Digg commenter Hiji writes, "This is the beginning of the end. In a few years all the major blogs and social-media sites will be owned by large corporations, putting us right back where we started."
The topic of discussion is, of course, TechCrunch's rumor that Digg will soon be acquired by Google for somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million. Digg's users are debating what Google acquiring Digg might mean for their community in this thread on the site. The question is, would being controlled by a big company like Google ruin--or enhance--the community that Digg has worked so hard to build?
Some background on Web 2.0 acquisitions
A few of the major Web 2.0 sites that have been acquired by big companies include YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace. Each of these sites has been greatly affected by being acquired by a larger company.
Once it was acquired by Google, YouTube was forced to take down much of the copyrighted material that had helped it rise to popularity. I would argue that YouTube has benefited from the financial backing and support that Google was able to provide, so the acquisition may have been a necessity at the time.
Flickr has seen little to no improvements in the way of new features, aside from Flickr Video, since being acquired by Yahoo. Despite the lack of innovative new features at Flickr, its photo community is stronger than ever, thanks in no small part, to Yahoo's ownership.
Although MySpace is still a force to be reckoned with on the Internet, especially in the music scene, it has watched its seemingly insurmountable lead in the social-networking space slip through its fingers and into Facebook's. Whether this is due to being bought by News Corp. is purely speculation, but the influence of the big media company may not have helped.
Why does Google want Digg?
In the case of Digg, Google would clearly be buying the site to acquire Digg's community. Digg has one of the strongest communities in the social-media space. Google certainly has the engineering power to build a site similar to Digg, or Yahoo Buzz, if it wanted to. But what it is really after is the people. If we can agree that Google wants the community, it would only make logical sense that the company would do whatever it could to keep that community happy and to get it to stay, post-acquisition.
How Google would change Digg
The other side of the coin that must be considered is the volume of people who would be streaming into Digg if it is acquired by Google. The added promotion of the Internet giant would send lots of newcomers to the site, who could break the delicate dynamic that Digg has right now. Digg suddenly being flooded by gardening tips, for example, might drive away a lot of the core users. Digg would, almost certainly, survive under mainstream attention, even thrive. But it could become a very different place from what we see today. The category structure of Digg submissions was built out for this very reason. If and when the mainstream public turns its attention to Digg, the audience that it has today might be able to find refuge in its own sections of the site--if it decides to stick around.
This acquisition would be a tremendous opportunity for Kevin Rose and company to cash in on some really hard work. They have done a great job building this company and carefully crafting the Digg community into what it is today. Being taken under the wing of a company like Google may be their big shot at really breaking into the mainstream.
Like I already said, the move would absolutely change the dynamic of the site. Some would like it and stay, some would hate it and leave, and many more would discover Digg for the first time. So, what do you think? Would Google destroy Digg or take it to the next level?
Digg's upcoming section, where stories wait for enough diggs in order to get promoted, has been very intimidating for users to jump head first into, given the volume of stories being submitted. It was fairly hard to sift through all of the crap in order to get to the real gems. Hopefully the introduction of a recommendation engine will make it a lot easier for users to find the quality submissions.
I believe that the addition of a recommendation to Digg is going to significantly help with the usability of the site and direct people towards the long tail of submissions. By adding a lot of new eyes to the upcoming section, Digg's homepage will certainly get a much fresher look than we have seen recently.
Digg's new recommendation engine lets you compare your tastes with the tastes of other users.
(Credit: Digg the Blog)The other important factor to look at here is the apparent benefit that the recommendation engine will be giving to websites. Making content more discoverable on Digg means more traffic for the sites that the content has been submitted from. I suspect that more and more sites will begin to feel the Digg effect as a direct result of the launch of this feature.
The introduction of a recommendation engine should give Digg a nice jolt. I haven't seen the feature in action yet, but if it is implemented correctly, I see Digg becoming a much more valuable resource and frequented by a lot more people. Kevin Rose posted a couple of videos on the Digg Blog which you can see embedded below. The first is an overview by Kevin of the recommendation engine, complete with graphics and the second features Anton Kast, Digg's Lead Scientist, talking about the new engine. You can read his whitepaper on the subject here.
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After over a year of operation, Spotplex is closing up shop, according to a message on their site. The company states that, "We regret to inform you that Spotplex is going offline. This was a very hard decision for us and we are sure you will miss the service as much as we do."
I wrote about Spotplex, back in November after having a conversation with their CEO, Doyon Kim (previously founded Dialpad, which sold to Yahoo 2005). At the time, I expressed concerns with the way that their site operates. In order for the content from a site to be included on Spotplex, the publisher of that content had to install a code snippit on their site, which also tracked analytics. The most trafficked stories were then displayed on Spotplex's homepage. I think that this restriction severely limited the amount of content that was included on the site, thus drastically reducing its value. This may not have been the best approach, in comparison to sites like Digg and Techmeme which rely on community input and not publisher participation.
TechCrunch is reporting that the reason for Spotplex's shuttering is "lack of adequate funding." Whether that means that they failed to find additional investors for the startup or that their money was poorly managed is unclear right now. I tend to think that the lack of funding might be attributed to the site not catching on as well as expected.
There is no doubt that Spotplex had talented and experienced people behind it, but, in my opinion, there were some key flaws in the site's core functionality, which really hurt them in the end.
In response to some of the recent community concerns, Digg is holding a town hall meeting tonight at 6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern on Ustream. Obviously Digg has a very strong and vocal community and this event should serve as a good venue for voicing opinions directly to those in charge.
Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson will be taking questions and responding to concerns, as well as talking about the future of Digg. Topics are likely to include censorship, moderators, Digg's new algorithm, and maybe even rumors of possible acquisitions.
This town hall should also serve as a means to test how Ustream handles an extremely large number of users on their service. Caroline McCarthy will be liveblogging the event and we will have some analysis after all is said and done. Here's to hoping that the servers involved don't die a horrible death when this thing kicks off.
Mashable is writing about a new news site called Newspond. Their "about" page boasts that the site is "the most advanced news site on the planet." That's certainly a big statement to make, given the competition that already exists. Its main function is similar to that of Techmeme, with some of the social features of Digg thrown in for good measure.
At first glance, it appears that the content that is floating to the top of Newspond is very different to what is atop Techmeme right now. It's not clear whether this is due to the sources that Newspond is drawing on, or due to differences in their algorithms. I tend to think that it is a result of the algorithm, since many of the sources for popular articles are comparable on both sites. I think that the content needs to be tweaked, although it may improve as the site matures.
As far as functionality and look goes, Newspond is at the top of the heap. Everything on the site moves so smoothly, and there are beautiful gradients and rounded corners as far as the eye can see. Comments slide out and boxes light up all over the site. The design of Newspond should be the poster child for Web 2.0.
I don't think that Newspond will dethrone Techmeme or Digg anytime soon, but they are definitely a start-up to keep your eye on. If any of their claims end up coming to fruition, we will be hearing from them a lot.
Social news site Digg launched on Wednesday night a new algorithm to try to prevent groups from gaming the system.
The update effectively punishes people who vote in groups to promote certain stories. The result of the update is that stories that reach the homepage will need to be "dugg" by a diverse group of people.
"Digg's promotional algorithm ensures that the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page," Digg founder Kevin Rose said in a blog. "Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page."
He goes on to say that as a result of the new algorithm, it will not be uncommon to see stories with more than 100 diggs still in the "upcoming" section. As I am writing this, there are three stories in the upcoming section with more than 150 diggs, the most popular standing at 155.
(Credit:
Digg)
This is supposedly evidence of the new algorithm at work, but I can't help but think that it must be disheartening for the submitters. The other side of the coin is that Digg's top submitters do wield a good deal of power and often receive a lot of diggs just because of who they are; that's not to say they didn't deserve to get to that point in the first place. The top submitters are in this position because they consistently submit great content.
This update will certainly give the little guys a better chance at getting a story on the front page, but it may anger some of the longtime users.
If the top stories are going to be read by a very diverse group of people, then it is important that they are determined by a diverse group of people. The truth is, however, that a lot of the content on Digg has been determined by groups of hardcore users, and this update may render some of their actions ineffective.
On the whole, I think it's important to stop gaming on Digg, and this is a really good way to do that. I'm sure that a good deal of thought was put into these changes and that Digg would not want to mess with a winning formula without careful consideration.
However, as we have seen in the past and as we are starting to see now, Digg fans are very vocal when they don't like something. Digg could have another great uprising on its hands if the new algorithm does not show any apparent benefits to the community.
We haven't heard much from the social news and analytics site, Spotplex, since the initial preview in February. Today, it launched an improved version of the site.
For those who are not familiar with Spotplex, it offers up a snippet of code that blog owners can install on their site. That snippet does two things. First, it provides information about its traffic to the blog owner, much like Google Analytics. Second, and most interesting, it uses traffic data from the sites that have this code snippet installed to determine the most popular stories in a variety of categories. One major complaint with the site initially was that larger sites would have a huge advantage in getting popular stories to the home page since they get a lot of traffic. Spotplex has corrected that and it now judges an article's popularity relative to the traffic that the site normally gets.
Among the other improvements it is offering today is a new geographical tracking feature, so you can see what stories are popular in different parts of the world and blog analytics tools that are customized for the various blogging platforms.
The major problem I see with Spotplex is that in order for the stories on its front page to be accurate, a large percentage of bloggers have to have its code installed. This is a vastly different approach from what Digg or Techmeme do. They give all sites an equal chance of making the front page, regardless of whether or not they know that they are participating. This results in a much more accurate representation of the most popular stories on the Internet. Spotplex, however, maintains this approach is flawed because these sites rely on the contribution of users. Spotplex is hoping that its customized analytics tools will coax blog owners into installing the code, but I'm not so sure that this is a big enough draw.
I had the chance to talk with Spotplex's CEO, Doyon Kim, about this release and how they might go about attracting more blog owners to use the service. He clued me in that they are working on some key partnerships with the people behind popular blogging tools such as Blogger and Six Apart. This could help to significantly increase Spotplex's user base, but we will have to wait and see how that pans out.
Right now, Spotplex has served up 7,000 code snips to bloggers and it estimates that it has 3,000 to 4,000 bloggers with the code currently installed. Spotplex seems to have a good idea going in theory, but in order for this to be pulled off correctly, it will have to have mass participation by the blogosphere, which will prove to be very tough.
Today, Techmeme unveiled a new feature that they call the "Techmeme Leaderboard." The leaderboard essentially makes data that Techmeme has had for years available to readers. It lists the top 100 sources for Techmeme stories, ranked by Presence, which is described as, "...the probability that a random Techmeme headline at a random time over the past month was published by that source."
Obviously there is going to be some bias in any "Top 100" list, regardless of the topic and that is the case with this list. Regardless of bias, I think that there is a lot less potential for tampering with this list than there is for tampering with the current king of the popular blog lists, Technorati, who just counts unique links to a blog to determine its rank. Technorati is going to have to scramble now to try and figure out a way to get back on top.
I think that Techmeme's list is a pretty accurate reflection of what I consider to be the most influential blogs and news sites out there today. The leaderboard is a great addition to Techmeme's already stellar offerings and I think it will keep people coming back almost as much as their front page news does. So, for all you ambitious bloggers out there, now you have a new list to shoot for.
Check out the Techmeme Leaderboard here.
Jason Calacanis' personal project, Netscape's Digg clone, has officially closed up shop. When it was initially introduced, Netscape drew a lot of criticism for the site's similarities to Digg and for trying to bribe its top users to switch over to Netscape.
There have been rumors of Netscape closing down the site for a few weeks, but now it's official. On Netscape's blog, Tom Drapeau noted the reason for the shut down as being that, "...we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn't expect to find it on Netscape.com." Going forward, Netscape will be focusing on a more traditional portal site, which can be found here, but will apparently also be releasing a new social news portion of its site.
So, goodbye, Netscape social news. It was a valiant attempt, but you just can't buy strong communities.
Today I'm checking out the new news aggregator, Newser. Wow, that's a mouthful.
When I first loaded the site up, I really liked what I saw. It has a very slick design, and the news is presented really well. The concept for content selection is pretty good too.
Newser's editors hand-pick the top stories of the moment and write their own summaries of them, also pulling in images relevant to the story. This style of presenting news is going back a little bit to Slashdot's style and moving away from the more hands-off approach of Digg and Techmeme. For me, however, Newser has some fundamental flaws that I just cannot get over.
The first and most serious flaw of Newser is that there is no blog presence whatsoever. The Newser page of top 100 sources shows the 100 sites that Newser's editors most often cite. Clocking in at No. 1 (at the time of writing) is the Associated Press, with 340 stories since March. On the other hand, there is not one single story from any of the top blogs, including sites like Engadget and TechCrunch.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with having AP content on Newser. The AP is a very important and influential news organization, and it should definitely have a portion of the content, but if you are going to do an Internet news site, you have to embrace new media, at least to some extent. Having 340 stories from the AP and 0 from Engadget is just absolutely ridiculous.
The other thing that seems pretty curious about the site's concept is that on its About page, it states that "Newser seeks to offer information free of bias." As Josh Catone at Read/Write Web says, "when you add a human element, you unavoidably add a bias as well." I absolutely agree. It's impossible to be unbiased when there is such a large human element involved in the selection process.
I think that Newser could have something good going for it. I like the idea of having news sites with hand-picked content to balance out the automatically generated sites. The editors just really need to expand the spectrum of the content that their editors are picking from and maybe throw in a few social features, such as comments, just for good measure.
