There's always a lot going down at the annual South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. As you probably remember, SXSW served as the original launchpad for Twitter, so it seems fitting that Kevin Rose's new Twitter directory, WeFollow, was launched there this year.
It's interesting, however, that Rose didn't choose to make his announcement during a talk at the conference, but rather through Twitter and Digg. At its core, WeFollow keeps track of different groups of Twitterers, as defined by tags, such as #tech or #celebrity and displays them in order of popularity.
Rose dominates the Tech category of WeFollow.
(Credit: WeFollow)Although current Twitter directory services already exist (see Twellow and Just Tweet It), WeFollow has the unique advantage of Rose's star power.
The directory has already and will continue to attract a lot of early users, simply due to Rose's enormous Internet presence. The hope is that Rose's following will be enough to push WeFollow into being the dominant Twitter directory, which people will use despite Rose's involvement, as is the current situation with Digg.
The "Kevin Rose factor" definitely plays a role here, but will it be enough to make WeFollow successful? It helped Pownce for a while, but the site was ultimately bought by Six Apart and shut down, so we'll have to see.
Users can add themselves to WeFollow simply by tweeting @wefollow, followed by up to three tags that they want to be classified under. For example, my tweet read: "@wefollow #tech #blogger". It's very easy to do, and by choosing this method of adding people to the directory, I think it could very easily start to spread virally. Since the tweets to @wefollow are public, people might see one, get interested, take a look, and enter themselves.
While WeFollow is, so far, a great tool for finding the top users in a given category, I do have a few criticisms. First off, WeFollow makes looking at anyone outside of the top 50 or so in a category a major pain. Unless you want to click through pages and pages of Twitterers, all you will likely see is the top users. Twitter itself suffers from the same tedious clicking through of pages if you want to see who a particular user is following.
Second, I know that this release is a very early version of WeFollow, but users should definitely be given the ability to sort using multiple tags, in order to yield more relevant results. If I am looking for tech bloggers, why not let me see people who match the tags #tech and #blogger?
Overall, WeFollow appears to be a solid offering, with a clean interface, that's taking a real stab at organizing the Twitterverse. With Rose's help, I think we're going to see it get very popular fairly quickly here. If they can add some better searching and filtering options, WeFollow will really be a killer service.
Ashton Kutcher
(Credit: Andrew Mager/CBS Interactive)
What a pairing: Hollywood slacker-hottie icon Ashton Kutcher and Silicon Valley slacker-hottie icon Kevin Rose have teamed up to create 24 Hours at Sundance, a Web-based reality show set at the eponymous film festival in Park City, Utah, later this week.
Backed by mobile live-streaming start-up Qik, the competition-focused show will pit four "social media mavens" against one another for 24 straight hours as they complete a set of challenges surrounding the annual film festival and broadcast them via Qik software on Nokia handsets. Rose (best known for founding Digg) and Kutcher, the Dude, Where's My Car actor whose production company Katalyst Media has created a Web show called Blah Girls, will co-host.
The four "social media mavens" are VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall, gadget blogger Meghan Asha, Konsole Kingz founder CJ Peters, and video blog personality Irina Slutsky.
"I kind of feel like there's been a trend in entertainment in general that moves toward a more visceral, more live experience," Kutcher told CNET News. "We have an idea of what we want to happen, but who knows what's actually going to happen."
Kevin Rose
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)"I don't think I've ever heard of anything else that's been done like this before, especially with the real time nature," Rose added. "It's only a matter of time before people in Hollywood and just everyone in general wants to participate and have a way to live-stream and connect with people they care about." Well, maybe not everyone.
From what it sounds like, dot-com culture geeks may find this fairly amusing. Kutcher told CNET News that one of the challenges will involve tracking down and interviewing dot-com icon Jason Calacanis, who will be present at Sundance. The Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo founder relocated to the L.A. area several years ago and has started to get a foothold in the Hollywood scene.
"It's unbelievable, it's like him versus (Robert) DeNiro for roles," Kutcher joked of Calacanis, who played himself in last year's film August, which chronicled a failing fictional dot-com. "It's getting out of control."
This post initially misstated Digg's 2007 loss as reported by 'BusinessWeek.' The company reported lost $2.8 million in 2007.
There are some stunning numbers in BusinessWeek about social news site Digg: In 2007, the company reportedly pulled in only $4.8 million in revenue and lost $2.8 million. In the first three quarters of 2008, it lost $4 million on $6.4 million in revenue.
Digg declined to comment on the numbers.
This is a little bit disconcerting, if true. Digg has been one of the hottest start-ups in Silicon Valley's hype machine for the past few years, due ironically in part to an August 2006 BusinessWeek cover story depicting boyish founder Kevin Rose giving a grin and a thumbs-up. (What innocent days those were!) It's also been vocally committed to growth, and has said that it's still hiring in the midst of the current recession.
(Credit:
BusinessWeek)
When Digg raised its last round of funding--a $28.7 million Series C in September--rumors pegged its valuation at around $164 million. That's significantly lower than the $200 to $300 million that was occasionally talked about in those pesky acquisition reports.
Which, by the way, we haven't heard many of recently. It used to be, per the gossip mill, that either Google or News Corp. or Microsoft or somebody else was trying to nab it; Al Gore's Current Media reportedly offered $100 million in 2006 and was snubbed.
Digg has a wild cult following, and Rose's background as a TV anchor and popular "Diggnation" podcast have turned him into one of the Web's biggest celebrities. And its traffic, by all accounts, continues to grow steadily as Digg makes strides to expand its base beyond the geeky young newshounds who made its community famous.
CEO Jay Adelson says he's cracking down and now aims to make the company profitable in one year rather than two. Considering what BusinessWeek has dug up this time (pun completely intended), that could be a tough task.
Digg founder Kevin Rose is taking the stage at 2 p.m. Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit for a brief "High order bit" discussion. Here, you'll find our take on his short talk, in real time.
Digg has always made its message clear: it's not social news, it's democracy.
The company's executive team--founder Kevin Rose, and CEO Jay Adelson--thumbed their noses at the DMCA complaint they received when users "dugg" a crack code for the now-defunct HD DVD technology. They also decided to connect with their users through "town hall" events Webcast live four times a year. So it's perhaps fitting that for the company's third quarterly town hall, Rose and Adelson set up shop in the "Big Tent" new-media hall at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Digg is a "Big Tent" sponsor.)
It'll be following up with an event held in partnership with MySpace at the Republican National Convention. The company also kicked off a "Digg Dialogg" event series, in which executives ask users' questions to prominent guests. Adelson, who called it a "perfect alignment of Digg and elections," interviewed House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the inaugural interview, in partnership with CNN's iReport.
"They're your raw questions," Rose said, his characteristic mop-top haircut forsaken in favor of a buzz cut. "They were completely unfiltered."
To be fair, Digg owes a lot to politics--its energetic base of news hounds loves election coverage, and the national elections inevitably pull a lot of traffic to the site.
The questions were largely technical ones that dealt with the minutiae of Digg culture: Adelson said that the "shout" communication system will be tweaked to limit spamming and a private message system is on the way, better technology to flag duplicate stories ("I hate this!" Rose said on the problem with duplicate story submissions) is coming this fall, and Digg is working on a way to let members flag stories as "not safe for work."
Most of Rose and Adelson's answers, which they breezed through more quickly than with previous town halls due to time constraints on the Denver stage, fell into the niche of "good suggestion, and we're working on it."
One question asked if Digg could institute a forum for members. That was a more contentious point for the company executives. "We do want to have forums for our users to communicate and support each other," Adelson said, but added that he's working on matching up the authentication system so that it uses the same credentials as Digg itself rather than an external forum system.
Rose was less enthusiastic. "Everyone has forums and it's always the same crap," he said. "It doesn't necessarily mean that they're helping elevate the good questions and helping the conversation come through."
A few genuinely good ideas came up: one question suggested "geotagging" for stories to group them into local news stories, something that could make the site legitimately compete with sites like Outside.in and city blog networks like Gothamist. "Yes," Rose said. "We've thought about this as well and it would be really cool if we could start to group different events around you." Adelson added that Digg has "a few projects on the way...think 2009, realistically, for some of this stuff."
Despite the somewhat dull nature of many technical questions about recommendation engines and comment improvement, Adelson and Rose insisted that those are the questions they want to hear because it's where Digg users can really make a difference in shaping the site's direction. "It's really important to know what you guys are thinking. It keeps us honest," Adelson said.
The next Digg town hall will be held on November 6--two days after the U.S. presidential election. Its next meetup, however, will be off American shores: Rose will be taping his Diggnation podcast live from London on October 10.
MIAMI--If you believe the blog rumors, Digg founder Kevin Rose is constantly dealing with a community that threatens mutiny at the drop of a hat, perpetual acquisition offers from companies such as Google and News Corp., and the aftermath of that thumbs-up BusinessWeek cover that made him one of Web 2.0's most recognizable shaggy-haired poster boys. Oh, and then there's this Yahoo Buzz thing that's getting a whole lot of press.
So here at the Future of Web Apps conference, I sat down with Rose to clear the air. He's participating in a panel on Friday called "How to Build a Web App in 45 Minutes," and he said we ought to get excited.
"It's going to be awesome. It's probably going to be the best panel of all time," he said with a mildly diabolical grin. "I've got so many ideas for Web apps. I'm going to freaking rock this panel."
Digg founder Kevin Rose.
(Credit: Digg)Kevin Rose is, after all, known as an idea guy. Not only did he found Digg, but he also created a video production company, Revision3, and a microblogging tool, Pownce. But, he says, Digg is his main focus by far. He's especially psyched about forthcoming developments to the site that will offer personalized recommendations based on a user's past activity, suggesting to them not only news but also other Diggers who share similar interests. (Does this mean that people will start using Digg as a dating site?)
Working with Digg's notoriously vocal community has been quite a trip too.
"It's been a really fun learning experience," Rose said. "Six months ago, I wouldn't have called it fun because I really just couldn't figure out how to best work with the community."
Eventually, he explained, he and the rest of Digg's team asked the community for specific, structured feedback on what they wanted to see on Digg, and that's when the experience changed. Rather than getting demands, they were getting answers.
"Once we did that, rather than the community saying, 'You suck, Digg--fix your comments,' it was a lot more structured," Rose said. "We got a lot more valuable input from the community."
He's not concerned about emerging competitors, either, because he says none of them have particularly impressed him. "I've Buzzed a few stories," he said in reference to Yahoo's new social-news endeavor, Yahoo Buzz. "I think that a lot of people like the idea of potentially getting their articles in front of a lot of people on Yahoo's Web site, and that's a huge carrot to hold in front of people, but functionality-wise, it's really lacking on the community side."
Rose also told me he doesn't want Digg to cash out with an acquisition anytime soon. "I've had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world," he said, "and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down. You can't get a product out the door fast enough." Hear that, Rupert Murdoch?
Here's part one and here's part two of the full Kevin Rose interview.
On Monday night, social-news site Digg took a new approach to its famously clamorous users: CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose sat down in front of a Ustream-connected camera with their MacBook Pros and a couple of beers and answered questions that had been submitted by Diggers.
As a relative outsider to Digg culture, I was fairly dissatisfied.
All in all, the session highlighted quite a few of Digg's strengths as well as troubles going forward--and additionally reflected a few common criticisms about the site as a whole. But in the process, the questions were inward-focused, dealing with the demands of an active but demanding user base. Very few dealt with Digg's place in the Web's landscape or new media industry as a whole.
Digg, like a handful of other social-media sites (Yelp and Vimeo come to mind), has become famous for a notoriously tight-knit community. On one hand, that's a sign of success. It's got a really dedicated user base. On the other hand, it invokes claims of cliquishness and complaints that it's hard for an outsider to break in.
Watching the town hall, those complaints seemed pretty grounded. Right off the bat, the 20 questions selected were chosen because of the numbers of Diggs each question amassed in a thread about the town hall. True, that's keeping it in the community, and Digg is all about the community. But it's also a bit incestuous, and the questions could have fallen prey to Digg's alleged insideriness--voting up a comment or story simply because of who posted it or submitted it, not because of the content of the stories.
And consequently, the vast majority of the stories were about the nitty-gritty details of the site, the sort of thing that would be of importance to a daily Digg user but which would be inconsequential at best (and potentially nonsensical) to an outsider. I'm not a top Digger, but I'm more than familiar with the site. Digg's users, for better or for worse, also happen to be a tech-savvy bunch. That means a tougher job for Adelson, Rose, and the rest, as the users will be more likely to demand upgrades to the service, insist on a better user experience, and the like. That's good; I'm tired of seeing Web 2.0 sites thinking that they can get away with perpetual beta phases and poor performance.
But on the other hand, Digg can't simply look inward because legitimate competitors have begun to surface. One of them, Mixx, just raised several million dollars in venture funding. None of the questions addressed on Monday night dealt with Digg's opinion of its competitors, plan for moving forward in a tough economic climate, or where Rose and Adelson see the site in five years. Granted, that's not their fault; the questions about "super-users" and comment system upgrades were, after all, what the users Dugg. But I sat through question after question about minute upgrades to the Digg comment system when I really wanted to hear about Adelson and Rose's collective vision for the site going forward.
One question did touch upon the constant gossip that Digg will get acquired. For obvious reasons, Adelson and Rose declined to comment. "We get asked this every day," was Adelson's response. "We are laser focused on the features that users want us to do, and frankly that is what we're focused on as a business right now."
Digg does have a great model for social news that, in my opinion, hasn't yet been paralleled by any other site. But it's in a bit of a Catch-22: ignore or deceive its community, and it faces mass backlash; but pander to its community too much, and it hinders its opportunities for growth as it focuses too far inward. I wanted to hear vision. I wanted to hear partnerships and developments and possibilities. What I heard instead was the gradual upgrading of the search algorithm. Maybe, because I'm not a hardcore Digger, I just don't get it.
But I appreciate that Kevin Rose is a fan of Chimay Red ale.
This post has been updated with comment from Digg CEO Jay Adelson.
Valleywag reported on Wednesday afternoon that a "major media player" was close to plunking down $300 million to $400 million for social news site Digg. Valleywag editor Owen Thomas wrote that "a source rules out all the big Internet players--not Microsoft, not Google, not Yahoo, not News Corp.," and that CBS had "taken itself out of the running."
Thomas went on to speculate that perhaps the buyer for the Kevin Rose-founded Digg would be the New York Times Company or the Washington Post Company. Social news and bookmarking sites have indeed proven to be hotter buys for media companies rather than technology companies, with Conde Nast's acquisition of Reddit a year ago and Forbes' very recent purchase of Clipmarks--the exception is Delicious, which Yahoo bought.
This should be taken with more than a grain of salt--OK, an entire margarita's worth of grains of salt--but here's an interesting tidbit. I was talking to Digg CEO Jay Adelson at Tuesday night's Founders Club party, and he sure didn't say anything that hinted at an acquisition (obviously). But Adelson, who is a New York resident, did say that he wishes the company had a bigger East Coast presence.
Adelson told me in an e-mail on Wednesday afternoon that neither he nor Digg would be commenting on the acquisition rumor. But considering how many "major media players" are based in Gotham, this still could be saying something.
- Digg to adopt OpenID. Later this year, Digg will be adding OpenID to its site. OpenID, which we looked at back in September, creates a master password similar to what you get with Microsoft's Live ID, but it's not proprietary. (TechCrunch)
- Flickr outage reveals site's scale. Flickr wasn't working yesterday, but fear not--it's back up. The problem mixed up a large number of photos across the site, which quickly led to Yahoo shutting down the service for several hours. Interestingly enough, the outage revealed that at times, the site serves over a billion photos a day. (CNET's Yahoo Blog)
- 37signals shows off a piece of new app Highrise. The first screenshots from the 37signals team have been posted, along with information on managing permissions and groups for its new customer relationship app called Highrise. It may seem a tad on the boring side, but for a collaboration-based tool, choosing who can and can't make changes is important. Previous Highrise coverage here. (Signal vs. Noise)
- Blinkx and Sproose partner for the video search tool. Blinkx, which we checked out at Demo 2007, has partnered with the social search engine Sproose, to provide dynamic search results for Sproose's video search. Sproose lets its users vote on the best results, to make searches more relevant.
Digg's Labs section launched last year with new ways to visualize Digg activity. Last week BigSpy, a new visualization tool that's eye candy in the purest sense of the word, quietly popped up. New stories appear at the top of the page, which offsets the rest of the stories in a wavelike motion. The more popular a story, the larger it is and the bigger the "wave" it causes on other stories. It's a mesmerizing effect.
One of the other Digg Labs' tools, Stack, was also updated. Stack essentially shows the popularity of a story with columns of various heights. Each new Digg contributes to a story's height. With the update, you can now see newly submitted stories and easily see which ones are gaining in popularity. Neat.
- prev
- 1
- next
