Posterous, the dead-simple service that makes it super easy to share your blog posts and media across the web, has acquired Slinkset, a startup that allows users to quickly build social news sites similar to Reddit and Digg. Slinkset.com will continue to operate, with Slinkset co-founder Brett Gibson joining Posterous full-time. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Both Slinkset and Posterous launched last summer as part of the same Y Combinator class. Slinkset is a white-label service for building your own custom social news site in a matter of seconds (think Digg, but with your own logos and a customized design). Slinkset isn’t the only company in this space — when it launched last July I noted its similarities to a handful of other services, including Reddit, which had recently gone open-source and allowed for custom sites. But while it may not be terribly unique, it’s easy to see why the Posterous team is interested in Slinkset.
Posterous cofounder Garry Tan says that the company is going to build “massively engaging sites for both content discovery (via social news) and content posting (via blog streams)”. Beyond that details are scant, but it’s not difficult to imagine the kind of features Posterous may begin to implement. → Read More
The twenty one startups from Y Combinator’s summer session are presenting their ideas and creations to investors in Boston this afternoon. Below are descriptions of the nine startups we haven’t covered and who don’t wish to remain in stealth mode any longer. See our prior coverage of Posterous, Anyvite, ididwork, Popcuts, and Slinkset – all of which are part of this batch and have launched already. TicketStumbler TicketStumbler can be described as Kayak for sports tickets. It aggregates tickets from sites like StubHub and RazorGator, making them searchable by keyword and allowing for the filtering of results by maximum price, quantity available, provider, etc. The site is live, fast, and gets extra points for not spelling “stumbler” without the “e”. CrunchBase Information TicketStumbler Information provided by CrunchBase People and Pages While yet to launch, the founders of People and Pages describe their service as “a better Google Groups”, although the screenshots show that it’s part WYSIWYG website creation tool as well, making it competitive with Google Sites, Weebly (also a Y Combinator startup), and others. Group organizers can use People and Pages to manage email lists and publish to the web in one place. CrunchBase Information People and Pages Information provided by CrunchBase MeetCast MeetCast is a WebEx and GoToMeeting competitor (yes, another one) that is marketing itself on ease of use (no downloads) and playback (all conferences are saved and indexed for later viewing). The founders draw comparisons to Tokbox for its simplicity. CrunchBase Information MeetCast Information provided by CrunchBase CO2Stats For a flat monthly fee, CO2Stats will measure the overall electricity usage of websites and then automatically buy renewable energy certificates for them to offset their effective emissions. Founded by academics from Harvard and Yale, CO2Stats has already turned a profit by signing up 2,500+ sites in over 25 countries. See our review from earlier today. CrunchBase Information CO2Stats Information provided by CrunchBase Youlicit Youlicit is a service prepping for relaunch that will generate Mahalo-like search guides by scouring the web for user generated content and compiling it into topics algorithmically instead of relying on human editors. These search guides themselves are intended to show up highly in the results of more traditional search engines like Google. CrunchBase Information Youlicit Information provided by CrunchBase Job Alchemist Job Alchemist is the parent company of two online services: Startuply, a job site for tech startups that we covered last month, → Read More
Three years ago, Paul Graham and his Y Combinator incubator funded Reddit, a social news site that has grown to over 2.5 million unique visitors a month. Reddit has never been able to match the success of Digg, its closest competitor, but in 2006 it got its payday after being acquired by Condé Nast/Wired for an undisclosed amount. Now, it seems that Y Combinator is hoping that lightning will strike twice. Its latest startup, Slinkset, is looking to offer a “hosted Reddit” solution, allowing users to create their own social news sites with as little technical knowhow as possible. You can see a hosted version of the site that has been created for TechCrunch readers here. At first glance, Slinkset looks like little more than a Reddit clone. Users can vote news stories Up or Down, with the most popular stories rising to the top of the page. The big difference here is that unlike Digg and Reddit, Slinkset isn’t looking to become a destination site. Instead, it’s offering users the chance to create their own branded “Reddits” with no coding necessary. For the time being Slinkset is offering its hosting service free of charge, with plans to introduce a fixed fee in the future. Unfortunately, despite its aspirations to let users to create no-hassle branded pages, Slinkset’s customization options are pretty limited. Site admins can easily swap the color schemes, adjust fonts, and add a logo, but that’s about it. In the future the site hopes to integrate drag-and-drop widgets and ad placement, but with a company that currently consists of only two co-founders, these are probably a ways off. So is Slinkset really necessary? You can already create your own hosted Reddit through Reddit itself (albeit with limited customizability). Mixx, another competitor in this space, also features a similar hosted offering. And the site’s launch comes less than a month after Reddit went open-source, allowing developers to create their own, fully tweakable, Reddit clones (you can see our version, Tech News, here). Slinkset co-founder Brett Gibson says that while the release of Reddit’s source code will help skilled programmers create their own social news site, it won’t do any good for the legions of bloggers and small-time sites that don’t know how to implement it, which is where he hopes Slinkset comes in. This may be the case, but unless Slinkset can improve on its customization features, it → Read More
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