Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

Spotplex came into the picture just a few days ago and has a good chance of becoming a Digg competitor. We decided to hold off writing about it so we could test it out, and get a taste of how it works. Just like Digg, they promote content from around the web. Instead of relying on user submitted content like Digg, Spotplex has bloggers enter code into their blog, and then they use that code to determine how many people are reading each article.  The more views an article receives, the higher it will appear on Spotplex.

We decided that we wanted to get in on this beta, so we signed up and received the code to insert into our blog.  Inserting the code was extremely easy, and the image below shows what it’s like to sign up.

Normally the site is pretty fast, but today everything seemed to load really slow.  I imagine they’re probably under heavy load right now as they adjust to the increase in traffic as more blogs are added, and more people come to check out the top stories.

Assuming they do things right, they may be able to catch up to Digg sooner rather than later. Looking at Digg’s recent statistics, it looks like they’re on a slow downward trend.  While Alexa isn’t always the most accurate source out there (so take it for what it’s worth), they’re showing that Digg ranked 104 on the web yesterday. While this is still an impressive number, just 173 days ago Digg was ranked 23.

I like Spotplex because it gives you a real-time idea of what’s popular around the web. They divide the content into categories like technology, business, sports, and science.  By clicking on “Blog Standing,” you’ll get a list of the most “popular” blogs based upon traffic that have the code for Spotplex inserted into their sites.

Their real-time approach is interesting and could prove to be superior to Digg’s voting system that’s often times filled with fraudulent votes. Another interesting feature is that they currently don’t have a commenting system. This could be both good and bad because it forces people to visit the blog where the article originated to comment.

While it will probably take a while for Spotplex to build a strong user-base, they’re off to a good start. But where will it go from here? Your guess is as good as mine.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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