Open the Tubes

So this is pretty cool, I think.  Michael Arrington is reporting on TechCruch some results of being put on the Yahoo! homepage via their new Buzz service. I'll be honest and tell you that I've never even heard of this new Buzz thing before, but I've been a bit out of it lately.  It sounds like it's another Digg clone with a slight twist.  Stories that get voted high enough will make it to the front page of Yahoo!.  That means that if you get up there, you'll have the potential of a whole lot of traffic.  That's precisely what happens, too, based on Arrington's post.  In the online world, there is something known as the Slashdot Effect, and more recently the Digg Effect.  This is when a link becomes popular on the Slashdot or Digg sites, and suddenly has a ton of visitors.  While I'm not sure exactly how many people this sends over, it's considerable, but nothing like what Yahoo! can do.  None of this is my point, though.  What I found really interesting is what this means for broadening people's views.  The demographic of sites like Slashdot or Digg is pretty much nerdy pasty kids that are under 28, and probably have as much porn on their computers as you have music.  The vast majority of the public has never even heard of these sites.  However, a ton of people go to Yahoo.com everyday.  While a site like TechCruch probably makes it pretty high on Digg everyday, your typical Yahoo! user doesn't even know it exists.  What this means is that people who may usually be completely oblivious about some things online are suddenly seeing it linked to off their homepage.  These people may click through to a story on some tech site, and find it interesting enough to read something else there.  At this point, I should probably admit that this is an entirely selfish enjoyment I have for this new service.  Basically, it means that your average Joe (or Jane) now has potential to know just what the heck I'm talking about when I mention something I read online.  To me, that's pretty darn cool.  The trick, then, is to get these normally geek-centric sites to be appealing enough to attract the typical Yahoo! user (that is, assuming they even want them sticking around).  I'm basing that on the assumption that having one million users coming from Yahoo! is actually a beneficial thing for the site.

Not Pouncing on Pownce

Kevin Rose announced yesterday his new venture. It's called Pownce, and is an application for sending files, photos, and messages to others. It is built on the Adobe AIR platform, so it can be used either as a web app, or downloaded and run from the desktop. Kevin's two previous endeavours have been quite successful. Digg has recently surpassed Facebook in daily visitors, which given Facebook's success shows just how popular the social news site is. His other business is Revision3, which does online media. It is just like a television channel, but with on-demand, online service. The most popular show on it is, expected, Diggnation.

This new undertaking, though, is a bit different than his previous things. The space he's entering is already fairly crowded. Also, it doesn't seem to provide anything that is terribly different than what you can do with other services. It seems to be a combination of email and Twitter, almost. I'm not really sure why you would use this instead of just shooting people an email. Here's one example they give of how you could use the service.

You might send an event out to a dozen of your friends letting them know you're
hosting a party this Friday. They could easily get the event details you
entered, respond with questions or comments and then quickly rsvp.

Hmm, sounds an awful lot like email to me. If I want to send a message to multiple people, there are countless services already for this. I can do it on Facebook. I can IM them. I can email them. Why should I use this new service? On top of that, they will all need to be on this service too. So now I have to convince them all to sign up for yet another thing.

The other thing is that this is an ad supported service, which you can pay to upgrade. Once again, where's the benefit here? Why do I want to use something with ads when I can get the same functionality out of other things without them?

Given the amount of Digg fanboys, I'm guessing that this service will at least get a good amount of buzz, and probably a few die hard fans. However, I personally don't see how this is going to set itself apart from other services out there, and why I should use it instead of something I already have.

If Corky Decided the News

TechCrunch has an article covering the news venture of MySpace. They lauched it about a month ago, but still have yet to garner much interest. The system works by MySpace gathering stories, and then dividing them out into categories. After they have been divided out, users can visit the different category pages and vote for stories a la Digg. From the sound of the artilce, it doesn't look like they've been able to get any interest at all.

But the front page of MySpace news shows most stories with zero votes. Two
stories have a single vote. None have more than that. Perusing through the
various categories shows the same thing - page after page of stories with no
votes or other evidence that anyone is visiting the site.

I don't know if I should really be all that surprised by this. MySpace consists of two types of users. There are the morons, and the people that are there because their friends are there. The first group is too stupid to even comprehend what important news is, and probably rely on their idiot friends or PerezHilton for world events. The second group, the ones that aren't morons, aren't likely to use MySpace for their place to read the news. More than likely, they are already visiting sites like Google News, Digg, or have an RSS reader for this. To top it all off, to prove just how dumb the admins are MySpace are, they have hardly any advertisement for this new service. According to TechCrunch's article, they don't even have a link for it on their main page (Disclaimer: I can't verify this since I've blocked MySpace). If this service ever does take off, I expect it to be driven by the first category of user so the likelyhood of anything decent showing up is pretty slim.