The Social

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 their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.

Reddit Bacon.

The site's humor-inclined team referred to the site update as "somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it." More likely, it'll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn't otherwise have it; Reddit's team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.

Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit's open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.

Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best "custom Reddit" from scratch (i.e., fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1,500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!

Reddit, the social news site that publishing giant Conde Nast acquired in 2006, has made a big announcement: The site's code, as of Wednesday, is open source. It's been released under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).

The Reddit alien mascot. 'You can play with me now!'

"We'll leave it to the users and see what they come up with," co-founder Steve Huffman told CNET News.com in an interview when asked what the site expected would happen. But more than anything, he's hoping users will tweak some of what they want to see changed and add new features. Social news sites like Reddit and Digg are often home to extremely opinionated communities, and by making its code open-source, Reddit will be able to let those users work on the site themselves to an extent rather than repeatedly petitioning for changes.

"It was kind of an easy decision for us," Huffman explained. "One of our driving goals is to stay as open and transparent as possible and give our users an alternative to mainstream media...this is just the next logical step toward that goal of opening up the actual system." He added that he was surprised that Conde Nast was so quick to approve Reddit's proposal to go open-source.

Reddit now counts 4.5 million unique visitors monthly, significantly smaller than rivals Digg and Yahoo Buzz. But the site has grown 1,000 percent since the acquisition by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division, Huffman said. And its open-source move is something that none of its competitors is doing, he emphasized.

Growth of news aggregation start-ups, however, could take a hit when the frenzy over the 2008 U.S. election is over. "I'm not too worried about it," Huffman said. "I think traffic will definitely change a little. We've seen that in smaller scales already. We saw when the Ron Paul movement kind of came and went...when Ron Paul kind of cooled down, a lot of those users left but the traffic stayed up."

Reddit has a history of openness, too. Last year, to celebrate its acquisition, the company toured around the country giving away free beer.

Social news site Digg has the beer-fueled Diggnation podcast, but its Conde Nast-owned rival Reddit is working on something more highbrow: a TV show on PBS.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced Wednesday on the company blog that the site will be powering the news behind YourWeek, a new show on affiliates of the public broadcasting network. In a more youth-focused spin than PBS' news is known for, the new show details the week's headlines as chosen by Reddit users. Reddit has set up a new section of the site for discussion.

"We're finishing taping on the pilot this weekend and I can confirm that the Reddit alien (the site's mascot) will be getting on-camera time," Ohanian said to readers. The site is celebrating its new show's user-generated spirit by throwing a contest for users to remix its theme song--"I suspect it won't be long before we get a Rickroll remix," he added.

Right now, there's no formal debut date as the show is not completely greenlit. The show's pilot will be broadcast online only, hitting the Web on June 6, and YourWeek will ideally launch on PBS stations in the fall.

Meanwhile, Reddit, which trails Digg in traffic and faces new competition from Yahoo Buzz, still has nothing against beer.

It may be too soon to say Flip.com has completely flopped, but Conde Nast has indeed flipped its strategy.

The teenage girl-centric site, which the company's CondeNet Web unit launched last February, has been morphed from a standalone social network to a set of distributed Web applications designed for existing social networks' developer platforms. It'll first go live on the Facebook Platform, according to Conde Nast.

In essence, the magazine-publishing giant realized that capitalizing on the popularity of existing social networks was probably a better strategy than trying to create its own.

The original Flip was centered around shared "flipbooks" that members could create using photos, videos, and other content--and as many predicted, it didn't gain a whole lot of momentum. Currently, it has only 300,000 registered users, and TechCrunch noted that traffic measured by ComScore has been plummeting.

The Flip home page will remain, but the majority of its features will be tweaked into applications suited for Facebook and its brethren. But this niche might not be any more open: companies like Slide and RockYou have already made it big as widget creators--not to mention the overwhelming glut of other applications that can make it extremely difficult to rise above the noise. Flip's new strategy will have to offer something really new.

Party at the Wired Store!

(Credit: Louis Seigal for Wired)

On Thursday night, a slew of well-dressed publishing types flooded into a cavernous space in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood for the opening celebration of 2007's Wired Store. For the past few years, the tech-focused magazine has created a "pop-up store" to feature the gadgets that it wants to highlight this holiday season.

And like any party, there was an open bar. Last year's Wired Store party had featured booze from Budweiser and Yellow Tail. This year, Wired parent company Conde Nast had stepped it up a notch with drink selections courtesy of Patron tequila--including a mojito bar that was consistently mobbed all night.

But the real attractions were the gadgets, which visitors can order by hitting up a computer kiosk inside the store. On display were digital photo frames, satellite radio consoles, solar-powered messenger bags, HDTVs, robots, and thousand-dollar headphones. There were also talking barbecue thermometers, the cute One Laptop Per Child computer, a "Darth Vader Learning Laptop," and a $13,450 "water bobsleigh" designed in Germany.

And no "hot gadgets for the holidays" list would be complete without a mention of either or both Red Octane's Guitar Hero III and MTV's Rock Band video games. At the Wired Store, both were on display and fired up for test runs. But one party guest I was talking to thought that Guitar Hero had passed its prime ahead of the holiday season.

"I don't know," he said to me. "I think Guitar Hero totally jumped the shark on Wednesday night. Did you see it was all over Gossip Girl? That's when you know it's totally over."

"Yeah, um, I watch Gossip Girl," he added, embarrassed.