People ask me a lot what "social media" is. I want to tell them that it's a stupid fucking buzzword that could mean about a million things. Instead I'm usually more polite than that.

From now on though, maybe I'll just direct them to the slide embedded below. It's 74 slides. That right there should show you why it's hard to define in anything but vague generalities.



[via SixtySecondView and FriendFeed]

Internet - Can we please stop with the FriendFeed murderous meme?

Over the weekend it was that FriendFeed is going to kill Twitter - which won't happen. Today it's that FriendFeed is going to kill Google Reader - which won't happen. The simple fact of the matter is that FriendFeed doesn't have to kill anything or anyone to be useful. In fact, it can easily be argued that both Twitter and Google Reader make up a good part of FriendFeed's usefulness as it currently stands. You do, after all, need something to talk about.

I really don't get Loic Le Meur's post at all. It starts out with the following:

It [FriendFeed] has almost totally replaced Google Reader for me, h ere is why:

-instead of making me use Twitter less, it makes me tweet even more, because I know it also goes to Friendfeed and I will get comments there. I must admit I start to like Friendfeed comments more than @replies in Twitter, but I read both.

That has absolutely nothing to do with Google Reader and several of the other points are only very loosely related to Google Reader in that I think he's saying it should be more about conversations.

Okay, that's fine, but if there were to be a conversation about every single feed item I have in my Google Reader (thousands everyday), I would be completely overwhelmed. It would be nice to have a feature to maybe turn conversations on and off, and maybe we'll get something like that in the future, but for now there is no way I could use FriendFeed to replace Google Reader.

And really, the point is that I don't need to - their overlap is pretty small for me. I find great stuff on FriendFeed, but I still find much more stuff on Google Reader. They complement one another for my information intake.

Sometimes I worry that users like Le Meur and Scoble are building up FriendFeed too quickly, setting expectations too high, too soon. It's a great service, one of my favorites, but it's not the end all, be all - at least not yet.

More importantly, lets stop suggesting that FriendFeed is going to kill every single service that it imports data from - you just know a "FriendFeed is going to kill Del.icio.us" is coming next. Or maybe FriendFeed will kill Seesmic (Le Meur's start-up); it too pipes in data from there after all.

FriendFeed is not out to kill anyone. If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.

When I set up the Elite Tech News Reddit back in the end of January, it was more of an experiment - I wasn't sure if anyone would ever see it, let alone use it. A few days later there were a dozen or so subscribers, so I invited my friends Steven Hodson, Frederic Lardinois and Louis Gray to join in submitting sites to it.

By the time of the podcast I did with Mashable just two weeks later we had over 300 subscribers. I asked Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins to help out after the show and invited Jason Kaneshiro as well. Since then we've added Tony Hung to the mix as well (though he's a slacker).

So here we are not quite two months later and we now stand at over 1,250 subscribers! The thing is growing faster than ever now - we had just crossed 1,000 when I was at SXSW last week. Both Frederic and Mark note why this likely is: It's something that another friend of mine Muhammad Saleem wrote about a few days ago, Reddit's changing of the way its main page is displayed based on what 'Other Reddits' (those that aren't the main one) you subscribe to.

When I go to the main page of Reddit now I see a ton of content from the Elite Tech Reddit on the page. I also see content from the other 'Other Reddits' I belong to. This makes these sub-Reddits much more useful as I don't specifically have to go to them for their content.

Check out the Elite Tech Reddit here.

Now if only we could get a custom little alien guy...

On a related note, LinkRiver was kind enough to make a L33t Tech News area of the site which offers even more useful results based on what all of us share - if l33t Reddit just isn't enough for you.

A few people have asked why I didn't weigh in on the whole FriendFeed debate today - basically Duncan Riley of TechCrunch said he didn't really understand why FriendFeed was exploding in popularity while Louis Gray told him he was missing the point of the service. Well first and foremost I'm busy with my new gig, but also I've said what I had to say quite a few times now.

I've been using FriendFeed since sometime around the beginning of October last year. Back then it had far less features and was still in private beta - but I still could see its potential - exactly what it is reaching right now. I was even surprised back then that Google bought Jaiku (which they still have yet to do anything with) instead of FriendFeed - which of course was started by a group of ex-Googlers.

Back in December I wrote a post entitled "You Should Probably Be Using FriendFeed" in which I stated:

"I really like FriendFeed and quite frankly I'm a little surprised that more of the "regulars", those tech users who seem to be on every service, either don't use it or don't talk about it often."

As so here we are. People are just now sitting at the table, but I've already had my dinner.

And of course remember that Prediction #7 for 2008 was that social aggregators would be huge. Naturally I mentioned FriendFeed first in that category (though they do go far beyond simple aggregation now).

I think this debate may qualify as another Bitchmeme - whew it's been a while!

Google Maps has unveiled another new feature today meant to showcase other users' 'My Maps' creations. The 'Recent My Maps' page allows you to cycle through recently created custom maps from around the world - which in about 2 minutes has already led me to some interesting ones, including a Texas football recruiting map with players pinpointed and their vitals and commitments given - cool.

As Jess Lee, a Google Maps Product Manager puts it:

Our goal is to create the world's most comprehensive virtual atlas -- the best, most complete map of the earth. This is no easy task, and we know we can't accomplish it without the help of our users, because nobody knows a neighborhood better than the folks who live in it.

Sounds like your typical Google goal: extremely ambitious yet it makes perfect sense.

I would love to see a way for you to specify a city or region to cycle through it's 'My Maps'. This wouldn't have to be date dependent, as there might not be enough recent maps for a select area, but it would be cool if you're taking a trip somewhere to gets some random ideas of what to do via a feature like this.

'My Maps' launched almost a year ago, and since then we've seen it take on social elements that have yielded some interesting projects. This new feature should appease Miss Teen South Carolina and her fear of map shortages.

It's been relatively quiet the past 24-hours from both the Yahoo and Microsoft camps in terms of the hostile takeover - too quiet. TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider appear to know at least half of the reason - Yahoo is in the midst of ongoing discussions with News Corp. about a potential counter offer to rival Microsoft's.

Such a deal would involve News Corp. spinning off Fox Interactive Media (MySpace's parent) to be a part of Yahoo and News Corp. giving Yahoo a large cash infusion - the total package being worth around $15 billion. In exchange, News Corp. would own upwards of 20% of Yahoo, making them the largest shareholder in the company.

This would be beneficial to Yahoo for a couple reasons, the first of which is obviously that they would remain independent (though with a new minority owner in News Corp), and second this would apparently be a better deal money-wise than Microsoft's. News Corp's package would put Yahoo's total value north of $50 billion rather than the $44.6 Microsoft is currently offering.

The main problem in such a deal, as TechCrunch notes, is that Yahoo may still have to outsource its search marketing to Google to make the numbers work. While all parties involved would likely be very happy to do that - the FTC might have something to say about it. However with three huge companies with some of the smartest minds in the world working for them, I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to come up with some sort of arrangement that makes the numbers work and wouldn't necessarily draw the ire of antitrust watchdogs.

I foresaw such a three-way deal taking place 10 days ago:

Or perhaps Google could try to funnel money to someone like News Corp. so they can put in a bid - News Corp. does seem open to someone buying into MySpace, and Google has a large ad-deal with MySpace...

Perhaps News Corp. could send MySpace Google's way rather than Yahoo's and in exchange Yahoo could take control of advertising across FIM (which Google isn't doing a great job at anyway apparently). Who knows, it's really just thinking out loud at this point, there are a million things that could go down.

This is all starting to read very much like sports teams' backroom dealings leading up to the trade deadline. The NBA is famous for its huge multi-team deals - perhaps Yahoo/News Corp/Google can pull one off. I think Yahoo would take draft picks and expiring contracts at this point.

Just about 2 weeks ago I wrote about testing out Reddit's new 'create a Reddit' feature. As I explained at the time I thought it provided the perfect way to test out the supposed 'Elite Digg' idea that Dave Winer laid out back in November.

Thus the 'Elite Tech News' Reddit was born at the URL: http://reddit.com/r/l33t/. While I wasn't sure anyone would actually join as first of all I was somewhat skeptical of the idea and second of all I wasn't sure if anyone would even find it beyond my blog, I was surprised when I checked it a few days later and a handful of people had subscribed.

I decided to get more people involved and contacted Louis Gray, Steven Hodson, and Frederic Lardinois to help contribute stories, they all gracious agreed. We started growing quicker.

Then last week Mashable writer Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins invited me to do a podcast with him about the idea (embedded below). Right before that aired we hit the 100 subscriber plateau.

After the show I invited Mark to join in helping out as well as Jason Kaneshiro. Since that time (one week ago), we're now just about to cross 300 subscribers and are quickly working our way up the 'Other Reddits' list (currently on page 3).

Maybe the rapid growth has something to do with Digg becoming increasingly less tech-centric, or maybe it's just a fluke, but if you're interested in tech news, feel free to check out the Elite Tech Reddit.

TechCrunch is reporting a rather vague rumor claiming that some company large enough to spend $1 billion to $1.5 billion is about to spend that much to buy some other company in the social space. Using the powers of deductive reasoning, TechCrunch has come up with either Google or MySpace buying social networking site Bebo.

Rumors of Yahoo buying Bebo came up last May for a cool billion dollars, those rumors seemingly turned out to be false as nothing came of them. Still it's somewhat interesting that Yahoo paying a billion for Bebo 9 months ago was considered a somewhat credible rumor and apparently the price tag has changed much since then. Compare this to Yahoo trying to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in late 2006 and them eventually selling a stake to Microsoft a few months ago for an amount that pegged their value at $15 billion dollars.

Of course this latest rumor could be way off as well, though Bebo did recently hire a bank to either look into selling (they claimed no) or raising more money.

More interesting I think is the prospect of Google being involved in some kind of billion dollar-plus purchase so soon after Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. Certainly a purchase of Bebo wouldn't make nearly the headlines of a Microsoft/Yahoo deal, so perhaps that is way off. Instead, maybe they are involved in a multi-billion dollar deal of some sort in order to help bail Yahoo out of accepting Microsoft's deal.

Sure it's pure speculation, but it's pretty clear that Yahoo is looking for anyway out and Google wants to help them but can't directly.

Google has announced that as part of their Super Tuesday coverage they will be teaming up with Twitter to provide live updates from people all around the country (and actually the world apparently) as they vote/think about voting/watch coverage of the elections. While I think it's great that Google is utilizing Twitter, I can't help but wonder if this will lead to another massive Twitter outage.

While Twitter seems to have rebounded nicely from a rough few days where they were out for hours at a time, it seems pretty clear that any major event can still take them down in a heartbeat (MacWorld). They did manage to stay online during the Super Bowl, so perhaps their move from Joyent did produce some results.

I also find it interesting that Google would choose to partner up with Twitter (apparently also utilizing the 3rd party app Twittervision), rather than try to use their own property Jaiku. Google has basically done nothing with Jaiku since acquiring the service last year - and in fact still has it shut down from allowing new sign ups. I know I haven't logged-in in months.

This event would have seemed like the perfect roll out for a newly useful, Google-branded Jaiku. Instead they go with Twitter - Google also acquired Ev Williams' Blogger back in the day remember, should we be reading deeper?

Silicon Alley Insider has a tipster claiming that a collaboration of some sort between Ask.com and Digg is nearing launch. This would seem to substantiate the claim from a couple of months ago in Valleywag that Digg was working on a white-label version of the site with IAC (Ask's parent).

Very little is known about the collaboration but the speculation is that it could be some sort of generic version of Digg built around Ask. This would normally mean nothing as there are dozens of Digg rip-offs out there in every field, except that if this one actually had the Digg branding, it could carry some weight - similar to Reddit's recently added ability for users to create their own 'Reddits'.

Perhaps Digg is borrowing a page from Reddit's idea and allowing for the building of branded Diggs - only they may be taking a much more hands-on and corporate approach. Rather than letting any user create their own Digg, they may partner up with companies and sites to help them build their own version.

More interesting would be if Ask tries to make a Digg-based search engine of some sort. This would seem to be very much similar to a test Google was working on a few months ago. That however was only meant to serve individual users better results based on their likings and dislikings, this could be much more meaningful if it were an attempt at a full-scale social voting search idea.

Yahoo was testing out implementing del.icio.us data into their search results before the whole Microsoft hostile buyout fiasco happened. This Ask/Digg collaboration may be an even bigger step into social search. Or it could just be the first Digg-backed Digg knock-off.


[UPDATE 2/6]: Here's the collaboration: a news aggregator called BigNews with Digg elements and integration built-in. You can read my review/thoughts about it at VentureBeat.

Digg has announced on their blog the creation of 'Digg Town Halls', a series of meetings that will be held on a "regular basis". The first of these will be on February 25th and will be webcast live and made available for download afterwards.

This is of course in response to the mini blow-up that happened a couple weeks ago where some prominent users of Digg felt shafted by an algorithm change that made it substantially harder for them to get their stories on the front page of the site. Both Jay Adelson (CEO) and Kevin Rose (Founder) appeared on the weekly live-streamed podcast The Drill Down, and the town hall idea is one of the potential solutions they laid out at the time.

While it's not exactly clear from the post as to how these town halls will go down, it would seem from the wording that it will be some kind of live show on one of the video-streaming sites where users can either call in or type in questions which Kevin and Jay will answer.

Also mentioned is the possibility of going on a meet-up tour, which sounds a lot like Diggnation, but perhaps more somber - and more sober.

Though not everyone is happy with the steps Digg is taking to be more in-tuned with its user base, to me these town halls seem like a long-overdue step in the right direction. It's certainly debatable as to whether Digg would change at all if the hardcore users left as others would seemingly rise in their place, but without changes eventually those users would feel slighted as well - and so on until the only people using Digg would be users in passing and content quality would drop quickly.

More thoughts:

• Full Circle: Slashdot Thinks Digg's Crowd Is Its Weakness
• Testing Out Reddit's New 'Create a Reddit' Feature
• Revision3 Launches 'The Digg Reel', a 'DiggVideoNation' that Makes Digg Comments Useful?
• Digg Now Pimping MacWorld - Attempting To Becomes the Go-To Mac Rumor Site?
• Digg's Adelson Talks Acquisitions, Foreign Markets Expansion, and the Non-Ranking Ranking System
• Digg Hires Firm To Help With Potential Sale
• Dave Winer Wants to Create an 'Elite Digg'
• Mr. Rose, Tear Down This Wall! (that hides the bury data)

Instapaper, a new site by Tumblr employee Marco Arment, simply put will easily be one of the websites I visit most this year. It may very well be the easiest and most beautifully minimal bookmarking site ever created. Let me give a brief history of my arduous experience with bookmarking.

At one point years ago I did all my web bookmarking through browser bookmarks - including stories I wanted to read later. This was clunky, slow and inefficient for anything other than an actual site you planned of visiting a lot.

I was very happy about the rise of del.icio.us which not only make things faster, it made a bookmark available to you not matter what computer you were on - but I still found the process a bit cumbersome.

Eventually I started using Digg as a kind of bookmarking site, digging things to read later, but that of course is not the intended use of Digg and Digg's increasingly slow load times eventually rendered that inefficient as well.

Then came Google Reader, which brilliantly brought the 'star' feature over from Gmail for items to read later, however this had two problems: 1) I had to be subscribed to a feed to save something to read later and 2) I eventually was starring so many things that it became impossible to go back and read them all. As such I started using the 'share' function to mark stories that I really wanted to read later, but this method lost its practicality when Shared Items actually started to become useful with Reader's social elements.

So I went back to using del.icio.us via their bookmarklet, which was nice, but still in my opinion rather cumbersome for what I need. This is where Instapaper comes in. You create a user name (can be a name or an email, doesn't matter) - and that's it, you're ready to go. Notice I didn't say you pick a password. You can create a password if you want, but you don't need to. You then simply drag Instapaper's "Read Later" bookmarklet into your browser and you now have the most simple bookmarking program out there.

You come upon an article you might want to read later, you hit the bookmarklet, a box briefly pops up to tell you 'Saved!' and that's it. No redirects, no logins, no tags, nothing. When you go back to Instapaper your bookmarked page is there under the 'Unread' area with whatever title the article had. From here you can either click to go back to the story (at which point the link will be moved to a 'Recently read' area) or you hit a button to skip it - which will place the item down below in the 'Recently skipped' area. You can also edit a stories attributes if you really don't like the title, put in the wrong URL, or want to put in a summary. Along these lines you can manually add a bookmark here as well, but that is already making the service seem more complicated than it is.

It's one-click bookmarking. It's exactly what I've wanted. It's so simple, it's ingenious. Sometimes I don't care about sharing or tagging, I just want to bookmark a story so that I remember to read it later. That is exactly what Instapaper does. Definitely check it out.

[via SAI and Jakob Lodwick]

First The Wall Street Journal cozied up to Digg, now they're cozying up to Facebook. The newspaper's website has just launched a new feature in conjunction with Loomia that will allow you to easily see what stories are popular with your Facebook friends and networks - all without leaving the story you are reading.

This new 'Popular with My Facebook Friends & Networks' places a section on the right-hand sidebar of every story. You have to opt-in to the service to allow it to access your Facebook data and send information back, but once you do that you will see a list of stories populated based upon how many people you know have read them (and are also using this application).

Certainly there are other applications like this on Facebook, but this one is unique because it is not solely on Facebook and doesn't require that you go to the site at all to use it - Facebook in a sense just works as an information conduit back and forth to The Wall Street Journal.

Interestingly enough I had just written yesterday on VentureBeat about a very similar potential idea Digg could explore with their new membership in the DataPortability group. Seeing as The Wall Street Journal already has 'Digg This' button on everypage, perhaps they will also one day have a ''WSJ Stories Your Friends Dugg' sidebar section.

If you're willing to opt-in and install yet another Facebook Application, this Wall Street Journal one could be pretty useful. I expect to see a whole lot more of these social network elements on more traditional sites in the coming months - especially when OpenSocial hits.


[UPDATE]: Let's also note the connections here. Microsoft has an advertising deal with (and owns a small part of) Facebook, they also have an advertising deal with Digg, and as of yesterday they have an advertising deal with...The Wall Street Journal.

Are the digital media empires starting to form?

Digg was founded on the premise that Slashdot is a great site but it could be potentially much more interesting if the wisdom of the crowds was used to pick the top stories rather than a handful of editors. The idea proved to be in many ways correct as Digg eventually passed Slashdot as the go-to place for tech news. Now it appears we're coming full circle with Slashdot's founder today in the New York Times questioning whether the wisdom of the crowds is really a good idea in picking news items.

Slashdot's founder Rob Malda was making these comments in response to the flair up that took place last week in which some of Digg's top users were upset over algorithm changes that seemed to try and de-emphasize their influence on the site. Malda's point is that for crowd wisdom to really work as intended there needs to be an emphasis on the majority rather than the vocal minority. In many ways it would seem Digg agrees with that, hence the algo change, but as Malda points out, that can quite often make those very vocal users upset.

A better example that Malda points to is the proliferation of Ron Paul stories on Digg and other social news sites. While Ron Paul no doubt has a nice-sized Internet following, the frequency with which stories about him hit the frontpage of Digg is ridiculous. It's pretty clear that a group of Paul fanatics have successfully manipulated the wisdom of the crowds to their advantage to the point that it has driven someone like me away from visiting Digg too often because it's completely cluttered with Ron Paul propaganda. Obviously if editors were running Digg, this would not be the case is Malda's point.

But what Malda fails to mention is all of the great stories on Digg that an editor may miss or for whatever reason pass up on. An editor is still just one person looking at a story and making a determination. Maybe they don't think a story is interesting or worthy, but maybe 100 other people out there do and thus the power of a site like Digg where this stories comes to life.

The point is, that despite both Slashdot's and Digg's belief that their way is better, both ways have pluses and minuses. This is exactly why a site like Slashdot will never be completely killed by Digg and vice versa.

The idea behind Tweetmeme seems pretty simple: look at Techmeme and copy that but based around Twitter rather than tech blogs. It has some potential functionality-wise and with the rabid users of Twitter but I see a couple problems with it right off the bat. 1) they need some kind of language filter pronto. 2) It's all entirely based around links on Twitter, which Twitter is still not very friendly with.

First off on the language front, I'm not trying to sound like an arogant American, but I simply cannot read about half the things on the main page of Tweetmeme and the subpages are even worse. We've got Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish. It's great these countries are so actively involved, but can we please get a language filter going? I'm sure not all of them want to read English either.

The 2nd part speaks to a larger problem I've had with Twitter for a while - it's really bad at handling hyperlinks. In my experience sometimes it will encode them as tinyurls (I'm talking about the web-based app here), sometimes it won't. Many times I have to encode them myself, which is a visit to another site that I simply shouldn't have to make. Pownce runs circles around Twitter in this regard as they have a separate URL field with which to share links.

This matters for Tweetmeme because every conversation is formed based around a common link people have tweeted. One interesting aspect that Tweetmeme does have is the ability to apparently tell if a URL is a blog, an image, a video, or an audio file. This ability to sort could be very helpful in finding new hot links on Twitter based on what you are looking for.

Tweetmeme also fails to thank Techmeme in their initial blog post thank yous - which they probably should given that nearly every aspect of the Tweetmeme layout is identical to Techmeme's layout. 'Top Items'? Check. 'New Item Finder'? Check. A "river"? Check. Upper right-hand corner timestamp? Check. Ads in the same place? Check. Subscribe area in the same place? Check. Archive in the same place? Check.

TechCrunch thinks Tweetmeme will turn into a game for people based around who can find the next hot link first so they'll be the "leader" of the "coversation". Certainly I could see that happening, but until Twitter itself gets serious about hyperlinks, you probably won't be finding me too often on Tweetmeme.


[UPDATE]: Here are two more somewhat similar sites to check out that were left in the comments. The first is PownceMeme - which I'm sure you can imagine what it does. The second is Hashtags which tracks Twitter usage based on the usage of the hash sign followed by a word rather than links. [thanks Bryan and Rod]

In a move that kind of reminds me of Google's attempt to make a strange interactive experience out of watching what photos people post to Blogger (but much less creepy), the Google Lat Long Blog yesterday announced that you can now watch and follow in real-time as people make edits to Google Maps.

These are the edits that users can now make to various locations to give them pinpoint accuracy (rather than say having the address on the wrong side of the street, or wrong corner of a building). On the screen you see a map and one of Google's pins appears with an address that was recently updated. A few seconds later you are zoomed to somewhere else (all the edits so far seem to be in the United States) that was edited recently. The pin bubble shows you when the edit took place as well as how far the pin was moved in meters.

The more zoomed in on an area you are, the more focus seems to remain on that zoomed in area - so if you wanted to see who was updating what in your hometown, you could presumably do that. One problem - I cannot figure out how to zoom back out after zooming in via double-click.

While I'm not exactly sure how "addictive" it is to watch this, it is somewhat interesting and I do still think that giving the community the ability to update and edit the public map is brilliant. The goal of this project would appear to be to get more people involved in editing locations as there is a big "Enter a location to edit." search box along the top. Sometimes people need to be enticed to get them to do work for you.

View the Recent Edits Map here.

Tonight I was lucky enough to be invited in to try out the new Reddit "Create Your Own Reddit" beta feature that I discussed a few days ago. After playing around with it for just an hour or so it's very clear that as long as we're not completely inundated by new Reddits that dilute the power of the original version, this is going to be a great new aspect of the site.

Already popping up like crazy are sub-reddits for topics such as: robotics, math, Obama, NSFW, LOLcats, music, photography, Apple, Microsoft and yes, Ron Paul. Dozens exist already with more popping up every few minutes. Some of these new Reddits already have 50+ subscribers while many hover at 1 (their creator). With so many coming, it's certainly going to be hard to distinguish between all of them; perhaps we're going to need a 'hot' and 'new' menu area just for new Reddits.

Creating your own Reddit is as easy as entering in the name you'll want to appear in the url as reddit.com/r/NAME. Then you pick a full name for your Reddit, enter a description of what stories it's supposed to contain, you select a language, and finally select the type. As I talked about a few days ago, you can either have a fully 'public' Reddit that anyone can see and submit content to, a 'restricted' Reddit which anyone can see but only select users can submit to, and a 'private' Reddit which only select users can both see and submit to.

Once you create your own Reddit there is an easy-to-use manage area where you can edit your settings as well as add moderators/contributors, ban users, and filter spam. The 'stats' area still exists in the toolbar, but it is still just for overall Reddit stats, it would be great to be able to see the karma stats for these new sub-Reddits. It would also be great to be able to create your own Reddit logo.

For my test Reddit I went ahead and created a restricted 'Elite Tech News' Reddit now found at http://reddit.com/r/l33t. As I wrote about a couple days ago, I thought a platform such as this would be perfect for testing what Dave Winer wrote about wanting to create a few months ago - a kind of "Elite Digg". While I'm still not sure if something inclusive like this can work better than the current Digg, Reddit, Techmeme, Readburner, etc, here is a potential chance to test it out.

If anyone is interested in being a contributor, shoot me an email (find my address at the top of the site). I'll set the requirement for entry (sorry if this sounds too elitist, but for such a thing to work there has to be some determining factor for entry - again, anyone will be able to see the submissions and vote on them) that you must have had an article on Techmeme at some point in the past year.

As the Reddit Blog noted a few days ago, this new 'create your own Reddit' should only be in closed beta testing for a short period of time before it's open to everyone. It certainly already seems ready to go - and fits in nicely with the regular Reddit site as you can easily subscribe and unsubscribe to these new user-created Reddits just as you could with the previous sub-Reddits. It will be very interesting to see what user-created Reddits become popular - besides obviously, the Ron Paul one.

Another new controversy is swirling around the social news site Digg tonight as an update to the algorithm appears to have quite a few of the prominent users of the site up in arms - so much so that there is a rather rousing impromptu debate going on right now on The Drill Down's Ustream channel.

Digg apparently updated its algorithm again a couple days ago and while they are very secretive about exactly what this entails, the consensus seems to be that for certain heavy users of the site it's going to make it much, much harder for stories they submit to reach the frontpage. While some may applaud this effort the level the playing field as it were, Digg is very much a community driven site and if everyone in that community is not equal, you're going to start to see major issues.

Some users have even gone so far as to craft an open letter to Digg, which has been republished on Valleywag. The 5 main points of the letter are:

1) Lack of communication and disregard for the Digg community

2) Unexplained and unacknowledged banning of top users

3) Lack of transparency - Digg only shows you the stories that people have dugg, but not the ones that are buried.

4) The auto-bury list - For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever.

5) Repeated and flagrant disrespect of its top users

Digg founder Kevin Rose weighed in on the changes a few hours ago on the Digg Blog. While he confirms the algorithm changes he appears to be urging patience within the community while the new algorithm perfects itself. It's clear from the debate going on that this will not placate these users.

While no firm decision has been made as to what to do from the user's perspective, it appears many of the top users are now willing to sit it out for a few days and not use the site at all while they make a decision. You can probably expect another response from Digg at some point soon.

Rizzn Hopkins has a very comprehensive post on the revolt and its backstory on Mashable.

You can find the site that holds the Open Letter here, complete with plenty of comments.


[UPDATE]: Both Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have joined in on the conversation at The Drill Down. Jay is taking questions right now. Kevin is currently downloading Skype to call in...

[UPDATE 2]: The conversation came and went. Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose answered questions and addressed concerns - the revolution appears to have been put down (walk out cancelled). They have also promised some kind of new monthy public forum to address future concerns - as you know this will all come up again in another few months...


*Disclaimer - I am a former top user of Digg, but do not use the site that much anymore.

Reddit has announced a brand new feature that they are currently testing out in closed beta - the ability for users to make their own Reddits. Reddit has long had the "other reddits" featuring ones specializing in programming, science, politics, etc, but by allowing users to create their own they are essentially turning Reddit into a platform - nice move.

This appears to fulfill exactly what Dave Winer was asking for a few months ago when he proposed that someone create a new "Elite Digg" where only selected members can contribute stories. This could be created under Reddit's new "restricted" Reddit creation (where anyone can view the Reddit, but only select users can submit stories). The other two types of user-created Reddits will be "public" - which anyone can view and submit, and "private" where only invited users can both view and submit.

The closed beta testing of this new service will last only a week or so at which point it seems Reddit will open it up to a larger audience, if not the public. As long as these user-created Reddits are easy to set up and use, this has the potential of being huge. Sports fans can now create their own individual team Reddits, hobbyists can create their own, and yes, maybe there will even be an elitist tech one created.

Sure there are other Digg-clone makers out there, but the prospect of having a successful site like Reddit dish out its known look and feel should add an element of legitimacy to these newly created spin-offs.

Will Digg respond?

Everyones favorite Twitter comparison application, Pownce, is set to leave its private beta tonight at midnight for the public spotlight.

As I've noted numerous times, I like the idea of Pownce a lot. It reminds me less of a straight-up Twitter clone and more of a Tumblr meets Twitter application; there is simply a lot more you can do on Pownce than you can on Twitter. That said, despite its 150,000 beta testers, the main problem I still have with Pownce is the seemingly complete and utter lack of use. I have 150+ friends on Pownce right now, yet my main screen still has messages that are 5 hours old. On Twitter? Try 10 minutes old. Max.

A new desktop client built on Adobe Air may help that - as may the ability to now import friends from Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and the like. Also giving me hope is a new 'Featured Powncers' area coming tonight to help highlight some of the established users that new users might be interested in following - something I know Twitter could use for anyone new who signs up.

The other really useful application I think Pownce could have is something I wrote about last month: mobile access to event posting. This feature on the mobile version of Pownce (which I think even in early alpha stage is better than the mobile Twitter), could be great for something like impromptu meetings or simple meetups. The version of Pownce that launches tonight is also said to further emphasis the 'events' aspect of the site, which should be an important social layer to help differentiate itself from Twitter.

So with Pownce now going public and the potential for access to users to be equal now with Twitter, it'll be interesting to see how the two co-exist. Both seem to be out there wooing developers to use their platforms, but is there room for both in our increasingly crowded social networking lives?