Is Twitter the only micro-blogging service worth it?

Late last week, I updated techfantastic and the Gamer Collective to post to identi.ca (techfantastic and the Gamer Collective on identi.ca) and pownce (techfantastic and the Gamer Collective on pownce) to spread the tech and gaming news thru a few other services. I plan on adding support for Jaiku and Plurk as soon as they open up (Jaiku) and/or provide an API (Plurk). So far, it’s been interesting to note the differences between the the two aforementioned services and Twitter.

Identi.ca is more similar to Twitter than Pownce and that made integrating with their API extremely easy to to use. Pownce took a few minutes longer to integrate with since you have to create an account for your application, similar to how to have to register Facebook applications to use the Facebook APIs. Once that was done, the actual integration was a snap.

As far as traffic goes, Twitter is usually the driver of the most traffic with Identi.ca and Pownce taking turns at second place. Techfantastic seems to be more popular on Identi.ca while the Gamer Collective seems to be a touch more popular on Pownce. The only metric I’m using for popularity right now is the number of hits I get back to my sites (which is currently only a handful).

As far as actual followers, Identi.ca has been more generous to the Gamer Collective (6 followers to the 1 for techfantastic) while Pownce has been a little nicer to techfantastic (2 followers to tGC’s 0…I did say a little). It’ll take longer than a few days to see if they catch up to the numbers each site gets on twitter (85 followers for tGC and 119 for tf)

Now granted, the numbers are still relatively small and neither service, Twitter included, is driving a terribly large amount of traffic so the differences in follower counts doesn’t matter much just yet. That makes the answer to the question posed in the headline pretty easy to guess; they’re all worth it! They all drive some amount of traffic to the site and right now, I’ll take all that I can get.

How I’m dealing with low-traffic news niches

I was finally able to get a few more news sites up and running (yay!) and after about 10 minutes of patting myself on the back, I realized that I kind of had a problem. Two of the sites, Tech Fantastic and the Gamer Collective, were generating quite a few more news items than the others (Agile Fantastic and Ruby Fantastic) since, naturally, their target audience and overall niche is quite large. There many news sources in the tech and gamer spaces and not really so many in the agile and ruby space.

After a few days, the difference between the sites was even more glaring. The front pages for Tech Fantastic and the Gamer Collective were changing throughout the day, while the front pages for the agile and ruby site hadn’t moved an inch. Ouch.

On one hand, that might not be a bad thing. The way the engine works, it’s picky about what news to show by default and with it being so picky, maybe it would help cutback on the noise and only show the most recent and pertinent news. That sounds all well and good, but I was a bit worried about people losing interest (myself included).

So what I decided to do was to throw posts from sites that had more than a certain threshold of credibility into the front page mix. My thinking was, “this sites are already established as being relevant to their niches (as determined by our system), so more often than not, their posts would most likely be noteworthy…what the heck”.

If you look at Ruby Fantastic and Agile Fantastic, you’ll see that they have more news items that don’t have any related stories, as compared to Tech Fantastic and the Gamer Collective, and those stories are still quite relevant. Now, sure when something popular hits in one of those industries, you’ll see more activity, but for now, I think this is a pretty good way to stay even more up to date in these respective niches. What do you think?

Making my news smarter

Outside of my day job (working as a Rails consultant at the best Phoenix Ruby/Rails shop, Integrum), I’ve started plugging away on building a smart news aggregator for the handful of industries I’m heartily addicted to keep tabs on. My whole reason for building these sites was that I was the worst at following everything in my feed reader. I’d have to read so much just to keep up and after I subscribed to so many sites, trying to keep keep became flat-out impossible. 

So as I was pondering my life’s existence one day, I realized; I like the idea of techmeme, but I wish I had the same type of site for [insert industry here]. So away I began to plug. A little over a month later, I had a pretty decent prototype. My bot was crawling sites, discovering new sites and relating related content. Today (roughly two months after I started), I have a few sites up and running but their nowhere near where i’d like to take them. The groundwork is good, but there so much more that is possible!

I think I’ll post my progress here as I try to build some smart AI into these news sites and make them actually worth paying attention to. 

Oh yes, before I forget. I guess it would b a good idea to fill you in on where the sites are actually at. The two I’m using as the main proving grounds so far are tech fantastic (for the best tech/gadget news) and the Gamer Collective (for the latest video game industry news). Feel free to check them out and to bombard me with insightful input It’s always appreciated.

so yeah, here come more posts

Being a Ruby/Rails dev by trade, I did the Mephisto thing for a while and as fun as that was (it wasn’t), I decided to go with something a little more stable and easier to use. I don’t want to have to roll-my-own or worry about maintenance so I’ll try this for a while and see how it goes.