Reddit announced an open source version of its popular news aggregator service this evening, and we’ve launched our own version of the service, called TechCrunch TechNews. Links from any news source can be added, we’ll leave it up to the community to filter it up or down.
This is to take nothing away from Reddit itself, or Digg, Hacker News or the other dozens of news aggregation sites out there. We just want to see the news that our own community thinks is most relevant, and Reddit just made that incredibly easy for us.
We put this together pretty quickly this afternoon, and it is still on one of our test servers. Over the next few days we’ll get the details sorted out.
Here is a (completely unwatchable) video stream from the Reddit party tonight where earlier tonight they announced the new product, and the launch of TechNews.
lol
Too hard to set up a proxy that you have to use an iframe pointing directly to the WSGI server? Maybe a Reddit clone is *hard* to set up
The First rule about yc is you don’t talk about yc. Live it, love it.
Hmmm… cannot load the page.
Works for me.
down
This post assumes that the Techcrunch and Reddit audiences are fairly different. I beg to differ. I predict Technews competing with Mixx for #3 in the space in a few months.
Ely Rosenstock
http://www.crastinate.com
reddit is really okay with you using their logo like that? seems like asking for it, should conde nast find out about it.
For those who are having issues; the DNS is still propagating.
shawn, to the contrary, using their logo is apparently a requirement of using the code.
oh wow, i hadn’t looked into it that far. that’s an odd thing to do with a respectable brand.
I’m still waiting for more Elevator Pitch videos. I love that site.
snazy
well…
the more popular reddit clones will be popular and successful anyway and reddit can cover their sitting area with our code is open source and our brand is only used for acknowledgment of the original creator we do not specifically endorse the content or audiences of derivative services so if anything notorious happens they can make it look like it was not their fault
kudos to TechCrunch team for getting a reddit clone up so fast. By requiring the use of reddit logo, reddit actually gains more brand recognition. Now people who visit any of the sites that uses reddit code would get familiar with the reddit alien logo as well.
If you really just wanted a place for your users to submit stories for you, why didn’t you just create a reddit for that purpose on reddit.com?
And technically, you’re still in violation of the license. You are supposed to include this image along with your attribution text: http://code.red...reddit_logo.png
Jedberg: attribution is fixed.
wow! t’was fast..
Michael,
Why don’t you guys just use pligg?
michael and others, would you be willing to contribute to the documentation at reddit’s wiki by explaining how you ran the set up on what looks like a mediatemple box?
@jeffohara – reddit is fast and easy, pligg is great but slow and suffers from feature creep (at least in past 6 months)
Pretty cool, will be interesting to see it in a few months.
You’re going to make Reddit regret they ever opened the API… I wonder how many of the technews.techcruch links overlap with Reddit’s home page – Will they bleed users as niche sites use the technology?
Same goes for Hakia who opened the API today. What is the benefit to them beyond branding?
Works for me.
Unless I’m missing something, TechNews doesn’t seem to have syndication feeds. Any reason for that?
More DNS propagation. Sorry folks. TechNews does have feeds, they’ll be up when the DNS flushes.
@Henry: Glad to see you guys are so responsive. Although you still didn’t answer my question about why you guys didn’t just make a reddit on reddit.com for this purpose months ago when that feature came out.
Sure thing Jedberg. Thanks a lot for the open sourcing the sucker! Quite a project.
As for why we went with our own install, we’ve been thinking about doing a similar site for a while. We’d like to integrate TechNews into our properties, customize a lot of stuff, have our own branding, etc. Thanks to you guys, we have a great head start.
Henry,
I understand. We just didn’t offer the customiztion you needed. Thanks for the feedback.
We’re glad you guys will be able to use our code — after all, that is one of the main reasons we released it.
Just don’t forget to make your source code public, so if you do something cool, we can fold it back into reddit.com!
It’s quite interesting to see TechCrunch putting up a version of Reddit, because of the recent dispute with CondeNet. Interesting…
not a lot going on in the site…