ReadWriteWeb

Comunitee is a new social network with the news-obsessed reader in mind. It purports to deliver news based on the your reading patterns, cutting away the clutter that you see on social networks that were not built with news as the main type of content. Its name is a mashup of the words "community" and "committee," which is the driving concept behind this combination social network and news site.

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).

The acronym "YASNS" is well-known in Web geek circles. It stands for Yet Another Social Networking Service. In 2011, perhaps the acronym should be "YAUSNS": Yet Another Useless Social Networking Service. Even large, otherwise successful tech companies aren't immune to YAUSNS. In September last year, Apple launched a music social network called Ping. It's basically 'Twitter for music,' however it's been a fizzer - despite being embedded right into iTunes. Another company at risk of what I'll now call The Ping Effect is Amazon, which released Kindle Profiles in March of this year. It's a social network for reading, but so far it hasn't set the world on fire. A commenter on my Google Plus profile called it "The Ping of Books."

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...

You remember those social news shows and segments that debuted over the last couple of years, right? Right? I hope you do because I don't, and neither do any of the other writers here. Al Jazeera is hoping to buck that trend with "The Stream."

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.

For a few months now, Digg has been beta testing a radically new version of its popular social news aggregation site. Those lucky enough to secure an invitation have been experimenting with Digg's new social focused "My News" section which provides curated news feeds based on the activity of your friends and the people you choose to follow. Today, Digg has flipped the switch and launched version 4 to the public, but it hasn't been a smooth transition.

Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures." (emphasis ours)

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.

Two years ago social news site Newsvine was acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture. The site had launched publicly in March 2006 and was considered to be one of the best designed new breed of 'web 2.0' news sites. Features include user-generated content, reputation, voting, comments, friends lists, tags, and more.

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.

Everything you need to find voter information, report on your experience, and track election results using social media and the web.

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.