Meshly is a new nanoblogging platform that's built around publishing via instant messages. Users can create and publish posts in AIM, Google Talk, or Windows Live Messenger using IM bots. Creating posts is like having a conversation with someone. Type "post" to the IM robot and it will ask you to fill out the post title, body, links, and tags, before it publishes the content to Meshly's post queue.
Once post are there, other Meshly users can vote to decide which ones are interesting. Stories that have piqued enough user interest will be promoted to the front page, which is a system closely matching Digg's.
Users can vote on small posts, comment on them, and see a short description.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I'm not sold on the usefulness of a system that enables posting only via instant messenger (instead of a browser and/or a mobile platform). Nor am I sold on the system's ability to scale to something the size Twitter has become. Just a casual glance at the front page of Twitter shows that all of the public posts have happened within the last minute--hardly something that can be kept track of easily. Digg has gotten around the problem of dealing with the huge amount of submissions by adding a cloud feature that groups together tons of headlines.
Adding a rating system on tiny blog posts to corral them is an interesting idea. I'd like to see something similar done to Twitter's limited favorites system, which becomes cluttered quickly for heavy Twitter users. For publishing, though, one of the things that makes services like Digg, Twitter, and Tumblr so great is their easy-to-use publishing tools.
[via StartupSquad]
CampusRank is a new service for ranking fellow college students, using a variety of yearbook-like categories. The service ties into Facebook, making use of the social network's application programming interface, so users simply log in with their Facebook account to begin voting. CampusRank launched quietly last week, and is making its official live service announcement tomorrow morning. The service is limited to just under 300 college networks, and does not allow private groups or company users.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
CampusRank lets users choose from 34 categories to nominate friends for things like "Most Athletic," "Most Friendly," "Best Hair," and so on. And by friends, I mean that CampusRank won't let you nominate people from your school who aren't on your Facebook friends list. You can't even look them up--a major flaw in my opinion. To sort through the people who are your Facebook friends, CampusRank provides a quick list to scroll through. Once someone has been nominated, there's a ranking system where other CampusRank users can rate them on a scale of 1 to 10.
CampusRank is an interesting take on combining social democracy tools and social networks in one space. However, things get mired down by the friends list limitation and by requiring Facebook users to venture off-site to use the service, two things that need to change before the service can really take off. Screenshots after the jump.
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Spotplex is an interesting take on social-voting sites. If you're familiar with Digg's system of user voting for story promotion, you'll notice that Spotplex takes a slightly different approach, counting click-throughs per link to promote stories to the front page. For blogs or Web site owners, submitting stories is automatic if you add a piece of code to your site. Spotplex then crawls and adds your content to the list of upcoming stories.
Spotplex has an arguably better system for site owners to add stories and to keep track of how popular a story is without using third-party analytics. The system becomes problematic with obscure links, which are common of Digg front page content. There's also a lack of editorial freedom when compared to submitting a story to a site like Digg or Netscape, where you can create your own description and add relevance to the site's readership.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Interestingly enough, Spotplex has employed tags instead of categories, which Digg users often find limiting. Spotplex stories can have several tags, which leaves the possibility for abuse or mislabeling.
What currently limits the Spotplex system is the lack of user interaction. There's no way to comment or effectively disagree with a story that's been posted. From a content provider standpoint, this is great, as it forces visitors to use your comment system and interact with your site. However, as a Digg user, I will often read a popular story or link I don't think is very interesting and want to talk about it in the same place I found it, something that Spotplex currently can't do.
Keep an eye on this one.
[Found on TechCrunch]
-- Google expands video ad test. Not to be confused with ads placed in user-generated videos on Google Video and YouTube, these video ads from Google will be embedded videos on the page that users must click on to begin. Google is now partnering with content providers such as The Wall Street Journal and Epicurious.com to bring Adsense video ads. (CNET News.com)
-- AT&T to ramp up IPTV rollouts. While Joost and Babelgum have made some noise among the blogs, the prospect of watching IPTV programming on an actual TV is coming closer to being a reality. AT&T is planning on getting IPTV to eight million homes by the end of the year. (CNET News.com)
-- MySpace confirms upcoming launch of Mexican version. Rupert Murdoch wants to say "hola" to the one million-plus MySpace users from Mexico who will have their own localized version of the site in just a few weeks. (CNET News.com)
--Netscape 9 standalone browser to integrate social bookmarking features. The once dominant browser that gave birth to the now popular Firefox is getting a facelift and an upgrade with some tie-ins to the Netscape.com democratic news service. Users will be able to check mail, friend activity, and add stories to the Netscape.com home page with integrated browser buttons. (The Netscape Blog)
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
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