POPrl, a new site from the developers of uLiken, is trying to bring a new twist to the Digg/Reddit user-submitted story space. Instead of relying on a voting system that can be easily gamed, POPrl measures a story’s popularity by looking at its virality – the more people that click a link, the more popular a story is (makes sense, right?)
Users submit their favorite stories to the site and get the equivalent of a TinyURL (e.g. http://poprl.com/r/q is the URL for this post). Users then take this tiny URL and distribute it around the web through Twitter, SMS, or other websites. The site measures the number of clicks that link gets, and uses an an algorithm to determine a story’s popularity. The most popular stories are featured on the site’s front page, though clicks from here won’t count towards their popularity score.
Unfortunately, this system has some fundamental flaws. The site’s short URLs provide absolutely no information about what they’re linking to – users can say whatever they want in an attempt to get others to click on their links. Sam Bensalem, one of the site’s co-founders, explains that users who abuse the system will lose trust from their respective online communities, so people will stop clicking their links. In a perfect world that might be true, but you can be sure that spammers will simply find new online forums to flood with links offering new iPhone details (or something equally tempting).
POPrl has a compelling idea, but it’s going to have a hard time weeding out the spammers in its current form. For the time being the site can probably afford to use human intervention to ensure that spammers don’t get their way, but they’re going to need to figure something else out if they want this to scale.
a way to link baiting. i would say. and people are not getting backlinks.
So all you have to do is to make people open the link?
That’s ridiculously easy to game. All you have to do is submit the link to one of those traffic exchange sites (autosurfs or manual surf).
Thanks for the review Jason.
We are currently working on a tracking algorithm to minimize click fraud and to maintain the quality of our links.
It might be good if it worked at all. I tried two different URLs and they either went nowhere or sent me to a hacker site.
Sorry about that Michelle. The heavy load is causing the site to act erratic. Should be solved shortly.
I think we just pulled a twitter.
Kinda sorta doesn’t work…
You cant even judge a regular digg story URL by clicks – that only measures the popularity of the *headline*.
Which every digg user knows is consistently sensationalized beyond any sensible limits in order to get the click.
Digg headlines frequently read like Weekly World News.
@7 that’s also one of the benefits of our site. All of our headlines are pulled directly from the site.
http://www.poprl.com/r/0M
Seems they could add a service like the http://ri.ms URL shortener and allow people to submit their own text descriptions if available. Still no certainty where it comes from, but they have the ability to do a “preview before sending me” thing like TinyURL supports.
The link you gave is wrong, it should be http://poprl.com/r/S as is depicted in the screenshot you included in this article.
these sites are lame
digg is the king
all these clones need to go after another market
is this what web 2.0 has begun copycats
become lol
@12, kind of. but there aren’t a lot average web user knows about Digg as well.
Step 2: RICKrl
Very similar to yoorl.com. Yoorl.com also gives you real time info on who’s watching the URL you sent/posted RIGHT NOW and the way the link spreads around the world via a dashboard. Check it out!
I tried to use the service for my site and it generated a link to foo.com
Hey there,
I am building a mixed music blogs aggregator to post updates of mixtapes, mixes, shows, dj mixes, live concerts, podcasts ect….
I just post your latest update`s on my blog spot?
If you mind, let me know.
In the future you can post your update`s yourself and i will post them on my blog.
I only post the links to your site, NO deeplinking.
You can post your updates
Here
Go to the blog and hit the “add your blog” button.
To add your blog in the Lists
Thx and keep up the good work.
DaDexter – The Mixdiggerz
http://mixdigge...z.blogspot.com/
where did you find this
Sounds like a little fun project I put together called http://yuarel.com, minus the whole digg/reddit community aspect.
From what I’ve experienced on my little site, most people will create URLs not related to the content their linking to. (In most cases with Yuarel, it’s a RickRoll, not spam.)
They’re using the trust system to prevent spammers? It’s sort of a ridiculous notion to assume clickers will stop trusting a spammer’s links since they will sprinkle their links with different identities all over the web (and possibly spam email?). Perhaps they’ll have other mechanisms in place to prevent such things. They’d better.
Lucky760
http://www.videosift.com