There is no shortage of social news aggregators looking to help users cut through the noise on the web. Digg is by far the most popular, with similar offerings from Reddit, Newsvine, and a host of others. Today, Socialmedian (not to be confused with SocialMedia, the ad network) is launching its own take on social news. The site has just launched in public beta, and can best be compared to Digg, with some elements of Twitter and FriendFeed thrown in.
At first glance, Socialmedian bears more than a slight resemblance to Digg. Each story is ranked according to the number of votes (called Clips) that it has received, with an expanding tab for comments and sharing. Even the color scheme is very Digg-like.
Founder Jason Goldberg acknowledges that Socialmedian does share some features in common with Digg, but says that its focus is on helping you find stories that you’ll be interested in, rather than finding stories that are popular and appeal to the masses. To do this, the site allows users to create their own personalized networks, or chose from over 1000 existing networks. Each network monitors certain keywords for stories submitted across the entire site, and generates a list of related stories. Users can also specify RSS feeds they’d like to automatically pull stories from, and they can use a sliding “Noise” meter to limit the number of stories displayed.
Socialmedian also uses a Twitter-like follow system to help generate relevant results. Whenever you come across a story submitter than you particularly like, you can flag them as a “Newsmaker”. From then on, their stories will receive a higher ranking, and are more likely to appear on your main news feed.
Because the site is so young, it’s hard to get a feel for how well these filters work (the vast majority of the stories on my front page have fewer than 10 votes). The site has far more customization than Digg, but its ultimate success will lie in its ability to cut out the noise - something we won’t know until it has to deal with thousands of stories at once. The site will also see competition from other social news sites like Reddit, which mimics Socialmedian’s network function by allowing you to “roll” your own customized feeds.
I have been using social median for quite a while now.
And, I thought *the noise* was far less, than at other places.
Let’s see, how it grows!. Volumes would tell
http://veryrecent.com is a better idea
Built in India
Such a lack of creativity in India. Not sure why that is, but copying seems all they can do. Npthong unique about it, Digg with a twist.
Deadpool as soon as they tire or get a new contract.
so?
only external links can be opened when you have an account. very silly.
Hey Marco — we just finished an invite-only alpha and wanted to push to opening to the public asap as early user feedback has been quite nice and what we need most right now is more user input. We spent the last 3 months building more than 350 directly user-requested features/enhancements on the site.
In going fast to open up the site last night, we didn’t have time to get all of the remaining registration walls put far away. We’ll be working on that soon. We agree with you that the user should be able to do much more on the site before registering.
I must say I don’t quite under the India-haters here on TechCrunch. It’s just senseless to make comments like that with no basis or understanding. What we have at socialmedian is a global team, not an outsourcing. And, everything we’ve built on socialmedian has been 100% spec’d, designed, planned, and strategized together as a team.
Samuel — our 4300 alpha users would argue against you. They built socialmedian with us the past 4 months. But, as they say, time will tell. We’ll see how it goes. Nothing is certain except trying.
ok, so external links will be possible without an account when it’s ‘official’?
Lets see !! Time will tell
Would be nicer if you could actually browse the site without signing up. Kind of a major turn off.
Please excuse them, they don’t know any better. They think it’s 1999. Their next clone with a twist is days away. I hate these wannabes.
Great Site! Wish them all the best…
I have been in the beta and find its a major step forward in efficiency of consuming news and posts.
I was luck enough to ve invited before the beta, and have been using it for a while. It actually is more than a Digg clone - it has some elements of FriendFeed and better search
It helps me know what other people think are important so I do not miss anything
ok guys…
regardless of the indoa thing.. what’s the monetary strategy..
aside from advertising, i don’t get it…
and as far as advertising, you’ll have to do something far more than you’re going to do initially to really make a play in this area…
thoughts/comments…
peace
Goldberg got chased out of Seattle like a poisoned toad for a reason. Nice to see that he still has no original ideas. Even more comical is the fact that someone was stupid enough to throw money his way.
Tankage soon.
hmmmm, huh, wha, another social news site? i’m going back to bed, wake me when you have something innovative
looks good - anything has got be better than digg, considering how incredibly easy it is to game that site…good luck jason! glad to see that you’ve rolled along after jobster with something potentially more interesting
You got some retards here claiming nothing innovative, these the same people that wouldn’t recognise innovation if it knocked them over at 100 miles per hour..
Jezz. This is extremely interesting and solving one of the major problems of the day (noise from retards)….
Go Go SocialM
My RSS reader looks like Google-News, I can’t possibly read everything. If this helps, I’ll surely use it to get my signals above the noise.