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Topix, a social news site will be announcing six new content partnerships, which include partnering with Eventful, Zap2It, InfoUSA, LiveDeal, Apartments.com and Informa Research Services. The partnerships will give Topix users in each of US’s 32,500 zip codes access to localized event and entertainment information, business directory data, pet classifieds, mortgage resources and apartment listings.

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ABC News is celebrating their 10 year anniversary by becoming a lot more social. According to Michael Clemente, Senior Executive Producer at ABC News:

The new site is designed to harness the power of community. And by community we mean “citizen reporters,” our viewers and readers who help us report the news by contributing, commenting and telling us what they know. The redesigned ABCNEWS.com makes it much easier for our Internet users to add to the facts, ask questions of newsmakers and make their voices heard.

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StumbleUpon has launched a new feature called StumbleThru, that lets you stumble through your favorite sites. So if you are a Flickr freak, you could now use StumbleUpon to stumble flickr photos, give recommendations on the photos and with time the system will start serving you with hyper relevant content. The sites supported by this feature include-Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Google’s Blogger, Wordpress.com, TheOnion.com, pbs.com, physorg.com, cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, .gov websites, .edu websites.

The initial set of sites for which the feature has been enabled must be the favorite destinations among StumbleUpon users, however their is a lot of useful, interesting and exciting content scattered around the web that is yet to be stumbled. What I would like to have is a way for my visitors to stumble through posts on Startup Meme. The ratings of the users from my blog could then be fed into StumbleUpon’s recommendation engine and could be used to determine which posts are really good, and could be served to general StumbleUpon audience who has the relevant preferences. This will in no time provide StumbleUpon with immense and valuable data about the great content scattered across the web, hidden even from the spying eyes of some of the best Search Engines.

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Digg has released its API to allow developers to access Digg data dating back to 2004. A Flash application toolkit is also been released alongwith the API. Digg is also kick starting a contest for the most creative and innovative visualizations and applications developed using the API and Flash toolkit. The ten finalists will get a Grand Prize featuring a Falcon Northwest gaming PC, the full catalog of EA PC games, and the Adobe CS3 Master Collection. This is really a nice way to get developers excited in order to build a vibrant ecosystem around your data.

Digg has recently hit the milestone of 1 million registered users. MySpace has also launched a Digg like news site yesterday to gather some of the magic of Digg, its yet to be seen how the competition fares. However the release of API will definitely solidify Digg’s position as a prime social news site, and will make reaching Digg’s front page even more valuable.

MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corp, has launched MySpace News, a Digg like site that will allow the 160 million users to rank the news stories on order of importance, relevance and freshness.

The service is built on Newroo Technology, a startup that News Corp acquired last year, even before the beta release. MySpace News is fetching news items from a number of trusted sources via RSS feeds and have organized them into 25 main categories and 300 sub categories including fashion, entertainment, sports, technology and others. Users can vote on each item from 1-5 and at the moment there is no option to negatively vote an item. Just like Digg, the positioning of the news item is determined by user voting, the more votes it gets the higher it will appear on its respective category. At the moment users can not submit news but I think its just a matter of time before that is allowed as well.

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Techcrunch and GigaOm are reporting that eBay is about to close the acquisition of StumbleUpon, a very addictive social service that lets users discover websites based upon recommendations by people having similar interests. StumbleUpon has been in acquisition discussions since last November with Google, AOL and eBay and the price tag is rumored to be between $40 - $45 million range.

StumbleUpon lets users discover new sites and content around the world via a browser toolbar. All you have to do is to click on Stumble! and it will take you to a random page according to the preferences specified in your profile. After viewing the site you could rate it by by giving it a thumbs up or down. The more you will use stumble upon the better it will get to know about your likings. With this information about you StumbleUpon will begin to serve you highly relevant content that is rated positively by people with similar preferences. People who have once used this service have not seen back, even more so because of the surprise factor in what they might see next, and also because of delivering highly relevant and interesting content.

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Yoono, a startup based in France that allows users to share websites and online articles with others much like StumbleUpon, has launched a new service called “Buzz It”. The new service is similar to what Grouptivity, Clipmarks and Share2Me already offer.

Buzz It is a browser applet that lets users capture text, links, images and video while they browse the web. Users can then use these clippings to post to blogs, social networks or just share it on their Yoono Buzzlog, which can then be made public or private. Yoono already offered browser suggestions as you visit various websites just like StumbleUpon, and is claiming to have more than 600,000 registered users. Yoono is also beefing up its social features and might transform into a full fledge social network, where users could come and share their findings-likings and dis-likings. According to Yoono CEO Pascall Josselin:

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StumbleUpon, a premier social news site has launched a redesigned homepage to look more like a socially driven news and content site. Together with the redesign has come increased usability and host of new features like:

• Del.icio.us like section that shows the recently popular sites.
• “Recent Stumblers” section that shows the people who stumbled recently.
• Most Popular Topics section
• Classic Testimonial section.

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CenterNetworks has an excellent writeup on news.ycombinator.com. In it they have tried to compare news.ycombinator with Digg, Reddit and Netscape. News.YCombinator is a social news aggregator about startup related articles and posts. The difference from digg is that it is startup focused period, so nothing fancy is done. Just startup news and users could only vote the story favorably. My experience with using it suggests that for every article that does not hit the front page of Digg, Reddit or Netscape, news.ycombinator sends you more traffic than all these three sites combined. The reason in case of my blog is obvious, since most of the audience at news.ycombinator is startup focused which is exactly the audience this blog caters to. Clearly news.ycombinator has drafted a great niche for itself and is generating some good traffic alongwith some great PR for the seed fund.

Remember what Paul use to say. “Create something what the users want and a way to answer this is to ask what you want” (Ok these might not be the exact words, but this is how I have memorized it.). news.ycombinator was something that Paul wanted for himself and in trying to achieve that he has created something that a large number of users want and will surely use.

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Topix.net which changed the the face of online journalism is doing it yet again with the relaunch of their service under the newly acquired domain name of Topix.com. This time they are targeting social journalism through the release of a new product that will allow readers to write, edit and share local news articles directly on Topix.com.

The news was broken by USA Today whose parent company Gannett McClatchy partly owns Topix together with Tribune. Topix covers local news already, which at the moment is auto generated. But this will going to change once and for all and from tonight Topix will become a socially edited online news paper. Topix allows users to comment on stories and its from these comments that the initial editors will be selected. It wont be long, when we will begin to see other goodies like localized news RSS, tagging, News from friends and so on.

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In the second quarter of 2007 MySpace will launch MySpace News a social news aggregator much like Digg. According to Terry Heaton, it would include:

- MySpace News takes News to a whole new level by dynamically aggregating real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web
- Creates focused, topical news pages that users can interact and engage with throughout their day
- MySpace is making the news social, allowing users to:
Rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system
Submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog
- MySpace users previously had to leave the site to find comprehensive news, gossip, sporting news, etc. With MySpace News, we bring the news to them!

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Digg, the social news mogul of our times today announced that they have hit the 1 million registered user mark in less than 2 years. The one thing we don’t know yet is whether this include all those fake accounts, that have been set up on digg, as well or not.

At digg you could submit you favorite story from across the web. Users could then digg, bury, comment and blog about it. Digg eclipsed Slashdot, a long time back, as the leading hub for techies, and continues to build on that momentum. Digg recently added the ability to share and rank videos as well alongwith the introduction of several other news categories. Readers could also see upcoming stories and visualize them Digg in real time by utilizing tools provided by Digg Labs. A great feature is the ability to read an excerpt from the story on the popular stories page, an idea incorporated from Google.

Due to Digg´s ability to send huge amounts of traffic to content providers, it has been an active battle ground for people trying to game it to promote their stories or to bury the ones from competitors.

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