louisgray.com - Latest Comments in louisgray.com: Social News Sites Add Features Amid Some Criticism

Re: louisgray.com: Social News Sites Add Features Amid Some Criticism

mjlambie — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:10:00 -0000

louis, have you checked out Streamy.com? It's almost a web homepage, social news, friend-feed. it's quite functional and fun.

Re: louisgray.com: Social News Sites Add Features Amid Some Criticism

Benjamin Golub — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:58:00 -0000

"He added, "the stuff that is popular, and that is shared, gets shared so quickly between the various and sundry sites, it doesn’t really matter which site you go to."

To some degree, he's right. If RSSMeme's top story ("Switching to GMail" from Robert Scoble) has 19 shares and ReadBurner's version of the same story has 15 shares (which it does as I post this), it's trivial."

I'm not sure that it is that simple though. RSSmeme shows 56 now and Readburner shows 31 for the current top story which is the same on both sites. But look down a little more, RSSmeme shows a story that is 9 hours old with 25 shares in second place and Readburner has that same story (http://www.rssmeme.com/stor... like 5 stories down with only 9 shares. In a world where people only read what is "above the fold" that story is effectively never seen on Readburner because most people will have navigated away already.

I don't know how many users are in ReadBurner's database or how fast they crawl but that does matter.

Re: louisgray.com: Social News Sites Add Features Amid Some Criticism

aviv — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:37:00 -0000

Hmm, 7 years later and Blogger still doesn't let you edit comments?

Re: louisgray.com: Social News Sites Add Features Amid Some Criticism

aviv — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:34:00 -0000

>> While so many people try to decipher just how Gabe Rivera's TechMeme algorithm operates, RSSMeme and ReadBurner just make sense - mathematically speaking

I have to disagree - mathematically speaking, RSSMeme and ReadBurner *doesn't* make sense. Think about it, what do they do? Well, they tally Google Shared Items. Thing is, it's pretty darn biased - since many people visit Techmeme first thing in the morning, IMHO they are more likely to share items that are already popular. Also, both ReadBurner and RSSMeme give you the option to share directly from their site (read: first page), which adds a Digg-like bias factor. Popular items just get even more popular and are repeated over and over in RSSMeme, LinkRiver, FF, etc. all day long... Still, great efforts, but I just had to disagree with that line :)