December 13, 2006

Google Reader could be a Digg killer!?!????

Since posting about My Shared Items, the following occurred to me.

If Google Reader aggregated and displayed how many people Shared each post and then calculated the most popular ones and displayed them in a separate label (like they have for Stared and Shared) they could have a feature that kills Digg!

No more waiting for Digg pages (and all the ads) to load slowly. No more stupid troll commenters. Actually, in fact, the comments will be on the actual pages being Shared, not a third party site like Digg.

It's a win win for the publishers and a very easy thing for Google to add. I bet if Jason Calacanis was still at AOL he would have put this in MY AOL overnight.

Posted in Digg , Google , Websites & Cool Links by usrbingeek at 2006-12-13 19:03 ET (GMT-5) | 6 Comments | Permalink

Comments

Agreed, there's no doubt but that Google will turn on these features soon enough. I was making a similar going to Paolo Valdemarin a while back -

paolo.evectors.it/2006/11/22.html

Posted by: James Corbett at December 26, 2006 05:53 PM

Before killing a single site (Digg), Google would have to dominate a whole space (news aggregators). As long as there is a significant number of people not using Google Reader as his/her news aggregator, sites like Digg will still be needed, IMHO.

Posted by: RBA at December 26, 2006 06:22 PM

RBA: Google would not need to dominate news aggregator business to do this. Just get enough people doing enough LinkBlogging. My readers are already converting to Google Reader at a very rapid rate. My LinkBlog done with Google Reader is a big part of the reason why.

Posted by: Robert Scoble at December 27, 2006 06:40 AM

Also think of the AdSense revenue it would bring in for Google! Google absolutely dominates the blog ad world, and they own a blogging service now (that's integrated with AdSense). In fact the starring and sharing options don't make much sense without a service like this...

Posted by: Michael.NET at December 27, 2006 09:53 AM

This has already been done by rojo.com. Their main page is built with posts voted up by users.

Posted by: Sérgio Carvalho at December 28, 2006 05:48 AM

I don't think it could, must admit I love the Google Reader but I didn't star anything until just now and I really don't know if I want to keep doing that.
I'd prefer the Google Reader to suggest me others feed I might be interested in, but feed-wise not post-wise. Small difference but big enough to have space for Digg and GR

Posted by: TomK32 at December 28, 2006 11:59 AM