Twitter’s Trending Topics is a great way to see what’s buzzing, what’s going one and what’s happening in the world. Often, big stoies are made publicaly aware on Twitter trends before they hit mainstream news. Several times I’ve watched BBC World News when the presenter used Twitter trends as a source.
Now Digg are launching a new trends experiment which will follow in the footsteps of Twitter. However it’s not just a carbon copy.
The trends feature will display stories that people are digging fast but only recently. The idea is to catch big stories in their initial phases before they hit mainstream media.
Here is what the official Digg blog reads about the new experiment:
Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there.
How does it work? Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage. Here’s an example of what a Digg Trend might look like:
The goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not. We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible.
There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.
Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?
I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.
Shovel – Digg App
Author: Scott Fitzhugh
Price: Free
Ratings: 147 Reviews – 
(at the time of writing)
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/d5yqhu
iTunes Description:
Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.
Personal Review:
Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:
- Popular Stories
- Top Stories
- Movers & Shakers
- Brand New Stories
All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.
Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”
Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.
In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:
Overview
Pros
- Easy to use
- Clean interface
- Ability to access all Digg content
Cons
- Free of charge
- Can’t Digg, comment, or bury content
- No Digg account profile/community features or functionality
iReddit
Author: CondeNet
Price: $1.99
Ratings: 41 Reviews 
(at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: http://getsatisfaction.com/reddit/products/reddit_ireddit
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/ce6tt2
iTunes Description:
The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.
All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.
Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.
It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.
And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.
Personal Review:
The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.
Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:
- Programming
- Funny
- Science
- Tech
- World News
- Entertainment
- Business
- Comics
- Gaming
- Best Of
- Economics
- Cappuccino
It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.
I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.
Overview
Pros
- Easily vote on stories from the actual story page
- Save links to view/read later
- Comment participation
- Customization of footer subreddits
Cons
- Most expensive Reddit app
- Not a wide-range of subreddits to customize on your footer
- Can’t browse all subreddits
- No search functionality
- No personal account status functionality
Open Source Reddit
Author: Joseph Pintozzi
Price: Free
Ratings: 10 Reviews (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: reddit@pintozzi.com
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cpjzvj
iTunes Description:
The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.
Personal Review:
This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:
- reddit.com
- bacon
- politics
- pics
- WTF
- funny
- technology
- programming
The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.
Overview
Pros
Cons
- No commenting
- No voting
- Can’t browse all subreddits
- No search functionality
- No personal account status functionality
Satellite Reddit
Author: 3Cube Technologies
Price: $0.99
Ratings: 8 Reviews – (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: satellite@3cubetechnologies.com or http://twitter.com/3cube
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cx8eec
iTunes Description:
Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.
Change in this version includes:
- Greatly improved performance
- New, Controversial, and Top views are available for all subreddits
- An overlay displaying the full article title and comments count shows while loading an article
- The subreddit list is reorderable
- A beautiful new icon and splash screen have been added
- New lower pricing.
Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.
Additional Satellite features include:
- Shake the app at any time to explore random content from Reddit
- Next/previous buttons are available at the screen edges to move through content without returning to list view
- Full portrait/landscape modes, including upside down. Great for handing the phone across the dinner table to share your discoveries!
- Returns to the content you were browsing at start-up. Pick up right where you left off when that call came in.
- Highly addictive content discovery available anywhere, at any time!
Personal Review:
This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.
This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.
Overview
Pros
- Personalized
- Nice User-Interface
- Good functionality for voting and commenting
- All Reddit content accessible through this app
Cons
- Isn’t free
- Can’t see your karma points
- No search functionality
HAPPY BROWSING WITH THESE SOCIAL MEDIA APPS!
Finding quality articles can be time consuming in today’s era where we are hooked to reading interesting and worthwhile info on topics we like. Regator is such an aggregator portal which searches and provides interesting articles and latest news and happenings in technology, health, entertainment, sports, and latest happenings in business and finance sector, all organized and categorized at one place.
Regator is a portal where you can find links to various interesting article published on web from time to time. So you don’t have to search and keep looking for an hour for something useful and interesting to read. The Site has various categories where you can find articles of that niche and click on the link to read it. Actually regator has a team of few people who work to search these articles from sites and blogs that provide quality content and put them at one place for people to read.
You can even search posts and articles on your favorite reality shows or episodes. There is a ’search’ and even ‘advanced search’ feature for you to search for specific reviews of products like your favorite ‘iPhone’ or cool new ‘Nokia N97’ and you will find tons of posts on it. Also you can register on site and rate the posts you read on regator and the highest rated articles are shown on the front page of regator, just like the other social bookmarkers like Digg. You can personalize a lot on regator including organizing, saving and rating your favorite articles and posts.
Not only does it have article search but also audio and video posts for those who like watching more than reading. If you specifically like reading content from blog, they also have that search category – ‘Blog results’ on front page. Regator has nearly 2 millions posts archived by them till now. Its actually archiving the best of weblogs content and presenting it in a organized and searchable way.
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Sagar Trapasia from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog.
Often, users of Digg comment how they enjoy some of the content, but that readers notice that the same individuals get their
HYPick Logo
stories on the front page time and time again. Users that try their hardest to get their stories on the front page fail more often than not, leaving many to wonder if the site is truly leveraging the wisdom of the crowds or if the system is being gamed.
I won’t get into that discussion, you can find plenty of content on that if you search. What I do want to focus on is an alternative to the Digg’s, Reddits, and other supposed community news sites. Enter HYPick, from the creative mind of social media strategist, Oren Todoros. His vision of truly representing the wide swath of internet users is visualized with this social news site that heavily encourages it’s users to HYPE their favorite stories and articles.
On HYPick there’s no specialized voting system, or fancy magic attached to stories, it’s purely at the mercy of the community. Articles with the most activity are ranked higher. So as users come and go, read and comment, links and pass on, the article gains momentum as something the community feels should be read by others.
No good vote, bad vote system, just real people participation!
There is no doubt that the passions of the community will have a voice. Many would call this a level playing field, that will remain to be seen. For now the HYPick community is alive and well and already gaining momentum.
The Purpose
Putting power into the hands of the users has been what most community news sites have been after. Accomplishment is iffy at best, but no one can deny the current reign of those sites that have dominated this arena for several years. HYPick’s unique approach will truly test the vision that Oren and his team have put together.
In order to make HYPick the next attractive playground for user submitted news stories, they have integrated two HYPick specialized widgets for their users.
The first:
HYPick Reader
The reader widget which can be placed on the right side of your site. It provides easy access for your readers to see what is being ranked and spoken about on HYPick, but also gives you the ability to quickly jump to the post of interest.
I can even appreciate how the posts can also show imagery when they appear on this list. HYPick did a great job with this widget ensuring that users of their service will always have instant connectivity to the happenings in the community. Detail wise I’m not too sure if there are limitations to the articles listed on this widget, whether they are selected as highly ranked posts rated by the community, or if any post that is put to the community is automatically listed here. Still, HYPick wants to make sure that the community is always involved.
Of note the widget is customizeable to a point, but again, it shows HYPicks dedication to the opinion of its readers!
The second HYPick add-on is this:
HYPick Website Button
In it’s continued effort to ensure that readers and users alike are constantly connected to the community, you can integrate the HYPick icon onto your site, similar to what Digg and Reddit due with their icons. This will notify readers that your post can be placed on the community site for involvement by all. The icon is set up to be unobtrusive yet functional in its duty.
Overall the entire system seems pretty sound. It’s a new playing in the user submitted news community, but it also provides a platform for those that are frustrated about their lack of appearance on the front page of some of the major players. Now I can’t personally vouch for these individuals, I don’t know what their content is, but HYPick seems to be an open forum for a wide variety of possibilities in the news community. I look forward to seeing what this player can do!
There is a post over at Techcrunch that seems to be getting a lot of hits today and I’m not entirely sure why! Kevin Rose the founder of Digg, Revision3 and Pownce, has written a guest post for Techcrunch which outlines the top 10 ways to increase your Twitter followers.
The 10 points that he makes seem be very basic and if you actually know how to use Twitter properly I’m sure they aren’t new to you. However what I find funny about this post is that Kevin has probably only really got his followers from mentioning Twitter on every Revision3 show that he does and by being hugely known in the USA as a tech boy pinup. It is just weird that he is trying to preach ways to increase your Twitter followers when he hasn’t really used any of these methods.
Digg has finally made some critical changes to the way they are doing business. It has been reported by various sources this morning that Digg has fired about 10% of their staff and are hiring a direct sales team. I know this statement is probably bitter sweat for some of the employees fired, but Digg really needed to change the way they were doing business or eventually everyone there was going to be out of work.
This all comes on the back of BusinessWeek recently disclosing that Digg’s revenue was just $4.8 million in 2007, and through the first three quarters of 2008, $6.4 million. These results meant that they lost about $2.8 million 2007 and $4 million in 2008.
Digg are making these changes for one reason and that is to find a buyer! In my opinion Digg has to make a profit to have any chance of a acquisition. I think the team Digg have really taken the site as far as they can, because they had so many opportunities to implement Digg into a white label solution which would bring in million in license fees, but they were too busy trying for an acquisition based upon heavy loses. Is it just me or does this sound like a stupid business model. I know these days most tech startups don’t have a business model when they first start and they seem to be very reluctant to even add some advertising to at least generate some revenue. In this current climate that kind of business acument really doesn’t boad well for an acquisition!
Not too long ago the guys over at Killerstartups launched a new service called Dataopedia. Dataopedia is a basic solution that allows users to type in any url and find quickly key metrics from various sources.
Metrics that are measured include Google PR, Alexa Numbers, Compete and Quantcast analysis, Social media breakdowns, Twitter news, Technorati links, Friendfeed and url registration information. Currently, Dataopedia pulls in all this information from various partners including Crunchbase, Compete, Digg, Getsatisfaction and more.
There’s also something interesting buried at the bottom of the site profiles: an ability to comment on the site using Disqus. While that’s not likely to have the reach of a Google Search Wiki, it provides yet another way to gather details about the site and its reputation.
Dataopedia does a great job of pulling all the key quantitative and qualitative site measures required in todays world of web 2.0. There is still a lot of improvements that can be made with the user interface, but over it is probably already leading in this specific market, even thought market is very small.
Yesterday I was having a great conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick (Vice President of Content Development at RWW, not sure what that means) about how to get your blog noticed in the current environment. The discussion started with me posing the basic question “how can I get my blog noticed because we seem to be producing very good content but not getting the rewards”?
It was first mentioned that Problogger is the best source for this information on the web, however I have been reading his site for many years now and most of the content seems to be getting a little reproduced. Additionally, Problogger talks a lot about social media and how to use it to your advantage, but these days everyone has been reading those articles for year and most bloggers use StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Buzz and other very proficiently. If most bloggers are using these tools to their advantage then you still have the same issues, how to stand out from the crowd?
I know that here in Europe a blog that has been on the rise lately is TheNextWeb, but I know these guys have been writing that blog for several years now and they also have one of the best technology conference on the mainland of Europe. Therefore if I want to improve my readership it is a little difficult to just start a conference, or is it worth adding some add-ons to the site such as job board, marketplace or others?
Content is also a major player in this issues, cause most good bloggers say that content is king. However, I think that content is king when you are either a small blog or a large blog, but definitely in the middle content isnt king and it is all about promotion and push.
This is main problem with web 2.0, noise! Currently, there is just simply so much noise in most niche’s, so why instead of writing individual sites and keeping a little revenue, maybe the plan should be to join forces with other blogs and create a larger blog and take a smaller slice of a much larger pie.
I propose this question to you, “how can I get my site to stand out from the rest, especially considering we produce amazing content that is much better than the majority of our competitors”?
It was a week ago today, that Pownce lost it’s bounce. Co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone took their team with them to work with the company that acquired Pownce, Six Apart, on a new micro-blogging platform called Motion.
Pownce launched with wild-acclaim, supported by the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, it seemed to have all the necessary features to put it toe to toe with Twitter, photo and video sharing, status updates and a delightful interface. It just never really took off, despite being more stable than Twitter.
What does this mean for other micro-blogging sites?
Twitter, the biggest micro-blogging site thus far, recently shook off a $500 million offer from Facebook. And rightly so. As pointed out by Cnet’s Rafe Needleman, “…when it comes to business philosophies, the companies do not mesh. And I’m not just talking about the well-reported SMS expense that Facebook would take on if it integrated Twitter. More than that, Twitter’s stated revenue plans don’t work for Facebook.”
Twitter, one imagines, see themselves as fighting in the same field as Facebook, but on the other side of the fence. They are competitors, but not competitive.
The likes of Tumblr and YouAre are the main rivals to Twitter’s crown. How will these guys possibly stand up to fight with a company that can brush off a bid of half a billion dollars?
The key thing is to offer user friendly tools, such as sharing photos and videos, which Twitter just doesn’t do at the moment, unless you’re a fan of the tinyurl. Secondly it’s important to make it easy to sign up (box ticked) and to make it easy to encourage your friends to sign up and be a part of the action.
My problem with a lot of the newer micro-blogging services is that they’re falling into the trap of being too customisable. Look at Facebook’s wide ranging apps – how many are actually useful in our day to day lives and make a difference to the way we communicate? Very few. Similarly with Bebo and Myspace – the integration of new and exciting things to put on your page is exciting for a moment, but nothing more.
If Twitter is to be ousted, or at least equalled, competitors will need to find niches that they can cling on to and exploit. I see Tumblr as being a brilliant way to share photos for example – the message boxes are just large enough for a high definition image to be shown clearly, but not at a size that will set your PC into meltdown.
It is this specialisation that will see each service acquire a following and then grow as that group develops a culture unique to them. All these different cultures will eventually begin to intermingle as users being to find each service useful for different things and then telling their friends to join them on xyz.
It comes down to talent in the end however. Six Apart will have known all along that they were really just after the Pownce team, and not their name or platform. The biggest challenge facing all of the micro-blogging services will be to hold onto their key staff, thinkers and doers alike.
Social Networking, at the moment, is a philosophy that is becoming increasingly tangible, but not ingrained in mainstream culture as Facebook currently is, yet.
Have you ever spent a lot of time searching around the Internet to find the perfect social media button that can be added to your site? Well stop searching and head over to 
