User-moderated news aggregators such as Digg and reddit have made a huge impact on the way people find and consume news, blogs, video, and other online content. A recently launched Y Combinator startup called Slinkset offers anyone an opportunity to create a niche aggregator for public or private use. Examples include an Apple-focused aggregator and typehype, which highlights resources related to fonts and typesetting. The Industry Standard recently spoke with founders John Baunach and Brett Gibson about Slinkset's current feature set, and where they hope to take the service in the future.
The Industry Standard: When did you start developing the service?
Baunach/Gibson: January 2008.
TIS: Why aren't Digg, reddit, and existing niche services like Sphinn and FSDaily enough?
Digg and reddit have proven how useful this medium is, but they're clearly not for everyone. Sphinn and FSDaily attest to that fact, but required more technical know-how to get up and running than most people have. We want to address the rest of the ideas, individuals, groups and organizations around which social news communities could naturally coalesce.
We aim to do this by making it really easy to get sites up and running and by giving our site admins as much ownership as possible while still hosting the sites ourselves. In our efforts to foster independent communities we think it's an advantage that we don't have a "main" slinkset social news site that our smaller ones feed into. We've been able to design customization features from the ground up without having to worry about how they will effect a larger offering of our own.
TIS: When did it launch?
We had a soft launch for feedback in March. We went back to work after we were funded by Y Combinator and had a larger public launch on July 14th.
TIS: If I create a niche aggregator how is content brought in? What restrictions can a Slinkset site admin place on visitors and registered users?
Content can be posted via user submission or auto posted via RSS. Site owners can choose to make their sites public, private or editorial. If the site is private only users the owners have invited can see the content or submit. If the site is editorial anyone can see the content, comment and vote, but only the site admins and those they designate as editors can submit links. If a site is public anyone can see the content, vote, comment or submit. In any case site owners can choose to ban any user or kill any link they don't like.
TIS: Can the algorithm be tweaked in terms of the stories that rise to the top -- for instance, by extending the time period that determines front page placement, or giving more point power to highly ranked users?
Our software currently allows for this, but we have yet to expose it through the UI. It is something we hope to get to soon, but for the time being users have to contact us to change how their site's ranking works.
TIS: What's the business model?
We believe there is room to charge for premium features much the way that Ning currently does with their social networks. We are also looking into business applications for our software, so far mainly as an internal communication tool or for customer outreach (e.g. a site for ranking feature requests).
TIS: Plans for the future?
Right now we're mainly focused on continuing to build the features our current users want. See http://features.slinkset.com/.
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