In response to Carissa, I don’t see any 70 day old stories on the frontpage, most of the stories are only an hour or so old, and the older ones on the front page are only a day or two old. It’s been a bit since her comment though, maybe it’s changed.

Also, there is a tell a friend feature, just click “Tell a Friend” and a form appears where you can notify a friend about the site. I’ve just used google talk to send the link to friends so I haven’t tried it yet.

Regarding adding friends, it took me a bit to figure it out, but in another person’s profile, click the plus sign that’s labeled add to friends and it sends them a friend request. I added a couple friends, and the friend notification is great, much better than Digg’s. It gives short descriptions of what your friends are doing on every page.

I say definitely check this one out, they’re doing lots of cool new things, especially for those interested in politics and the election.

Also, the site has a social networking kind of feature, so you can see how your friends have ranked stories. I thought this would be particularly interesting leading up to the election in Novemeber. It would be a great way to share articles with my friends. On every page of the site (for now at least) there is the following banner “Welcome to VoteOften, where you can find out what’s hot in politics. Take the site tour. Tell a friend!” There is nowhere on the site (I spent a good 20 minutes perusing the site) to send an invitation to your friend. So let’s say I send out an email to all my friends, urging them to join and be active so we can share stories. That’s great but unless I am able to connect to them, we won’t be sharing stories. At that point we might as well just email articles to each other.

So that’s a big flaw. I emailed the site a bit before 10 this morning, but still have not heard back. Will update if/when I recieve a response.

Also, when I click on friends, the site says “you haven’t added any friends.” Well that’s pretty obvious to me. On most social networking sites though there would be instructions as to how to add friend or how to find friends who had posted similar stories. Adding stories (submitting) is easy enough. I have posted 4 thus far. I posted all 4 about 3 hours ago. One story has three votes (one is mine), another has 12 votes, another only has two (so only one person besides me cares about that story), and the final submission only has my vote.

Bottom Line: The site seems to have a good concept. Too bad I can’t add friends to really utilize that idea.

On the flip side, I just saw Barack Obama’s house. It’s HUGE!