In its attempt to be as simple as possible, Comunitee employs a combination of social network functions, including Lists (Twitter and Facebook), Circles (Google+), socially relevant news (Digg), personalized news apps (Zite, Flipboard, News360), news based on your social graph (Facebook), frictionless sharing (Facebook), discovery (StumbleUpon) and news based on your interest graph (Twitter).

Comunitees are organized a lot like Google+ Circles. For example, "Tech Entrepreneurs" might be its own comunitee, much like it could be its own circle on Google+. This comunitee will curate all the news that falls under this topic based on other users' reading patterns. You can also switch it up by allowing one of your "comunities" to curate a section of the site. For example, if you choose Tech and then select your "Tech Entrepreneurs" comunitee, your Tech section is curated by the that comunitee. As you build a presence on Comunitee, you will earn Foursquare-like badges.

Comunitee also employs the idea of frictionless sharing. Unlike Facebook, which sprang seamless sharing on its users, Comunitee users sign up for the site already knowing that every article clicked will automatically show up in their My News section, which is created organically. By tracking a user's reading patterns, it surfaces content that matches your interests. All other news is categorized into "All News," "Interest Feed," which is just based on the interests you select. "Comunitee Feed" is a feed of news from your curated comunitees.

"Our goal with Comunitee is to make consuming personalized/social news as simple as possible," Comunitee CEO Don Daszkowski tells me. "Every time we think about incorporating a new feature we ask ourselves if it fits our model which is 'users are expected to read news and invite friends.' We want to make the user experience is as easy as possible."

Social news site Digg does over a personalization section, but Comunitee takes that a step further by bringing in friends from Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also invite friends via email. Unlike Digg, Comunitee isn't interested in asking users to vote articles up or down. The site does all of that for you. In that sense, Comunitee is similar to discovery engine StumbleUpon, which organizes content based on your taste graph.

Comunitee is an interesting concept, but the site itself employs so many different aspects of the social web that it might actually be making itself more complicated.

Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...

How to Use LinkedIn Today

At heart, LinkedIn Today is a semi-personalized news portal. You start by selecting certain industries and news sources to follow. Your LinkedIn Today front page then serves up news from those industries and sources. For example, I am following the 'Internet' and 'Online Media' industries, among others. I also follow ReadWriteWeb, PaidContent and other sources that I like to check daily.

The way LinkedIn Today works is simple yet clever. Taking the 'Internet' industry as an example, it claims to serve up "the most shared news by people in the Internet Industry." LinkedIn Today knows which industries its users are in from their LinkedIn profiles.

For example, I categorized myself in the Internet industry in my LinkedIn profile (see below screenshot).

So if I 'share' a tech news story to LinkedIn Today, it essentially votes that story up on the Internet industry frontpage. The same applies if I tweet it, provided that I've connected my Twitter profile to LinkedIn. Indeed, Twitter is probably responsible for the majority of sharing activity on LinkedIn Today.

One of the best features of LinkedIn Today is being able to see who shared a particular article. Using my own Kindle article from yesterday as an example:

I can drill down on any of those names, to see what they do for a living. (btw I'm not in the habit of sharing my own articles, I only did that one for test purposes!)

How LinkedIn Today Compares to Other Social News Services

So how does the news delivered by LinkedIn Today compare to the likes of Techmeme (more of a curated news service than a social one, but still similar) and Google News?

As with many social news services, a few publications appear to dominate LinkedIn Today. At the time of writing, the blog SearchEngineLand had the top story. It also had two other headlines on the 'Internet' industry page. AOL's tech blog TechCrunch and social media blog Mashable each had two stories in the headlines. The only other sources to have a prominent headline as of writing were NYC blog Business Insider and mainstream news site USA Today, who each had one.

In comparison, Techmeme has more headlines per page and thus more sources - although it too is often dominated by just a few news sites. Google News has more of a technology bent than both LinkedIn Today and Techmeme, with services like PCWorld and Ars Technica near the top as of writing.

The Ping Effect

Overall, LinkedIn Today seems to be relatively well-used. It's already one of ReadWriteWeb's leading traffic drivers, which is always a good indication of the success of a social news site.

It's fair to say that LinkedIn Today has avoided The Ping Effect. Although, it's also never going to become the leading social news source for the various industries it covers. Specialist social news services, like Techmeme or the tech news community Hacker News, will always have a broader and deeper selection of news than LinkedIn.

But for the business-oriented user, who wants to stay on top of what others in his or her industry are reading, LinkedIn Today offers good value. In addition, the social hooks are actually useful - they allow you to find similarly minded people to connect to on LinkedIn.

Are you a LinkedIn Today user? We'd love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments below. Also, don't forget to add ReadWriteWeb as one of your sources in LinkedIn Today!

The Stream draws for its stories from the flow of social media in the Middle East, a flow that's grown positively torrential over the last six months. independent participants on Twitter and Facebook have frequently outpaced even the most competent and committed reporters. And the best of them have in turn contributed to the stream.

Hosts Derrick Ashong and Ahmed Shihab-Eldin turned their studios, a thunderdome of screens, into a hellbroth of feeds and videos for the 30-minute show's online beta premiere. Ashong described it as a "social media community with its own daily TV program." The broadcast debut is in two weeks.

The beta premiere looked at Mexicans using social media to counter drug violence, a Yemeni blogger's return home and Indian anti-corruption efforts.

"I thought it was great," said the Berkman Center's Jillian York, one of the guests on the premiere. "It was a bit unexpected: I thought I'd be talking about the social media aspects of the stories they sent me, but instead I was asked about the actual bits."

Two things struck me. First, it was professional. The people directing and curating the conversation were competent and agile. Second, the social media was a series of veins to be mined and lines along which communication ran, not ornamentation or gimmick.

If anyone is going to do something like this right, Al Jazeera, which has a good track record of real social media innovation, is a likely candidate. It will be interesting to watch how it grows.

Unsurprisingly, the show has a Twitter feed and a Facebook page, both of which are points of pretty vital conversation. The Stream uses Storify to curate information relating to a story. I admit I've yet to get my head around the utility of this tool as a story-telling medium, though I seem to be odd man out on this.

Other sources: Lost Remote

Given all the traffic Digg sees on a daily basis, it seems unlikely that a sudden glut of visitors could bring the site down. What's more likely, is that pushing the new Digg has resulted in some temporary slowness. But hey, server speed, schmerver speed - here's a reminder of the new features now available on Digg.

My News - If you visit the page while logged in to your Digg account, your new homepage is now "My News" where stories your friends have commented, dugg, and shared are aggregated. Digg now makes it very easy to find and follow your friends or your favorite outlets and personalities by pulling contacts from Facebook, Twitter and the like.

Some have criticized Digg's more social and publisher-friendly approach, but I for one think it's a wise move. The social side of things makes finding relevant stories much easier and actually encourages interaction with the site through digging and commenting. I know now that my friends are more likely to see a story if I digg it or comment, so I'm incentivized to actually do those things.

It will be interesting to see how the rest of the Digg population reacts to the new changes once the site is actually speedy enough to be used again. (UPDATE: It is.) Just as with any site, there are bound to be many who are enraged about the new layout, but I think Digg 4 is going to win over more than it turns off in the end.

Are you fan of the changes? Go check out the new Digg and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community.

Much of the reason why Slashdot isn't impacting the social Web community is its focus on heavy duty tech. Slashdot's byline is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." That captures not just who its core audience is (nerds), but its attitude to what is newsworthy (only stuff that "matters" to technical people). Slashdot founder Rob Malda wrote on his web site that typical topics include "Linux, Open Source Software, Legos, Games, Star Wars, Science [and] Technology."

Slashdot is targeted to engineers and programmers - and makes no apologies for it. However this relatively narrow focus means that Slashdot has not grown to have broader appeal, like StumbleUpon and Digg. However, why then is Hacker News - which is also targeted to programmers - doing so well in Woopra's statistics?

The obvious answer is that Slashdot has lost users to Hacker News and other tech news communities. The following monthly traffic chart from Quantcast suggests that users have migrated from Slashdot to other sites. The trend over the past few years has mostly been a downward pattern (although note that these are estimated figures only).

Do You Still Read Slashdot?

We asked our community via Twitter: do you still read Slashdot?

The following responses were from ex-Slashdot users who have either reduced the time they spend there or drifted away from the site entirely:

@Transition: "On occasion. I've been on /. since 1998, but don't follow it as much anymore. Never got into the others, but I should."

@peterc: "Still visit /. once a week or so but no longer contribute (used to be a heavy user). Use HN & Reddit mainly now, never Digg."

@morganpyne: "I was a longtime Slashdot reader (5-digit ID, lurker way before signing up), but it became irrelevant a few years ago. So... no."

@ceesaxp: "/. always was a much different place from digg or reddit. But you're right I'm reading it much less, hardly once in a month these days."

@jezlyn: "I haven't read /. in many years. Got tired of the snotty attitude and comment wars."

Others Still Loyal, But Frustrated By Slow Social Media Take-up

Another reason for Slashdot's decline in the social Web has been its slow uptake of social media technologies. It only recently introduced Facebook and Twitter integration, many months after similar news communities had added them. In addition, Slashdot has historically favored stories submitted from traditional media, over 'new media' such as blogs. Both of these things have made Slashdot seem behind the times and a bit too closed minded.

However, Slashdot obviously still has a core and dedicated audience. For example Adam Monago, a VP at a California IT company, said via Twitter that he still reads Slashdot. "It continues to have a community feel that the other sites you mention do not have," he commented. By that he meant that the other sites (like Digg, Hacker News and Reddit) "do not have [an] identifiable set of traits or ideals that bind their users in the same way as Slashdot." Certainly, Slashdot's audience shares a common set of values around open source and scientific discovery.

Some people also complained that Slashdot was too slow to feature breaking news. "I catch a Tweet from @slashdot now and then," remarked freelance web developer @pluc, "[but] it didn't ride the realtime wave like others." Likewise, library student @battmutler commented that Slashdot "seems to always be 12-36 hours behind the curve." Although to be fair, a story can sometimes take 12 or more hours to hit the Digg frontpage too.

Slashdot continues to have a passionate, intelligent community. However the impact that this community has on the social Web is minimal, according to Woopra's statistics. Slashdot is no longer the powerhouse it once was.

Let us know in the comments if you still use Slashdot; and if so, whether you are happy with the experience there or would like to see it improve.

At the time of the sale, Newsvine was promising to integrate some of those web 2.0 features into the main MSNBC properties. CEO Mike Davidson told ReadWriteWeb in 2007 that "over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense." Has that actually occured? Let's check in with Newsvine to find out.

Newsvine is a "Citizen Journalism" site; a news publication built using the voices and recommendations of ordinary citizens. It also syndicates content from its parent company MSNBC, Associated Press and others. Newsvine has a lot in common with social news sites like Digg and Slashdot - only it has more mainstream topics.

Slow Development, But Keeping Abreast of Trends

What's new at Newsvine circa 2009? There is nothing overly different from what we saw in 2007, but the site continues to look elegant and is still packed with social features.

Newsvine appears to have kept up with current trends - we noted today a Real-Time Web feature, called Newsvine LIVE. This is a rapidly scrolling view of emerging stories, displayed as a pane on the right-hand side of the homepage.

However as with many startups that get acquired by big companies, the pace of development at Newsvine slowed considerably after being bought. A scan of the Newsvine blog this year doesn't show much development. There was some administrative work done on groups and a hook-up with Facebook. Not much else is noted in the blog, although Newsvine has been active in developing widgets for sites like Netvibes and Yahoo.

Mike Davidson blogged in August that "things, for the most part, are going swimmingly [at Newsvine]." He admitted though that "building technologies and services for msnbc.com has slowed our development efforts on newsvine.com a bit, for the time being."

Traffic: Steady

When we last spoke to Newsvine, in July 2007 just prior to its acquisition, Newsvine was getting about 1.2 million unique visitors per month. It was said to be growing at an average rate of 46% per quarter. The top topics in Newsvine in mid-07 were Politics and Technology, echoing the popular topics in the blogosphere of that time.

Traffic over the past year at Newsvine has been fairly flat, at least according to Compete - which puts the US unique visitors at around 1.2 million and shows little growth.

However in an August 2009 post, Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson claimed that Newsvine now gets "over 4 million uniques a month." So perhaps Compete's statistics are too low (which wouldn't be the first time).

Conclusion

All seems fine and dandy at Newsvine, despite slow development of new features on the site.

However, as yet there is little evidence of Newsvine functionality on MSNBC sites - certainly the readers don't contribute much content to them. Hopefully we see more of that over the coming year, as Mike Davidson did say integration would occur "over the next few years" back in 2007.

Overall, it's good to see that Newsvine's community is still relatively vibrant. As of time of writing, a story entitled 'Dick Cheney was a Lying, Treasonous Coward' has 239 comments. Evidence that it is an MSNBC site after all!

Over the past few weeks, we've heard of several different ways we can use the web to keep track of the U.S. Election coverage. We can use Google to locate our voting locations, record our voting experience for YouTube, and even Twitter our voting issues. Now that E-Day is finally upon us, it's time revisit those tools as we prepare for the most digitally enhanced election ever.

• Visit Google's 2008 Election site to get voter information, directions to the polls, or your state's voter hotline. (And once you know your polling site, you can catch a ride with the Carpool to the Polls Facebook app).
• Vote411 has a poll finder and other related election information, ideal for last minute information.
• Can I Vote? If you're not sure if you're registered to vote, head over to Can I Vote to confirm your details.
• Overseas Vote Foundation: Information on voting if you're living or traveling outside of the United States.
• Pew Center on the States: Information on poll opening and closing times.
• Election Protection: Monitors voting problems. Place to report issues or track them as they happen.
• Track voter rights news and resources at the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition's 866ourvote.org.
• Check out a map-based overview of voting machines used in each state from VerifiedVoting.org and the Verified Voter Foundation, both run by technologists advocating for reliable and publicly verifiable elections.

Record Your Experience

With Video

• Bring a video camera with you to the polls to capture your voting experience on YouTube's Video Your Vote channel. Google is using Google Maps to track these videos across the country - and to see where polling problems might be occurring during the day.
• Document the irregularities or other problems you encounter with your cell phone camera, Flip videocam, or other device, and then upload that content to the CBS News social-media site CBS Eye Mobile. Alternatively, you can submit by e-mail to the address politics@cbseyemobile.com. The CBS News Investigates team will monitor those submissions, and may then present select ones in election coverage at CBSNews.com or in on-air reports.

Via Twitter

TwitterVoteReport is a Twitter app that will aggregate all the election day tweets that use the Twitter hashtag #votereport. Just include "#votereport" in your tweet in order for it to get tracked by the service. More advanced Twitterers can also include other hashtags like:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you're voting; ex., "#12345″
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. "L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC"
• #machine for machine problems; ex., "#machine broken, using prov. ballot"
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., "#reg I wasn't on the rolls"
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., "#wait:120 and I'm coming back later"
• #early if you're voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

From Your Mobile

• Send a text message to 66937 and start your message with "#votereport"
• Download and use the iPhone app for VoteReport
• Find the "votereport" app in the Google Android marketplace

From Your Phone

• Enter a report by calling 567-258-8683 (VOTE), 208-272-9024, or 617-960-8900
• If you have a problem voting or see one, call the CNN Voter Hotline at 877-GOCNN-08 (1-877-462-6608).

On The Web

• If you find yourself having trouble casting your vote, VoterStory.org can help. This non-partisan site is designed to let voters report problems with their local polling place.
• If you have a problem voting or see one, share your early voting experience with CNN's iReport.

Get The Election Results

Videos

• CNN, MSNBC and ABC News will stream their election coverage live.
• MSNBC's feed is already up. Watch it here.
• Watch up-to-the minute election news on Hulu with their MSNBC Decision 08 coverage.
• ABC News will stream using Windows Media Player, but will make its feed embeddable for local affiliates using tech from live-streaming service Ustream.
• Watch John McCain's official Ustream feed to see his final stump speech at 11:30 a.m. MT in Colorado.
• Watch Barack Obama's official Ustream feed at 9 p.m. CT in Chicago to see his concession/victory speech.
• Politico's James Kotecki will stream live on Tuesday evening 7 p.m. to midnight.

On The Web

• The New York Times will publish a dashboard to track results as they come in at the county level. NYTimes.com will also keep track of which races the major news organizations have already called. More on the Times' efforts here.
• Visit TwitterVoteReport.com to see the reports flow in.
• The CBS News Investigates team will monitor video submissions (see above section), and may then present select ones in election coverage at CBSNews.com or in on-air reports.
• Political videos will be featured on the Google homepage all day, including videos made especially for Election Day by both the McCain and Obama campaigns.
• Current is incorporating streams from social media sites, Digg, Twitter, 12seconds.tv, along with music from DJ Diplo.
• Access news and results as they occur on the Google Maps Elections Gallery (you can even embed the results onto your own site), or via the Elections section of Google News.
• Socialmedian is pulling in all sorts of media from tweets to blog posts to Flickr photos, widgetizing all the updates they find, and featuring them on web sites like the washingtonpost.com, guardian.co.uk, and mediadeluge.com.
• Ask.com launched Election Poll Smart Answers that give local polling information in just one click.
• Twitter tracks election-related tweets at election.twitter.com
• Upload photo messages about the election, the candidates and the issues to Giveusahope.com.
• Follow and contribute crowd-sourced election stories and add your two cents on media bias at Skewz.com.
• Take a look at the aggregation of election-related news stories, blogs, polls, video and commentary on Electicker2008.com.
• Contribute election-related news stories and video and blog posts to Politics.com.

Just The Polls

• CNN will post their exit polls here.
• Gallup.com - The election 2008 poll results from Gallup, one of the best known polling companies.
• Pollster.com - Tracks various polls and gives you updated charts on how each candidate is tracking. Also offers an electoral map as well as analysis of what each poll means.
• RealClearPolitics.com - Features poll breakdowns by state. You can also see a national overview that shows you which candidate is in the lead in each state and by how many points.
• USAElectionPolls.com - Brings together information on national and state polls, battleground polls, house & senate polls, and more.
• USAToday.com - While USA Today's map looks like an electoral vote tracker, it is a map of polls with color coding to give you an idea of the percentage of difference between the candidates.

From Your Mobile

• AT&T and Verizon's live mobile TV streaming provider, Flo TV, is offering all manner of coverage of the election, including content from NBC, CBS, FOX News, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and MTV News--such as "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" and "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams." Flo TV will also offer special Election Day versions of "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show," along with content from MTV's "Choose or Lose" and recap up through the first 100 days in office.
• Sprint will also have live streams and TV clips on election day, featuring content from ABC News Now, CNN Mobile and FOX News Channel.
• Election 08 application ($0.99)  delivers the latest McCain and Obama polling numbers for every state, graphs historical polling trends, and charts voting patterns in previous elections.
• On your mobile phone, head to m.google.com/elections to locate your voting location as well as access the latest news.
• Get SMS text alerts about the election from the New York Times by messaging 698698 with the text: Newsalerts (to stop, text: Stop newsalerts) or text Elections and your zip code (eg, Elections07407) (to spot, text: Stop Elections)
• Viigo has just added a real-time results for tomorrow's US Election. The Live Election Results Feed will provide both Overall and State By State results throughout the evening as each contender demonstrates a Firm Lead, or is declared a Winner in each State. Results will be updated every 5 minutes. Download it for free from here.

Reward Yourself!

Now that you voted, reward yourself with some free stuff! If you go to Starbucks today and tell them you voted, you get a free cup of coffee. If you go to Ben & Jerry's today and tell them you voted, you get a free scoop of ice cream. If you go to Krispy Kreme today and tell them you voted, you get a free donut.

Thanks to Silicon Alley Insider for video sites, Inquisitr for voter info sites, AppScout for mobile voter sites, GigaOM for voter info sites, Mashable for poll web sites

(Image credit: Zappowbang)

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.

Submitting Stories

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.

Reputation Index

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.

Verdict and Invites

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.

These numbers are even more impressive if you consider that Mixx only had about 1 million unique in May.

Since then, Mixx has added a number of new features, including Mixx Communities, but most importantly, it seems the size of the Mixx community itself has reached a tipping point. In its anniversary blog post, Mixx diplomatically attributes its growth to all the "fabulous, intelligent and wonderful Mixxers," but it is also clear that Mixx's strategy of partnering with large content providers is finally starting to pay dividends for the company.

Our initial impression of Mixx was very positive and the new features the company has added since then have only solidified our opinion of Mixx as a very useful social news site for mainstream users.

At the same time, though, it is also worth pointing out that Digg now gets about 30 million unique visitors a month. Digg's Kevin Rose has admitted, however, that the site needs to become more relevant to mainstream users if it wants to keep growing. As Mixx is already geared towards mainstream users, we think that is should be able to continue its rapid growth for the foreseeable future.

Besides the closer integration with Twitter, Socialbrowse also switched from flat files to using SQLite as its database back-end. This, according to Socialbrowse co-founder Zack Garbow, resulted in a 10x speed increase over the old system.

Also, the sidebar now features a 'Hot' tab which displays the most popular and active shares or discussions in your network.

How Does it Work?

At the core of Socialbrowse is a Firefox extension that displays your friends' activity on the service in a sidebar. It's important to note that Socialbrowse does not aggregate your online actions the way FriendFeed does. Instead, Socialbrowse adds three icons to your Firefox navigation toolbar that let you toggle the sidebar, share and tag a site, or comment on it. Every time you share something or comment on a page, your updates will instantly appear in your friends' sidebars.

Twitter

In this newest version of Socialbrowse, you can also send your links directly to Twitter to share it with your social network there. Interestingly, Socialbrowse is using its own URL shortener in these Twitter posts.

Sidebar

In the sidebar, you can chose to either see all of your friends' updates, or you can chose to only see their latest shares or comments. It would be nice if you could comment on a page as you are sharing it, but for now, Socialbrowse is keeping these two activities completely separate from each other.

Once you close your sidebar, you will still get update from your friends through little pop-ups at the bottom right of your screen. This is a nice feature, especially if you have a small screen and you don't want a sidebar to take up a lot of your space.

Ranking

One other interesting feature in Socialbrowse is its ranking system. You get a 'social point' every time one of your friends shares a link you discovered first. Based on this ranking, Socialbrowse then creates a list of highly active users that new users can chose to follow when they sign up.

Annotated Links

One really nifty feature of Socialbrowse is that it analyses every page you surf to and then adds little icons to links that your friends have already shared or commented on. As you hover over these icons, Socialbrowse will display a list of your friends and the comments they left. To us, this feature itself is worth the price of admission.

Invites

Socialbrowse is still in private beta, but Socialbrowse gave us 500 invitation to hand out to you. Just follow this link, sign up, and you will get an invitation immediately.

If you want to follow me on Socialbrowse, my profile is here.

Since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. Desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed 'traffic mecca' have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to Yahoo's main page. Here's what you need to know about the current state of Buzz.

ReadWriteWeb's one (and so far only) appearance on the yahoo.com frontpage - Wikipedia story bottom right

1. Yahoo! Buzz is not a social experience. The process of being featured on Yahoo! Buzz is socially driven (based on votes, shares, and search patterns), but if you consider the site's place in the overall structure of Yahoo's strategy, the experience isn't social. Yahoo! Buzz is the picking ground for the content that ultimately gets featured on the Yahoo! main page, which means it is social in the exact same way Slashdot Firehose is social. Your votes may get a story to the main page of Yahoo! Buzz but after that it's up to an editor's judgment whether a story gets featured on the Yahoo! main page or not. So the final result, or the process of getting featured on Yahoo's main page is not entirely social. Furthermore, there Yahoo! has turned off the comments so there are no conversations, and because there is no networking aspect to the site, there are also no relationships.
2. Your votes don't mean much. Number of votes is one of the metrics used to determine content popularity. Even then, I've learned that the impact of votes is arbitrary. I know people whose content was featured on the Yahoo! main page with 0 votes, and people whose content didn't even get to the Yahoo! Buzz main page after 75 votes. The other metrics are the number of times content is shared via email and on other social sites, as well as search volume.
3. Exposure is very limited, inequitably distributed. The Yahoo! Buzz main page presently is less significant than even the upcoming/most page on Digg. Although being on the page may increase your odds of catching an editor's eye, you don't get any exposure unless you are featured on the Yahoo! main page. Furthermore, such an insignificant number of stories cross from Yahoo! Buzz to the Yahoo! main page that for the average person, participation in the quest for exposure is an act in futility.

To summarize, Yahoo! Buzz is social insofar as a community of users gets to submit content, and vote/share it. Anything more than that, Yahoo! Buzz doesn't do.

That said, the site also doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is. It doesn't consider itself to be a competitor to other social news and networking sites, in fact it allows you to and even recommends you to share Buzzed stories on other social sites and then counts 'shares' as another metric to measure content popularity. As the popularity of Yahoo! Buzz grows and more people start frequenting the Yahoo! Buzz main page to read and at some future point discuss stories, that will all change. Until then, that page is just a stepping stone to the Yahoo! main page, which is the end goal.

Who should participate on Yahoo! Buzz?

From a content producer's/publisher's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz should without question be used by anyone publishing multiple posts a day on a site, or anyone that owns a network of blogs publishing content for different niches (heck you can automate the submission process). Networks like Hearst Digital Media and Conde Nast Publishing come to mind, but the strategy should also work for networks like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media. From a community member's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz's features are so limited that they would probably appeal to someone with a passive interest in social news, or someone just entering the space and wanting to get his or her feet wet. If you are interested in making friends, participating in heated discussions, etc., look elsewhere.

What kind of content works on Yahoo! Buzz?

It's a wry twist in the story. The people most interested in exploring Yahoo! Buzz and participating on the site are the digerati. But the kind of audience Yahoo! Buzz is designed to cultivate is quite the opposite. Before you give up in frustration, understand that the audience the site is supposed to appeal to is the same audience for the Yahoo! portal for news and entertainment. That's why you won't see a lot of insider Silicon Valley news featured and instead you'll see content from mainstream news outlets (a lot of syndicated content from Yahoo! News) about mainstream news events or entertainment.

What's the future of Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz is an interesting service because it has become an awkward balance between social news and mainstream news, where some of the basic social news and networking elements are intentionally missing. At the same time, it is also interesting because although the site made some buzz for supposedly dethroning Digg, the prevailing social news champion, the site doesn't compete with it and is not cannibalizing the social news audience. If anything, people who use Yahoo! Buzz may very well over time switch to sites with more robust social news and networking capabilities.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

For those who already have established communities on reddit, being able to point your own domain to reddit without having to host the open source version of the service yourself is a great step forward. Also, being able to customize your CSS stylesheets gives you the opportunity to make reddit fit into the design of your own brand. This makes using reddit a lot more palatable for those with established names who would like to experiment with social news sites, but shied away from it so far.

Reddit definitely doesn't seem to be afraid of giving up control. In the end, though, this move is only going to help it grow its audience - and while the audience might sometimes not even be aware that they are looking at a custom reddit site, reddit itself will surely run advertising on those sites, so its bottom line is only going to benefit from this.

One thing reddit doesn't allow you to do, though, is to create your own voting algorithm - though judging from the direction the developers have been moving in lately, this is probably only a question of time.

Contest

Also, reddit has announced a contest for those who want to start their own community on reddit. Whoever manages to create the largest sub-reddit within the next month can take away a Macbook Air and a reddit bobblehead.

Reddit Keeps Growing

Reddit also announced that they have seen a 300% increase in subscribers and subscriptions since unveiling their latest redesign in May.

While reddit is still much smaller than Digg or Yahoo Buzz, it is definitely driving the development of its site forward a lot faster, and, at the same time, pushing its competitors to become more open and creative as well. While Digg is trying to keep very tight control over its service, reddit is moving in the opposite direction and judging from the numbers cited in this announcement, it is working out quite well for them.

The foundation of Socialmedian is its user created 'news networks.' Right now, there are over 1000 different networks on the site. Given the nature of the service, it is no surprise that most of them deal with technology in some form or another. Users can add links to these networks, but Socialmedian also automatically suggests stories based on keywords users can add when creating a new network. This is a very smart idea, as it allows even small networks to have a constant stream of updated news.

Vote Till You Drop

To share items on the site, users can either use a bookmarklet or 'clip' any story already on Socialmedian and share it on another network. One of Socialmedian's most interesting aspects is that it allows its users to vote on almost everything on the site. Users can, for example, vote on the ranking of the keywords and sources that are used to seed the networks.

With all this voting, it would be easy to consider Socialmedia as just another Digg, reddit, or Newsvine clone, but its personalized networks and extensive social networking features set it apart from most of its competitors. While both Digg and reddit are moving towards more personalized experiences, Socialmedian has made those the foundation of its product right from the beginning.

Keep Following

Out of all its core features, Socialmedian's social networking features have probably seen the most extensive remodel. Most importantly, users can now 'follow' each other. This is, of course, a similar model to what other social networks have done in the past as well, but this feature also allows you to see what topics and posts are most popular just among the people you follow, which puts a nice twist on the following/follower scheme.

Among some of the other new features are the ability to directly post to Twitter, as well as Socialmedian's use of Google's Social Graph API to help seeding new networks and recommending stories to its users.

Socialmedian is a very nicely designed social news network with a feature set far too extensive to cover in this short post. Thanks to its extensive alpha test and close interaction with its early users, almost everything on the site feels very well thought out and we did not come across any major bugs. Overall, we would be surprised if Socialmedian couldn't carve out a very nice niche for itself in the social news market.

Maybe one of the most interesting features of these sub-diggs will be that those users who manage them will be able to control how and when newly submitted stories will be promoted to the front page.

For Digg's competitors like Reddit and Mixx, the sub-sites have definitely been a success. At reddit, which is arguable a lot smaller than Digg, the more popular sub-reddits can have between 3000 to 20,000 subscribers.

As social news sites like Digg grow in popularity, a lot of their early, hardcore constituents can often feel pushed to the sidelines by the more mainstream users who start using the site over time. With these sub-sites, these users can still make the site their home and take control over their experience again.

Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on 'groups,' but the Mixx Communities take this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.

There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx's efforts add some interesting ideas to this.

Setting up a Mixx community is very straightforward. Besides deciding on obvious things like a name, color scheme, and categories, users can chose to pre-populate their community with content already available in Mixx by importing items tagged with up to ten different keywords.

The communities also feature their own message boards and the ability to add polls. There is also a 'member lounge', where the recent activities of group members are displayed. Karma points a user earns in one of the communities are added to the 'general Mixx karma pool', an important feature for many power-users who tend to jealously guard their status on the site.

Mixx communities are somewhat similar to Reddit's sub-reddit feature, which also allows users to create their own hosted communities. Reddit, however, does not allow for any degree of customization, but it does have more granular access controls than Mixx. All Mixx communities are open to all users, while Reddit has public, restricted, and private modes. Update: Mixx does actually have very similar access controls to Reddit's - but they are not part of the set-up procedure like Reddit's are and have to be set after the community is created.

Now that Reddit has open-sourced its code, anybody can of course create any kind of reddit-clone, but the communities on Mixx cater to a different audience.

Making Money

The 5th step in the set-up process is probably the most interesting one for publishers: Set Up Advertising & Revenue Share. Mixx allows publishers to link their Google AdSense account to their Mixx Community page and then shares 50% of the revenue with the publisher.

This will probably help Mixx to gain a larger following among small to mid-sized blogs and maybe even some larger publishers who will create their own communities on the site. Still, social news sites are notoriously hard to monetize through pay-per-click ads and I wouldn't expect most community owners to make a lot of money from this.

Making Users Happy

Allowing users to take greater control of their experience seems to be a trend among social news sites lately. As these communities grow, some users often start to feel alienated. Allowing for the creation of more formalized sub-groups most likely helps to retain a lot of these users who still feel very attached to the service.

It will be interesting to see if Mixx's competitors like Digg, Newsvine, and Propeller are going to follow suit here anytime soon. Digg especially, because of the sheer size and diversity within its community would probably benefit from allowing users to create smaller Diggs on its site, too.