Evan Prodromou discusses what’s wrong with current social news sites such as Digg, the limitations of a number of alternatives that are considered more ‘open’, and what is truly needed to have an open distributed service that can work across different sites.

Read the whole article here.

Evan has a similar, though more technical article, about what it would take to open up social networking sites like Facebook.

Excerpt:

“Social news Web sites have become a staple of many people’s Web experience. Examples include Reddit, Digg, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz and Propeller. In my opinion, a flagship free network service for social news could be an important part of an open software services ecology.

The Wikipedia article on social news redirects to social bookmarking, which I think is incorrect. Here’s my description: on a typical social news site, users submit URLs for Web sites, images, videos, or news articles. Other users comment on and rate the URLs — usually a binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote. Submitted URLs with the highest ranking are shown on the social news site’s front page, and users may also have “personalized” front pages that include only URLs recommended for them. Typically (not always) there’s a social network involved, such that a friend’s submissions or votes matter more than a stranger’s in recommending links for the user.

Digg, in particular, has become an important arbiter of popularity on the Web in 2008. Getting a new link “dugg” and ranked highly, or even put on the front page, can be a make-or-break driver of traffic for bloggers and other site owners. The once-famed Slashdot effect is now dwarfed by Digg’s ability to send traffic to a new site.

There are, of course, some serious downsides. The algorithms for ranking submitted links on most social news sites are proprietary. Data on URLs’ popularity, voting records, the social network itself and the profiles of users on the service is typically put under a strict no-reuse policy (Digg’s public domain dedication being a notable and refreshing exception) and is usually hard to retrieve in bulk. Finally, no current social news site supports a distributed model, e.g. cross-site voting or “friending” protocols.”

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What could a social news site (or sites) that works well in an Open Software Services ecology look like? First, it’s probably clear that a single leader is necessary, to get the kind of traffic numbers that will drive people to submit and rank stories. Second, it will have to leverage its Open Source software with a networked voting system, such that adding more services to the site will stimulate a network effect. Letting groups and users create their own sites that use the same software, but feed data and users into the rest of the network, would really grow the project and make it more valuable.

I encourage anyone interested in helping to move forward Free Network Services to look into this problem. Just installing Pligg or Reddit and adding liberal data-sharing provisions is going to be a big win. (If it was me, I’d scrape that nice public-domain data from Digg, too. Why not?) The distributed social news problem is a hard one, but ultimately (I think) necessary to the project.”