The top headlines at a given time on Wednesday morning at OurSignal. Yeah, a bit short on relevant news.
(Credit: OurSignal)On Wednesday morning, I read about a new site called OurSignal, which mashes up the top headlines from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and HackerNews, promising to show a more diverse array of what the Web's recommending. Kind of like OriginalSignal for social news.
Unfortunately, when I loaded up OurSignal, staring me in the face was "Goatse In Spore," a reference to an extremely crude graphical Web meme (don't Google it, please). Not exactly the kind of top headline I was looking for.
The concept is kind of cool: "warm" colors mean a story is gaining momentum, and "cool" colors mean it's fading. Bigger boxes mean more votes on a story across the Web. And it refreshes every 15 minutes, which isn't that impressive in the real-time culture of Summize, but is still quick enough to provide a fresh take on the news.
That's the problem: news. Social-news sites, for better or for worse, have become known for being places to find the most popular Top 10 lists and funny videos in addition to the news, and OurSignal is no exception. So if you're looking to find the goofiest Digg and Reddit headlines in one place, this is a nice resource; but if you're actually looking for the news, you might be out of luck. Putting a handful of social-news sites together unfortunately doesn't do much to help the content.
I'll stick to Google News for now, thanks.
Importing my Flickr feed into Facebook
(Credit: Facebook)This post was updated at 2:54 PM PT with comment from Facebook.
Facebook members now have the options to import their activity from a number of external social-media sites into the "Mini-Feeds" on their profiles, a post on the company blog explained on Tuesday.
Currently, this is limited to business reviews site Yelp, bookmarking site Delicious (owned by Yahoo), and photo-sharing sites Flickr (also owned by Yahoo) and Picasa (owned by Google). More are on the way, including Digg, the post by engineer Harry Huai Wang assured members.
With aggregation the hottest topic in social networking these days, plenty of sites from Pownce to Plaxo have opted to let members pull in feeds from external sites, and an entire genre of "lifestreaming" services like FriendFeed and SocialThing have sprung up for those social-media junkies who want to be able to track everything their friends do in one place.
But it's a bit curious on Facebook: most popular social-media sites already have applications built on Facebook's developer platform, and those can pull updates into the Mini-Feed--so at first glance, it seems slightly redudant.
Using the Mini-Feed import, however, requires no application to be installed on Facebook (read: it's easier), and is fully opt-in, unlike Facebook's controversial Beacon advertisements (of which Yelp is a partner). I originally speculated that perhaps Yelp, Picasa, Flickr, and Delicious were "partners" in a Mini-Feed import program, meaning that Facebook may have gotten some revenue out of the deals.
But a Facebook representative confirmed to me that there were no formal partnerships in place, meaning that it was more likely just an API integration--curious.
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