My "Discovery Page"

I have always started the web with MyYahoo, at least since MyYahoo was launced in the mid 90s.

I've got my "daily reads" there now via RSS and I still grab a fair bit of news there and of course the weather and my stocks. So I don't think I am going to leave MyYahoo, but there is one thing I am absolutely going to do and that is put at least one and possibly several "discovery pages" right at the top of MyYahoo and start every morning with them.

Discovery pages are web services that showcase the most interesting stuff on the web right now. There are three and a half that I am considering. I will describe them and then I'll ask for suggestions of others from the readers.

First, the "half". Memeorandum is a great service. Currently you can choose two views, tech and politics. I visit the tech page at least once a day and possibly many more times. I don't know whether to call Memeorandum a "discovery page" or not because its really very narrow and you don't see stuff about completely random things. The blogs it culls from are a tight set and it tends to generate "group think" which I am not a fan of when I want discovery. So while Memorandum is a must read for me every day, I think I'll leave it out of my "discovery page" list.

That leaves three candidates.

Delicious' Popular Page - The grandaddy of the "discovery pages". And a huge part of delicious' popularity. Though I find the stories often a bit too techy for my taste, the ability to post/copy to my delicious account is a huge plus. And filtering the popular page by tag is a great feature that they ought to make easier over time.

Digg - Along with delicious, Digg is the current favorite of the digerati. One look at this Alexa chart shows how these two services have grown in lockstep over the past six months. Digg has a "cleaner interface" and uses votes/diggs to determine what's interesting to the users. I have used Digg a lot over the past year, but haven't completely warmed up to it and its not an every day experience for me, at least yet.

Reddit - Considered by many to be a Digg clone, Reddit is interesting to me on several levels. First the user interface is more like delicious than digg and frankly I am used to that and prefer it. Second it uses the votes that each user makes to build a personalized version of Reddit over time for each user. I like that idea in principal and am going to see how it works for me.

My plan is to put at least one and possibly several of these "discovery pages" at the top of MyYahoo and start my day with them. Right now I may go with all three of these and possibly whittle it down to one or two over time.

If you have another one I should consider, please let me know in the comments and I will check it out.

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Posted December 19, 2005 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

I'd recommend giving diggdot.us a try, since it captures two of the three that you're interested in: it's digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular munged together and deduped. Very handy.

Posted by: W.B. McNamara | Dec 19, 2005 12:22:37 PM

Fred - we are just getting started, but there is a prototype of Personal Bee that you can look at -- www.personalbee.com -- I'd love to chat with you about the concept in more detail.

Posted by: Ted Shelton | Dec 19, 2005 1:01:45 PM

ok. i can be a little slow but i'm missing the boat on most of these. tried diggit.us and it didnt seem to let me choose topics. am i supposed to just be interested in what's most popular on these services? is that the point - like technorati top 10? or am i an idiot and missed the UI?

i'll admit i still dont use delicious, have never used myyahoo, tried digg once and didnt get that either.

i'd like a service that a) has no work cause i'm lazy, b) based on a few clicks offers me topical/category news, c) gives it in very short bursts like bloglines that i can fire through fast. if it also showed me most popular in a category or which fred was reading, icing but not necessary.

Posted by: mark pincus | Dec 19, 2005 1:10:42 PM

I'm an avid My Yahoo! user as well, but am getting increasingly frustrated that they don't offer me the ability to read more without clicking thru -- why not offer a hover/javascript option so that I can read the first 100 words without clicking off their page? Would be a mix of a dedicated RSS Reader and the usefulness of MY!.

I'd like the same feature from the mail summary that's on my MY! page as well.

So, Santa, if you'd give me that, I promise to not mind the bucket of coal...

Posted by: David Schappell | Dec 19, 2005 1:23:27 PM

Fred,

You may want to consider 180N at www.180n.com. Also consider 1Num for your portfolio.

Brandon

Posted by: brandon McLarty | Dec 19, 2005 4:55:17 PM

Fred:

I would second the diggdot.us vote -- I track their RSS feed and it has the best of several worlds in it. I'd also note that Reddit is slightly different from Digg in that links can be voted up or down in popularity, rather than just being "dugg." For what it's worth, I posted an email interview I did with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian on my blog here.

Posted by: Mathew Ingram | Dec 19, 2005 5:11:25 PM

I subscribe to the RSS feed for the del.icio.us tag "to_read" (http://del.icio.us/tag/to_read)...via Bloglines but it should work with My Yahoo. Less volume than the Popular tag, more quality content.

Posted by: Ed Costello | Dec 19, 2005 10:57:04 PM

Fred,

My system zifus.com is in alpha testing right now and I'm looking for more alpha test users currently.

Zifus is different from the systems mentioned above in that personal relevance is the main focus of the system. There are two modes: popular and viewpoint. Popular mode operates similar to reddit allowing you to vote an article up or down (although there is a bigger range than +1 and -1). Viewpoint build statistical correlations around what you like and how similar you think about news and comments to other users. Using those statistical correlations your index page is generated using a complicated scoring algorithm.

The upshot is that Zifus is a highly personalized content aggregation system that allows you to both find out what it is going on in fields that you are interested in, and to discover new items that you wouldn't have encountered typically.

I am still looking for more active beta testers, if you are interested you can mail me at: alphatest.zifus@recursor.net.

Doug

Posted by: Doug | Dec 20, 2005 12:54:08 AM

Hey Fred.

Play with TailRank. You can import your own OPML feed and tags weblogs and we adjust your recommendations based on this. I think we need to do a better job here specifically to make it easier for people to 'grok'.

You can also select tags and view memes just on a specific tag.

Posted by: Kevin Burton | Dec 21, 2005 2:11:15 AM

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