News Streaming

In the latest release of Socialmedian, you now have the ability to share content from other sites including Google Reader, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, and the RSS feed for your own blog. In a way, this is similar to the popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed, which brings in everything you do from across the social web. But where FriendFeed forces those that subscribe to you to hide and filter the items they don't find interesting or relevant, Socialmedian puts you in control of what is or is not shared and your followers on the service will only see those items that are relevant to them.

To determine what constitutes something being relevant, newsworthy content, Socialmedian matches the streamed content from the people you follow on the service with the topical keywords in the news networks you're a member of. Only those updates that match up will be displayed to you unless you configure the service otherwise.

The one exception to this rule is Twitter. Because that service tends to be noisy, only tweets deemed popular by the community are shared by default. If you want to see more tweets, a "noise volume" slider is provided which you can use to increase the number of tweets that appear.

Other Upgrades

In addition to the news streaming, Socialmedian is now also offering bloggers a way to promote their site on service. Their new "reverse blog widget" is a widget that promotes your blog on their site (instead of the reverse - a widget that promotes their site on your blog). When anyone is reading or commenting on your blog on the site, the widget displays.

The upgrade also includes improved ways to find popular discussions and stories. They've added a "Stories" option to the site's top navigation that will let you quickly access the stories in the following categories: Popular Today, Popular Week, Popular Month, Rising Fast, and Hot Discussions.

Is News Streaming Better Than FriendFeed?

Out of all the upgrades today, the most interesting addition is this idea of news streaming. Like a less noisy FriendFeed - and one that's pre-filtered for you based on your interests (as determined by the communities you join) - there is some appeal. But for those who are already heavily using FriendFeed, there is no chance that any new service can possibly replace their activities there. In that case, where does that leave a site like Socialmedian?

Perhaps then Socialmedian can appeal to those that want to locate and read interesting news, but don't want to spend half their day in Google Reader browsing through feeds. This puts Socialmedian in competition with sites like ReadBurner and RSSMemeinstead. But difference is that those other two sites only feature Google Reader shares. Socialmedian lets you share more of the social web with friends, and they see only the parts they find valuable; that could make Socialmedian a more relevant and useful service than the others.

What do you think of the new version of Socialmedian? Share your thoughts in the comments.