. This was a hugely requested feature, as most lensmasters feel that their readers will be more inclined to share or Like or thumbs up a lens after they’ve scrolled down and read the whole thing.  We’d love to hear if you see some success from this!