Can Amplify.com Help You Find Great Content?

Most of us use the Internet every day. Whether for work, school or play, the Internet is woven into the very fabric of our lives. Although we spend so much of our time online, we rarely give much thought to what actually makes up the content of the Internet.

Let’s be clear, the Internet is really divided into three types of stuff: (1) terribly addictive, uncomfortably funny or tremendously valuable content, (2) average, run-of-the-mill, “I already knew that” -type content and finally (3) utter crap.

As a marketer, you’ve created content in all three buckets before (nobody bats 1.000…), and as a web surfer, you know that the Internet is almost 99.999% composed of bucket #3.

No, seriously, the Internet is almost completely filled with useless, boring content that probably only appealed to the one person that made it.

Not to be a downer, but I only harp on this fact to say that I had a dream. I had a dream that I lived in a world where the Internet was only filled with interesting, valuable and funny content.

Things that would make me look 100 times smarter than I am, and content that would make my potential customers flock to my accounts and talk to me for days about whatever I had shared.

Then one day, I was asked to review Amplify.com, and I thought my dreams had come true…

Ampli-Who Dot What?

On the surface, Amplify.com just seems like another site that wants you to share what you like (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) and connects you with friends who do the same. The front page graphic gives off a music site feel. I even thought it was a bit rock-star (like myself)… until I saw the water cooler in the middle of the crowd.

Amplify.com is as simple as the graphic on the front page suggests. They want you to share interesting things from the Internet with your peers, but only “water cooler-worthy” stuff. More on that in a second…

What Can It Do?

Like Twitter, But Longer

Amplify.com lets you microblog just like Twitter, but your limit is 500 characters. The days of showing restraint online are numbered.

Blog Via Email

You can post content (blogs, snippets, photos, etc.) to your Amplify stream via email. Amplify.com gives you a personal email address to send content to, which will automatically add that content to your stream. Unlike other sites with this feature, Amplify.com doesn’t make you memorize a 6,000-character email address. You have a short convenient address customized to your username. I consider that a victory for the little guy.

Find Content Based On Subject

Want to find all of the best content for social media? Easy. Just click “social media” and browse the best stuff. There are several categories to choose from and the content is sorted chronologically.

What’s The Main Event?

Ok, I’ll be honest; none of these features by themselves are impressive. You can do all of these things on Facebook without ditching your friends and setting up another profile (which we all LOVE to do… right?). Fortunately, Amplify.com redeems itself from a life of redundancy by adding one simple feature that can save the entire Internet. Interested? Let me explain.

Remember when I said that the Internet is 99% utter crap? That’s true, but if we’re really being honest, even the really good articles that we read are at least 30% filler (not this one, though J). It reminds me of a lesson I learned when I took a speed-reading class:

“There are plenty of good books to read, but more importantly, there are plenty of good chapters to read.”

Think about that. What if you could share a fantastic article without having to share the part that isn’t amazing? Amplify.com has the answer. They allow you to clip any section of any site and share only that section on Amplify.com, or one of the several social networks that you can post to automatically.

Find a great couple of paragraphs in a New York Times article? Great, only share that section. Find a blog with three great tips? Take the tips, leave the rest.

Amplify.com has given us a chance to trim the fat off of the Internet. Yes, my heart just fluttered.

Why I’m Not Doing A Cartwheel Right Now

Unfortunately, it’s not all butterflies and candy corn with Amplify.com. While bringing us one of the greatest tools online, they’ve also allowed some of the tools that kinda make the Internet suck in the first place.

The site needs a filtering option. I click on a popular topic and about half of the options are in a language that I can’t understand, and that’s bad news. Chronological order is OK, but if the section is called “popular topics,” I expect the links to be… you know… popular. That leads me to my real point.

Amplify.com is a great site, but it would be amazing with a ranking system. The problem with the Internet is that anyone can post anything on it and you have to sift through the junk to get to the goods. Amplify.com’s clip functionality is useless if I still have to sort through everyone’s junk to get to the best clips.

Allowing the site’s users not only to comment (they allow this already) but also to rank content would really “Amplify” the best clips and move the site to the “water cooler-talk” level that the front page suggests.

Final Thoughts

As with most dreams, my love affair with Amplify.com was slightly soured by having to sift through so many posts. As with any new site, there will be kinks along the way. And while there is a “Recommend” feature, it works more like a retweet than a content judgment system, which is what it would take for me to really like it.

Amplify.com has a bright future ahead of it, and the issues I see now seem more of the “growing pain” variety than the “death knell” variety. As of today, Amplify.com scores a 7 out of 10.

Have you used Amplify.com yet? What did you think about it? Do you know of another site with the “clip” functionality? Have a site that you’d like to see reviewed? Let us know in the box below!

A Comprehensive Guide to the New Digg

When social networks release a new version of their platform, the changes range from design to functionality. Digg has done a drastic overhaul to both.

Here is a look inside the new Digg – from the first login to submitting stories, advanced features, best practices and some things to consider.

Your First Login

When you first login to the new Digg site, you will see the first evidence that they are trying to get more people to be social with the following two-step process.

Find Profiles to Follow

In Step 1 after you first sign in, you will be given a list of popular profiles on Digg to follow. You can look at all topics or narrow it down to your specific area of interest using the categories in the left sidebar.

You are able to revisit the popular Digg users in each topic at any time, so you can skip this step for now if you choose.

Find Friends to Follow

In Step 2, you will be asked to connect your Digg account with your Facebook, Twitter and Google accounts to find your friends to follow from those networks who are on Digg.

You are able to connect to your other accounts any time, so you can skip this step for now if you want to jump right into the new layout.

Your New Home Page

In the previous version of Digg, once you login, you are taken to the latest top news stories. Now, when you login, you will greeted with a Welcome to My News. This area shows the stories recently dugg by the people that you follow on Digg.

Alternatively, this is where the Find Profiles and Find Friends steps come in handy. If you are not following anyone, you will not have anything in your news when you first login to the new system.

If you prefer to just see what is popular on the main site versus just among your friends, you can simply switch to the Top News tab.

Your Profile, Following, and Settings

At the top of the new Digg layout, you can access pertinent information about your Digg account, as well as your settings.

Followers vs. Following

To see who is following you versus those you are following, click on the appropriate links underneath the numbers.

The unfortunate change in the new Digg system is that you can only see whom you are following (or not) in your followers. There is not a mutual following icon like in the old Digg system, however, so you cannot see if people you are following are following you back.

Profiles

The new Digg profile has changed some, mostly in aesthetics.

You can update your profile under the Settings menu > Profile.

You can also add external links to your websites and social media accounts under Settings > Links.

Unfortunately, you can no longer enter an instant messenger handle like you could in the old version of Digg. If you want to build Digg connections via IM, you will need to include that information in your bio instead.

Import Feeds

One of the more convenient (and controversial) new features in the new Digg settings is importing a blog feed to your profile.

When you enter a feed URL, you can choose the category to which new posts should be submitted. After installing a verification code on your website to confirm you are the site owner, your latest posts will be automatically submitted to Digg.

It is suggested that you create a specific category; that way, only new posts in that category are auto-submitted. This would be especially useful if your blog covers topics that could fit in different Digg topics, as stories in the right category are likely to get more diggs than ones that are miscategorized.

Personally, I don’t think I’m going to use this option for two reasons. First, if you auto-submit, Digg will choose your post’s thumbnail for you. If you have multiple pictures within a post, it may not select the one you would prefer (not to mention it might pull Gravatar images, social bookmarking icons, etc.). Second, you won’t have the option to modify the title and description to make it more appealing to other diggers.

More Settings

Additional settings that you can configure include:

• Notifications: choose to receive email notifications when you get new followers and Digg announcements.
• Viewing Digg: change specific settings for how you view Digg.
• Connections: see what social networks your Digg account is connected to – if you skipped Step 2 earlier, this is where you go back to it.

Submitting a Story

The new Digg system has made story submission a lot simpler. From the My News or Top News tab, simply enter your URL in the Submit a Link box and click Digg It to get started.

If your URL is already in the system, it will show it to you immediately.

If not, you will get a simple submission form that allows you to select the thumbnail for the story, edit the title or description and choose a topic to place the story in and Digg It!

From here, you can Tweet your story, post it on Facebook, send it by email or add a comment. I would suggest adding a comment, because it makes the story stand out better when it comes up on your followers’ My News tab. Also, the link it shares socially is direct – not to the story’s page on Digg, but to the URL of the story itself.

Additional Features and Changes

The following are other significant changes and concerns about the new Digg platform.

Finding Profiles and Friends

If you skipped the initial Steps 1 and 2 on your first login, or you want to check your social networks to see if you have new friends on Digg, you can go under your My News tab and Find Profiles.

By clicking on the sites under My Networks, you can see and follow your friends on Twitter, Google, and Facebook.

Although you can’t message people when you follow them, if they have email notifications turned on, they will be alerted when they follow you. This is why it is important to have a good profile as well as a strong Digg history, as the email links directly to your profile page. This could make the difference between gaining a new follower or not.

The Digg Monster

Reaction to the new version of Digg has not been pretty, to say the least. While those who are more concerned with the ability to see what their friends are doing on Digg are excited to have a little more community, those who enjoyed getting a variety of great stories from the homepage (including their own) are less than impressed with the new system. Posts that make the homepage seem to be only from major publishers like Mashable, Entrepreneur.com, Gizmodo, Techcrunch, and so on.

One of the more amusing reactions was angry Diggers flooding the homepage with Reddit stories. If you look at the most popular stories in the last 30 days, you will see that 22 out of the top 30 stories are all from Reddit.

The other eight are from a random sponsored listing (which always comes up in the third spot no matter where you are in the site and changes when you refresh), Read Write Web, Huffington Post, I Can Has Internets, the Oatmeal, I’ma Weird, and imgur.

Upcoming Stories

Another major complaint with the new system was the missing upcoming news area where you could see what stories were not quite homepage ready, but on their way. Fortunately, this was fixed and now you can see the Upcoming stories tab in the main navigation.

Power Diggers

So with the My News tab and the new socialization, what does this mean to power diggers? Will the people with the ability (in other words, network) to get stories to the front page, leading to massive swarms of traffic, lose their power? Some say yes.

How did posts get to the homepage of Digg in the previous version? The simplest explanation I have seen is from PostRank Analytics. It is based on the speed at which the story gets dugg – if a submission goes live and then gets hundreds of Diggs within an hour, that is usually going to make it move to the homepage. There are also more lengthy details on getting a story to the front page.

The big questions before this new version was released were 1) whether this will change in the new system and 2) if people logging in are always directed to My News first, will the homepage popularity matter as much? The answers look like they will come from further changes to the new system, as documented on the Digg Update page.

Story Burials

One other function missing in the new Digg is the option to bury a story. Your only options in the new Digg are to report stories as offensive (assuming they are) or use the “x” icon to remove them from your news view. The upside of this is that there will be no more fear of the bury brigade. The downside is you cannot simply get rid of spam (which may get a little crazy with the new Import Feeds features), but you can remove it from your personal viewing.

Your Thoughts on the New Digg

Have you tried out the new Digg? Do you like the new changes that Digg has brought about to improve speed, personalization and diversity of content? Or do you think these changes will hurt the popularity of this news-sharing network? Share your comments in the box below.