

100 exclusive alpha invites to socialmedian code = hacker - socialmedian
http://www.socialmedian.com

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michael_dorfman
Is there any hint of what the site will do for me? "social|median is a social
news service that connects people with personalized news and information"
sounds alot like what I am getting from MyYahoo (or Google News).

~~~
socialmedian
Michael -- this is from Jason Goldberg, founder of socialmedian in response to
your question.

First, let me say that this is ALPHA in every way -- there's very little
polish and we've spent 0 time on messaging, faq's, about files, etc. yet.
We've only been at this for a few weeks in total.

\--

Our site basically asks (and is attempting to answer) a big question: What if,
instead of just the media companies filtering the news, we could collectively
filter the news for each other? Imagine, for instance, if you could know on
any given day what articles just your most trusted friends or colleagues are
finding important. Or, if you were able to know what every person who has your
job title is finding interesting. Or, if you could know what thousands of
people from all around the world are finding important on a very specific
topic. That’s what we’re after here at social|median.

Our thesis is:

a. Yes, there is a lot of great content out there and the Internet is making
content creation and distribution easier and easier.

b. But people need help wading through all that great content and discovering
just the news and information that is most relevant to them.

c. A potentially powerful way to help people get a personalized view of news
and information would be through collaborative filtering by people with common
interests.

At the highest level, what we are trying to do here is to present people with
the most relevant personalized news from any source. There’s a ton of content
out there (and more being created every day) and as the noise level increases,
people need help discovering just the most important stuff to them. That
follows whether you are interested in broad topics like Tech News, or
Politics, or more specific topics like Rock Band (the game), or android, or
modern interior design, etc. Typical RSS readers and news aggregators lack an
intelligence layer to cut through the noise and serve up what matters most to
the individual based on their own unique “information DNA”

(It’s worth noting that part of our inspiration for this service came when one
of our founders was on the treadmill at the gym one day and observing that all
50 people there were watching the same 30 minutes package of CNN Headline
News, while all 50 of them most likely have very different interests — it hit
him that at some point in the future we should be able to get more of just the
news relevant to our unique interests — so we started to think about how we
might step our way towards that).

As noted, our thesis is that a way to solve this problem is to utilize
collaborative filtering to help people with similar interests
identify/discover what to read/view. (that's not all that new). The new part
is the notion that on any specific topic (down to the topic level), there are
a set of people who can help other people discover what matters, from any
number of sources....SORT OF LIKE HACKER NEWS FOR AN INFINITE NUMBER OF
TOPICS/GROUPS OF PEOPLE.

On socialmedian, a group of people who share interest in a common topic or set
of related topics form a “News Network” -- which enables them to collectively
discover and identify to each other relevant stories. Wiki-like,
social|median’s members can create and join News Networks on any topic they
desire. Again, wiki-like, in each News Network, the members decide everything.
They pick which topics to include in a News Network and what sources to get
news from. Finally, within a News Network, members identify interesting
stories to each other by “clipping them.”

So far, our 2000 alpha users have created more than 600 "News Networks"

Our Product Model: Ship fast and iterate faster, following user feedback. We
launched the first early alpha version of our website in March after just 3
weeks of development and have committed ourselves to rapidly add new features
regularly (currently 3 times per week) based on user feedback. We wont always
get it right but we are committed to trying, listening, and learning.

Please submit feedback using the links on the site.

Thanks!

~~~
khangtoh
So how's this different from Digg - submit news to different categories, which
sounded like what you News Network is about, except Digg does not allow you to
create your own category (aka your News Networks) which I see as a plus.
However, wouldn't there it be hard to find News Network from 600 "News
network" with only 2000 users. What happens when you have 20000 users and 6000
News network. Finding a News Network could be a nightmare.. no?

I think you guys are using Rails, but the site is just so dogslow, why?
Perhaps consider adding more mongrel instances, are your servers hitting its
load with only 2000 users? The slowness of the site sorted of turned me off
when I first tried the site. Remember social news is a tough market to fight
in, so the first impression counts.

I also suggest you post your design competition on 99designs.com, I'm not sure
how many people knows about your design competition. A $1000 prize would
definitely draw a lot of entries.

Any finally, is Jason Goldberg - the Jason Goldberg from Jobster? Just
curious.

~~~
khangtoh
What about newsvine? I believe you guys are awfully similar.

~~~
socialmedian
Hey guys. This is Jason Goldberg, from former Jobster. I started working on
socialmedian in January. The team is myself and 9 awesome guys/gals in Pune,
India. We're going scrappy, throwing stuff out there and figuring it out as we
go.

Some key differences between what we're doing and Digg, Newsvine:

-news networks --> everything starts with topical networks that members create and join and have full control of

-members can feed in news from any number of sources into their news networks, not just rely on user submissions. IN fact, upon entering some topics (like keywords), we go crawl the web and suggest sources the might want to include.

-today, all news networks on socialmedian are public -- anyone can create and join them. soon, we'll also layer on private networks

-Everything on socialmedian revolves around the member's personalized feed on their homepage. Our algo offers up a personalized view on the news unique to each user based on their interests. We'll also be layering on some unique types of filters (e.g. know what certain types of people are reading)

more on the way :) it's early. only been at it 2 months

Join 3-4 news networks, create 1, and then check out your homepage. Then give
us some feedback as to how to make this work for you.

------
socialmedian
Oh, and in case I forgot to mention, it's alpha :) so please send your
feedback!

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capablanca
if you are sending those, i wont mind getting one at jrcapa@gmail.com

~~~
technoguyrob
Seconded for technoguyrob[at]gmail.

~~~
socialmedian
Hey guys. you just need to go to www.socialmedian.com, click on "create an
account" and enter the invite code "hacker"

We've opened up 100 invites using this code today.

~~~
ovi256
Oh, the invite code IS hacker. It seems I am not the only one to misunderstand
you title :-P. I first got it as "Alpha invite to hack on social|median's
code".

