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SocialMedian is confusing to start. At first it seems like they just crammed a bunch of functionality that many other services have and mashed them together into a big confusing pile. After playing with it for awhile I have learned that is not the case.

The “Getting Started” email I got when signing up for the service does a great job explaining what it is you are getting into…

At the highest level, what we are trying to do here is to present people with the most relevant personalized news from any source. There’s a ton of content out there (and more being created every day) and as the noise level increases, people need help discovering just the most important stuff to them.

Our hunch is that a way to solve this problem is to utilize collaborative filtering to help people with similar interests identify/discover what to read/view. The notion is that on any topic, there are a set of people who can help other people discover what matters, from any number of sources.

social|median is made up of many News Networks, each based around a topic (like “android”), set of related topics (like “wireless software and devices”), or a particular grouping of people (like “marketing directors in wireless companies”). Join the networks that reflect your interests to discover and share news and information with other people like you

Louis Gray sums up the service pretty well…

SocialMedian is best described as an amalgamation of pieces from FriendFeed, Digg and Del.icio.us. Like in each service, you can bookmark external items, and share them with friends. Like with Digg, each item gets a total count for how many times it is “Clipped”. You can see my own page to get an idea of what I’ve clipped over the last 100 days, who is following my updates, and who I’m following (like FriendFeed does)

A long time ago I praised the service SearchFox, which eventually shut down, sold its technology to Yahoo! and was never to be seen again. What I liked about the service was the noise filter it provided with its RSS Reader. I am hoping Social Median does the same thing adding both a human filter based on my network and a programmatic filter based on my habits. I am looking to Social Median to take the place of my RSS reader…

Cool Things…
- Auto-Imported people I’m already following on Twitter
- Found all my Social Network accounts and blogs (presumably through the Google Social Media Graph API)
- Defaulted my picture to Bill Clinton
- Specialized Topical “Networks”
- Allows you to set your own relevance rankings
- Human Filter allows your “Newsmakers” to bubble up relevant content to you

Follow me on Social Median here.
Join the Iowa Network too!

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