Socialmedian is a new social news service that connect you with the personalized news and information. It is still in private alpha mode, received some favorably response as the founder of this site Jason Goldberg who is also the founder of Jobster. For the inquisitive, they may request an alpha access to it before this site goes fully launch in later stage.

At fist glance, I see it as a startup like Twine, which utilize collaborative filtering to help users with similar interests discover what to read in their leisure time. For this type of social news service, users are gratefully submitted some interesting news or URL links that might interested other users in the community, and often the payoff has been substantial; users created a news network with the most unique news will thus attracted the most users. As an alpha user, I like that concept of delivering the daily news from the popular news network to my designated email. In this way, I know what is happening on Socialmedian as well as remain the connection with the news network there.

Upon you granted an alpha account, you’re prompted to change the photo of your profile. On Socialmedian, you can search for the most popular or the recent news network, or join the network. You can also search the topic you’re interested with, or users in Socialmedian (currently they only enable you to search the recently active users). Besides, they also built a feature that is very popular among all the Web applications, which is “Snip,” stands for snippet, allowing you to post your latest update.

In a social news service like Socialmedian, whose users are freely to create news network, it make me realize that everything is compete with everything for the eyeballs. There are a total number of 3,231 users that have created 760 news network. But reading the news network that shortlisted as popular are often with the popular and generic name such as Web 2.0, Tech news, social media watch, twitter, etc. It is important to recognize for a news network to succeed, having a good name is not enough, it need to understand the virtues of speed. I noticed one of the popular news network called Tech News, this news network has a huge number, i.e. 377 stories submitted in the past 24 hours, at the time of my writing.

In overall, I quite satisfied with their service, but satisfaction alone don’t make me feel loyal to the service especially I found that most of the submitted stories to some news network are not very difficult to find on the Web.