socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception.
First off, the new socialmedian will make it easier for users to get content onto the site and enable bloggers to better promote their content. Dubbed “News-Streaming,” socialmedian’s latest foray into bringing only certain content to its users is quite complex.
News-Streaming lets users filter out all the junk from the social media that they broadcast through the site. According to the company, if users want to share their Twitter feed with the community, but only want their tweets that are actually newsworthy to be collected by socialmedian, they can first input their Twitter feed and next to that, place certain keywords into the field to help the service filter out the tweets that the user doesn’t want posted. In other words, if you want to only post your political tweets to socialmedian, add your Twitter feed to the service and select keywords that may have some relevance to politics. From there, socialmedian will grab all tweets containing those keywords and post it to the site. The same goes for Google Reader feeds, Digg submissions, and Delicious bookmarks, to name a few.
To make sure all that information isn’t annoying other users, socialmedian is adding a filter feature that will let other users “turn the volume up or down” on the amount of tweets and stories making their way across the pages. Those users can choose to see all updates or only those “relevant updates” that they preset.
Part two of socialmedian’s new initiative will make it easier for bloggers to promote their material. In order to do that, socialmedian will launch a “reverse-blog widget,” which after users place their blog feed into their updates, will be featured in the clips section to the right of the socialmedian page and display the latest stories from the blog.
Taking a page out of the Digg handbook, socialmedian is also offering a page displaying the most popular stories of the day, week, and month. Instead of calling newer stories “Upcoming,” like Digg, socialmedian has two new entries called “Rising Fast” and “Hot Discussions.” Genius.
Finally, socialmedian opened up its site to make almost every page available to search engines and users won’t need to register any longer to view different pages on the site.
All in all, socialmedian’s updates seem rather logical and don’t really break the mold in any way. The site was in desperate need of improvement and it looks like it has finally happened. Now we’ll need to wait and see if its users embrace it.
I can’t grasp socialmedian and what its use is? Maybe if it were slightly more attractive to the eyeballs.
The new socialmedian features will be live in just a few minutes. Please give them a try and then pass along some feedback.
The new features are now live on socialmedian. You may begin adding your feeds
I agree with Mair. I’ve tried to understand SocialMedian and I still don’t get it. I can’t figure out why I would use or what it does. It certainly doesn’t give me news. i’m sorry, but adding the ability to add my twitter feed won’t help. fail.
TM: What’s your socialmedian username — we’ll help you get going on it.
Going in the right direction {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/e7TAa9p9f0_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Going in the right direction ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/auMGwk2fOz”}}}
Here’s reviews from:
Read Write Web http://www.read...s_streaming.php
Mashable http://mashable...comment-1094667
I have been using S|M (Social Median) from the beginning and I like it and use it everyday to get my doze of filtered and relevant news. If adding the twitter feature a problem, then what about the other features like allowing you to add your blog with similar filtering, your news caster, with similar keyword filtering. They all do the same thing! as twittering.
I am just a member without and binding to S|M. I think a little exploration will make you see S|M for what it is. Create your own news network, add feeds, let others do the same and you will be surprised how many others have the same interests as you and some of them are experts on the subject.
what is different with digg. why we have a lot of same type site?
Uh, how hard are they trying to be Facebook of “news” instead of “people”? (Look closely at the UI) This is not innovation, and is not competitive. Even then, attaching silly names to me-too features does not trick anybody.
SocialMedian is all about getting and sharing the least noisy, most relevant news and information. Think about browsing Digg or pouring through Friendfeed, how much noise there is, how much you find that you really don’t care about. With S|M, you’re getting the most relevant information based on your news networks and preferences. The newstreaming features–which are a snap to activate, add additional sophistication. I can bring in my Diggs, some or all of my Tweets, Delicious items, FF ads, etc. This shares them with my S|M followers rather than having to submit (”clip” in s|m parlance) each item to S|M separately. Rather than just a general lifestream containing all of a user’s impulses and activities, what’s created is a focused and filtered newsstream relevant to the user and community. Try it, you’ll like it. Even if you don’t get into every feature, you’ll find it easy and useful.
I’m sure we’re probably not supposed to ask, but what is the business model of aggregators like s|m or friendfeed built on the backs of other sites (digg, twitter, google reader, flickr) which themselves have no business model?
I mean, granted, friendfeed can’t even muster the “pioneering feature” of keyword filtering, but geez. yawn.
If I don’t want to bother to tell my friends directly about a “update” I made on an actual destination, maybe it’s not worth these so-called aggregators to spew the shit out another faucet and pretend people care about it.
At least s|m isn’t trying to promote some jackass “protocol” that asks the destination sites to do the work for them aka just deliver updates. Guys trying to make a business on RSS polling have gone and built themselves–oops!–a nice shit sandwich:
/==================\
poll, poll, poll.
Even if no one cares, poll, poll, poll.
No one has read the updates in a month
poll, poll, poll.
\==================/
I’ve been using socialmedian for quite a while now and so far I’ve had no major complaints. The democratized development process has been very refreshing, creating project review teams from site users. There is a real atmosphere of inclusion, encouraging everybody to have their say and Jason Goldberg seems to have a superhuman ability to listen, respond and actively get in touch with people.
In terms of the functionality which differentiates the site, for me, the networks and the way in which the site can (optionally) automatically assign new clips to relevant networks takes some of the work out of adding links or finding the ones that you might be interested in.
@waiting for the point — Good point. Finally someone who is saying “the king is naked”.
I think that TC, Mashable, RWW and other tech blogs should start putting more emphasize on business models when covering new companies.
if everyone thought like most of the commentors above, we would all be driving Fords now. Have you ever thought of improving something or making something better, like, to use the same analogy, a Toyota? (Prius
Packaging adds value, intellignet packaging adds more value. The business model seems – hard to see – this is a concern mostly because I am not sure how I am being pimped
SM is starting to become more S&M and I am the M – lol – net I hate getting this in email every F**)*& day
My Advice – take a page from newsWEEK – its not newsday its newsweek
Why should users have to filter? Services should filter, services should be smart. Anyone can build a news collector.
How does SM compare to NOBOSH? nobosh has a cleaner design and I don’t have to filter what the site should be smart enough to filter out right?
http://nobosh.com/
I have been using Socialmedian for long enough now to say, that all of the new features recently added, have made the site a pleasure to spend time on. It is simple and intuitive, yet powerful.What I like best of all is that it feels like part of the more 2.0 community of sites that I use. Obviously, there is still some work to be done. Yesterday, I emailed Jason a shortlist of additional features I would like to see, and to my surprise, he emailed me back saying, ” Working on all of these,Thanks!”. So, the way I see it is, If its good now , it will be event better in a couple of weeks. Jason is obviously determined to make this a success. That’s a tall order to fill in such a crowded field. Personally, I like to see a startup make something out of itself. I thought that was what the TechCrunch 50 is all about. Finally, you can’t compare Socialmedian to Digg, unless your just comparing technical features. Social Media is all about the community, and in this case, it is a mature, friendly, and thoughtful group. Your work is featured over there quite often. Digg on the other had is very adolescent, and has developed a community which is very typical of that demographic. A better comparison would be to compare Digg is to MySpace, and Socialmedian to Facebook. Get it ?
Social Median has become for me best solution for promoting articles related to Social Media, and because update options and improve connections on the social networks, demonstrates professionalism, but also targeting primarily to the users to put in the foreground activity.