reddit

Consumer Reports says it can't recommend the iPhone 4 because the antenna issue can be replicated and is, in fact, serious. Fanboy response: suck it up and buy a case. Molly response: epic rant. Also, the RIAA's wildly inflated file-sharing damages are smacked down once again, and Reddit begs for money.

Digg's new iPhone app, which arrives Wednesday, does not bring any of the new, or exciting features announced by the company at the SXSW festival last week. It will, however bring a better and more complete Digg experience to iPhone users than what they've had with the company's mobile Web app.The software, scheduled to appear in the U.S. App Store in the next few hours, was pre-announced by Digg founder Kevin Rose during an FOWA London conference interview back in early October.

Digg has long had a mobile Web browser-friendly version of its site (m.digg.com), … Read more

Wow. Numbers crunched by traffic and uptime firm Pingdom indicate that Facebook is absolutely crushing the rest of the social Web in terms of monthly page views. With about 260 billion page views, the sprawling social network's page view count is 11 times bigger than the second-place entry, News Corp.-owned MySpace. It's also 59 times higher than Twitter's, which comes in fourth. (Social network and gaming site Hi5 is third; Friendster, which was recently sold to a Malaysian tech company, is in fifth.)

These numbers are a testament to Facebook's phenomenal growth: remember, as late … Read more

Reddit has a new dedicated video site called Reddit.tv for clips that have become popular on its main page, as well as on its "sub-Reddit" categories. It consists of a simple video player that streams in clips, along with a playlist that lets you jump around. Nearly all of the ones I saw were from YouTube, but there were a few from Vimeo as well. There's also the option to send the video you're watching as a Twitter message, which links back to the Reddit.tv player. Users of Ffwd's Twitmatic will feel right … Read more

StumbleUpon, an online discovery site that competes with Digg, Mixx, and Reddit, said Tuesday it has expanded its partner program to include Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com.

StumbleUpon launched its partner program this fall with HowStuffWorks, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The Huffington Post. According to StumbleUpon, its partner program tools help sites' users find articles, photos, and videos indexed by StumbleUpon without heading to StumbleUpon's site, downloading its toolbar, or registering for an account.

StumbleUpon said its feature offer more exposure for its partner sites' best content and, in turn, increase the appeal of … Read more

Social news site Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division two years ago, has announced the start of a new strategy to distribute its technology around the Web. It's partnered with the U.K.'s Independent newspaper to install Reddit technology on its Web site and encourage readers to vote up and down on the news.

While a prominent button for the Independent's internal voting system will appear on each of the publication's online news stories (these will show up in a few weeks), it will also accept links submitted from around the … Read more

After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That's the company's latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.

"Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites," a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit … Read more

Reading through my RSS feeds this morning, I noticed a reasonably large concentration of Diggs focused on Reddit's decision to go open source. Maybe someone thinks Digg's executive team actually reads through the froth?

I guess the real problem it points out is not a code problem with Digg, but rather a people problem, since the Digg system prompts the submitter to verify that the submission is unique. Perhaps these Reddit fans chose not to notice that scads of similar postings had already hit Digg? :-)

Maybe it was just a matter of time. Yesterday Reddit went open source, but it's not alone: Facebook, eBay, Google, and other web companies have increasingly opened their platforms in various ways to achieve competitive advantage.

I've been one of the most vociferous opponents of the web companies "free-riding" on the backs of "open-source 1.0 projects," but it's increasingly clear that this phenomenon was a moment in time. A brief one.

The packaged software industry took decades to determine that open source is a winning strategy. (No, Savio Rodrigues, I'm not suggesting that it has settled on a 100 percent open-source strategy.) The web? Maybe three or four years.

Are we rapidly getting to the point where everything, including the web, will be flavored with open source to greater and lesser degrees? I think the answer is an unequivocal "Yes."… Read more