Social news sites are like retailers

I think you can classify social news sites by comparing them to retailers, both online and offline. This might help provide a good jumping on point to newer users or to people who want to explore beyond the bigger news sites.

The second most interesting and thought provoking article that I read yesterday was Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Social News: Can the Digg/Mixx/Buzz Model Hold Up Against FriendFeed and Sphinn? In summary, this is what I took from the article:

Social news sites are general (many news categories) or specific (focused on a small sample of areas of interest)
General sites tend to be bigger (e.g. Digg), broader, less detailed, and slower to bring news to the front page because of the effort required to do so. They tend to form a large community of sorts, but there’s not necessarily a lot of cohesion and unanimity.
Specific sites (Sphinn is sited as an example) are more detailed, more attuned to a specific community, and a place to find news that doesn’t get attention elsewhere. However, stories do get missed because there are fewer people participating on those sites.
Specific sites have the potential to eat away at the market share of the general sites as people look for specific items that they can’t find.

The concept of general retailer vs. niche retailer can help people understand social news sites and, perhaps in a wider context, social media in general.

Let me offer a few comparisons:

Digg = Wal-Mart: Wal-Mart is quite possibly the largest retailer in the world and definitely is the largest in North America. It stocks a broad range of items but, generally speaking, focuses on high-volume, fast moving items that are delivered to the stores “just in time”. Wal-Mart covers many, many product categories but over time each category becomes dominated by the best selling products in each category as consumers “vote” with their purchases. Wal-Mart is everywhere and tends to domininate a local market until savvy smaller retailers learn to fulfill the niches that Wal-Mart chooses not to exploit.

Mixx = Target: my impression of Target is that it’s smaller but hipper than Wal-Mart and it has its own loyal customer base. It has a lot of the same things as a Wal-Mart, but it probably specializes in other things. People who get tired of Wal-Mart might like to try Target to see the difference (just like Mixx’s initial user “burst” came from disgruntled Diggers.)

StumbleUpon = Amazon.com: I make this comparison because of the power of recommendation that’s built into StumbleUpon. This recommendation functionality parallels the combination of Amazon’s customer reviews and the site’s functionality to recommend similar purchases based on the buying history of other customers. StumbleUpon uses automated recommendation logic based on your Stumbling history (what you liked and didn’t like) to take you to a different website when randomly Stumbling. At the same time, as you build up a Friends list in StumbleUpon, you start to see their preferences. StumbleUpon friends often share similar interests and tell each other about good stories, so to me that’s like the word of mouth between friends who recommend books to each other.

I’m having a harder time classifying sites like Reddit, Newsvine, and Propeller.

I envision Reddit as a fresh food market where people pick up the merchandise, check it for defects, then toss it back in disgust if they don’t like it or else they pick it up and move on. Poor quality (or unacceptable, to use a broad term) content tends to be downvoted quickly and has a very low shelf life on Reddit, while the good (read: acceptable) content enjoys good visibility.

I’d say that Newsvine and Propeller are a combination of the mass-market retailer and the traditional farmer’s market. Newsvine in particular seems like a farmer’s market approach, particularly when contributors can earn some ad revenues. Propeller, on the surface, seems more like Digg and Mixx when you consider the breadth of content available, but I haven’t used it enough to comment further. Someone like Muhammad Saleem could speak more authoritatively about Propeller.

Places like Sphinn and Slashdot seem like specialty retailers to me, with narrower focus but potentially higher quality products/stories for a specific audience. Whether it’s sporting goods, designer clothing, or high end electronics, these places are where you go when you want depth and selection. I’m sure other sites fall into this category as well.

Fark: well, use your imagination. :)

The social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Magnolia, and Netvouz are harder for me to classify. I think of them as catalog-driven retailers like Sears, L.L. Bean, or the like. Bookmarks are like items in a catalog that stay around for long periods of time.

What do you think?

Am I out to lunch? Am I in line at the wrong checkout counter? Or do you think that retailers are a good metaphor for social news sites? Share your thoughts, please. I have a lovely comment section that’s just waiting for what might have to say.