Splurb Shows Stories That Are Hot on Multiple Social News Sites
By Christina Warren 2009-11-03 14:20:44 UTC
This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
Name: Splurb
Quick Pitch: Splurb is a cross-referenced list of the social web's most popular links. To get listed, a link must be popular on at least two social websites.
Genius Idea: Community news aggregators like Digg, Reddit, and Tweetmeme are a great way to find interesting news links and stories. The only problem is that it can be difficult to keep track of all the news from all the different aggregators. This is Splurb's mission: to simplify the social aggregators by only listing stories that have been deemed popular by at least two social sites.
Splurb aggregates stories that have become popular on sites like Digg, Tweetmeem, Fark, Reddit, Propeller, Yahoo! Buzz, and Mixx. Links can be viewed by category and are sorted by popularity over time. The size of a stories text indicates how many sources linked to it. It's really nice because at a glance you can see how many sites are linking to a story and how many collective votes that story has received. Clicking on the link takes you directly to the original source.
I really like the idea of aggregating and ranking stories that have already been submitted other places on the web. There are only so many hours in the day and I know that if I see a story has been linked by four different sites, it's a story that I might want to invest time in reading — as opposed to clicking on something that turns out to be sort of a dead-end.
Of course, sometimes, the comments attached to story on a social aggregation site are better than those on the story itself (I'm looking at you Reddit!). Splurb lets you view the comments at the sites linking the article (by loading them in an iFrame within an AJAX window) and you can leave comments on Splurb for the stories too.
Splurb has a clean, simple design and it delivers on its promise to offer a trimmed down list to the best links on the web.
How do you find new information online? What do you think of Splurb's concept? Let us know!
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Topics: digg, fark, Mixx, reddit, search, social aggregation, Social Media, Startups, splurb, Tech