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Social News: Can the Digg/Mixx/Buzz Model Hold Up Against FriendFeed and Sphinn?

2008-02-26T16:46:01Z

The social news space is developing at a mind-boggling pace. Just in the last 48 hours Yahoo! launched its new site Buzz, the increasingly mainstream site Mixx announced more funding and Digg held its first ever town hall meeting. Meanwhile a screenshot of the soon to be aggregated service Tumblr has been leaked, my email inbox is filling up with friend notifications from the $5 million richer FriendFeed and BricaBox launched a social content service. Those are just the highlights over the last two days, there's even more related news I'll pass over for now.

]]> There are two ends of a spectrum emerging - Digg,Mixx and Buzz are offering general interest social news about a variety of topics and fueled by large groups of users, whereas services like FriendFeed, the social media marketing site Sphinnn and sites like the Twitter-sliver Pulse of Open Source offer news from a targeted group of users and/or on very specific topics.

If general or specific are two ways to categorize social news sites, let's look at these two categories in terms of:

Quality of news
Speed of news
Detail of news
Community feel

Quality of news

In theory, big social news sites have the advantage of using large groups of people and correspondingly strong algorithms to discover and vet high quality content on any topic. In reality, though, this effect is often mitigated by the imperative to limit coverage to a single story concerning each news event. The big sites usually see the first good story on a topic promoted to the front page and subsequent quality coverage is left in the dust. The fact that something happened at all becomes much more important than deliberation over which coverage of that event is most worth reading.

The small niche social news sites don't suffer from this dilemma but depending on the breadth of your social network or niche userbase, important news may simply go unnoticed and not be covered at all. That's a risk you run on these kinds of sites, but on the other hand the wealth of resources that your friends can share is often much richer. Small social news sites don't care about repeat coverage of common events and don't revert to a "lowest common denominator" method of determining what's important.

From the outside niche sites may turn up a lot of content that doesn't look important at all, but the closer you are to a topic - the more important the details become.

If you can find a niche site for your niche, or an active set of like-minded contributers as contacts on a site like FriendFeed - then the quality of news will be vastly superior. Otherwise, and to supplement those small social news experiences, the big sites work well enough.

It's notable that Digg has been trying to create those kinds of small experiences within the big site, but I don't think it's worked very well so far. The Digg user experience is just not built for small communities of interest.

On the small social news side, two things worth checking out are FriendFeed's fantastically executed friend recommendation feature (it just goes on and on with suggestions) and social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia's seemless implementation of groups. Both are great examples of how to nail a small social news feature.

Speed of News

Nobody likes being the last to know about important news, so speed is an important metric. Sometimes, very rarely, the big general interest sites see something burn up the charts and hit the front page in less than an hour after submission. Far more common, at least at Digg, is for news to take 6 to 24 hours to get to the most visible place on the site. Big social news sites are so reliant on explicit user validation of news as important, and require that this goes on in the context of a terrible signal to noise ratio, that these are not the sites to go to for early news if being early is important to you.

Traditional mainstream news sites beat big social news sites on stories all day long, and if our new web can't beat the old-school then I don't know what it's good for. Joking aside, there are many things more important than being fast, but it is important in a news source.

All those criticisms being as they are, check out the Propeller Tracker on the right hand side of that site for a good example of a big site tackling the speed problem.

Small social news sites are much faster at unearthing news, if someone happens to catch that news at all early in the news cycle. Different sites handle this in different ways, though.

FriendFeed gives you a firehose and doesn't privilege the important stuff over everything else. The new Tumblr looks like it is going to highlight content as soon as a handful of people have linked to it, that's great and something I'll bet other sites will start doing soon. Sphinnn, the online marketing version of Digg, falls somewhere in between. Less populated voting sites have a lower threshold for popularity but less energy driving good news forward fast, too.

Detail of news

Big sites ought to have rich discussions in comments and offer greater detail on the news, but they rarely do. Slashdot and Propeller might be the exceptions so far. How's discussion over at Newsvine? I don't know, perhaps someone can let us know in comments.

For the most part though, mainstream audiences are still often not used to, don't feel compelled to or are unable to leave high-quality comments on social news stories. That's where the richness in detail comes from in the current model. How hard would it be to pull in related content on these news topics from sites like Del.icio.us and Twitter? Not very hard. That would be cool.

Niche social news sites lose out on some detail because of the smaller sample set of contributors, but they are clearly better for detail overall. There are more and more finely grained links discoverable on topics of interest to you in a niche site that suits your needs. Like the question of quality, detail is a criteria that niche sites clearly win on if a healthy niche site is appropriate or available for you at all.

Community feel

I prefer to spend my time in the company of people who have the same interests and who already agree with me about things that are important. I'm just kidding about that.

That's the trade-off you often make when choosing to spend your time on a niche social news site. You trade opportunities to make new and diverse social connections for the opportunity to develop a closer connection to a smaller, more homogeneous group of news lovers. Both have their place, I wouldn't want one and not the other in my life.

Final Thoughts

The complimentary nature of community on big and little social news sites is a good snapshot of what's probably true in all of the above questions - getting the best of both worlds is ideal.

I find myself spending about 75% of my news consumption time in niche social news sites (Twitter and Ma.gnolia mostly) and 25% in big social news sites. I wish I had more time for both. I intend to spend some more time on FriendFeed and I'm jealous every time I see a good Tumblr blog.

We've been having some slow times at Digg lately, so I'm interested in checking out Mixx.

What does all this mean? I think it means that big social news sites are at risk of losing substantial amounts of user engagement once users discover that more targeted news environments are available to them. Big sites will probably always be big, but the social news landscape is quickly growing richer day by day.

Comment from Tony on 2008-02-26

2008-02-26T18:13:14Z

Something kind of bugs me about lumping twitter, magnolia, and friendfeed in with the likes of mixx, digg, and buzz. Are the first three really social news services? Probably need a better term for these. "Social" has become such a generic term that it now applies to almost every website.

As for mixx, digg, and buzz, at the end of the day it comes down to how well you resonate with the stories that hit the front page. Digg's developed a unique community with a mix of stories I don't see anywhere else - this community is the reason for their success. But nothing really innovative has happened in this space since digg introduced there voting system. Everybody else is just jumping on the bandwagon.

Comment from Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2008-02-26

2008-02-26T18:18:38Z

Tony, I hear ya and thanks for that thoughtful comment. I do think though that for many of us services like Twitter, Ma.gnolia and FriendFeed are increasingly serving as a key source for news. There's some real advantages to doing so, as outlined above. Re innovation post digg, though I do think StumbleUpon (older than digg?) is pretty remarkable, I think what you say is too true. Here's hoping for radically new developments.

Comment from Tony on 2008-02-26

2008-02-26T20:01:19Z

Marshall, send me an email and I'll send RRW the first look at something really innovative about to happen in this space.

Comment from Brij on 2008-02-26

2008-02-26T20:14:12Z

Marshall - good overview of social media sites. Want to ask two questions -

Do you think what constitutes "news" itself is changing? and how the real-time streaming apps will change the notion of "news break".

We are in media tsunami and its getting more immediate as well as richer in content. By putting together these different apps in one overview blog post you have rightly expanded the scope of discussion.

Brij

Comment from Guy Rosen on 2008-02-26

2008-02-26T21:55:40Z

Thanks for the round-up Marshall. Do you think there is a critical mass required for a niche to be "social news-able"?

It seems that the further away you move from general news or technology, the harder it will be to find a decent audience to get a social news site moving. There are far too many sites where it takes just 5 votes to get to the homepage - the implication on content is clear.

At the end of the day, the major sites seem to remain quite close to the mainstream. Sphinn of course is a special example, as its the social media people's own hangout (ever count how many of the top blogs are about blogging? (-:)

Comment from Watch IPTV on 2008-02-26

2008-02-27T00:50:29Z

I think their staying power lies heavily in that they are first generation aggregation services, the future of such services will be much more short-lived.

Comment from Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2008-02-26

2008-02-27T00:50:41Z

Brij, in response to your questions:

Do you think what constitutes "news" itself is changing?

- yes, I think that smaller events are becoming "of interest" to a larger number of people and I think that smaller voices are moving the needle on what constitutes an event worth noticing.

how the real-time streaming apps will change the notion of "news break".

- I was just saying on Twitter today that it bums me out when PR people email me about news that's so old it's already been blogged about elsewhere and hit Techmeme already! I think these quick publishing methods just shrink the scale on what's "breaking" and fresh.

Guy -

Do you think there is a critical mass required for a niche to be "social news-able"?

- I hear what you're saying. Here's my take on it in theory: The bigger the niche the faster the news (contrary to the bigger the news site, the slower the news) but I think any niche can have a valuable social news site. I think many already do in fact, though some niches may operate on a scale of news by the week more than by the minute.

Practically speaking, you're right. Many niches just don't get the traction to parse quality news. It would be interesting to see a study of the specifics.

Comment from Mark Dykeman on 2008-02-26

2008-02-27T01:01:03Z

Digg is like the Wal-Mart of social news, while the niche sites are specialty retailers. At Wal-Mart, consumers "vote" by buying, so Wal-Mart tends to stock high velocity, popular items that appeal to a broad group of people. Like Digg does with news.

But if you want to buy the best, most up to date golf club/fishing rod/hip waders, you go to the speciality store. Just like the niche news sites.

Comment from Tad Chef on 2008-02-27

2008-02-27T08:17:36Z

Mixx is different from Digg and other conventional social news sites which rely on the antiquated front page mataphor.

Mixx is a combination of personalized news and Ning-like subcommuniies. In fact I do not care for the frontpage aka popular items on Mixx most of the time. I have created "my own" community aka group there which competes in a way with Sphinn:
http://www.mixx.com/groups/seo20

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2008-02-27

2008-02-27T10:21:10Z

To equate it to the world I know best, web publishing, digg is basically a mainstream tech news site. Hence why they like mainstream tech news sources. Slashdot is mainstream too, but for mainstream IT geeks. But I think the digg audience is more at risk of moving to smaller, more targeted sites -- because slashdot has a much more defined community. They're all IT geeks (God bless 'em) and they love their open source and hate Microsoft. Whereas digg audience loves gadgets, stories about Obama and Hilary, funny pictures, science, entertainment, stories about World of Warcraft, etc etc. So digg's topic focus is all over the place - which is what they wanted of course (makes for big $$ if they can sell the thing). I think digg will always be popular, but I wonder whether a lot of digg's audience will in time gravitate to more specific communities, where as Marshall pointed out the user experience is actually better (if only they knew). I don't think there's anywhere near the same risk at Slashdot, where their audience is entrenched.

Comment from frederick on 2008-02-27

2008-02-27T12:26:41Z

i like the way mixx organize things!
@Tad,i'll check your group :D

Comment from Doug Wolfgram on 2008-02-27

2008-02-27T14:39:35Z

After being picked up by Apple for the iPhone and being made a staff pick, www.floort.com is becoming a huge force in personal news. While allowing reference to news stories, they primarily want YOUR opinion and they make news of it. Interesting twist from Digg which downgrades you for links to your own opinion of a story.

Comment from Tom on 2008-02-27

2008-02-27T14:50:57Z

Really interesting article and fasinating to see how the landscape of social media is changing so quickly. I wonder if/when users will get bored of these type of sites though. What will be next on the horizon?

Comment from Plaket on 2008-02-27

2008-02-27T23:49:56Z

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