Starting Monday 21 May, we’re introducing image discovery on ThingLink by making is easier to find other images by each user.

When your ThingLink image is seen, we’ll also feature thumbnails of your other images. It’s how we’re making image discovery a click away. We’re also introducing a way for you to unlist an image you want to keep in draft mode.

Unlisting your images on ThingLink.com

You find the “Make image unlisted” feature in the image editor of your tagged images.

Checking the box unlists the image and no one will see it on ThingLink.com except for you and anyone who has the link. The image will of course still be visible on any other site that you may have tagged the image on.

Please unlist any images that you do not want to display on ThingLink.com by 21 May.

Thrillcall, a live event discovery service with exclusive daily offers, and ThingLink, the interactive image leader in music and entertainment, today launched the Thrillcall rich media tag that lets concert ticket buyers locate and purchase tickets through interactive images. When a user hovers on a picture of an artist or upcoming show, they can easily click through to purchase tickets or share with their friends, eliminating friction between brand experience and purchase.

“It’s now a lot easier to find out about shows, but getting people in the door is still a challenge,” said Matthew Tomaszewicz, Thrillcall co-founder. “We are trying to solve this by using our technology to create new ways for venues, artists and event promoters to get more people to the show and build a closer connection to music fans.”

Event promoters can now drive ticket sales by adding the Thrillcall rich media tag to images on Facebook and across the Web. This also extends the connection with fans by enabling anyone to share or embed the interactive images on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, via email and anywhere online.

ThingLink CMO Neil Vineberg added, “Images remain the most effective way for event promoters, record labels and music artists to attract audiences to events. By adding a Thrillcall tag inside images, ticket sales can now occur where audio, video players and social links already engage consumers in the artist experience.”

The Thrillcall/ThingLink tag features the latest three upcoming shows for any artist with a link back to that artist’s page on Thrillcall, where they can purchase tickets.

Importing images from Facebook

So how do you get started? If you’re a new user, you’ll need to sign up. You will be prompted to upload or import images from Facebook or Flickr. Choose Facebook and sign into your account.

First you’ll see all your albums listed so click on the one you want to select images from. In the album, select one or several images and click “Import selected images”. All images will be imported to ThingLink and you’ll be able to tag them. If you only selected one image, the tag editor will automatically open.

Tagging with Instagram

Yes, you’re now able to tag images with your and other people’s Instagram photos. Since Instagram offers limited image browsing on their web version of the service it’s better that you use Gramfeed, Statigram or Webstagram to find interesting photos in their network. Just log in and grab the URL of any Instagram image. The URL needs to look like this - http://instagr.am/p/JwvlfkFtOV/, starting with http://instagr.am and followed by a unique number-letter series. Paste the URL into the tag editor’s link field and you’re set!

Wait, there’s more!

We have also released support for ThingLink image tagging, which means that you can tag ThingLink images with other ThingLink images. This makes it possible to create chains of tagged images for other users to explore. You’re able to create ThingLink image tags from any other ThingLink user’s tagged images.

Additionally, we’ve updated our tagging editor so that you can now easily share the image straight to Facebook’s Timeline once you’ve tagged it. Enable Facebook sharing from the editor by clicking “Activate sharing” and logging in. Check or uncheck the sharing option and click save. It couldn’t be easier than that.

ThingLink Smart Tags enable a rich expression of links from many of the world’s leading publications and blogs, including Women’s Day, “O” Oprah, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Better Homes and Gardens, Self, New York Times, Huffington Post, GigaOm, Mashable, TechCrunch, and TheNextWeb.

ThingLink CTO Janne Jalkanen said, “By introducing Open Graph Smart Tags, ThingLink is enabling publishers to visually convey links to content inside ThingLink images with no special coding or programming required.”

ThingLink also enables advertisers, brands, bands, media agencies and publishers to customize branded tags with a wide variety of functionality at ThingLink.com/developer.

Here are exemples of what  ThingLink Open Graph Smart Tags look like with links from different online publishers.

Sign up for an account by visiting ThingLink.com

And now, it can all be ThingLinked. Moar content! More fun! Who needs sleep?

Yes, ThingLink now offers sharing to Twitter, Facebook AND Tumblr on all ThingLinked images. Users could, of course, post ThingLinked images to Tumblr before we made this change — but now the sharing is automated.

Take for example this Soundcloud Heroes post originally posted on their blog. It’s easily sharable to Tumblr. Try it out yourself  on the embedded image below.

We’ve also made it easier to reblog images on Tumblr — when you reblog a ThingLinked image in Tumblr, it is now reblogged with the tags intact.

And the tagged image can now also be viewed in your Dashboard — you only need to click the Play button to see the interactive image.

If all that wasn’t enough, those of you who love to look at your Tumblr pages in Flipboard will be happy to know that ThingLinked images also work in Flipboard. There’s no excuse not to start posting and reblogging ThingLinked images in the hottest micro-blogging platform around!

Watch this video of one of our awesome employees, Thomas, showing off how great ThingLinked images look in Flipboard:

Today we’re doing a couple of major improvements to our developer offering. First, we’re allowing the tags you create to be sticky, i.e. the tags can have a close button and they won’t go away when the user moves the mouse out of the tag. This is especially useful if you developed a video player or a similar application.

Example

<script type=”text/javascript”

src=”//www.thinglink.com/jse/thinglink.js”></script>

<script>

thinglink.setSticky(true);

</script>

Check out the deeper documentation at http://www.thinglink.com/help/Thinglink%20Javascript%20Library

Second, we released a Developer Preview of Thinglink Connect. Thinglink Connect is a simple library which makes it very easy to add Thinglink to any platform. It uses the industry standard OAuth2 –specification (or at least a very close approximation of revision -16 of it.)

Here’s an example how you would use it e.g. with JQuery 

<script src=”//www.thinglink.com/jse/tlconnect.js”></script>

<script>

TLC.init({

client:’[YOUR CLIENT ID]‘,

user: ‘[ANY USER ID]‘,

isOwner: true,

redirectUri: ‘http://mysite.com/thinglink/redirecturi.html’

});

</script>

<div class=”thinglinkConnect”></div>

First, we load the tlconnect.js script. In this case, we do it synchronously. Second, we initialize the TLC object which is created by the tlconnect.js script. We put in the client id (which you can get from your Developer page on www.thinglink.com/developer) , an user ID (which is an opaque string from you), the isOwner parameter specifying that yes, the user currently logged in on your site is also the person responsible for editing this site. Then, finally the OAuth2 –specified redirect URI.

Third, we add just a simple DIV which is replaced by TLC.init() with a nice little “Thinglink Connect” icon if the user isn’t yet logged in.

Check out the full documentation at http://www.thinglink.com/help/Developer. There are a lot more options, functions and tweakeroos available to ease your integration.  Please remember that this is a developer preview, so things might still be changing around a bit. If you want to influence the library and the API, now’s the time. We welcome comments at http://support.thinglink.com.

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot: we now support oEmbed on all of our image pages. It’s a quick hack, but let us know if you’re finding it useful. This should make it far easier to embed Thinglinked images if your platform supports the oEmbed standard.

ThingLink CTO Janne Jalkanen, @ecyrd

Why should realtors be on Facebook?

Marketing expert Laura M. Donovan explains,”94% of businesses are using Social Media to Market. Are you still in the 6%? If you are – you are missing a great opportunity to really get your business, service and brand out to a large group of people, translating into more revenue for your company.

Broker/Owner Michael Byrd of SLO HomeStore.com, adds: “There are a lot more people on Facebook every day than visit my site in a year. As an Exclusive Buyers Broker I have no listings with which to stimulate inquiries so, simply put, I have to go where the people are.”

Here are five steps for creating a powerful real estate sales / rental Page on Facebook using ThingLink Tabs.

1. Take a Screen Shot of your Home Page

A screen shot, also called a screen grab, is a quick way to capture an image you’ll need to tag for your Facebook page.

On a Mac – Use Command-Shift-3.

On a PC – Use the “Print Screen” button (may also be labeled “Prt Sc”, “Prnt Scrn”, “Print Scrn”, or similar).

2. Edit the Screen Shot

Edit your screen shot so it looks like your web page.

On a Mac – Open the screen shot using the PREVIEW app. Grab the part of the image that you want to appear on Facebook.

On a PC use any image editor and grab the part of the image that you want to appear in Facebook.

Here is the SLO Homestore.com page.

“I improvised by printing the page as a .pdf, converted it to .jpg then cropped it to look like a screen shot,” added Byrd.

Here’s the website image:

And here is how that page looks on Facebook.

Notice how Michael tagged key part of this image with links to his main website. ThingLink Tabs is your tool for adding links and posting the image to your Facebook page.

3. Import the image into your ThingLink account.

Sign up a free ThingLink account. Import your an image into ThingLink following the instructions at the site.

4. Tag the image.

ThingLink Tabs is an easy way for realtors to share content inside one image on a Facebook page. ThingLink features an interactive photo editor that lets realtors add tags to any photo. ThingLink’s exclusive Rich Media Tags feature popular media players and apps — from YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Google Maps, Spotify, FlickR, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay, BestBuy, iTunes, Etsy, Mailchimp and FanBridge. Realtors can also create links inside images to anywhere on the Internet.

Byrd added, “ThingLink allowed me to create and post a tutorial for the most important functions of my home page. More importantly, it allowed me to make all of those functions directly accessible from one place on Facebook. I have other tabs, but they just lead to a single function compared to the ThingLink tab that provides nine specific functions. To my way of thinking, that is a very big deal.”

5. Post the Image on Facebook

Your image can be posted to your Facebook page with a few clicks of the mouse. Inside the ThingLink editor, simply click “Create a Tab on Facebook” and your image with its links will be transferred to your Facebook page. You’ll need to be signed up with a ThingLink Plus or Pro account.

ThingLink images are shareable with one click to Twitter, Facebook and email, and embeddable (like YouTube videos) into any blog or website. Every account includes metrics so realtors can monitor engagement. No programming experience is required and interactive images can be created and sent to Facebook in minutes.

ThingLink images are compatible with all websites, and can also be published and edited on any Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress.org blog.

For more information visit ThingLink.com.

Start by tagging an image. Remember that you can upload an image to ThingLink, import an image from Flickr or use any image URL.

After you’ve tagged the image, you will have the option of creating a ThingLink Tab on Facebook. Click Get started to get going. You can also click the link “Create a ThingLink Tab” above each image in your Dashboard.

Having begun the process, you have the option of seeing how the image would preview on a Facebook page, or to proceed. If your image is small, we center the image, and if your image is wide, we scale it down to fit. It’s always a good idea to preview your work to avoid confusion at a later stage. Remember that your image can be 810 pixels wide with Facebook’s new format, allowing for a lot of tag exploration.

If you are doing this process for the first time, regardless of if you logged in with an email address or your Facebook account, you need to enter your Facebook account again. At this stage, we verify the pages to which you have admin rights and provide you with a list of them. As you can see from the image, it is possible to also overwrite an old image for a page. There is no limit for how many times you can overwrite a ThingLink Tab.

Give your Tab a name. It’s by default called ThingLink, but you’re free to name it however you want. The only thing you can’t change is the icon for the tab. Note: by March 30th Facebook  will change the layout for all Facebook Pages, and you will no longer be able to set any tab as the default landing page for non-fans.

Bravo, you should have your ThingLink Tab up and running. Go and see how it looks!

If you for any reason want to remove your Tab, this is how. To delete the ThingLink Tab using the old layout, all you need to do is find it on the left column and click the little X that appears next to the tab.

This is how the new layout will look like for everyone by March 30th. Your tabs appear on the top navigation bar. To ensure maximum visibility for your ThingLink Tab, you should feature it visibly as one of the three first tabs.

To delete the tab, click the little arrow on the right. This opens the editing options for your entire layout.

To delete the tab, click the editing tool and choose Uninstall App from the drop down menu.

That’s it! With your Basic account you can create a ThingLink Tab on Facebook, with a small bit of ThingLink branding. Upgrading to Plus will remove the branding and provide you with in-depth statistics. Upgrading to Pro will give you four additional ThingLink Tabs.

Start creating now!

Please take a moment to review this post on how you can use ThingLink to take advantage of the new Timeline, and feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns.

Q. I read that by launching Timeline on branded pages, Facebook has essentially “killed” Tabs. Is this true?

A. No, not at all. Users can still feature a ThingLink Tab on their pages; they will, however, no longer be able to use the Tab as a default landing page. Once you convert to the new Timeline, your Tabs (apps) will be displayed at the top of the page, underneath the main image. Once a user clicks on the image, the Tab will be fully functional, just as before.

Q. So how do I best use ThingLink in Timeline?

A. The new page design allows page owners to tell richer stories through bigger photos (now 831 pixels wide). Start by posting creative images with compelling audio, video, and rich media content, and updating them frequently.

• HIGHLIGHT YOUR TAB (app) — Photos, likes and apps (Tabs) are at the top of your page. You can have a maximum of 12. Make your ThingLink Tab one of the top 3 viewable at the top of your page; all other tabs will appear in a drop-down menu.

• CREATE A STORY IN TIMELINE: When you launch a campaign or promotion, post a story about your Tab (app) in the timeline.

• PIN POSTS: After you post a story, click the pencil button to pin the story. Pinned posts highlight important stories at the top of a page for up to seven days.

Q. Can I still make a ThingLink Tab into my landing page?

A. No. You can make your Tab a top choice under the new header image, as noted above. But, you can no longer set a Tab as a default landing page. By posting a story to your timeline about your Tab, you can direct fans back to your interactive image again and again for the latest content — and help build your relationship with users.

Q. Can I still use ThingLinked images outside Facebook?

A. Of course! The great thing about ThingLink images is you can share and embed them with interactive links outside Facebook. One image works inside Facebook and across the Web.

With our Plus and Pro accounts, you also get a wealth of data about how people are interacting with and sharing your image, along with multiple image uploads.

Have a question? Write to Cortney (New York), Neil (San Francisco) or Jonas (Helsinki).

 When history considers MySpace, it probably won’t look kindly on the seizure-inducing backgrounds or terrible haircuts — but it will hopefully recognize how groundbreaking it was in providing a place for artists to easily host all their content in one place. No more figuring out HTML or domain names. Just cutting, pasting, and getting videos, music, tickets, and information on one site. See examples by ThingLink, Alan Partridge, NME, David Lynch and EMI.

Watch, listen, and interact, all within one image

No one else has managed that — until now. ThingLink Tabs for Facebook allows users to embed audio, video, and rich media links in images and post them as a Tab on Facebook. Fans can watch, listen, and interact, all within one image on one page. You can link out anywhere you want on the web and links can be changed as often as you like.

And it’s not just for bands. Maybe you’re a real estate agent and want to post videos of homes for sale inside an image of a neighborhood. Maybe you’re a small business and want to tag reviews and post audio of customer testimonials. Maybe you’re working on a film and want to release a clip a day to whet appetites. You get the picture.

An interactive web experience that drives engagement

Facebook has almost a billion users, which means if you’re doing anything, your audience is there. Super-serve them with content, presented in a simple, intuitive, elegant manner. No matter whether you’re managing a Facebook Fan Page for your band, brand, business or community group, ThingLink Tabs for Facebook transforms your page into an interactive web experience that drives engagement.

ThingLink images are viewable on mobile phones, tablets and computers. Every account includes our exclusive HoverClick™ metrics so you can monitor viewer engagement.

Get started now! The current ThingLink Tabs for Facebook plans are: