SheGeeks

Community recommendations are becoming all the rage these days. While, Twitter and FriendFeed are popular ways to get recommendations within your personal networks and within a community, they don’t specifically cater to finding the most popular content within. Here are four great sites that give great recommendations of popular content within your own personal community and more!

BlogRize

BlogRize organizes communities around sites instead of the usual organization method based on friends. Unfortunately, because BlogRize is in "beta", a site must reach a certain amount of members before it can become an open community. There are currently 4 site communities that are open: Louis Gray, Read/Write Web, Techcrunch, and Lifehacker. However, you can add your list of sites that you’d like to see a community built around and pray that others like it just as much as you do.

Within each community’s page, you’ll see popular shared items by other fans of the site and what the ratings for each article are. BlogRize sports a rather unique ratings system that users will benefit from. You’re not rating on a scale of 1-5. Instead, you rate whether an article is interesting, funny, insightful, lame, disagree, or facts wrong. You may find this more helpful then the lame 1-5 stars.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these BlogRize Reviews: BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers, BlogRize: Social News Gets Personal

LinkRiver

Last month, I called LinkRiver my personal Techmeme (Corvida on LinkRiver). I still stand by that statement.

LinkRiver goes the by the standards by allowing you to see what’s popular amongst those that you are following based on how many people have shared an item through their Google Reader linkblog and also the LinkRiver bookmarklet. However, it does an even better job of showing what’s popular amongst the entire LinkRiver community! On the LinkRiver Popular page, you’ll find more than enough popular content to get you through the week.

For more in-depth coverage, check out my LinkRiver review "LinkRiver Is My Personal Techmeme".

Social Median

A new comer to content recommendation, Social Median gives you the hottest content from all across the tech community. Recommendations are based on the number of "clip its" an item has received. You can "clip" an item using Social Median’s "Clip it" bookmarklet.

There are various popular networks you can join to get better news recommendations sent to you. Also, if you don’t have time to check into the service, you can have Social Median email you the most popular content of the day or at a particular time.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these articles on Social Median: Former Jobster CEO’s Social|Median Incubating in Alpha, Social|median: Personalized News Filter - 1000 Invites

Blern

Blern is another new comer to the content recommendation niche. The difference between Blern and the others services is that Blern attempts to learn your reading habits in order to better serve you, instead of basing recommendations entirely off of the community like the others.

You can help Blern learn your reading habits by importing your feeds from services such as StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc, and by visiting your recommendations page often to give feedback on recommended content.

When you run out of content, Blern also features buzzword and feeds pages so that you can get the latest items from your feeds and also find popular content from buzzwords of your choice.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these articles on Blern: Blern Makes A Mistake From The Early Nineties, Blern.com - Blogs and Articles Recommended to You

The Power Of "You" And "Community"

In this day and age, finding content really is a simple as putting in a keyword on Google. With plenty of filters going around, nothing seems to be the filtering effects of yourself and a great community. All of these services can help to filter and provide you with better content, better sites, and even better people.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Len Gutman recently write about feeling Social Media overload. While I don’t share his feelings about being overloaded, his post caused me to wonder if maybe we’re peer pressuring our readers into joining these services.
    

Social Media Is Not For Everyone

I feel as if most of us aren’t understanding this. Social Media is not for everyone for one reason alone:

Not everyone wants to socialize online 24/7.

There’s literally a handful of internet users that do like to socialize online . So, when we promote these services that cater to the social niche of the web, we’re essentially badgering others to hop on the bandwagon with no regards to users who really don’t need the added distractions.
   

What Are Some Solutions?

I don’t want to stop talking about how great these services are and my experiences with them. However, I don’t want to unintentionally pressure my readers into jumping on these services also. Moderation would seem to be the best solution for bloggers.

On the same note, it’s up to the readers to make the final decision and to stop letting bloggers make it for them. It’s perfectly fine for you to read my opinions and thoughts, but don’t let ME make the decision for you. I can’t manage your social media tools for you. Don’t drown yourself in distractions and noise just because you want to participate in the latest craze.
   

Just Ignore Social Media

I understand that the repeated mentions of certain services tends to have an effect on most of us. That doesn’t mean you should give in. It’s OK to ignore social media and what’s being said about it. Everyone has their uses for it, and for some, it may serve absolutely no purpose. That’s perfectly fine. If it’s becoming too much for you, take a break or switch your reading habits. That’s why niche blogs exist. Find other blogs that suit what you’re looking to find out more about.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as peer pressure because you make your own decisions. You decide what’s worth your time and attention. Keyword: YOU.

Popularity: 7% [?]

You don’t need statistics to tell you that "our world" of social media tools like Twitter, Friendfeed, and RSS has not reached mainstream.
     

Survey Your Surroundings

Just survey your friends or better yet, take a look at who you socialize with the most online. I’m willing to bet my next blog post that at least 60% of the users of the aforementioned services socialize with people that are not necessarily real life friends the most when online. I can guarantee that over 50% don’t have family members or real life friends that use these services, and for those that do, it’s because you probably badgered them into it.

Will Friendfeed, Twitter, and RSS Ever Reach Mainstream?

Who knows? I don’t see Friendfeed doing it, but I’ve noticed SocialThing!, a similar service, breaking grounds with the mainstream masses.

Twitter and RSS will reach mainstream, but I don’t see these services being used in the manner that early adopters are using them. Here’s a good example:

I was attempting to explain RSS to a friend. I told her that it’s an easier way to get updates about a site instead of having to visit the site all the time. After I finished explaining how to get the updates, her reply was: "So can I get RSS for Victoria’s Secret?"

Her reply made me laugh. :)
   

Do You Notice The Irony?

My friend wasn’t thinking in terms of blogs or updates about news, because that’s not what she goes online for. Most mainstream internet users don’t go online for these things either. They have the TV, Facebook, and text messaging for that. That’s not to say that our more advanced platforms won’t eventually make it. However, if they do, it will be for an entirely different reason from what made early adopters join these services.
     

Statistics Count For Something

Well, let’s briefly turn to statistics. Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/Write Web sent me some stats on the traffic between SocialThing! vs Friendfeed using Compete’s site analytics web tool.

Stats provided by Compete.com 

Now Friendfeed, is definitely more popular, but the tricky part of statistics is you don’t know who the users are. Are more early adopters using Friendfeed or SocialThing!? Are more mainstream web users using SocialThing! or Friendfeed? Do you also notice the spike with SocialThing!’s monthly visitors?
    

I turned to a private forum that a friend of mine started. The forum consists of tech-savvy, yet mainstream web users. They consider me to be the "know it all for the web" on the board. That says a lot in my opinion. I took a look at two threads that were started for Friendfeed users and for SocialThing! users. Currently, there are 3 users (myself included) that use Friendfeed and 9 who are using SocialThing!.

To quote one of the forums users:

Side note: There’s a similar service called FriendFeed (Corvy [Me] uses it a lot so I’m sure she can tell you more about it) that supports a ton more services, however, for me, SocialThing is more intuitive. When you add applications, it knows who your friends are already, whereas with Friendfeed, I believe you have to add others who also have a Friendfeed account. With SocialThing it keeps track of all your friends, regardless of if they are also on Socialthing.

While you can use the "imaginary friend" feature on Friendfeed to follow others, it would be much simpler to use SocialThing! instead of manually setting up "imaginary friends". This would be a conundrum for those who have no clue about RSS feeds.

Advanced Platforms Not Ready For The Masses

Maybe the masses aren’t ready for these platforms. Still, these are early adopter tools, regardless of the growth that one may be seeing. They all have the potential to go mainstream, but there’s a lot of work to be done. We’re still in our own bubble. Or are we?

Popularity: 10% [?]