Posts Tagged ‘Social News’

Reddit is an unusual beast.  With it’s sparse interface and esoteric terminology, newcomers typically feel like they walked into the wrong club and quickly head back out the door.    But in my experience, Reddit is just like Facebook — people first question why they would bother with another social network, but once they’ve been [...]

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

The New York Times/bit.ly News.me for iPad news app didn’t fit my news reading needs. Flipboard and Zite provide interesting mixes of tradtional news sources as well as new curated by the people you follow on Twitter and friend on Facebook. One of my recent favorites for news reading is, surprisingly, Microsoft’s Bing for iPad [...]

The New York Times/bit.ly News.me for iPad news app didn’t fit my news reading needs. Flipboard and Zite provide interesting mixes of tradtional news sources as well as new curated by the people you follow on Twitter and friend on Facebook. One of my recent favorites for news reading is, surprisingly, Microsoft’s Bing for iPad [...]

Big changes have been happening at MySpace over the past several months as the once dominant social networking site tries to re-orient itself in a post-Facebook world. Shortly after unveiling a slick new design this month, the Beverly Hills based company launched an all new music video recommendation app for web and iPad called Music [...]

D.C. based Mixx is releasing some new features today which empowers a few select “super mixers.” The goal of the new feature is to get breaking news onto the homepage fast rather than waiting for numerous votes to build up before the article ends up in the popular section. The way the service works, as Mike Arrington points out,

Once a story has been tagged by two Super Mixxers, the story goes to the home page under the Breaking News area. The story will continue to build up votes and move into the general Popular area of the page at that time. Others may drop off entirely.

This new feature is a strike against Digg which requires a significant number of diggs before hitting the homepage. Then again, a truly newsworthy story can build up a lot of buzz rather quickly on Digg, still reaching the homepage in a short amount of time. Mixx has been excellent at continuously rolling out new services but I’m a little bit hesitant about saying this new service is an excellent service.

My biggest concern is that favoritism may not be the best way to get a community built. Then again, rewarding members for being active is not such a bad idea. Additionally, just because their story is breaking news doesn’t ensure that the article will move to the popular section. Whether or not this is the best decision has yet to be decided by the Mixx community but Mixx has been quick to adapt so if the community doesn’t support it, I’m sure Mixx wouldn’t either.

After seeing Mixx at MashMeet DC a few weeks ago, I’ve realized the value in building sub-communities within the social news sites. Mixx is embracing that with their support of tags and this strategy will hopefully put them on top of other social news sites.