newspond: prettier, smarter app enters the news aggregation scence

[urlwolf]

Digg, reddit competitor. It seems to be doing some smart stuff behind the scences, not just relying on votes. Buoyancy (equivalent of diggs or votes in reddit) can go down as well as up.

http://www.newspond.com/about/

At the heart of Newspond lies a tireless electronic brain. This highly-advanced machine intelligence continually watches over and reads hundreds of different websites, including everything from major news portals, to the tiniest blog, or forum. As a news story surfaces across one or more of these sites, Newspond notes every detail about it - from how fast a story spreads throughout the internet, to the amount of discussion surrounding the story, to even things like the rate at which people click on or bookmark the article and the size of each of the sites reporting it. Every detail is carefully noted, sized, and gauged, reading at a faster rate of speed than any human being could ever dream of. That way, you don't need to visit multiple news sites to find out what's going on.

from

[tinjaw]

I'll have to check it out. It sounds feasible. They would need one hell of a data center and some fat pipes, but I assume they will finance that via some professional services to the Fortune 500 based on the free stuff. I'd like to get access to their database. 

[Lashiec]

Looks pretty cool, and the news are TRUE news, and not the usual dumb article that should not matter to anyone, but by the virtue of the stupidity of crowds makes a splash everywhere (God, the quality of the front page items in reddit and Digg are much, much worse than the last time I checked). It looks a bit funky in Opera, though.

What I like is that if something is reported over various sites, they will be listed as sources, that's something the other competitors do not have (well, reddit only has the headline, that's what I call link bait). And they list Digg and reddit between the sources

I'll bookmark it to see how it gets developed

[Fedorov]

I saw this yesterday and bookmarked it, quite like the look of this site.

[allen]

I'm the odd man out here, I think it looks too pretty. Partially because their obvious attraction to making a beautiful website makes me worried they won't let me utilize its content via rss in the future. . .

My silly anti-aesthetic tendencies aside, the important stuff--what's going on behind the scenes--seems really solid.  I love that it's real news scoured off the net by a machine, I have no stomach for pseudo-news scoured off the net by idiots ala  Digg, etc. 

Since it won't be pumping into my feed reader automatically, there's a good chance I'll forget it exists--but it is my intention to try to get some use out of it.  Fortunately it seems to work fine in opera 9.5 betas.