Digg competitor Mixx continues to impress us with new features (although the exodus of Digg users to them may have been short lived).
A new feature launches this week on Mixx called Related Items. It solves a common problem found on Digg and other sites where multiple articles on the same story compete with each other to get to the home page. One person may submit a story from USAToday. Another may submit basically the same story but from the Washington Post. Those stories are tracked separately on Digg, and votes are split between them as users discover them. The result is that the story takes longer to get to the home page than it otherwise should. Or worse, both make it and the story is duplicated. Digg catches duplicate submission for the exact same link, but they are unable to determine if stores are related.
The Related Items feature on Mixx flags a submission when it thinks that a story is similar. A message appears that says “We may already have this story! Or at least one startling similar. Take a look at the stories below.” The user submitting the related story can then choose to submit it anyway, or add it as a related item to the previous submission. Digg also flags stories that may be similar to other submissions, but does not offer the ability to cluster the new story to the old ones.
There is a benefit to the submitter in adding the story to the previous submission because the new story will be added, too (and traffic will flow). Users benefit because they get more information and perspectives on the story. Here’s a screen shot of how the clustering will look (click for bigger view):
The clustering that will occur from this will very much resemble TechMeme, which is a great way to quickly find multiple perspectives on the news.
Mixx, which is backed by Intersouth Partners and the LA Times, is still a tiny blip compared to competitors like Digg and Reddit. Comscore says Digg has 12 million unique monthly visitors, compared to about a million on Reddit. Mixx? They’ve got just 45,000. That’s probably a low count, since newer and smaller sites are much harder for Comscore to measure. but they have a long, long way to go before they are even no. 2 in this market. The company was founded by Chris McGill.
Digg already shows you possible duplicates before submission. Don’t think they have clustering though.
Indeed this is a big issue and a reason why we don´t use digg anymore.
yeah agree. It has a sort of duh factor now that i see it.
This is a big advantage. I think I will switch..
That “feature” should’ve been a basic requirement.. Web 2.0 companies should really try harder to solve harder problems.. the suppress-duplicate “feature” should’ve been one such basic problems to solve.
Agree to #5
Technicle, you really need to build some credibility up before you start talking about what’s obvious or not. Have you started a company? worked in a startup? anything?
read this:
http://www.tech...n-in-the-arena/
seriously, these guys are out there kicking ass for the thrill of it. don’t criticize until you’ve walked in their shoes.
Surely it won’t be that difficult to Digg to add this feature, which then renders Mixx worthless with no competitive advantage?
The trouble with such sites is that to succeed they can’t rely on one minor benefit that can (probably, I have no idea) be easily copied by others. The model itself needs to be different enough to survive and succeed.
Mixx will never overtake reddit or digg, and there is only space for two big competitors to handle the 80% market share of generic news in digg or digg clone space.
Being no 3 is never a good place to be, which is exactly why many conglomerates aim to be no. 1 or 2 in their target market and if they can’t achieve that, sell out to either of the market leaders or close shop.
1) It will literally take a few weeks for Digg developers to implement this feature.
2) Being able to cluster related stories is not a strong value proposition for users to switch from Digg to Mixx.
The biggest problem with Digg is not the dupes, but the fact that it can be gamed and controlled by a small majority.
Digg readers are retards.
@7
but to appreciate your time typing up the questions and recalling the Vardi article (read before, great one) — yes, started the first ISP in HK in 1992 which was acquired by a large US ISP in 1998.. and VP of Tech and/or CTO of public companies since the dotcom era… anyway, for what matters here, suppress-duplicate is just a feature so basic and simple, isn’t that true?
For what’s to the point, suppress-duplicate is a feature so basic of such service;
For the try-harder point of view, I’d recall the first prominent proposer of that idea of “Web2.0 companies should try harder in solving problems” was the creator of json, of yahoo;
For credibility, guess that’s not required for voices from wisdom of the crowds.. aka grassroot media.. or citizen journalism..
Digg flags stories that may be similar but later leave you to post once you swear that it’s original.
“Surely it won’t be that difficult to Digg to add this feature, which then renders Mixx worthless with no competitive advantage?”
This is slowly becoming one of the most annoying mantras on Techcrunch. So no one is allowed to attempt an innovation on an idea apart from the incumbent service? That won’t make for a very healthy industry, I think. In your world we’d all still be using Myspace instead of Facebook, for crying out loud.
Eventually, big incumbent services will be outpaced by smaller services and the cycle will go on and the VC money will keep rolling. That’s just the way things are. Digg is a great site, but as the company grows they won’t be able to keep pace with the smaller companies who have more drive than they do. I can’t remember the last time digg added a feature that made me sit up and take notice (does anyone really use those faddy “labs” things?) but this made me instantly think “wow, that makes a crapload of sense”. It’s not going to sway me into becoming a member of Mixx, but if they keep the pace up and release new functionality like this with some regularity – or at least faster than Digg can – then I may have to give the service some serious consideration.
@14
you can innovate and implement useful features as much as you like, but if the value proposition is not good enough for people to switch, then it’s useless.
Incremental improvements like these are great, but for Mixx to catch-up , it must be disruptive (there i said it) enough to upset the status quo.
@15
I’m not suggesting that the value proposition in this feature alone is good enough to make people switch – read my comment.
I’m saying that the smaller company is in a better position to release new and interesting features more quickly than the incumbent service that probably has bureaucratic / hierarchical issues as well as a much bigger user base to tip toe around trying not to alienate users through new, unwanted features.
And I’m saying that it’s fricking annoying to keep hearing “XYZ company can implement this in a week” – I have a feeling that it would take digg a week simply to get the idea approved, let alone developed and ready for a production level site that serves millions of pvs a day. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I’m saying they are bound by the constraints of their own professionalism and responsibility to investors and millions of users to not simply bash out new features on a whim and roll them into the main site whenever they feel like it or see something new and cool on a competing service.
@14, I think #15 summed things up quite well. What I am saying is that one small unique feature such as this isn’t going to be the foundation for success – it’s the business model that needs to be different enough to stand out from the crowd and differentiate from the big players.
Facebook didn’t clone Myspace and add the friend updates feature – it’s entire approach to social networking differed enough to stand out and appeal to users.
I wonder if Kerry at Mixx did forward my suggestion to the Mixx team:
http://www.m4tt...hat-mixx-needs/
My suggestion being: “A way to add a submission to another submission, the article’s linked in the submissions may reference the same source but have different stances for instance.”
Mixx’s community is one of the best I have been a part of IMO.
45K is not bad for a company that has not been around for long!
Things take time!
@16 “…I have a feeling that it would take digg a week simply to get the idea approved, let alone developed and ready for a production level site that serves millions of pvs a day.”
assumption is the mother of all f’ups
the problem with both platforms is that they are not open enough to make it easier to find what users need and what they want. They can’t find new ideas that they can implement because the ideas and suggestions are scatttered on different blogs and websites. Good opportunities are there for those who want to seize them. Making digg or mixx a more friendly and pro-user space should be a priority otherwise they will end up losing users to competitors.
For now Digg is ahead in the race, but for how long we don’t know. If it want to keep the crown, Digg should create a section where users will be able to submit ideas and not only stories // vote on ideas and not only on stories.
They need something more than a forum(which btw they don’t have).
Digg seems to be having 25M uniques/mo according to Quantcast and since the site is quantified this number can be taken for real. Both Reddit (~1M/mo) and Mixx (~40K/mo) are not quantified, but the Quantcast’s numbers seem to be matching the Comscore’s.
45,000 and climbing.
Mixx wins for me just because the community is less hostile. I tired to use Digg but was always met with rude and obnoxious users/comments.
Mixx does a better job at catering to the user. If you ask, they will listen and will take your suggestions and try to implement them into the upcoming releases. I know there numbers do not compare with that of Reddit or Digg but I know in time they will. There is too much passion and hard work behind the product for it to not.
Transparency: I do know some of the mixx developers but this is not why I use the site. I use apps/products that make my life easier and allow me to take daily tasks and shrink the amount of time those tasks normally take. Mixx does this. I get my news from mixx instead of printed papers, or scouring all the news sites out there. Sure there are other sites, but the design, user experience and overall karma coming out of the company is what has drawn me. If you use the site for a bit and stop being “the critic” I think you will embrace it also.
Might want to checkout newspond.com, it was just launched
It looks better than all of them IMHO
They shouldn’t have given this power to keep stories in one related post, as it may misused in long term and may bear unexpected results. Should have followed Techmeme type algorightm, so that readers can rely on it.
There is nothing wrong with being number 3 in this space. Online news is a huge market, and there is plenty of room for innovation and new players. The usual reaction of ‘Just another social news site’ doesnt really work with me. Google was just another search engine. Lets give these guys a chance and the market will decide their fate, not us posting comments on this blog.
Also, Mike – I think your reaction to Technicle’s comment (#5) was a bit harsh. He is entitled to an opinion, regardless of his startup experience. I understand your point (and live it each day as an entrepreneur), but you came down pretty hard on the guy!
I don’t know what is new about this feature.. Indianpad, a Indian centered digg clone has this feature right from the day i joined it.. (should be a year back)..
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think Mixx’s advantage is the potential in their location based submissions. As this type of news generation becomes more mainstream (see iReport on CNN), Mixx could be poised to steal that market away from Digg.
This feature is nice, but I agree that Digg could do something similar.
@27
but then, people (me included) post here not only wanting to be heard, but also are prepared to be “crunched” also… particularly our first[trade]name is called tech 
I’d certainly second that
I just wanted to point out that you have a typo in your quote of the message from Mixx. You put “Or at least one startling similar” but it should read “…startlingly similar.’
This sounds like a great feature for Mixx. However, it seems to me that Mixx is going to have to have some much more significant additional features and perhaps some good luck to ever overcome Digg.
wow, that’s a nice post.
While sites like Mixx and Digg do a great job at aggregating content for the tech audience what about other niches? We decided to address this question and created a social bookmarking site for African Americans. It is based on modded version of Pligg and we launch in January. Check us out if you are looking for content for the urban audience.
i was gonna mention, laughably, that CoRank clusters related items, too… then i went to CoRank (something i never do) to verify and saw that major changes have been made… if you thought it was bad before, you aint seen nothing… it’s terrible now!!!
a lot of commenters are talking about “luck” lately like it’s a major deciding factor or something… again, put Mixx and CoRank side by side…. what’s that about luck? They won’t need luck to overcome digg… they will need to consistently improve their product and give the users what they want… they need to work hard. It’s not about luck.
Why you guys just stick with digg, digg -> ready to more features ->
An emerging local news,videos powered by users, a good competitor for digg &
mixx.
http://popdup.com
I *really* hate to be the “we did this years ago” guy, but we’ve been doing this (and just about everything else Mixx seems to be adding) at Newsvine almost since the beginning. Duplicate stories based on URL? Got it. Related stories based on content of article? Check. In fact, we database the full text of stories that aren’t even hosted on our site… so if, say, someone seeds a TechCrunch article about YouTube getting acquired and then the AP writes about it, there is a link placed automatically at the end of each article, pointing to the other. No editors… all automatically via algorithm.
Also, I think groups were what the last Mixx writeup was about. We’ve had public, private, and secret groups for about a year and a half or so.
Anyway, not dissing Mixx at all… good job Mixxers. Just pointing out that they are following smartly and not leading, which is often a better strategy anyway. Heck, we weren’t the first to have groups either.
I actually had an idea for this type of relations wish I acted on it.
@36:
the difference is you are doing it algorithmically and don’t relate videos and photos and blogs and all else. People doing it makes a big difference from what is essentially a search result from newsvine. Not that what newsvine is doing is bad, but there is a difference.
Mixx is clearly setting the pace in this three-way marathon (four if you count reddit). Between being first with photos, videos and now this – it is becoming more and more evident that the people running Mixx are a lot smarter than the brains behind their competitors. I wish I could buy stock in Mixx….
@34 … clearly you were thinking of “tailRank” not “coRank” … of course coRank looks nothing like tailRank… hehehe. and no, tailRank hasn’t updated their stuff any… and yeah. they cluster stories and techCrunch rips them to shreds. hehehe. oh well.