coRank still has a long way to go, but I’m hoping there’ll be some cool things coming up along the way.

H Dursuzu

Our focus is on providing private group functions and enterprise feedback management for enterprises and websites and have paying customers in US and Asia, but we also offer a free version on our site. A user can join or start many groups, one for each interest or social network, see and manage all your groups on one page.

I consider Digg to be for one group already: young American male programmers. For people whose interests don’t match that group’s, Digg is not very useful.

Imagine groups based around different web communities — a “TechCrunch” group where the top stories include Web 2.0 stories that don’t necessarily make the cut on TechCrunch. An “Etsy” group with stories of interest to Do-It-Yourselfers. There could be all kinds of smaller groups — say, someone is interested only in social networking sites or only MySpace or crocheting or only vegan crocheting or whatnot.

I can see potential challenges — ie, what if I’m interested in vegan crocheting AND social networking sites, but don’t want my bookmarks to apply to both groups? If this is functional and slick, I think the userbase will follow, since bloggers and communities will promote their groups. I’m going to be rooting for CoRank!

I was pessimistic until the last sentence.

Although the feature list link you added explains it in greater detail, just to clarify, coRank isn’t so much about getting stories bookmarked by your friends, but about you selecting people whose opinion you value (like you’d do with the network feature of del.icio.us), and then, out of what all of your sources do (marking entries up or down), you get those stories that seem to be favored by most of them.

So in a way, it’s like a personalized Digg where you decide who plays the game when it comes to build *your* front page (if one source marks one story up, but the others mark it down, chances are you won’t see it in *your* front page). There’s more to it, such as discriminating your sources by topic “because I care about how Mike rates tech stuff, but don’t care about his taste in music or politics”.

In the end, I didn’t write coRank to build an empire (not even a little one) but to have fun and to build a site the way *I* would have liked Digg to be. And if in the process some people find the service to be useful, great. I know it works for me (got my sources, we’re all using it, done).

im not sure there’s enough space in the market?