Editor: This is a guest post by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, founder of CoRank - a service that lets you create you own custom social network. Rogelio has a bee in his bonnet about the term 'digg clone', probably not helped by the fact Read/WriteWeb called CoRank a "Create Your Own Digg" site in May when it re-launched :-) But Rogelio is adamant that the term 'digg clone' should be buried, so we've given him the floor to present his argument. Tell us what you think in the comments.
There are a lot of people on the Net who don't know what Digg is. But for those who do, there's a term just as popular
as Digg: the Digg
clone.
Has anyone ever heard Google being referred as an "Altavista clone"? What about Yahoo Mail or GMail being mentioned as a "Hotmail-like site"? I've never seen anyone talking about MySpace as a "Friendster clone", and definitely Wordpress.com would never be called a Blogger-like site.
Was the new Google Groups a Yahoo Groups clone? During the portal craze a few years ago, everyone was talking about portals - but we never heard that Lycos was a Yahoo clone. Even today, you don't often read that Metacafe is a YouTube clone, Google Reader a Bloglines clone, or Google Blog Search a Technorati clone.
Although pseudo-copying has existed since day 1 on the net, the word "clone" hasn't often been used when we refer to sites with similar functionality/interface as those that pioneered a particular service. Yet with the social news site Digg, we choked. We have web pages, portals, video sites, blogs, search engines, wikis... and Digg clones.
Pligg is an open source project that originally copied almost all of the functionality and the user interface structure Digg had defined. This caused many people to launch almost identical sites with little to no effort.
Moreover, most of these sites - Pligg-based or not - not only were a visual copy of the Digg UI, they also tried to provide the same type of social news service. Either international versions, or focusing on other niche topics. So those sites really are digg clones. Same interface, same goals, same purpose.
But it was shortly after we launched coRank, giving anyone the ability to create their own "social news/content network", and seeing how people were using it, that I realized there was something else going on.
While Digg is an extremely popular service, it really is a community. A very specific, yet large and decentralized one. But because of that "communal" nature (mostly young male techie), it has not yet reached mainstream - neither Digg nor the social news concept it popularized. And chances are this concept will not reach the mainstream being described as a "Digg clone". Why? Not only does the mainstream not know what Digg is, the way many people are using social news technologies has little to do with Digg itself.
Yes, I see many people using coRank - or Pligg, or whatever - to create Digg-like verticals about any imaginable topic (and let me say I see nothing wrong with that). But just as blogs or wikis earned their own name, I'm seeing many other people taking this concept further than digg - where the term 'clon'e fades away in favor of a more distinctive type of site.
Some people are creating sites to add "social news" to their existing community. They're not adding this functionality to build a Digg killer or the next great niche startup. All they care about is giving their existing community a tool that allows them to share things that matter to them. That's what drives them to submit things, not hitting "the front page".
But there's a lot more than that. Let me list the ways 'digg clone' is unsuitable when it comes to social news sites:
These are sites where their creators aggregate external content about specific topics, and if other people feel like contributing, they're welcome to do so. You could use other tools to do this, but it'd be like using email to play chess - there are better ways. You could use a blog, but blogs are mainly about publishing your own content; or a wiki, but wikis are about collaborative editing; or del.icio.us, but that's a global social bookmarking service, not your own.
Yes, the mechanics or even the user interface of some of these sites may resemble that of Digg. But their purpose and the way they're being used is quite different. Repositories, collective aggregators, personal sites, for-fun stuff... Who's talking about making the mighty "Front Page"? We can call them clones, but when we go and tell the people who created them "that's just another Digg clone" and they answer "What's Digg?"... that's when the concept is entering mainstream. Digg, as a concept, was a good first step; but there is a lot more.
Digg clone or HotOrNot clone? Definitely not social news!
Digg is the flagship of submitted/voted content, but adding categories or niches will not transform it into the company that'll bring social news into the mainstream. It will mainly offer their existing community more things to do. But if you let people take charge, do their own thing, reach their own groups and communities with their own socially aggregated content functionality, then you're talking social.
Yes, many of them really are clones, and that's fine, but applying the term "Digg clone" to anything based on submitting and voting content may degrade the fact that this is a medium gaining popularity every day. It's about communities and people using a new concept to interact with third party content, generate more content, get engaged, etc. While this was made popular by Digg, we might start considering it as a new type of site. Personally I call them "Social Content Networks", although the name is not important. It's something that will happen as the mainstream adopts the concept, something that's slowly already happening.
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Google wasn't called an "Altavista clone" because by that point the search engine market was rich and broad enough to have its own term that was as recognizable and meaningful as referencing a single product name.
When MySpace began becoming popular it was certainly compared directly to Friendster. That second generation of social networking sites all took the Friendster model and built on it. Hot-or-Not's version was called Yafro - Yet Another Friendster Rip Off. Dogster and Catster reference Friendster directly in their names.
By the time Ning and Facebook arrived on the scene there were enough of these sites that they'd earned their own category - "social networking sites". When you say "social networking site" in 2007 people know what you mean. If you'd said that in 2003 the best you could have hoped for was "oh, like Friendster?".
I think it's fair to be calling CoRank and Netscape.com and other social news sites "digg clones" right now because that tells users what they need to know - it's kind of like digg. In a couple of years we can call them all "social news sites", or whatever term sticks.
Posted by: Ian McKellar | August 1, 2007 4:28 PM
Richard, thanks for the opportunity. Reading the article it sounds as if I'm somewhat obsessed with the issue, even though that's not the case :-)
Ian, I actually agree with you to some extent. In fact, I've been introducing coRank for the last two months as a service where you can "create your own Digg-like site" - it worked a lot better than describing it as anything else. It was when I started to run into people that didn't know what Digg is (trust me, there are many) and who were doing things that had nothing to do with "hitting the front page" or social "news" when I felt the term wasn't going to get this concept to the mainstream.
Also, although not related, don't forget that the "...ster" trend was started by Napster I believe, not Friendster :-)
Posted by: RBA | August 1, 2007 5:04 PM
i'm burying this article as lame
Posted by: p | August 1, 2007 5:26 PM
Some good points here. I would argue however that some clones are good clones. http://www.Scoopit.co.nz for example is a digg clone based on pligg but its focus is regional, and as such, is a breath of fresh air in the NZ news scene.
Posted by: NIck | August 1, 2007 6:00 PM
The use of "Clone" come with Web 2.0 Before that, if you made a site function like other site, it won't named as a clone.
Posted by: Tom | August 2, 2007 12:42 AM
I've been very interested in this and am quite vocal about the issue in our local South African web scene where Muti.co.za popped up, as well as a bunch of similar sites.
Basically it does delve down to community, and many people still ask "oh no, another social networking site" but there are definitive advantages to going niche, and that's what the web is about at the moment.
Each enterprise should have their own Digg-like site, their own Facebook and their own Google Apps page.
Posted by: Uno de Waal | August 2, 2007 4:42 AM
Buddy - this is ridiculous.
Your entire business is building these Digg-clones, and the best term you can come up with is "social news/content network"?
This is a major marketing opportunity for you. Make a real term, one that is catchy and easy to say, one that perhaps includes your company name, and maybe it will catch on.
Nobody will ever refer to "social news/content network" sites, or "Social Content Networks". Horrible name. Does nothing for me. Sounds like a website that talks about feelings. Something social workers use. Yuck.
Try calling them CoRanking engines. That is more catchy. Or give them a fun acronym like SNOW (Social News Organized Network) and then call these sites SNOW balls (which makes sense because stories roll and get bigger as they pick up votes). That has a better chance of sticking in peoples minds than "social news/content network".
Be a leader, not a heckler. Don't give people a real name and you will die with people calling them Digg-clones. Give these sites a real name and you will forever be remembered as the person who named them. Think O'Reilly and Web2.0 - And Chris Anderson and "the Long Tail".
Looks like an opportunity to me. One that you are already missing because in this article you didn't name it at all. All I remember is Digg-clone. It's easy to remember, and tells me exactly what we are talking about.
Posted by: Tim McCormack | August 2, 2007 7:11 AM
Hmmm, I realize that my last post had one pretty odd thing in it. SNOW - Social News Organized Network - woops. Doesn't spell SNOW does it. =^)
Oh well, i tried. But you get the idea. Hopefully if you spend a bit of time you can come up with something better.
SNOW, Social News Organized Writings?
anyway, it has to be more catchy than Social Content Network. Nobody says "Asynchronous Javascript". People say AJAX. Nobody says "Socially monitored and public contribution portals". They say Wiki.
CoRanking engine sounds good. Techy but cool.
Good luck!
Posted by: Tim McCormack | August 2, 2007 7:18 AM
Definite opportunity to brand a new name/concept. CoRank engines or CoRanking engines does have a nice ring to it. Totally agree that creating a name not only for the company, but for the kind of platform the company offers is highly important.
Posted by: Jay Kelly | August 2, 2007 9:06 AM
I just posted a response to this article in my blog. The post does not directly address the theme of this article. However, it is more about whether we need "clones" on the web. As an alternative view, I suppose many of you might also be interested in this post too.
cheers,
--- Yihong
Posted by: Yihong Ding | August 2, 2007 10:38 AM
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?
I think getting caught up in the nomenclature misses the point. Ultimately the debate should be not be do you call these thing xyz clones, or do they add value to the web? Does it change the way we gather and share information and form online communities?
Digg does this beautifully, and I think it's only the beginning.
Posted by: George Mandis | August 2, 2007 1:03 PM
We're taking our own pass at the social news/content without copying much of digg at all.
Big differences:
1. Not a democracy, all votes are not created equal.
2. No real "popular page" (every user sees a different list of links). Harder to game and more personalized content
3. Focused on a niche topic (in our case business geeks)
Welcome to try it out, it's in beta:
http://www.DailyHub.com
Posted by: Dharmesh Shah | August 3, 2007 12:16 PM
There's another decent Digg like site: http://www.convote.com
Posted by: Sue Do | August 8, 2007 1:28 PM