Social news aggregators are nothing new, but many of them have social features that leave a lot to be desired. Digg and reddit, for instance, use a voting system as the main social element in deciding top news stories, and include comments and user pages to round things out. While this is a successful model, there are other news aggregators out there that embrace more innovative uses of the social web to enhance your news gathering experience. Here are three social news aggregators we think you’ll love.
Pinyadda
Pinyadda allows users a fluid and customizable way of finding their news. Users can follow a person, topic, or website, and comment on and share news stories with the Pinyadda community as well as their own social network. As users increase who is following the stories they share, they will earn badges and points, eventually becoming Mavens of a certain topic or Ambassadors of a certain website.
Pinyadda really highlights the users who are sharing the top news stories. By allowing uesrs to search for and follow people in certain topic areas (like Politics, Celebrities, Social Media), users can customize their news stream while at the same time quickly become part of the community. This is news community building at its best: engaging users in “conversations” with one another based on shared news stories, interests in certain topics and sites, and providing a platform for the most active users to build their audience.
Spotery
Diverging from the “anything goes” model of most social news aggregators, Spotery uses human editors to filter its top news stories. While this may seem antithetical to the direction in which the social web is headed, Spotery does a great job of integrating expert content curating with social news gathering. Visitors to the site can follow the editor-selected news stories, or the live stream of all submitted links.
Social features of Spotery include the ability to add related links to any story, create a profile page with a live stream of your own “spotted” news stories and those spotted by the people you follow, and the ability to follow anyone using a personalized vanity URL. Spotery is still a young aggregator, only just out of its first seven months of beta testing, and it is a promising start.
Newsvine
Anyone interested in journalistic news should check out Newsvine. While this collaborative journalism website might not include the obligatory “cute cat mews at a mouse” and “man gets severely hurt in comical way” social news aggregator fare, it does cover news of all types with a social flair. Newsvine encourages both citizen journalism through giving users the ability to write their own articles, and traditional news sharing through mainstream news websites.
Users are the editorial voice on Newsvine, using their votes and comments to bump stories up to the top page. There is a live feed of all the latest stories submitted to Newsvine, and an active comments section on each story where users can discuss news stories with one another.
