TECHCRUNCH
JASON KINCAID
31 JULY 08
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.