Three years ago, Paul Graham and his Y Combinator incubator funded Reddit, a social news site that has grown to over 2.5 million unique visitors a month. Reddit has never been able to match the success of Digg, its closest competitor, but in 2006 it got its payday after being acquired by Condé Nast/Wired for an undisclosed amount.
Now, it seems that Y Combinator is hoping that lightning will strike twice. Its latest startup, Slinkset, is looking to offer a “hosted Reddit” solution, allowing users to create their own social news sites with as little technical knowhow as possible. You can see a hosted version of the site that has been created for TechCrunch readers here.
At first glance, Slinkset looks like little more than a Reddit clone. Users can vote news stories Up or Down, with the most popular stories rising to the top of the page. The big difference here is that unlike Digg and Reddit, Slinkset isn’t looking to become a destination site. Instead, it’s offering users the chance to create their own branded “Reddits” with no coding necessary. For the time being Slinkset is offering its hosting service free of charge, with plans to introduce a fixed fee in the future.
Unfortunately, despite its aspirations to let users to create no-hassle branded pages, Slinkset’s customization options are pretty limited. Site admins can easily swap the color schemes, adjust fonts, and add a logo, but that’s about it. In the future the site hopes to integrate drag-and-drop widgets and ad placement, but with a company that currently consists of only two co-founders, these are probably a ways off.
So is Slinkset really necessary? You can already create your own hosted Reddit through Reddit itself (albeit with limited customizability). Mixx, another competitor in this space, also features a similar hosted offering.
And the site’s launch comes less than a month after Reddit went open-source, allowing developers to create their own, fully tweakable, Reddit clones (you can see our version, Tech News, here). Slinkset co-founder Brett Gibson says that while the release of Reddit’s source code will help skilled programmers create their own social news site, it won’t do any good for the legions of bloggers and small-time sites that don’t know how to implement it, which is where he hopes Slinkset comes in. This may be the case, but unless Slinkset can improve on its customization features, it will have a hard time separating itself from its well-established competitors.
sounds good to me – I just set one up – couldn’t have been easier. Looks like a nice service and you can do your own domains as well.
Sinkset really looks like Reddit. Same user voting system, but it could work.
Nath
htpp://www.themostpowerfulcompany.com
This service is fast and it works right out of the box. It’s easy to set up a website and try it out, then come back and customize it later. There are a lot of ways to make your own social news site, but none that will give you a branded solution with only a few clicks.
Sure slinkset could pack on a bunch of bells and whistles, but is that what social sites need? I think it’s aimed at users who are looking for a simple way to share news in a midsize group more than the hardcore web 2.0 crowd. It looks like it’ll serve that purposes just fine.
Man, these guys got royally screwed by Reddit open sourcing their platform
Well, the open sourcing is for programmers and Slinkset is for the rest of the population plus some lazy programmers
I love slinkset. I was in their beta and set up a News site that fit in perfectly with my main site.
Sure it probably won’t get bought by conde naste, but it’s great for those who have niche sites (like me).
One thing that I think is interesting is that you can use one account to browse through all public slinksets. This is an advantage over open source reddit where, I assume, you would have to have an account for each site.
I’m sorry but remind me again what the advantage is to having your own reddit?
Karn: But, you can create a subreddit on reddit and any reddit user can join it. That’s about the same as any slinkset user being able to login to a slinkset powered website.
Jason, based on “color schemes, adjust fonts, and add a logo, but that’s about it” it sounds like you missed the sidebar (Settings/Advanced/Sidebar HTML) where you can put any code you like.
@Gunnar
That sort of defeats the point – this is supposed to be code free.
We’ve been using slinkset to host http://news.thinkgene.com and we like it a lot.
Slinkset is clearly for people who don’t want to deploy their own hosted reddit, which is just not very attractive for most users.
This could take off quite well! They should tweak it a bit though to not look so much like reddit and make it more attractive to the digg loving non-techy user base.
Sign up and click around. Change color scheme, etc. This thing is really slick – nice UI. Well done guys.
Both the TC and ThinkGene slinkset sites look really slick – they seem to match their home sites almost perfectly.
Simple, customizable, hosted, and easy to use? Looks like another sweet, lightweight social app. Interesting to see where they take it from here…
Yeah… a social link farm app…
But I thought the whole point of Reddit and Digg and such was that they leverage the “crowd”…so Slinkset will leverage the “small gathering” at your blog / site / ???
I’ll be posting all news about FUD, propaganda and PayPerPost.
Techcrunch will be a great source, thanks guys!
http://fudnews.slinkset.com/
Question – Isn’t this a public feed reader where as @Raskin pointed out, a smaller gathering will vote on the feeds. For now I’m using mine (http://www.1010.slinkset.com) as an RSS reader, also the ‘invite readers’ section can do with some ‘import contact’ help.
This seems like a great site anytime you and a bunch of friends/co-workers want to share links. I’d use it.
824ksdfk
Way better than “create your own Reddit”. Just created one for my music site in a few minutes and it looks good. You can see it (and try it) at rockonthestreet.com
I like it.
http://iphone.lockergnome.com/
Always wanted something like that!
Thanks Jason for the post, and thanks everyone else for the feedback and encouragement.
Um, wasn’t corank.com doing something like this since like years ago? wasn’t pligg also going to launch something like this?
why then is the “hosted solutions to create your own digg-like site” presented as something novel?
IMHO these tools can be useful if used internally, but as a public site, I don’t know one single “hosted social news site” that ended up being successful, except news.ycombinator.com (which isn’t really hosted) and streetviewgallery.corank.com
Well done, couldn’t be easier to use. Consider me impressed.
Why create one news aggregation/voting sites when you can create an unlimited number? I like the idea. Definitely allows somebody to easily take advantage of a niche without needing the expertise or work needed to create it from scratch.
This is so easy to use, and fast, too.
I set up one to share company-internal links and news. Better than email, less painful than a wiki.
I like slinkset and yes it does fill a void between the tech-gurus and tech-no-nothings..
http://design.slinkset.com/
very simple to implement.