Spotplex - another site wrongly accused of being the new Digg
Digg is a huge buzzword these days, so it’s being used even when it has little to do with what you’re writing about. Spotplex is a semi-automated news site much similar to Spotback, Techmeme, Tailrank, Megite and other automated news aggregators. Since it’s been compared to Digg one would expect RSVC (read submit vote comment) functionality, but there’s no such thing here. Users cannot submit new stories, and they cannot even vote on new stories. As far as users are concerned, it just aggregates new, popular stories from a bunch of news websites. It’s not similar to Digg - which requires participation and engagement from the users - and the unfair comparisons to it will probably do it more harm than good.
Spotplex does offers some innovation in the way it gets news. Site owners need to include a few lines of code on their websites, and Spotplex will then start fetching new stories from them. The more an article gets visited on the actual blog, the more exposure it gets on Spotplex. In turn, blog owners get stats on how many people visited their article.
Among other options, Spotplex offers a widget with newly discovered stories, tags of the day, and the standard tag based navigation. The news are categorized similarly to the sites mentioned above: technology, business, sports, science, entertainment, gaming, health, arts, politics, personal.
So, where Techmeme, for example, measures the relevance of a story based on how many other bloggers linked to the story, Spotplex measures it based on actual visits. It’s a nice idea, but in reality, Spotplex, while not bad, feels a bit lacking. The design is bland, and the whole thing boils to a long list of news story titles. It’s a kind of service I’d definitely add to my RSS feed, but I’m not sure if I would actually visit the site on a daily basis.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:13 am
“Digg is a huge buzzword these days, so it’s being used even when it has little to do with what you’re writing about.” HAHA…SO TRUE!
Yeah the site itself is sort of bland and it’s just another line of code in my blog that I don’t want to add.
Though if it does end up sending traffic to you, it can’t all be that bad. But then even as it is, all you would ever see on the homepage is the most popular blogs why visit spotflex to see them when you already have them in your RSS reader. Just another popularity contest.
Ho-hum…yawwwn!
March 1st, 2007 at 10:51 am
@Ali: I wouldn’t be so quick to completely dismiss the service, but the fact is that it has some pretty fierce competition in Spotback, Techmeme, Tailrank and Megite, who were between themselves been unable to differentiate much from each other. Spotplex will have to offer more than these services to become number one, and currently I don’t see how they’re going to do that.
But to say that it’s ‘the new Digg’ is preposterous: Spotplex will never have any sort of community because there’s nothing to build the community around. No voting, no submitting - it’s just an RSS news aggregator. Digg on the other hand has a huge community and that’s its strength.
March 6th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
[…] You can read a decent article about this at FranticIndustries. […]
March 8th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
[…] A couple of days ago, a new news aggregating service (and, at the same time, traffic metric) SpotPlex got featured on TechCrunch. It has received a very positive review from them (and a more moderate one from franticindustries), and it definitely got the attention of site owners with their limited offer of 1000 invitations for the service. A perfect start, really - not all startups get (unjustly, but still) lauded as the new Digg, picked up by most the relevant media publications, yet still retaining a vague notion of exclusivity. […]
May 10th, 2008 at 1:34 am
[…] my first article on Spotplex? And the second one? Well, unfortunately, they didn’t wake up: Spotplex is offline and I […]
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