News

You must know about Twitter's whale, the sort of official spokesperson of twitter. As the so-called Fail Whale made more appearances, people moved in droves to Plurk.

Plurk has been holding up better than Twitter, which is no doubt very dependent on the fact that it has much fewer subscribers. But it's not immune to the downtime as today, for the first time, I spotted Plurk's version of Twitter's Fail Whale:

As promised previously, the Reddit data is now shown in the Alerts Summary page. Right now you can see all submissions from the past 24 hours from the domain names you're tracking.

The alerts are not being emailed out at the moment pending some more tests to calibrate when the alert should go out. The rest of the post explains how I'm thinking of structuring the reddit alerting service to give you an idea of what the calibration entails and how the service will work.

A while back I blogged about how to track MyBlogLog profile views. It was a simple trick looking for hits to the associated RSS feed on your site coming from a set of Yahoo!-owned IP addresses. Now there is a minor update.

Until very recently (today even!), the user agent header of those RSS requests was blank. This was annoying me because it's a bot that's not identifying itself properly. I even emailed MyBlogLog support about the issue. As of this morning, I'm seeing a new user agent:

As per the title, Social Alerter is now tracking Reddit. The real-time tracking is for both the "what's hot" list and the "new" list sorted as rising.

Over the weekend, the final tests will be carried out, and all being well, early next week the alerts will show up in the Alerts Summary page and be sent out by email.

So... what other services would you like Social Alerter to track?

A story on Read Write Web asks if Digg is in trouble. The premise is based on a new comScore report that Yahoo! Buzz has now overtaken Digg in terms of traffic volume. The money quote:

Question: How many links does a story that just went popular on Digg have?

Another question: Say a story goes popular on Digg today, how many links will it have in one week?

Let's go for a hat-trick: how many links will a story have in 30 days?

Answers:

Hot off today's launch of the Mixx API, I'm very happy to announce that the Mixx stories are being tracked by Social Alerter.

I came across some really odd behavior at Digg.com involving what appears to be banned users. I'm not sure what's going, but it is very intriguing.

The Blackhole

One story in the Social Alerter database is logged as having 2604 diggs (which is why it caught my attention) and 255 comments. The story is supposed to be at http://digg.com/general_sciences/64_65_4 but browsing there gives a 404. It's a super-Digg and it's not found?

We already talked about the effect of Digg's January algo change. The summary of that analysis is that the chances of a story getting promoted after getting 25 diggs was cut by 38% after the algo change.

Today we visit the algo change again and, let me cut the story short, the algo change had exactly the opposite of its intended effect. Let's dive in.

In a thread today at SEO Refugee, Yuri asked about stories getting submitted more than once to Digg. The question is what happens if the same URL is submitted more than once? Will the submissions get buried? Social Alerter's data can help us in answering this question.

There is a lot of ground to cover here so buckle up - it's a long post.