Reddit Goes Open Source
Posted by James | Filed under Social, Web
Reddit has decided to open source their entire code base, allowing developers to see exactly how the social news site works. With the move, Reddit is encouraging developers to submit their own code and extensions for improving the site. Of course, they are also potentially opening up the site to serious gaming, since developers will be able to dissect precisely how Reddit’s algorithms determine what is popular and makes it to the homepage.
Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, thinks this transparency is something users deserve, and is a strong competitive move against leading social news site Digg. “Digg has struggled to stay transparent with their users,” he said. “Social news in general has hid behind algorithms, which has caused some consternation amongst users. Users don’t get why things aren’t showing up on the front page.” Of course, he is referring to the fact that Digg’s algorithms are completely secretive, often creating frustration amongst users when stories with a lot of Diggs and comments are left off the homepage, but seemingly less important stories find their way to the front.
Much like Facebook’s fbOpen, the idea of going open source isn’t so much as to encourage developers to build their own Reddit clones. In fact, Reddit is using the same licensing structure as Facebook – CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) – which stipulates that anyone who uses the Reddit code needs to make their changes available to everyone, as well as acknowledge they are using it.
Reddit’s new site for developers – http://code.reddit.com – is now available. At this point, the race is on to see who can figure out the algorithm first, and it’ll be interesting to watch and see how heavily people try to game the site once it becomes public knowledge. It should be noted that when the company launched its new re-design a couple of weeks ago, within minutes the most popular story on the site was one about how badly it sucked, encouraging Reddit to bring back the old version!
Tags: algorithms, Common Public Attribution License, CPAL, digg, facebook, Facebook Open Platform, Open Source, reddit, social news
Digg Joins Data Portability Group
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Future, Geek, Privacy, Semantic, Web
Digg made a post to the company’s blog yesterday announcing their officially joining the DataPortability.org Working Group. Digg follows Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many other companies in getting on board to discuss protocols that will make it easier for users to move their data around the web, whilst still protecting their privacy.
The company posted more specifics about its embrace of data standards than almost any of the other participating companies has. "Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard," wrote Digg’s Steve Williams. "We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, a Microformat that lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. We’ll be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months."
Tags: data, dataportability, digg, open standards, Privacy, standards
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
