Numbrosia – Merit Based News
There’s some chatter today on Hacker News and Profy about a new site called Numbrosia. Unlike Digg, stories are not ranked via user voting.
Instead, users solve math puzzles that get progressively harder. The higher their score, the higher their submitted news items appear. The exact number of points for an item is the recent score divided by the number of submitted links, so it makes sense for users to submit just a single story.
There’s no business here, and we’ll likely never touch on Numbrosia again. But I like the creativity, and sometimes seeing something like this creates the seed of a new idea in others. Plus, puzzle addicts will likely waste an afternoon on the site.
Perhaps intelligent testing could help other sites reduce spam or otherwise improve their service.
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Mixx Gets Credibility Boost From NYTimes
The New York Times tonight added Mixx bookmarking buttons on its site, which is an important milestone for the company. Facebook, Digg and Yahoo Buzz are the only other third party social bookmarking services that are offered.
The NYTimes doesn’t include well known and more established services like Delicious, Reddit and others on its pages. And since Mixx is only six months old, so this is an important sign of confidence in the young startup.
An example is here, just click on the “share” button to the right of the article.
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Little Known Hacker News Is My First Read Every Morning
Hacker News is a Digg/Reddit-like site that I am visiting more and more often. It’s my first stop in the morning, and I check it out a few times during the day as well.
Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.
Like Digg and Reddit, users submit stories to the site, and others can comment and vote on them. But Hacker News is also a forum of sorts, where users can simply post questions for others to answer - see this one asking for advice on creating a demo video for a new startup. Popular stories and questions move to the home page over time.
Hacker News used to be called Startup News and was launched in February 2007 by Y Combinator. They say “the most important goal of news.ycombinator was to create a place where founders and would-be founders can meet and talk.”
Hopefully as the site continues to attract new users, the magic won’t be lost.
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Digg Users Are Doing Their Best To Kill An Acquisition
Digg users tend to get pissed off about a lot of things. Any story about Microsoft, for example. Or anything that criticizes Apple. Usually, the ability to bury stories about non-mob-approved topics, combined with the comment area under headlines, is enough of a release valve to settle things down.
But not always - and Digg has a track record of surrendering to the mob when things get really bad.
Based on some of the comments to this story about Digg’s officially-not-happening (but happening nonetheless) acquisition, Digg users are getting all riled up for another fight. Particularly if the buyer ends up being Microsoft.
A sample of the 544 comments left on that story:
- Don’t sell Digg Kevin! Digg this story he needs to know how we feel!
- Why not sell digg when you don’t care about the community. Sell it and we will be happy.
- Somehow i think if Microsoft manages to buy digg a larger revolt than 09 F9 11… will happen, at least i know what i will do
-
I would have to see how things went afterward. If Google tried to shoehorn their “style” in to Digg’s interfaces (see: Jotspot), or if Microsoft tried to turn it in to a Windows program, I would switch to Reddit. I like Digg more, but either of those scenarios would kill Digg for me.
If MS is in, I’m out. - OK guys, Kevin doesn’t give half a shit about you. He cares about what all americans care about: $500,000,000 in his pocket. Good old capitalism, eh?
Goodbye Digg… Its been good knowing you… too bad you were gobbled up by corporate america. I remember back in the day when you were a bastion of free speech and unfettered entertainment, but no longer. I guess I will have to revert back to the “best of” section of Craigslist. Don’t sell your soul. - As long as they lets us delete our accounts
- I am new to digg.com and I really like it. If Microsoft were to buy it that would be it for me. I will remove it from my favorites and never come back.
- Dude. If Microsoft gets its fucking hands on this site then you will definitely have one less viewer. Those fuckers taint everything they touch.
- Is this for real come on Kevin don’t give up to digg to these huge companies. What makes digg so special and fun is that it’s independent this is not a good idea.
- If Microsoft purchases this site, go ahead and make your last act to institute a ‘delete your account’ function.
- This is terrible news. Lets see if we can have yet another viable outlet bought up by huge conglomerates which try to feed us what we are allowed to think and censor our beliefs. I tell you what. If digg is sold, I’m not coming here anymore! Kevin please don’t let this happen. Tell us this is about more than money.
So far, the feedback is mostly pleading, not angry (see this blog post). But as things progress, this could turn nasty, and fast. Mixx, Reddit and other competitors, I’m sure, are looking forward to that happening, and will be more than happy to pick up any stray Digg users who abandon the much-loved/much-hated Digg.
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Google, Microsoft Bidding For Digg
User-generated news site Digg has been working with influential investment bank Allen & Co. (the ones that recently got Slide a half billion dollar valuation) for a few months now, and pitching big tech and media companies on a sale.
And despite a number of false starts, this time a sale looks likely, and soon. We hear from a source very close to the deal that four companies are in heavy due diligence with Digg - two media/news companies, and two big Internet companies - Google and Microsoft. And Google and Microsoft are on the verge of making their bids.
Digg is prepared to take less than the $300 million Allen & Co. were floating late last year. Google, our source says, will likely bid $200-$225 million, which Digg would likely accept.
Microsoft is looking at a somewhat lower price. That makes sense, since most of Digg’s revenue today comes from a three year advertising deal that Digg signed with Microsoft last year. That deal has revenue guarantees - and Microsoft may be hesitant to value Digg based on revenue that they supply.
Any sale is likely to give Microsoft an option to terminate that advertising deal, which means Google isn’t valuing Digg based on revenue, either. But it is a big slap in the face to Microsoft to steal Digg away, and Google can certainly generate revenue on all those page views.
More as this develops, but we may be looking at a bidding war between Microsoft and Google over Digg. Plus any late comers to the table.
Digg was founded in late 2005 and has raised $11.3 million in funding.
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Google, Microsoft Said To Be Preparing Bids For Digg
User-generated news site Digg has been working with influential investment bank Allen & Co. (the ones that recently got Slide a half billion dollar valuation) for a few months now, and pitching big tech and media companies on a sale.
And despite a number of false starts, this time a sale looks like it might actually happen, and soon. We hear from a source very close to the deal that four companies are in heavy due diligence with Digg - two media/news companies, and two big Internet companies - Google and Microsoft. And Google and Microsoft are on the verge of making their bids.
Digg is prepared to take less than the $300 million Allen & Co. were floating late last year. Google, our source says, will likely bid $200-$225 million, which Digg would likely accept.
Microsoft is looking at a somewhat lower price. That makes sense, since most of Digg’s revenue today comes from a three year advertising deal that Digg signed with Microsoft last year. That deal has revenue guarantees - and Microsoft may be hesitant to value Digg based on revenue that they supply.
Any sale is likely to give Microsoft an option to terminate that advertising deal, which means Google isn’t valuing Digg based on revenue, either. But it is a big slap in the face to Microsoft to steal Digg away, and Google can certainly generate revenue on all those page views.
More as this develops, but we may be looking at a bidding war between Microsoft and Google over Digg. Plus any late comers to the table.
Digg was founded in late 2004 and has raised $11.3 million in funding.
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Yahoo Buzz Launches: Popular Stories To Go On Yahoo Homepage
Yahoo launches the much anticipated Yahoo Buzz tonight - a Digg-like site that takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 to start) and let’s users vote on stories and push them up to the top of the page.
To see it in action, click on the buzz button at the end of this, or any, of our posts (update: button functionality won’t be live until Tuesday). Like Digg, the more users that vote for a story, via the embedded button or on the Buzz site, the higher the story goes on Buzz. But user voting isn’t the only factor in how well stories do. Yahoo is also looking at their search engine logs in real time to determine hot or breaking news. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings.
But there’s another part of Buzz that will get publishers excited - every day a few of the most popular stories will also be featured on the Yahoo home page. Yahoo has been experimenting with linking to third party news directly from their home page since last year. In one case, the Buzz team told me, 2 million visitors were sent to Wired for a linked article in the two hours it was on the Yahoo home page. 2-3 stories from Buzz will go on the Yahoo home page daily.
Buzz has categories including entertainment, world news, U.S. news, sports, business, health, and travel. Images and video are also separate categories.
Of course, many publishers won’t be able to handle that kind of traffic flow. But Yahoo is also prepared for that. Smaller sites will only be linked on a fraction of the total home page views - in effect, Yahoo is turning down the firehose for those that can’t handle it.
Yahoo isn’t the first large company to try out the Digg model. In mid 2006 AOL relaunched the Netscape portal as a Digg-like site. AOL eventually moved the service to a different domain name and renamed it Propeller. The service has about 3.8 million monthly unique visitors (Comscore), compared to about 12.5 million for Digg.
Update: Yahoo says the launch has been pushed back from 9 pm PST to possibly as late as 11:30 PST. stay tuned.
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Digg Competitor Mixx Takes $2 Million Series B
Social voting outfit Mixx has taken $2 million Series B in a round led by existing investor InterSouth Partners.
Mixx offers a category based social voting service that competes with sites such as Digg, Reddit and Propeller. McLean, Virginia based Mixx was launched in September 2007 with talent including former executives from Yahoo!, AOL, USA TODAY and The Associated Press. The company has regularly launched new features in an attempt to stand out in a market place with strongly entrenched loyalties to existing players.
Mixx added the LA Times to its investor group in December. Total funding to date is $3.5 million.
(via VentureBeat)
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Digg Competitor Mixx Takes $2 Million Series A1
Social voting outfit Mixx has taken $2 million Series A1 in a round led by existing investor InterSouth Partners.
Mixx offers a category based social voting service that competes with sites such as Digg, Reddit and Propeller. McLean, Virginia based Mixx was launched in September 2007 with talent including former executives from Yahoo!, AOL, USA TODAY and The Associated Press. The company has regularly launched new features in an attempt to stand out in a market place with strongly entrenched loyalties to existing players.
Mixx added the LA Times to its investor group in December. Total funding to date is $3.5 million.
(via VentureBeat)
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Mixx Launches Related Items Pages – Digg Should Have Done This
Digg competitor Mixx continues to impress us with new features (although the exodus of Digg users to them may have been short lived).
A new feature launches this week on Mixx called Related Items. It solves a common problem found on Digg and other sites where multiple articles on the same story compete with each other to get to the home page. One person may submit a story from USAToday. Another may submit basically the same story but from the Washington Post. Those stories are tracked separately on Digg, and votes are split between them as users discover them. The result is that the story takes longer to get to the home page than it otherwise should. Or worse, both make it and the story is duplicated. Digg catches duplicate submission for the exact same link, but they are unable to determine if stores are related.
The Related Items feature on Mixx flags a submission when it thinks that a story is similar. A message appears that says “We may already have this story! Or at least one startling similar. Take a look at the stories below.” The user submitting the related story can then choose to submit it anyway, or add it as a related item to the previous submission.
There is a benefit to the submitter in adding the story to the previous submission because the new story will be added, too (and traffic will flow). Users venefit because they get more information and perspectives on the story.
The clustering that will occur from this will very much resemble TechMeme, which is a great way to quickly find multiple perspectives on the news.
Mixx, which is backed by Intersouth Partners and the LA Times, is still a tiny blip compared to competitors like Digg and Reddit. Comscore says Digg has 12 million unique monthly visitors, compared to about a million on Reddit. Mixx? They’ve got just 45,000. That’s probably a low count, since newer and smaller sites are much harder for Comscore to measure. but they have a long, long way to go before they are even no. 2 in this market. If they keep launching new features like this, though, I think they have a chance at success.
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