

Ask HN: alternative news management sites, worth the effort? - Tichy

Recently I found myself pondering an older idea of mine for handling news, that has many aspects in common with friendfeed. It is not the same, but I could imagine friendfeed could mimic those features relatively easy. Not sure if they would want to - anyway, I wonder if it is too late to pursue the idea? Will there be room for more than one friendfeed? I am (so far) just one guy and money is scarce, so there would be a disadvantage against ff.<p>How do digg and reddit co-exist, are they not essentially the same thing?<p>I remember to have read about several news filtering projects on HN, so I wonder if for you the effort was worth it, despite of Reddit and Digg having a strong hold on the market? Did any of the more recent projects gain any traction?
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adrianwaj
I'd like to see a way of comment aggregation, eg for 1 article there are
comments and duplicate articles at multiple degrees of separation:

\- Article + same story elsewhere on news site + each one's comments

\- Blog reference to article + duplicate references on other blogs + each
one's comment

\- Digg + competing social news sites + each one's comments

\- Social network references + other social networks + comments

\- Comment communities, eg co.comment

\- Friend aggregators eg Friendfeed and competitors + their comments

Would be great to see framework or system to see all discussion in 1 place,
not necessarily forcing users to discuss in 1 place, but to see from a
historical perspective the different viewpoints. Maybe some type of tag that
an original author can insert. Trackback V2 perhaps.

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josefresco
You opened a rather large can of worms here, the short answer to your question
is that you're kind of late to the game, there are hundreds if not thousands
of Digg/Reddit competitors and taking on FriendFeed/Twitter has and IS being
done on a daily basis (Plurk etc.)

Anyone familiar with Reddit or Digg will tell you they are about as similar as
a Ford Taurus and a Honda Accord. They share the same basic function but vary
vastly in audience, content and culture.

All that being said, if you can build a better mouse trap but all means do it.
I'll be waiting on the sidelines cheering you on and sharing my thoughts on
what you're doing right and wrong ;)

~~~
Tichy
One approach to Twitter is of course to create a site that is acting as a
Twitter frontend, which I think friendfeed is also doing. Ideally, it would
still be independent of Twitter, so that if Twitter goes down, my users could
still communicate.

I think there are several popular implementations of IM clients (like Pidgin,
Trillian, whatever), so perhaps the same could work for news sites - they all
access the same data, but with different interfaces.

I will see if I can find a basic functionality that could be implemented in a
relatively short timespan, then I'll decide if it is worth tackling...
Certainly it would NOT be a reddit clone ;-)

Edit: of all the reddit clones, did any become a reasonable success? To "own"
a project like Hacker News would make me proud (so I would count it as a
success), but I doubt that something like HN would bring in a lot of money(?).

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wheels
You don't want to end up in a pissing match in a dominant market unless you've
got something that will truly differentiate you up your sleeve. This isn't to
say that you couldn't compete, but even in your best case scenario, you've
captured part of a market that is heading towards being a commodity. Sure
there are lots of IM programs out there. How many of them do you think
generate revenue of interest?

Maybe consider open sourcing it so that folks can build their own friendfeed-
ish sites.

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geuis
Go for it. I've sat on my own ideas and watched the world go by to see the
same ideas become popular websites. Ignore what you see as competition. The
worst that happens is you gain no users. You learn from it anyway and its a
springboard to your next great idea. Fear doubt and just start coding n

