Digg to Expand to Cover Product and Services Reviews
TechCrunch reported over the weekend that social news superpower Digg will expand its categories in “the next 6 to 12 months” to cover reviews of products and services.
This is the most significant development to hit the social news/social bookmarking world in a long time.
Here’s why: The “big three” (Digg, Netscape, Reddit) of social news sites – where the readership submits news stories and then votes the most popular submissions onto the front page – do a pretty good job of covering general news and opinion stories. Digg, the overall market leader, has pretty much cornered the market on tech, while Netscape covers a broad swath of stories for a more general web readership, and Reddit is the most eclectic of the lot.
There’s a hunger, I’ve been wagering for some time, for social news “niche” channels that the Big Three – as well as a host of so called “Digg clones” – has as yet failed to address.
One area that is currently ill served is reviews. Let’s say you’d love to go to a site to find the most popular music reviews on the Internet today. Or the most popular stories criticizing or praising a recent Nintendo Wii release. Or you’d love to be able to easily sort and sift through the upcoming avalanche of Harry Potter, Volume VII reviews. There’s no place like that right now.
Digg, smartly seeing the huge space in the market it dominates, is looking to fill it up itself.
The recent launch of MySpace News proves that simply launching an all purpose social news platform – even when tied to branding of a social networking site that boasts many millions of users – doesn’t cut it anymore. There’s still plenty of ways to create value within the social news space, for the right kinds of companies who can find and execute on good ideas.
A social news version of Memeorandum, for instance. In other words, a social news site that just covers politics, or better yet, political stories and analysis just coming out of the blogosphere. My own personal favorite would be to see a social news platform that just focuses on Internet-related stories, or stories coming out of the blogosphere, or media-related stories. One custom-suited to the online media cultist, you might say.
Digg’s expansion into product and services reviews will delight a galaxy of web publishers and web companies to no end. Of course, it will also need to take on that much more effort to combat gaming, but that’s a somewhat small price to pay for success.
