We have surely seen our fair share of Digg-style social news sites over the last few years. The latest entrant into this market is Vanno, which puts an interesting and novel spin onto the social news experience. Unlike other social news sites, Vanno's focus is exclusively on news stories about companies and Vanno then uses its community's votes to calculate a company's reputation.
Vanno is still in private beta testing, but we were able to get 500 invites for our readers. You can find a link to the sign-up page at the end of this post.
Vanno's basic feature set is comparable to that of other social news sites like Digg, Reddit, or Mixx. You get to vote stories up or down, search for companies, comment on stories, and you can filter your stories by popular or upcoming submissions. Vanno also provides a separate RSS feed for every company in its index.
As Vanno is still pretty new, a lot of companies are not yet associated with a lot of stories, though the Vanno team and the early beta testers have done a good job at seeding the index with stories. Vanno also displays a set of basic information about every company, including information about its employees' political contributions.
It should be noted, however, that Vanno's focus is clearly on the U.S. for now.
Vanno uses a bookmarklet for all the major browser for submitting stories to the site. However, submitting stories to Vanno is a bit more complicated than submitting a story to Digg or FriendFeed. With every submission, the submitter also has to identify the aspects of the company's reputation that is discussed in the story, as well as whether the story strengthens or damages a company's reputation.
The core feature of Vanno, besides the social news aspects, is clearly the 'Company Reputation Index,' though Vanno doesn't detail how it calculates these numbers exactly (besides vaguely referring to Bayesian statistics in its FAQ).
This 'Reputation Index' is broken down into a few main categories: Community involvement, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, environment, patriotism, and social responsibility.
For now, it is hard to tell how realistic these reputation scores are, as there are simply not enough votes and stories in the system yet.
Vanno definitely looks like an interesting experiment. Overall, its feature set is very complete and the only feature we really missed was an embeddable widget with company information.
As is typical for social news sites in their early stages, Vanno's success will depend on how many users will start submitting stories. If you would like to get involved, Vanno has given us 500 invitations for our readers. Just head over to Vanno's sign-up page and claim yours.
Comments
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It's too bad I can't thumb down Digg in Vanno's index.
Posted by: Tamar Weinberg | October 27, 2008 1:30 PM
How about a Vanno for each industry segments like Automotive, Accounting, Real Estate, Tech?
Posted by: Mircea @ MyTestBox.com | October 27, 2008 1:52 PM
You can compare companies across industry segments on Vanno!
There are a couple of ways of doing this but I am going to describe one:
On a company details page like this:
http://vanno.com/company/microsoft
The drop down labeled "All Companies" near the top-middle of the page contains the business categories that are tagged to Microsoft. Change that to see how Microsoft compares to other companies in that category. From there, if you click the blue rank link, you can MS compared with other companies in that category.
Let me know if that makes sense.
Landon Clark
Cofounder of Vanno
Posted by: landon | October 27, 2008 2:05 PM
Very interesting...sounds almost identical to Consupo.
Posted by: Peter K. | October 27, 2008 2:42 PM
Heh. I'll bow out of the beta invite (is any application not in beta these days? GMail is still a beta product!) but will watch the waves to see what people think.
My point is with GMail and Google Reader and all those other beta products that are still being tested. It could be argued that sending humans to the Moon remains a beta project as it's only occurred once despite NASA projections for a repeat mission.
At an age when hundreds, nay thousands, of firms are operating in the social web sphere, what difference does another firm or application matter when, as Peter K commented above, Vanno sounds like Consupo?
Posted by: Ari Herzog | October 27, 2008 3:19 PM
BTW, I meant to say thanks to Frederic and RWW for the great writeup. We definitely understand that submitting stories to Vanno is a little more work than other sites, but we hope that we offer enough value to make that extra work payoff for our users.
We definitely have the "embeddable widget with company information" on our list of things we will develop and add to the site.
Finally, thanks to everyone that has accepted the invitation and checked us out already.
Landon Clark
Cofounder of Vanno
Posted by: landon | October 27, 2008 4:57 PM
Wow, Peter K. was right. Vanno seems to function quite similar to Consupo.com. Even down to the reputation index, which appears to function nearly the same as the consupo index.
Posted by: harold | October 28, 2008 9:52 AM