Apr

8

Blogrize Review: Shared Feeds meet Social Networking

April 8, 2008 |

Jesse Spauling, the developer of Blogrize send me an invite to try out his new service yesterday. Blogrize is still in a private beta. Louis Gray had some invites yesterday, but they seem to be all gone at this point there are still some left, so hurry to Louis’ site and grab one.

Blogrize describes itself as “today’s news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.”

At its most basic, Blogrize creates a community around shared RSS feeds. You can think of it as Linkriver, but with a stronger emphasis on community building, plus a digg/reddit like voting system.

The design of Blogrize is overall very functional and elegant. Very few tasks take more than a click to perform, yet the interface doesn’t seem cluttered.

To populate the reddit-like “hot” list, Blogrize also looks beyond the Shared Feeds of the specific community by doing a semantic analysis of the shared items and populates the list with other content that it deems relevant.

There is also a more Linkriver like option to just see only items posted by your friends. As far as I can see, this list is also ordered by a mix of “hotness” and recency.

blogrizeIn the screen shot to the left,you can see the view of Blogrize from the Louis Gray community. Once you hover over a link, you get the opportunity to vote on this item. Unlike Friendfeed, where you can only like a post, Blogrize gives you a plethora of options: “Interesting,” “Funny,” and “Insightful” on the positive side, and “Lame,” “Disagree,” and “Facts Wrong” on the negative side. This seems like a bit of overkill right now, as most users I see in the system really only use the “Interesting” function.

Of course, you can also comment on every item as well - where you can vote on every post as well, using the same taxonomy as above. The commenting system uses threats, so even long discussions remain quite readable.

jesseOne nice touch is that the user profiles are a bit more in-depth than those at other similar services, which stresses the social networking aspect of Blogrize. Linkriver does a good job giving its users an idea who the users are. Blogrize goes even further and can, as more users come into the system, break down the community by geography as well.

The individual user profiles are also very interesting, as every user’s recent comments and votes are archived there. To me, this is an easy way to see whether it is worth following somebody.

Overall, I think Blogrize is a very interesting service. I was actually surprised I liked it, as I have seen my fair share of Shared Feeds based products in the last few months and couldn’t really see what Blogrize would do that would set it apart that from the competition. Yet, Blogrize really surprised me and I think the addition of the voting features and the emphasis on social networks represents the next step in the evolution of the Shared Feeds based web apps.

Technorati tags: , , , , ,


Share This

Related Posts

Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Jesse Spaulding on April 8, 2008 5:59 pm

    Hi Frederic. Thanks for the glowing review. I still can’t believe that really happened :)

    We made the different vote types because we thought this would make it more social and fun. It is a bit of an experiment for now. But we also think this extra information will help us rank items more effectively. For example if someone ‘disagrees’ with something the system is not going to dump the item like if someone marks it as ‘lame’.

    I would also just note that the accepting Google shared items feeds was a recent addition to the site. We think of the site more of an evolution of DIGG/Reddit. The real power of the site is in the communities and the algorithm which ranks articles on the HOT page for each community. Of course we love having all the RSS addicts on the site as well. It’s a great place for people to follow your shared items.

    There are still some more ‘louisgray’ invites available. And otherwise just put your name and email and we’ll send out an invite very soon.

  2. Frederic on April 8, 2008 7:04 pm

    Thanks for the explanation Jesse. I wasn’t aware that the Shared Feeds were only a recent addition.

    I changed the post to reflect that Louis still has some invites.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind