Despite my fondness for customizable start pages (Netvibes, iGoogle, My Yahoo, etc.), I have found myself continuing to use PopUrls, a pre-built aggregation page that's almost as useful as a customizable page.
Unlike other start pages, PopUrls is not general-purpose like iGoogle or My Yahoo. It is an aggregation site for dweebs, with a focus, by default, on tech-friendly user aggregation sites Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. It does, to be fair, grab headlines from The New York Times and Google News, but also does so from Slashdot and Wired. A top content section aggregates the popularity of PopUrls items across sites, giving you a very good idea of what's popular across all the tech aggregation sites at any given moment.
Not necessarily the news, but what the nerds at the major sharing sites are interested in.
PopUrls does offer customization features and alternative views, if you do want to adjust it. I have not. And recently, PopUrls got a new sharing feature. If you create an account with the service, you can get your own page, which shares items you like with others. You also get a widget to embed on your site. And you can set the system to send your shared items out to feeds like Twitter.
Given its built-in functionality and focus on tech, I find PopUrls a useful counterpart to TechMeme, which is far more responsive to news items and which does a better job of grouping stories together (PopUrls doesn't group similar stories at all). PopUrls tends to point to more frivolous stories, but it does show you what's striking the fancy of the geek set over a somewhat longer period of time.
Like top ten lists? You might like SmashBuys, a link aggregator of the best selling items on the Web. Sites included are Amazon, iTunes, VGchartz, and Downloads from Webware's sister site Download.com. There are nine in all, and clicking any link will send you straight to the product page. You can also hover over any item to learn more about it.
It was pitched to us as a PopUrls for products, which is very true, although Smashbuys users have the added benefit of seeing how popular each link is with the community. Items that get more clicks get their own form of promotion, making it pretty simple to see two layers of data at once. Go give it a spin.
Track what's hot all over the Web with Smashbuys, a single page aggregator for products.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
While there's a giant crowd of people waiting for Digg to unveil its pictures section, there are already several services available for browsing popular news by pictures, including Google News and AOL's Mgnet (coverage). There's also a smaller, more independent group of sites that have been created by fans of some of these sites who have created their own visual solutions. One of them--Reddit Media--has increasingly become so popular it's led to Digpicz (Digg in pictures), and now PicUrls--which is a play on words, and similarity to the popular aggregator PopUrls.
The site pulls in stories and pictures from nine popular user-generated services including Digg, Flickr, Reddit, and Del.icio.us to name a few. It accomplishes this task by scraping the story data, going to the targeted news page, and pulling the relevant photo thumbnail. As the end user, you're getting a quick, direct link to the story, and a small view of what awaits you once you get there.
Like other aggregation services, PicUrls adds its own layer of social networking with integrated comments that layer on top of each service and integrated forums. You can also drill down to each individual site to see a complete listing of the latest popular stories, 16 at a time.
I absolutely love services like this that piggyback on one design and create a whole new way to visualize content. It's one of the things that made the Digg Labs visualization contest so enjoyable. While I'd prefer to see these projects using open APIs over scraping, in this case it's only being done once for the service, rather than for every user.
See also: Digg doesn't have a photo section yet, but these seven sites do
[via Digg]
Check out news from everyone with engaging thumbnails using PicUrls.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
SportSnipe is a new single-page aggregator the likes of Original Signal, PopUrls, and others, although it's focused specifically on sports feeds from all over the world. Users can browse through headlines and video thumbnails for various leagues, genres, and teams. Like Original Signal, SportSnipe has the option to hover over any headline to read the first few lines of the story, along with a comment button that lets registered users add their own commentary to the story--separate of the parent site.
The service claims to pull its headlines from over 1,300 different sports feeds. It also doubles as a regular old build-it-yourself feed aggregator similar to Netvibes and PageFlakes, albeit a little less flashy. Users can add RSS feeds as either text or video feeds. The video feed catcher is especially cool and gives you a little thumbnail for each clip. If you do this with a text feed, you won't get anything but a black box.
SportSnipe has a few ways to sort and share content. You can bookmark pages you'd like to share with others through a variety of social bookmarking sites. You can also turn off comments and hover over previews. With a quick toggle you can rearrange the feed boxes and extend the feeds to see more than just a few headlines. There are also embed codes for putting your feeds on a blog, Web site, or social networking profile (which I've done to the right.)
In many ways, SportSnipe isn't very original as a single-page aggregator. Pageflakes and Netvibes do a much better job with their presentation, and the resemblance to Popurls and Original Signal is unquestionable. However, SportSnipe has a really great directory of sports feeds that aggregate quickly and are far more comprehensive than what Original Signal offers. The video feed implementation is a nice touch as well.
More screens after the jump.
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