Yahoo MSN and Dell Grow Digg Like
February 25, 2007 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
You’d think if people were going to copy the idea behind Digg, they would have done it much sooner than now. You know, people like Netscape, who jump in there quick and really rip something off.
Profy.com has a post about Yahoo!, MSN and Dell beginning to offer services for their users to rate various resources and pages to share with the rest of the community. These ratings then impact each other’s rankings. Told you it sounded very Digg like. Their story does a great job of including screen shots of the different service options as well.
This seems almost standard and old-school features at this point, I think this would be a good space to expand into, as long as you bring something new to the table.
Jason, we are all talking about how Digg is far from perfect. These new clones only seem to copy Digg’s fetures for their existing fans (fans of Dell, Yahoo! and MSN, I mean) without really solving many of Digg’s problems. Honestly, I think there is enough space for an aggregation website that would ensure “Digg effect” and eliminate possibilities for votes manipulations. Don’t you think so?
I think the rating system should almost be independent of a specific website. I believe it should be functionality that’s built into browsers, toolbars, etc. by default. I believe a rating system should be a combination of individuals setting out to give items a thumbs-up or down, or 3 out of 5 stars, AND traffic in general. The data should be collected and reviewed by potentially a single governing authority, possibly similar to the Nielsen Ratings for the web.