Ning (and now flux) commoditized social networking and allow anyone who can click a mouse to have their own network. The same thing is now happening with social bookmarking sites that allow people to vote bookmarks up to a top list (better known as Digg). There are scores of Digg clones already, of course. The most well known is Reddit, which was acquired by Condé Nast a little over a year ago. But there are also emerging platforms that allow anyone to create their own Digg-like site. We’ve covered these as they launch. Our favorite is coRank, which recently relaunched and has a lot of loyal users. Pligg is another – it’s a well known open source project that allows people to create Digg-like sites. Pligg was recently put up for sale, but as far as I can tell it was never sold. Today Pligg announced (buried in a blog post) that the upcoming launch of Fraxi Soon we will be launching a new service called “Fraxi” which will allow anyone to create their own free Pligg powered niche community with just a few clicks of a mouse button. For example if someone living in Miami wanted to create a social network for the citizens of their community, they will be able to create Miami.Fraxi.com in a matter of seconds. No hosting fees, no installation process and no time wasted. They can then concentrate on growing their social network instead of needing to learn the ropes of FTPing, monkeying with server configurations, setting up domains, etc. More information about this service and website will be unveiled soon. Not much in the way of details, but the Fraxi site is up with a landing page. See this blog for more editorial. Digg itself will likely enter this market in 2008, we hear. This could possibly be through an acquisition, although a source tells us this would be for customers, not technology. CrunchBase Information Digg coRank Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
A hot rumor early this week/ late last week had Digg in acquisition talks to acquire hosted social voting site provider coRank (coRank allows users to quickly create Digg-like sites in much the same way Ning allows people to create social networks). No one asked coRank to see if the rumor was true, so I did. CEO Rogelio Bernal Andreo denies being in acquisition talks with Digg: coRank is still a baby and we still have a lot of work to do. We’re exploring collaborations and partnerships, but not a full sale. So my official answer is that no, we have not previously talked to Digg Rogelio told me that coRank approached Digg in May about a possible collaboration but were rebuffed. He suggests that Digg cloning would be a logical business for Digg. Digg was not adverse to the idea, he said, but they were not willing to partner. As Digg looks for new avenues of growth, they may be inclined to help others build Digg-like sites by providing a white-label service. Today that business is grabbed by coRank, the open source Pligg, and others. coRank has moved on from its original roots as a Digg-style site provider and now offers a range of varying sites, many of which don’t include Digg features. See our October write-up for their latest incarnation. CrunchBase Information coRank Digg Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Hosted social voting site provider coRank has relaunched with a list of new capabilities. The new options can be enabled/disabled by owners of coRank sites as they see fit (except for the personal dashboard). New features include Local copy: Being able to store local ‘cached’ copies of anything that is submitted. coRank note that this may be controversial, but claim that legally it has been cleared. It certainly sounds evil. Collaborative editing: Users can now edit submitted stories, and also have access to wiki-style features such as view “change history.” Individual privileges: Users can now decide who can/cannot submit stories and edit submissions Full Template Edit: Site admins can now edit all of the coRank site templates, allowing for 100% customization. coRank claim that from a development standpoint, this feature + the API offers a platform only matched by the freedom of using Open Source. My Dashboard: A central location from where a coRank user can get a glance of whatever is that he/she is doing at any coRank site Users can already eliminate the Digg-style voting feature, which coRank claims opens up the possibility of using the service for a plethora of different uses, such as collective social bookmarking and dynamic repositories such as Wikimarks. coRank currently has 1600 registered site owners, of which around half are regular users. → Read More
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Digg would be at the top of the heap. The site that popularized social news has been copied, cloned and even spawned Pligg, an open source Digg style script. If Pligg opened up Digg style clones to site hosts and developers, coRank takes the concept to the mass market; users who either can’t or don’t want to host Pligg on their own domain. coRank is to Digg clones what Blogger once was for blogging. coRank has evolved from its earlier incarnation as a stand alone Digg clone. The new coRank is now a fully customizable hosted social voting platform. Users can set up social news sites through easy to use menu options without the need to edit code. Like Blogger there is a range of templates available, including one that looks just like Digg. The options are surprisingly broad. Users can customize everything from the name of voting members through to the names given to the actual voting system. Everything from user banning through to privacy options and user statistics has been included. Although the entire morality of an army of Digg clones may be a passionate topic for debate, there’s little doubt that social news continues to grow. Ethics aside coRank is a notable point in the progression of social news development. In time coRank is an idea that is sure to be cloned itself. → Read More
Digg revolutionized social news when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of news link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers. Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule. The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg, which lets users “build their own Digg”. But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg – sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service. *Personalized refers to recommendations uniquely tailored for each user BlinkList BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link. ClipMarks Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole. CoRank CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page. Netscape Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team → Read More
CoRank launches out of private beta this evening. It’s best described as a cross between Digg and Bluedot. It has a Digg-like user interface where users view stories, but by default you are only shown stories bookmarked by other users you’ve added as friends. To see the whole feature list, watch the tour, here. I like keeping track of stories bookmarked by my friends (which is why I prefer Bluedot over Del.icio.us), and this may appeal to some users. For others, they’ll be just fine sticking with the services they’re already using. It’s going to be very tough for services like CoRank to get the foothold they need to grow. Before you count CoRank out, though, it’s worth noting that the founder, Rogelio Bernal Andreo, is both a former manager/engineer at eBay and Netscape and, more importantly, is the founder of eListas and eGrupos, one of the largest social networking site for Spanish speakers. Andreo says that he plans on introducing CoRank to the eListas audience, which is 20 million strong. → Read More
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