Here’s another good news tale of a social application that reached out to me to see if I would be interested in taking a look at their offering. that service is socialmedian. Their CEO, Jason Goldberg, reached out and asked if I could take a deeper look at the site as I had tweeted that I was struggling to get value. He offered to help, and we’ve been chatting since.
socialmedian are a very new (they fully admit to being in alpha and are very feature incomplete) social news gathering service that aims to provide you with targeted news based on broad (or potentially very focussed) subject matter groups you create yourself or join after others have defined them. For example, I created the eGovernment and Government 2.0 group and have joined others including Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and Experience Design.
The service provides suggestions for news sources for your groups, allows you to add your own and provides a browser bookmarklet you can use to push stories to a particular group.
It’s early days yet, but it seems to be working pretty well as far as the core, news gathering functionality works. I’m hoping to work with Jason and the rest of the socialmedian crew on building out the social aspects of the site, as the way socialmedian works is ripe for rich sociality. In fact, socialmedian actively invite feature requests and seek to push new code live a few times a week. It’s very much development in the open.
Jason has given me a bunch of special invite codes that you can use to join socialmedian in you’re interested. Comment here to ask for one.
EDIT: Actually, let’s make it easy… Go to http://www.socialmedian.com/signup. Use the invite code acidlabs.
Have fun. Play. Give them feedback. Let me know how you go.
There are 50 instances of the code, so if you’re #51, sorry.
Socialmedian certainly sounds like it might be worth a look. I must say I’m getting a lot of value out of Friendfeed at the moment, especially with the advent of FF Rooms. There are some great discussions going on over at Friendfeed.
Having news items suggested up based on your interests sounds attractive. I’ll put my hand up for an invite, please! If you could please send to matt [ at ] matthooper dot net.
I’d be interested in giving it a gander.
Stephen I have been using socialmedian for a couple of months now, one of the first few alpha users. They are making changes all of the time. It is an interesting service and time will tell how it improves.
Thanks Stephen, I’m up and running now (must have squeezed in before #50).
I’m in, thanks - I’m not grabbed yet, but maybe I will be when there’s more people in the groups I might be interested in.
Ok, I’m starting to see potential, in that it can be more topic focused than, say del.icio.us or Digg.
But when I “clip” something, it says “Great. We’ve let your networks know that you are interested in this story.” Actually, some of the networks I’m in would regard it as irrelevant and thus annying. SM need to improve this.
I’ve been on it, and am getting the emails, but absolutely fail to understand the point of it. Getting off.