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.

Twine is one of the startups that is in my waiting list to be reviewed on TagEdge and I recently got a private beta access to it. It is a new Web application that applied the common semantic model, based on the fact that human experts are expensive, and users on Twine can provide valuable search and data information.

To understand what Twine does, and how it differentiate itself from any other Web application on the Web, you need to understand what semantic is. Semantic is refers to the computers’ ways to process the language or code, and understandable, experts usually correlate semantic to information management. But to understand semantic Web, the founder of Twine, has explained it, in a post, entitled, “On the Difference Between “Semantic” and “Semantic Web.” On Twine, what they do is to provide a semantic Web environment whereby a user is given a profile page, and the ability to social bookmark any link or URL address as she like, and Twine will do the rest with the new approach or concept of semantic analysis. Semantic analysis exists in helping you to interpret the information you put on your profile page, categorize, tag, summarize, abstract, and even extract similar link to the data information you like.

Perhaps this semantic technology is highly automated, and apparently not been easily understand by users who never came across this technology. However, the semantic technologies in existence is for the sake of the public. Perhaps you can consider it as a technology to help users create a data information library, discover all the bookmarks that you want to find out, but couldn’t achieve it by one’s own effort. With this technologies, it will grouping all the interest things, stuff in an organized way, and thus, we’ll realize the real relationships of these things with our lives. But expect there is a huge volume of data information out there on the Web, it’s always impossible for us to expect Twine will perform well barely in categorization, classification and tagging automatically on all the data users enter to the site, but more advance this technology evolve, the more it will understand human language, the perception on human towards language or computer code. In short, Twine was trying to make their system “smart” about the environment, but in practice, there’s still a lot of improvement that Twine will need to do, in viewed of many positive feedback, and some are negative out there.

To use Twine, upon you’ve been granted a private access, you’ll be given a profile page. Simply put, it’s like a social network, meet friends with similar interests, access to the data information collected from other Twine users, and join groups, etc. On the profile page, you’ve the options to talk about your latest status, what you’re doing right now, introduce yourself as well as list your own Web site on the page. You also provided with a notification page when there’s somebody would like to “connect” with you, and a Twine Digest for you to read as your everyday meal of information.

I like the fact Twine has provided a “Twine This” bookmarklet (drag it to the browser’s toolbar) that provide users to directly add a Web page they like onto their “My Items” of their profile pages. The another way is to email your favorite Web pages through with your own personal email address. All the Web pages you bookmarked are private, only if you purposely create your own public Twine, and add the Web pages you like to the public Twine, the bookmarks will be appeared as public in both “My Items” and public Twine. To illustrate this example, I’ve created a public Twine called “Startup to Watch.” To encourage users to share knowledge or information they came across on the Web, users are welcome to create as many Twines as they like, but manage those strategically. And be cautious you can’t change the URL address of your Twine as it’s impossible for a user to do it at this moment.

The core of semantic technologies is to find and expose content. To achieve this aim, Twine also allowed users to explore “Top 100 Twines”, “New Twines”, and “Top 100 Members.” From the Twines you discovered, you can find the articles, news you’re looking for a long period of time, but couldn’t find it other than Twine provided here. You also will meet some like-minded people in this platform. Meanwhile, there are several public twines that interested me, including the one created by Nova Spivack, Twine’s founder, Ruby on Rails, and Facebook research.

Twine is a project of Radar Networks, a startup based in San Francisco.

Diigo, a company that specialize in social bookmarking service is releasing a new and updated of its core product, i.e. Diigo version 3.0. Diigo v3.0 comes with a completely new User Interface and code base, as well as over 100 new features has aimed to give its users a different experience in using the social bookmarking and annotation service. Based on the features of Diigo v3.0, it is undoubtedly that it has been cited as the top 10 research tools by CNET.

For readers that aren’t heard of Diigo, it is a free social bookmarking service that helped a user to highlight text or comment on a Web page, particularly if she just want to highlight one sentence from a 5,000-word article she found on the Web. There are in fact many free social bookmarking services available on the Web, such as del.icio.us, QQ Shuqian (China), Mister Wong, Xerpi, CoReap, and etc.

Apparently, masses of users access to these social bookmarking services and use it in hopes of achieving their own ends, it is unlikely for an existing player to offer the features that will suit all the users’ needs. Thus, I’m not sure this make Diigo to offer a bunch of features in order to cover all the needs of the users. However, as stated on Diigo’s press release, some of the features found in Diigo v3.0 are really impressive. Their newly features include the improved usability as a research tool, improvements as a team research platform, social browsing, personalized social content, and social information networking.

To know more about Diigo v3.0, there is a video embedded in the below.

In order to better manage and share the bookmarks for the users, Xerpi has announced the launched of community views today. Community views feature is designed to enhance their user experience and it’s the first movement of Xerpi in fulfilling its promise in freeing the users on the social bookmarking activities. Despite the popularity of social bookmarking, the use of sharing the links with an user’s friends in an simple yet organized format is rare. In technology settings, Xerpi designed a user interface that allowed a user to drag and drop the link block into a new view in an easy manner. With now the availability of community views, Xerpi has made some of the page views available to the public, whether those who visit the views are registered users or not. Xerpi users can create as many community views as they want, with the customize layout and the page occupied by links. The view can be made as private, or to the public. Collaborative filtering can be achieved on Xerpi, which means users can add, edit or update the links found on the community views. There are some public views , i.e. community views on Xerpi, some great examples are Everything Flamenco, and All iPhone. Currently, there are top 10 public views listed on Xerpi. Though the idea community views is sounds simple, but all the relevant links found in one page can help anyone who use this page grow her knowledge in the area she interested. If community views properly manage by a group of users, it might facilitate a large-scale collaboration. Imagine you share your favorite links with your friends through a view, and your friends share their favorites with you, all the users can thus benefit from this feature, even in a small scale. If you want to know more about how this works, you can read Xerpi’s blog entry that entitled,”Put it on my tab.”

Currently, Xerpi offered downloadable plugin and Xerpi Mobile to help users to manage their links in a one-click process or through the mobile devices. Each new user will be offered a new “My Xerpi Page” that all the links is categorized under well-designed headings such as Business, Shopping, Sports, Money, Travel, News, and etc., as shown in the below. Xerpi also identified the potential benefits of social bookmarking and social network and hence, they released the link info button in which it allow users see who else on Xerpi has the same favorites and access the like-minded users’ Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn profiles, and then connecting these group of users across multiple social networking sites.

Xerpi is a New-York based social bookmarking startup and officially launched in last month, i.e. October 2007. It was originally called “Go Do” when it was first launched in the UK in 2004.

The other day I came across a new startup that launched about two weeks ago. It was called BAAGZ that founded by a French search engine Exalead and the site is built on Ajax, feeds, with some mature social search and semantic technologies which include search and information access, content tagging and evaluation.

BAAGZ is a new form of social network that allowed its users, they preferred the name “Baagerz”, to easily store their favorite things online in a file format, or a folder called “baagz.” Since it was powered by the social search technology, it’s not surprise that the semantic search will suggest their users on the things they like, and eventually connect the users with a common interest in an interest-oriented groups. With the shared folder, i.e. baagz, users can share with their group members their favorite Web pages, articles, links, blog entries, pictures, videos, etc. Perhaps the most important BAAGZ’s approach is the capability of indexing the baagz for social search and the ability to notify its users when something new appear on the network. In other words, users can find social recommendations they want through the tagged content stored in a baagz created by other users, or simply waiting for the notifications. A bit acted like the social bookmarking approach. Moreover, Baagz can be publicly viewed, shared only with an user’s friends, or in private.

Currently, BAAGZ is still in private beta and only supports Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7.