What if Digg and Twitter had a love child?
With the launch of the new micro-blogging and voting tool called “Dwigger” over the weekend, it looks like we will get to find out exactly what it is. Dwigger is “voting and threaded conversations for Twitter.” It is a product of Sift Partners, created by IT Director Rommel Santor. So why did they come up with Dwigger? Sift Partners says, “We love Twitter – but the social interactions sometimes don’t work very well. We want to make Twitter more interesting for people to use.” Dwigger works with your existing Twitter account, so anything you “dwigg” in Dwigger gets ‘tweeted’ on Twitter , with the same 140 character limit.
The plot twists to the tool are:
1. Users can “vote” on the popularity of a dwigg, a la Digg and Reddit, and
2. Conversations are threaded and therefore syndicated via RSS.
Other unique features are tabs set up for members in major cities and countries around the world to identify with their fellow citizens. (I’m still lobbying for a Dirty South tab, so Dwigg it here if you want to support it.) They feature a tag cloud which they term a “Zeit Cloud”, a short list of words taken from Twitter posts that gives an indication of what people have been talking most about in the past few days. As with del.icio.us and other tagging tools, the more frequently and recently a word is used by Dwigger members, the bigger it appears in the Zeit Cloud. If you want to track your own keywords, you can use the Hit List function. Any dwiggs or tweets with the keyword you enter will be tracked for you in real-time.
Dwigg walks it like it talks it too. In what I think is a savvy move, visitors are asked to “Help get the word out around the traps” about Dwigger by voting for the site in Digg and Reddit, or tagging it in del.icio.us. This box is placed right in the masthead on the right, so you can’t miss it. If you already have a Twitter account, give Dwigger a try. My gut tells me that, just like Twitter, it is going to find a path of its own and a myriad of uses.
Category: Startups, web 2.0 | Tags: Digg, Dwigger, micro blogging, social bookmarking, twitter
@Richard:
What I think makes Dwigger different is:
1) Individual tweets can be voted on, like in Digg, which facilitates ranking,etc. As the founders said, they wanted a more ‘conversational’ version of Twitter.
2) Dwigger works with your existing Twitter account, so no need to add yet another login/password/profile to the mix.
3) Tags, in the form of their “Zeit Cloud”, are right on the home page,so you don’t have to go to a different site to follow what’s hot.
Hope this helps. Thanks for you comment!
So….how is this different from friendfeed? That it’s threaded? I don’t think that’s enough.