Latest Features from Digg and StumbleUpon

Although news outlets continually bring reports about new features on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, there is actually a lot happening with social aggregation sites as well. To catch us up to speed, Brent Csutoras gave WebProNews a rundown of the latest news from both Digg and StumbleUpon.

First of all, Digg has a new trending feature that allows users to be more involved in the actual voting process. Since people are always complaining about the items that reach the front page, Digg is incorporating this new feature to give users more of an opportunity to vote on a particular item.

On Digg’s homepage, the feature will display an item that is close to being moved to the front page and give users 10 minutes to vote to move it or not. After the 10 minutes are up, the feature will show whether or not the item was moved.

StumbleUpon has also seen some drastic changes over the last several months. Earlier this year, the company broke away from eBay and is currently being run by its original founders. Since becoming independent again, StumbleUpon revamped its design, added more content to its homepage, and essentially, tried to become more like the other social sites.

Most recently, the site has made an attempt to focus on the social profile. Csutoras however, does not welcome this change. For him, StumbleUpon was different from the other social sites. He relied on StumbleUpon for finding really unbiased and good content from anyone. But now, the content is heavily dependent upon the social group that recommended it, much like Facebook and Twitter.

“It does put an extra click or two between you and content,” he said.

All these changes are currently in beta and Csutoras is quick to point out that StumbleUpon is very good about listening to user feedback.

What are your thoughts on the new features from Digg and StumbleUpon?

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

StumbleUpon: New URL Shortener promises More Content Exposure

URL shorteners have grown increasingly valuable as a result of sites such as Twitter and Facebook becoming popular. They allow users to share long links across Twitter, Facebook, email, and other platforms. Up to this point, TinyURL and Bit.ly have been the most popular. However, StumbleUpon announced its own shortened url called Su.pr.

So what makes Su.pr different from the others? Su.pr is designed for publishers and allows them to broadcast their content across Facebook and Twitter (for now) as well as StumbleUpon. The free syndication tool also tells publishers the best time to post their content and lets them see real-time analytics on clicks, tweets, and traffic associated with posts.

Katie Sween, the Head of Marketing at StumbleUpon says the main reason Su.pr is different from the other url shorteners is because:

“…We [StumbleUpon] really are focused around helping the best content get more exposure… so the traffic element really is one of the biggest differentiators between us and some of the other shortened url services.”

Social media expert Brent Csutoras says the service really is super and claims it is, “…one of the most feature filled shorteners to date.”

StumbleUpon granted WebProNews 250 invite accounts to Su.pr. So, if you would like to try out the free service before it goes into public beta, you can enter: suprwebpro into the homepage of Su.pr. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Related articles by Zemanta

• StumbleUpon’s Su.pr URL shortener now open to the public (downloadsquad.com)
• Su.pr Shrinks and Shares Your Long URLs [URLs] (lifehacker.com)

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.