#11: Social Media

The concept of social media fascinates me. While I don't usually use it myself, I can definitely see the appeal. With millions and millions of pages, it can be difficult to ferret out the 'best of the best' in the ever changing world of online news. These sites offer a way to explore sites and stories recommended by others. I think it can be a fascinating discovery tool, but it's much like a garage sale--there's a lot of junk to be waded through before you find that hidden treasure. I find most of the sites to be quite overwhelming (and this is from someone who has 100+ feeds in their Google Reader and goes through 500+ postings a day!). I find that I would rather let the bloggers do that culling for me, and then read what they post about it. I try to be very select with my blogs, and they have to 'prove' themselves before I commit.

I can see using these sites with an alert system, to help you focus in only on items matching a specific criteria. I do the same with Craigslist and Google News alert, and it can be nice to have that information come to you. But on a whole, I am just not too enthused about social media for my personal use.

Here are my comments on each of these four social media sites:

*MIXX: Way too overwhelming, with no easy starting point and less categorization. I would never use this site.

*DIGG: I liked this much better. The categories up top give me something to focus on based on my interests, and the homepage is much cleaner and less overwhelming. The RSS option is good, and something I might consider. I didn't quite like that the default for search results is 'best match' first; I ended up getting items that were a year, two years, or more old. I didn't really understand what an 'upcoming' story was either, because those results were all quite old too. I also found that the search results, even when limited to newer first, were still quite old (the newest was 19 days ago, the second was 83 days!). I was indifferent to this site.

*NEWSVINE: This site was a lot better spread out than others, with the 'nuggets' helping the eye separate out different categories. Categories were given up top and RSS was an option. The search results for these didn't give me a lot of information (how old is it? what source did it come from? what category is it in?) and I really didn't like that.

*REDDIT: First off, I love the little Reddit guy. Adorable! However, the site requires quite a bit of deciphering, and isn't very clear to a newbie. Things were a little confusing in search results, and the text-heavy site makes it difficult to wade through everything.