So I loves my news aggregators, and I loves my social news sites. You may have also heard of a new breed of such sites, which aggregate shared bookmarks via Google Reader (and more), such as readburner, linkriver, and rssmeme.
Anywhoo, I was about to wax poetic about how useful these new services are, when, upon closer examination, I realized that much of the stuff that was bookmarked and shared was quite similar … even the same, really.
Oh, sure. Smaller stories are different. Each community has its own idiosyncracies. But the big (and even medium sized) stories? All the same.
Right now I’m battling what seems like an evolving cold, so I’m not going to do any heavy lifting with respect to numbers, charts, graphs, and all manner of social geekery (but if you feel so inclined, please do so and then let me know) — but its just an observation.
I wonder, as all the field of social information-aggregating services mature, particularly in areas where this kind of thing started (tech / geek interests), if what we’re seeing in late 2007 and well into 2008 is the evolution and commodification of popular content.
That’s not to say that the information or content itself is a commodity, specifically, but that the sites themselves might begin to be.
Or, put another way, the stuff that is popular, and that is shared, gets shared so quickly between the various and sundry sites, it doesn’t really matter which site you go to. Unless your level of geekdom is extreme, and it matters to you how quickly you see stuff (in the order of minutes or hours), for the lay-geek — you know, who has a job, who goes to work, who has a family, and who can’t monitor this stuff as obsessively as they would like — I don’t think it *really* matters.
If I’m looking for old-ish kind of news (like 12-24h old — man, I can’t believe I just called news that was 12h old “old”), I can look to Blogrunner, Techmeme, Digg, Propeller, and one of those shared-bookmarking sites above, and you can bet the big stories will all be up there.
The implications?
That its tough for new sites to break into this ecosystem of shared / social news, as there is already a huge contingent of players looking for news (social news sites), or automated bots which are similarly crawling for said news (news aggregators), or scripts that are looking for people to share such information (social / shared bookmarking tools) — all of which, when they find something newsworthy, is thrown up on all of these sites in a variety of ways, overlapping each other within minutes or hours of each other.
I don’t know exactly what the future holds for Social News, but on a cold blustery Friday evening, I’m wondering if we’re at a stage where we’ve hit a bit of a wall, with few services really providing a breakthrough in this experience.
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:02 pm | Permalink
Yes, RSSMeme and ReadBurner are the same concept - in the same way that FaceBook and MySpace are the same concept. The started with the same goal, and each has its own features that will lead to people selecting their favorite. You would to throw Shared Reader in the mix there as well, though it’s lagging the other two.
As for LinkRiver, it is more like FriendFeed than the others you mentioned. LinkRiver is combining different activity from different streams, not just Google Reader shared items. It doesn’t have some of the social aspects FriendFeed offers, yet.
There will be more and there will be some very interesting developments in this space. Why? Because the obvious leaders haven’t yet developed them. Google hasn’t done it - and may not, if they don’t deem it valuable. But yes, there will always be similarities. The most popular feeds will usually be the most popular shared - just like the biggest sites are most likely on TechMeme. That doesn’t make the process broken, but it does make it somewhat predictable.
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:21 pm | Permalink
Greetings. There is certainly a lot of redundancy, but skimming titles in Google Reader (or other tool) helps.
While a lot of things are relevant, I feel that we can constantly expand and evolve. For example, I just found your site via Louis Gray’s Shared Items. Now I’m subscribed — thanks for having an interesting site — and for stating your mind.
Another option is going after the blogs or twitterlogs of people who write about unique things — rather than following the buzz of the day. I think it was Steve Rubel who recently commented that most blog articles are just the same dribble repeated over and over. So finding your niche will help.
Cheers,
Mike
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:24 pm | Permalink
Totally agree - popular content is becoming a commodity. I’ve said this as soon as ReadBurner launched - the quality of shared content available through RB (and other newcomers) will quickly average out as they continue to crawl more and more “Shared Feeds”. Instead of solving a fraction of the so-called “information overload”, users face duplicate items all day long coming from all directions. Popular content is not where the problem (or the opportunity to innovate) is at.
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:32 pm | Permalink
LinkRiver is different (or has the potential to be different, as the user base grows) from the others in that you can follow whoever you want to follow. It doesn’t just show you the most popular stuff shared by all people — it shows you the most popular stuff shared by the people you follow.
Adam
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:09 am | Permalink
I definitely don’t think there are any walls when it comes to the explosive nature of social media related on the web. It’s merely one recipe vs another as users constantly crave, create and consume social news.
Over time i’ve gone from a PubSub to Digg to LiveMarks to Doggdot.us to Techmeme to ReadBurner consumer of news. I look forward to new recipes, new combination offers of news, in fact I crave them so much I know they’ll appear, even if in unlikely forms like TwitterLinkr or something.
With the advent of tools like dapper.net and Yahoo Pipes heck even I can get in on the recipe game and make my own news site.
There are definitely no walls in this game.
dan
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:09 am | Permalink
I don’t use rssmeme, but ReadBurner, AssetBar, FriendFeed and LinkRiver all do different things for me. Some do certain functions better than others (AssetBar rules in social functions) but that’s contrasted by other strengths like LinkRiver gives me a more “focused” stream than FriendFeed.
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:16 am | Permalink
Per what Adam Styles of LinkRiver said, I completely agree. I follow people who bring me good info (relevant to me and fresh/new), like Louis Gray and Adam Stiles.
However, following people also allows for greatly different interests. For example, if I were to follow my wife’s shared items (if she had them), I’d learn a lot more about style, fashion, beauty tips and utterly meaningless gossip :) ….. The point being that it is possible to find new things - of our choosing.
February 24th, 2008 at 12:15 pm | Permalink
@Louis — thanks for stopping by.
1. I wondered if we had reached the pinnacle of social news — not whether it was broken, in as much as that many social news sites feature the same information.
2. I agree - it will be interesting to see what will happen when one of the larger players steps into this evolving pond; for google it’d be pretty natural as they own the data to Google Reader anyway
3. LinkRiver is different, I agree, and alluded to as much when I inserted the weaselly phrase “and more”, after I described how most of them aggregate shared bookmarks. :)
Thanks for stopping by
tony.
February 24th, 2008 at 12:16 pm | Permalink
Mike — thanks for stopping by. I like fresh voices — keep up the good work on your own blog.
t @ dji
February 24th, 2008 at 12:27 pm | Permalink
Aviv — thanks for your thoughts. So if popular content isn’t the problem any more, what is?
(and is favoriteposts.com going to solve it? ) :)
February 24th, 2008 at 12:30 pm | Permalink
@Adam — thanks for stopping by. Yeah, I realize that its more than just shared feeds (hence the “and more” portion in my post).
It’ll be interesting to see how Linkriver grows
tony.
February 24th, 2008 at 12:32 pm | Permalink
@Dan — no one’s disagreeing with you there. I was just contending that with our without walls, most of the popular content gets seeded across most networks … therefore, if the goal of social news is to find “good stuff”, and if “good stuff” is necessarily popular (via the voting of people through social mechanisms), then have we reached the top already?
Cheers
t
February 24th, 2008 at 12:33 pm | Permalink
@Daryl — it’ll be interesting to see how this space grows (and how it does that, and if it does that to any meaningful degree)
Cheers
tony.
February 24th, 2008 at 12:46 pm | Permalink
Thank you Tony, will do. Cheers.
February 25th, 2008 at 4:48 am | Permalink
Tony, I posted a response to your concerns here:
Social News Sites Add Features Amid Some Criticism
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/02/social-news-sites-add-features-amid.html