I was graced with an early peek by Scott over at beta.popularo.com. Popularo will be launched publicly available (beta) tonight at 7PM (Eastern Standard). Popularo came about because disgruntled Digg users had enough of the craziness and shady business going on at Digg.com. Popularo hopes to become unique in it's own right and fill a void in social news. Perhaps popularo will become a "digg killer". I personally love the thought of Digg being taken down a couple of notches.
My first thoughts are it is very clean and simple and straight to the point.
3 voting options - Hate, Skip and Love
Registration is also very easy and straight forward.
From Scott at Popularo
Since we are just getting started, the system is pulling in RSS feeds to "seed" the database with articles to vote on and rank. Once more real people start submitting things over the next few days, we will turn off the RSS importer.
The GUI is intentionally simple. We will soon be announcing a contest to skin the site, where the users create and submit a layout and then other users vote on the submitted layouts. The top three skins will be made available on the site for everybody to use. We felt this was a great way to get the users more involved in the site early on, and it allowed us to concentrate more of our initial development efforts on the algorithm instead of the look and feel.
I couldn't go much further at the moment until the official launch tonight, however, popularo is interesting and I wish the staff good luck. I will post more as time permits tonight or early tomorrow morning.
Update 2/25/2008 9:00pm - popularo is pretty cool, it seems to be part "Hot or Not" and social news combined. One thing that stands out is the fact that "friends" cannot easily sway popularity as each item is voted on its own merits via Hate, Skip, or Love voting options.
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Is Popularo going to be Digg killer?
I would love to read your comments on popularo!
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