OurSignal News Mashup Launches

Launching this morning is OurSignal. OurSignal is a mashup of Digg, Reddit, Y Combinator Hacker News and delicious stories. We’ve seen these type of mashups before. If the background color of the story is darker, the story is on the rise. If the background color is lighter, the story is on the decline. The larger the box, the more votes the story has relative to the other stories on the page.

The sources on OurSignal are only refreshed every 15 minutes which makes this a bit less than real-time. If they want to be taken seriously, 15 minutes isn’t going to cut it.

The story links go back to the source which is great but I think there should also be a link to the social site. This way if someone wants to digg the story or save it on delicious, they have that option as well. But that option should never be more prominent than the direct source link.

OurSignal was created by Guy King who also runs CushyCMS and RetailMeNot.com. There’s a link to RetailMeNot in the header so perhaps this will be used as a marketing vehicle for RetailMeNot. I guess they could also stick in sponsored boxes within the page.