Nunc Ubique Blog

I remember those days when part of my daily online routine was browsing Digg.com. I use website like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon for latest trends on the Web. Finding out what everybody is laughing at, what’s the latest online video people are watching, discovering the latest web meme.

Digg and Reddit shares the same formula. On Digg and Reddit, users submit stories and other users vote on stories they like. Item that has high votes are promoted to the front page. In a way this filters out all the crap and only the worthwhile crap are seen on the front page. The Internet is full of crap so this is good.

These days however, I find myself visiting Digg and Reddit less and less. I use to visits these sites multiple times in a day, now it’s a few times in a month, sometime almost never.

With Twitter, I don’t have to rely on Digg or Reddit for knowing what’s the trend. Most of the time I’ll be looking on my Twitter feed and clicking on links to discover interesting stories, breaking news or funny viral videos.

In Twitter, you choose the people you follow, they are either your friend you’ve known for a long time or someone you find interesting on the web. This itself acts as filters. You only read tweets from people you want to read tweets from.

I would check out links posted by someone I follow on Twitter because if that person, who I find interesting enough for me to follow on Twitter, finds that the link is interesting enough for them to post it on Twitter, therefore the link should somehow be interesting enough for me. See the logic there?

If there is a breaking news, it spreads on Twitter like a wild forest fire on a dry season. Twitter, with enough interesting followers is like having your own personal assistants that finds stuff on the web for you. At least that is how I feel.

So how does Digg and Reddit keep up then? By being on Twitter of cause. Reddit has its official Twitter feed that syndicates top links on Reddit onto Twitter for anybody who follows Reddit’s Twitter account.

Digg also does the same thing. They created Twitter account for each categories posting top links that got voted up. You can choose which categories to follow.

Twitter has become too big that these once giant social news websites like Digg and Reddit has to caved in and made themselves available on Twitter. I would love to see the actual metrics for Digg and Reddit, wonder if Twitter getting big these days does effect Digg and Reddit’s pageviews.

There is also Tweetmeme, that does what Digg does only instead of counting votes it counts re-tweets. This is something I’ll cover in an another post.