Socialmedian Archive

Earlier this week we wrote about Socialmedian leaving beta. Socialmedian is a popular social sharing tool with the early adopter crowd. I became concerned when I saw the huge amounts of source content that is included in postings on Socialmedian. There are plenty of ways that Socialmedian could operate without the extended scraped excerpt.

This evening I was called to a story by Svetlana at Profy. Svetlana has an indepth review of a new service called Fairplay by Attributor. The Fairplay service aims to help you locate scraped (i.e. splogged) content across the Web so you can take the necessary actions against the involved parties. During her testing, Fairplay staffers evaluated her content feed to find out where the scraped/splogged content is located across the Web. Svetlana notes (my emphasis):

It was very interesting for me to watch what the product was capable of and see who was engaged the most in stealing my content (Social Median seemed to be the site viewed as the worst splogger by Attributor). The major revelation to me was that the post that was republished the most (without permission or a link back more than a hundred of times compared to the usual a few times per post) was the one that was very popular on Google News – so it looks like sploggers use Google News for their content.

My guess is that a lot of Profy’s content gets shared on Socialmedian and that’s why they show up as the "worst splogger".  

Note that I believe that Socialmedian isn’t maliciously scraping the content whereas there are real sploggers out there who make a living at scraping a full feed into their own site. I’ve got about 5 of them on CN, I see what looks like 80-100 scraped splogs for larger sites like Mashable.

Anthony Ha at Venturebeat reported on Friday that Socialmedian has left the beta stage (whatever that means). Ha says it’s an important milestone for the company. Ha went on to note, "I’m not seeing anything that will tempt me away from social messaging/sharing sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, or the sharing option within (the newly redesigned) Google Reader."

What I see with Socialmedian is that founder Jason Goldberg has committed grand theft content. Basically what Socialmedian does is take content from around the Web, put it onto Socialmedian and let you comment about it. If your post is very long (and I mean VERY long), Socialmedian offers a read more link but the majority of content I see on the service is full scraping. What this means is that for most content on Socialmedian, a reader will never find their way to the source.

While I don’t see any ads on the site yet, I am certain that Socialmedian’s business model will be based around generating revenue from everyone’s hard work creating the content.

But wait, it gets even better! If you share an item from Socialmedian, by default it sends the Socialmedian link, not the original source link. Here’s a Twitter share example. For some reason I started receiving emails from Socialmedian daily about 10 days ago. All links in the email point to Socialmedian.

I see that now Engadget sends along a terms of use link in every feed item in their RSS feed. It will be interesting to see how long services like Socialmedian remain popular with content creators.

Socialmedian has raised about half-a-million dollars in funding and their team is mainly in India. If Socialmedian wants to aggregate comments back to their site from their users commenting on the source, fine. I’ve read their extensive about us and history pages, but I really don’t see the appeal of this service.

Microsoft’s Dare speaks about commenting in his latest post regarding Windows Live. Dare notes, "The more sites Robert (Scoble) imports his blog feed into, the more it fractures and steals away the conversation from his blog post. This is in addition to the fact that there is some confusion as to where people should leave comments on his blog post."

It’s almost like the idea is to create the laziest possible application – the lazier the better? Each app that comes out moves the lazy needle a bit further along. I wonder what’s next in lazy apps?

Check out Adrian’s look at people and content aggregators.