Sumolabs

TechCrunch has an article called "Is SpotPlex a Better Digg?" that ran today. While this seems a lot link link bait, there may be relevance to this statement. Digg, for all intents are purposes is a popularity content. SpotPlex, on the other hand, more accurately represents how much traffic an article is getting: Regardless of if the subject matter is popular. Both have pros and cons. Let's examine that.

Unlike Digg, news stories are not submitted by users. With SpotPlex, TechCrunch is reporting that sites who want to participate will need to include a small snippet of javascript on their site. This small snippet of code, tracks what posts are being read and the frequency in which these posts occur. Very popular stories will make the jump and appear on the main homepage.

So, the ending result is a front page that looks very similar to that of Digg's.

Digg Criticism

Digg has received a lot of criticism in the past, due to widespread speculation that it is being gamed by a relatively small number of users. Digg user's can join together, and rapidly vote up an article to the front page. This voting fraud is a big issue for Digg.

Secondly, since only users contribute new stories, it is really a 'link popularity' engine and nothing more. I find it hard to differentiate Digg and delicious.

SpotPlex Criticism

SpotPlex will face a number of problems with their approach. The biggest of which would appear to be link bait. For instance, a user can create a completely non-relevant but attractive or shocking title to their post and they are likely to receive a lot of traffic despite the article being absolute crap. At least with Digg, a user has the ability to view the web page, notice that the page is crap, and "Sink" it. SpotPlex will have to figure out a way to get around this link bait issue.

A second problem is that of click fraud. While voting fraud is no longer an issue, a moderately intelligent person could easily create a bot to spoof multiple IP addresses and browsers to drive up their rating. Even more possible, is the opportunity it creates for someone to create a malicious program that infects computers for the sole purposes of making their slave PCs visit a particular website to drive up the vote.

A third problem that makes a lot of sense, was suggested by TechCrunch:

Another problem with Spotplex is the fact that large blogs and publications will dominate it to start just because they have large readership already. To avoid this “the rich become richer” problem, I’ve suggested to Spotplex that the rankings be based on a publication competing with itself - so only very popular stories on TechCrunch (compared to average TechCrunch traffic) would get to the Spotplex home page.

Conclusion

We've seen Digg-killers and Digg-Clones before, but SpotPlex is doing something uniquely different. Due to the organic nature of how it monitors popularity, SpotPlex will stay updated, busy, relevant and fresh even if no one visits their homepage. That is good. (And cool). They do however, have a few nice
to get around in the future.

UPDATE: Currently SpotPlex seems to have underestimated their popularity and their servers are down. I've signed up for an account, and I will review it when the service becomes available.