Filtering Reddit and Hacker News

Giles had a fantastic rant this week that cut to the heart of what’s wrong with all of these “social web application sites”:

People who waste their own time have, in effect, more votes than people who value it – to elevate bad but popular ideas and irretrievably sink independent thinking.

It’s analogous to what’s wrong with the entire massively online roleplaying game genre (eg: World of Warcraft) in that success is a greater factor of the time invested than of skill or talent. Many social web applications add extra features to keep the users interacting with the site, even if this interaction offers dubious value to their lives.

Yahoo Pipe: Sub-Reddit Feed Filter

Popular social bookmarking site Reddit has announced a great new feature: users can create their own sub-reddit. What does this mean in English? Users and communities can create their own social bookmarking sites around specific topics: blogging, wordpress, specific programming languages, etc but still use their regular reddit account for submitting links and voting.

You can see a full list of all the new reddits here, sorted by popularity. Of particular interest to me is the new Reddit created for Ruby/Rails related posts.

Of course, it’d be nice to be able to subscribe to a filtered version of these links. I’ve created a modified version of Dave S‘s “reddit popular on delicious” Yahoo Pipe that works with Sub-reddits.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/engtech/subredditpopularondelicious

1. Click on the link
2. Enter the name of the sub-reddit you’re interested in
   • ie: ruby, see full list of all the new reddits here
3. Enter the minimum number of saves on a delicious before a link is included in the feed
4. Enter keyword inclusion/exclusion filters if you want to limit what you get
   • ie: include only rails-related posts or exclude all rails-related posts
5. Click Run
6. Click on the subscribe to RSS button

I’m using the Ruby sub-reddit as an example, but this is a great way to track links based around any topic there is a sub-reddit for. Even lolcats.

I’m looking forward to when this Reddit feature comes out of beta and it’s possible to create a few new sub-reddits like blogging, wordpress and lifehacks.

Related Posts

• Greasemonkey Script: Yahoo Pipe Cleaner
• Blog Tip: Create a Link Post in 3 Seconds
• The Programmable Web – Yahoo Pipes

Be My Friend (on social network sites)

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand (or *gasp* you aren’t obsessed with Internet culture), then you’ve noticed that we’re seeing more and more web service startups over the past few years. Last year I flamed the Bubble 2.0 soundly in “Web Too.Many.” Earlier this year I tried to get an idea of what websites people actually use by starting the What’s Your Web 2.0? meme.I think I’m past breaking when it comes to my attention span and the number of services that I use. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some I heartily recommend. If you use some of these services as well, then please go ahead and “friend” me. And yes, there is a Facebook account in the list.

Active

• Facebook – I have separate profiles for blog friends and real friends
• Del.icio.us – bookmarking, blogging
• Last.fm – music discovery, sharing music with friends
• StumbleUpon – voting/sharing
• Digg – voting/sharing
• Reddit – voting/sharing
• WordPress – blogging
• Gmail – email

Software Hosting

• Google Code Hosting – hosting software projects
• Yahoo Pipes – creating RSS feed filters
• Userscripts.org – all of my greasemonkey scripts

Autopilot

• Twitter – sharing, republishing
• Tumblr – aggregating my online presence
• Jaiku – sharing, republishing

Deadpool

These are sites that I used to use often, but I’ve given up on:

• MyBlogLog – too much spam
• Flickr – it’s easier to share photos with friends on Facebook
• RottenTomatoes – it’s easier to share movie reviews with friends on Facebook
• Technorati – never indexes me properly
• Blogcritics – got some books, but they aren’t a very good source of traffic
• LinkedIn – until the next time I’m looking for work
• … more than I can possibly remember.

What got me thinking about this is trying out Pownce for the first time and seeing how horrible it is at re-discovering my friends.

I just sent out some invites to Kevin Rose’s Pownce to my FeedBurner subscribers. (Thanks for hooking me up, Adam)

Pownce First Impression

I’ve seen other complaints that the biggest problem of Pownce is “what do I do with it?” It’s probably the most powerful web-based instant messaging client out there.

I was very surprised that they Pownce doesn’t have an “import contacts from address book” feature. That is rapidly becoming the only way to easily import the list of your friends from one web app to another. I was trying out Blue Swarm the other day and they are using a very slick widget from Plaxo that does easy address book imports. All web startups should use this, since email address contacts are the only universal data format for identifying your friends on the web.

This is a perfect example of why the Facebook application experience is so powerful… signing up and maintaining a user account is the major barrier that prevents most web startups from gaining a massive user base. “Social” web sites have an even bigger barrier in that you have to move or re-find your network. Facebook apps allow for any application to have the same user account and social network.

Obviously I think it would be pretty awesome if that Plaxo contact importer also supported Facebook as well as Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.

What Others Have to Say

Scoble: “I see many of the same people in my friends list on Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce. Pownce is growing faster than the other ones right now, though. 728 people have already added me on Pownce. I can’t take many more social networks.“

Memoirs of a Bystander: “My question is this: Is there any value actually garnered from adding an obscenely large amount of random people as your friend on various social sites? Honestly, if a social networking site it meant to enhance you life through discovery of new interests, music, recommendations, etc…, is that easily done by wading through thousands of people?”

Mashable: “And it is this: on Pownce, you can send a message, or a file, or a song, or an event, to one person; or three of your friends; or only your family; or everyone.”

SocialHam: “Now more than ever Email seems to becoming a dead medium so can micro blogging sites fill in the gaps?”

JetPacked: “Can’t decide between pownce and twitter? This should help. Here’s how to post your pownces to twitter.”

Daily Grumble: “Social networking is a very difficult area for a new service to break into. How on earth are you going to persuade users of other, more established social networks to come to your service?”

Greg Verdino: “Are social media mavens living inside a bubble of our own making, artificially inflating the impact that most of these nascent technologies are having on the population in general, and ultimately getting our companies and our clients riled up over something that will, over time, turn out to be, well um, nothing?”

Get RSS Updates when your Site is Submitted to Digg or Reddit (Yahoo Pipes)

I’ve put together an RSS widget that I like to call Social Site Submission Watchdog. It creates an RSS feed for when people submit your site to digg.com or reddit.com. The reddit results are tweaked so that they link to the voting page on reddit instead of the page on your site. The link title indicates which site the source is coming from. I’ve also created a Reddit-only version of the Pipe.

This is an essential tool for building a dashboard for your blog.

This is an essential way to keep track of your site so that you can prep a post for the potential wave of traffic heading towards it by doing things like adding a Digg This widget. It’s also a good way for a reader to keep track of specific sites they want to support.

Any feature requests? Leave a comment.

Digg Pipes

• mine: Pipe for getting merged/tweaked Digg/Reddit results for a site being submitted
• Pipe for searching within a specific user’s diggs
• Pipe for getting a Digg RSS feed based on category, number of diggs, and number of comments

Related Posts

• Yahoo Pipes RSS feed for Technorati Rank
• How social bookmarking sites should save URLs
• Tech and blog predictions for 2007

See the full list of free software I have created.

You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.

Aaron Swartz on becoming a DotCom millionaire

Aaron Swartz of Reddit fame is blogging about the experience of becoming a DotCom millionaire this week after Reddit was bought by Cond�Nast/Wired magazine (Aaron’s collection of web clippings on the acquisition). It’s a very interesting read for those of us working at startups in high tech. The fact that he’s a good writer only helps.

UPDATE 2006/11/09: Mike-o-matic has a nice writeup on the same subject.

I remember how when reddit started, the whole thing seemed so childish.

The cartoony alien, the barebones design, the fresh-faced programmers, the rented house. And none of that has really changed. It’s just that with success behind it, it’s harder to dismiss. A scribbled drawing a kid hands to you is “cute”, the same thing on the wall of a museum is “art”. You assume there must be something there, even if you can’t see it.

It’s hard to notice this when you’re in the middle of it. During the days, I mostly saw my co-workers, who lived and breathed the site. At night, I hung out with my friends, who all knew what I did. On weekends, we’d go to parties for local startups, who all wanted to emulate reddit’s success. Everyone we talked to treated us like it was serious.