Digg revolutionized social news when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of news link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers.
Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule. The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg, which lets users “build their own Digg”.
But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg - sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service.
*Personalized refers to recommendations uniquely tailored for each user
BlinkList
BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link.
ClipMarks
Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole.
CoRank
CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page.
Netscape
Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team of anchors to submit stories and cut out spam. The anchor’s stories are featured on the front page along with the current top 25 stories. They also got into a little hot water with their recruitment practices. Netscape has managed a greater variety of content in it’s front page, pulling 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels.
Newsvine
Instead of a submission free-for-all, Newsvine implemented it’s own form of quality control by only allowing users to vote on content from the Associated Press and other user’s personal articles. Users are given a live feed of all the latest AP stories, voting on articles and writing their own on their personal column page. Newsvine shares 90% of all revenue generated by advertisements on your column page with the user. Users can also personalize their feed
OpenServing
OpenServing is a product of Wikia, and the opensource version of BlinkList works for fun or profit. The concept is the same, a personal page of links, democratically ranked by your friends, but it also lets you post your own ads on the site.
Reddit
Reddit made headlines when Conde Nast acquired them. The site is a favorite of mine and is still up and running, with some key differences from Digg. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot, -1 for cold), meaning a story can dance up and down Reddit’s top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. To see what’s on top now, there’s also a “hot” list. This type of voting system also means the front page can be stagnant, to the chagrin of some users, but it has also avoided Digg’s payola scandals. Another bigger differentiator for Reddit is their recommended article page, which suggests links based on your voting pattern.
Spotback
Spotback is an automated alternative to Digg, that aims to use personalization to improve the signal to noise ratio of the stories you see. You train Spotback by clicking and voting on the stories it digs up. Voting positively on a story causes Spotback to reveal the next most relevant story. One of the best parts about Spotback is that it doesn’t even require a registration to get up and running.
Spotplex
Spotplex is another automated link site that automatically submits stories from blogs carrying its badge. Stories are then ranked on the Spotplex homepage based in part on how many views the article generates (the algorithm is still being tweaked). The site’s automation and closely controlled blogroll seems has avoided the types of rigging Digg was subjected to, but it lacks the community of commentors that make these social media sites addictive.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon provides a different user experience while discovering and digging up links. You use a tooblar (FF & IE) to tag, submit, and vote for links. While the site does rank links the main experience is by taking a random walk around the internet. It keys in on Diggs greatest strength, an easily accessible constant stream of interesting links. StumbleUpon is definitely catching on, they recently surpassed 2 million users.
Comments
That is great research….it will be exciting to see how these service mature and dominate content picking.
Spotplex has potential. They really need the community following and I agree that allowing comments would help that cause.
>> Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance
Well, it sure seems to have cornered the market in Wii vs PS3 and Apple/Linux vs Msoft fanboy wars - but important?
Has Digg broke a story?
Is Digg making money?
Is a million registered users worldwide actually a big number for a site doing social news?
The BBC’s message boards in the UK have 4-times more users than that…
Digg is definitely NOT a social bookmarking site. If you submitted sites to digg simply because you wanted to go back to them later it will get buried as spam and that site will then be prevented from being submitted in the future.
I also don’t see any of these sites doing any damage to Digg because, let’s be honest, exceptions aside, Digg has an extremely loyal user base and only a complete diaster on Digg’s part could do any damage to them.
Where I see Digg stuck and with little chances of getting out at least for now, is about the demographics of that user base. Yes, they can add politics, sports, diversify the categories, etc. However that mainly gives more categorization to the same user base.
One note on coRank - yes your main filter is the people you select as your sources, but also, if you want, you can select categories of interest for each of your sources - the typical example: I’m interested in what Mike Arrington considers interesting regarding tech stuff, but I don’t want to know a thing about his musical preferences
In my opinion Newsvine.com is to date the finest publishing platform I have ever found.
“Toward a Better Digg”, huh?
In order to achieve that goal (a better digg), what they need to do is implement some user standards. At the moment, almost every one of those million users is a 13-year-old Apple/iPod/Linux/Wii fanboy who will automatically bury anything that’s pro Microsoft/Christianity/Religion in general/George Bush without actually reading it.
Digg’s pretty bad, but I generally look because maybe 2 or 3 front page links are worthwhile or interesting. The rest are Apple or Google. Gets old fast.
Reddit’s the worst of the bunch, they had the top 13 straight stories being impeachment stories maybe 2 weeks ago, and truly believed it was a widespread reflection of public sentiment. Then last week they had a day where stories were just disappearing. So there were like 8 stories on there. Any given day, if you want a nice view of far-left sentiment, it’s kind of fun.
After some time Spotplex might get good, we’ll see. The algorithm seems like for the start it might end up a little tough for small sites to get on.
My personal opinion is that my Pligg-based site is as good as it gets.
Spotplex only works with some kinds of blogs - the creator has not contacted me back since my first email to/fro him. Disappointing.
interesting digg-bait - esp. considering Mr. Arrington’s remarks a couple weeks ago regarding digg:
“no, we don’t care that much about digg traffic actually. it’s far less than 10% of our total traffic, and when we aren’t on digg the comments are much more intelligent. digg is good for a quick traffic spike, but it isn’t a useful way to build an audience. I like digg as a business, but don’t really care about the links.
digg basically sends a never ending stream of angry 16 year olds. not something the sponsors are that interested in.”
And how is digg a social bookmarking site? what aspects does it have to be a social bookmarking site?
Despite what some people say about Digg they are the undisputed leader in this area. Once a site has gained the major market player in a particular area it is always difficult for others to move in late and over take them. That said we need competition and I like what some of these others sites are doing.
Nick:
*Please* don’t call this social bookmarking. Digg is *not* about *bookmarking*. Digg is about promoting interesting pieces as high on the list as possible. This type of stuff “mis-teaches” people about what bookmarking is about. As the result, I get to zap a PILE of self-promoters over at Simpy every day (minute?). The web is now full of people who write “articles” and then go around the web looking for places to submit their articles. That’s self-promotion in my book, not (social) bookmarking. Digg is not a social bookmarking service is. Del.icio.us is, Simpy is, but not Digg.
Where is del.icio.us on this table?
Will a newcomer stand a chance?
Digg is *so* last year.
Take a look at this pligg-based parody of digg.com, and other social applications addictions. Have fun! http://www.techjunkr.com
Can’t understand why spotplex is on this list.
Why didn’t you include the memetrackers like Tailrank? Explicit voting isn’t the only way to compute a link rank!
Hello guys… we have recently launched Profigg.com which is bound to become the main competitor of Digg… there are basically two main areas covered: Business&Technology… The reason why we started this site is that we have enough of small numbers of diggers who control the whole website… information should be equal… if you belong to those who used to write great posts,, but never got more than 20 diggs… join Profigg.com and get visibility for your posts…
The major difference between Digg and all those other sites has been quietly introduced recently, and in such a way that it is not recognized by major publications like TechCrunch.
I’m talking about the silent ban; the check against some websites which makes their stories buried and gone if someone looks at them the wrong way. It is not implemented against big sites no matter how much actual buries their stories get. But all the previously banned then unbanned sites, as well as many, many others cannot get to the front page anymore. Users can submit stories from these websites, but the chance of them not getting buried is nil. It is explained in detail in this post over at 901am: http://www.901am.com/2007/has-.....sites.html
Why is this important? Because Digg is now profoundly different from all those other social content sites: it is no longer a good place to promote your young blog. It takes away a lot of Digg’s appeal if you’re a blogger, and I reckon that most bloggers will move on to other sites. Will this result in a better or worse Digg, I can’t say: but it definitely will make an impact.
These sites are well-known for their great content. But here in this post I’ve revealed som new for me. It’s great. Thank you!
I just signed up for ClipMarks.They have a really cool idea and a proposition with real value to it.
A few comments along the lines of ‘digg isn’t bookmarking’ above ring true. They shouldn’t, but they do. I use del.icio.us for bookmarking and avoid participating in Digg (and reddit) just because I get sick of abusive messages from Digg zealots calling me an idiot for bookmarking a site. I still surf Digg from time to time.
If I bookmark a deep page on my own site on del.icio.us it will often be because it’s easier to tell a friend to check my del.icio.us feed for ‘arkatena’ rather than read out a big URL. Do that with Digg and my site risks a life ban. Great!
If one of these services can nail this issue, allowing bookmarking to live alongside collective intelligence then I might learn which other sites are clustered around my bookmarks. Which seems to be the killer service to the surfer.
Digg like are very cool just to read news like when in a waiting room!
Stumble Upon is personalized….you select categories that you wish to “stumble upon” and then you rate pages and the algorithm selects pages that you would like.
If that isn’t personalized then I don’t know what is.
It’s worth having a look at SpicyPage too:
http://www.spicypage.com/
I signed up for StumbleUpon a year go, played around for a week then lost track of it until last month when someone added one of my tech blog posts. In one week I had more traffic to the site than I had in the previous four months. I was shocked to realize how big it had become and I’m definitely watching it more now. I reinstalled the toolbar and have found quite a few interesting articles, some of which I’ve added to my Del.icio.us-powered links blog.
I agree with the poster above…Martin about stumbleupon. I had written them off a long time ago when you had to install a toolbar….now that it is simply a firefox “extension” it doesn’t seem to bother me but it is essentially the same thing. All in the name.
Shredder
OMG …I love techcrunch, but get your facts straight. StumbleUpon is older then Digg, much older! StumbleUpon has been around even before the IT Bubble Crashed, Digg only came afterwards.
StumbleUpon is NOW heavily influenced by Digg, with digg articles getting syumbled obviously.
Muvy is in some ways better than all of them.
http://Muvy.org
/. where’d you go?
Stumbleupon is the most original of the ones I’m familiar with — and in some ways the best.
However, for fast access to interesting new links, it’s not competitive with the likes of Digg. Now I’m off to look at these other Digg competitors. Thanks for the list!
I think StumbleUpon is the one with the most potential out of that list. They just need to diversify their offerings - but they already have a great db of users and links to start with.
Stumble upon does seem to have the most attraction of the lot, even though they could do many things to improve the quality of the service (basically offer better views on their data).
Just their name alone is going to dissuade many important contributors (”Hey come waste some time with us”).
I think most if not all of these sites are going to have problems growing bigger than their current herd of people that say “cool” too much.
Are there any amalgamation services? i.e. the dogpile of recs?
I’m always impressed (perplexed?) at how so many Digg articles only have one to five diggs to their credit, but a couple still have diggs up in the 500 to 2000 range.
I can’t help but think there’s something fishy about that, and the minute I figure out what it is, I’m doing it.
The word “bespoke” does not mean what you think it does.http://www.audiocdburner.net
I don’t see why digg has to be changed. It’s great the way it is now!
I think you missed Shoutwire (http://shoutwire.com).
IMO, Stumbleupon is definitely the future. Will the Diggers continue to have the same motivation 2 years from now, I do not know.
Digg isn’t a Social Bookmarking Site. Its a social news site.
Sreejith:
Correct. See comment #12 above.
Steve M:
If you are interested in that type of discovery (finding sites similar to the ones that you’ve bookmarked), have a look at “Similar users” feature at Simpy. It’s not direct site-2-site matching, but rather user-2-user matching, which ends up being tags-2-tags matching, and that in turns tends to discover sites-similar-2-sites. For example, see “Similar users” on my profile. Over time I’ve gotten to know to some of the people listed under “Similar users” on my profile page, and indeed we have very similar interests, showing that this stuff works and matches even real life situation, not just online presence data.
Exciting getting a page rank 7 back link - is it not
- Great article too! 
I wonder if Google will eventually mine their contact lists for bookmarks? It seems like they could have their toolbar suck in URLs added to lists that can mux with your contacts. This would be a truly “popular with your friends” ranking approach. Then again, it might just reinforce the same links you already shared… but having a way to let Google Reader export the OPML in real time would be kind of neat. I already like the ability to “share” with Reader but I’m not clear that there is a way to bring community to the application or where community would drive items towards…
This is a great list, thanks.
very usefull article.
I think that spotBack using an algorithm to rank, isn’t in the same category like digg or netscape
Netscape has tags as well… might want to fix that chart!
Digg should let you set up your own categories for the links, make it easier to look through later
It would be interesting to hear folks talk a bit about the way the market will evolve between pligg and ning…
I would add Profigg.com to this list… even though is in a Beta cversion you can already win prizes… so the advantage is that you can do 2 things at the same time… submit stories exactly as you do with digg and win books, cds, etc. It’s great…isn’t it?
You were right Nick. Clipmarks really is a steamship porthole to the web… http://clipmarks.com/clipweek/
Somehow, amazingly, my web site was left off the list! It’s based on the pligg engine and is slowly gaining ground. We need new users for the community.
I don’t know … I still like digg better than all of these sites. I still think that with Digg’s high number of users, it’s still immune to the vote manipulation we see (buying votes, etc). But I wish there was a function in Digg where we can just read the articles above a certain Digg mark like 750 votes or something. If I had to choose any of these social bookmarking sites, I would definitely choose StumbleUpon. Really, what I look for in a social bookmarking site is one that boasts a large user base so that it “evens things out” so to speak. And StumbleUpon delivers on that aspect.
Allan
hacker not cracker
Digg works great for techies, but other type of sites or blogs do horrible & get buried quickly. i think Stumble Upon is the way to go for anyone with entertainment (music blog).
It just to inform, I also have a list of 150 social bookmarking site (above) i have not rank them. But I use them for my blog!
That a good information for social bookmark website. There is another site like digg sadta.com is a do follow social bookmark website.
Good list of social bookmarking site list.
can you please add one more site of sb
which is http://www.spicybookmark.com
thanks.
IT Chimes is India based global Web Solution and Offshore IT services provider. IT Chimes a web development company, develops, integrates and maintain web applications and custom applications. IT Chimes is your one stop IT solutions provider.
May i suggest another Seo friendly bookmark which have PR3 googletop.net
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