An Update On Spotplex

Over a month ago I signed up to Spotplex, a web 2.0 site that TechCrunch called a better Digg. I gave my own first impressions on the Spotplex service at the time and settled down to see whether it would develop into a useful popularity site, capable of unearthing interesting articles and driving traffic to worthy sites, or whether it would slip away quietly and concede defeat to the already established services. So far it has hardly made a splash, but Spotplex is not giving up just yet as it unveilled two new features to it’s users today.

What’s Wrong So Far?

First complaints arose about Spotplex when Tony at Deep Jive Interests noted that it had crashed under the weight of traffic it received after being featured on TechCrunch. For a service that was supposed to rival Digg, crashing, rather than sending too much traffic to a featured site, was a bad start.

Dan at The Wrong Advices also noted that Spotplex wasn’t counting hits properly. The central idea of the service is that well visited pages appear as popular on the Spotplex site causing an influx of more visitors, akin to Digg. If they can’t get the hit counting scripts to work then the whole thing falls down.

Finally, the inherent problem in counting page views as a measure of popularity swings things wildly in favour of already popular and heavily trafficked sites. I have the feed for popular Spotplex posts on my Google personalised homepage and, 90% of the time, 3 out of the 5 posts displayed were from TechCrunch. This leaves little reason for medium or small blogs, like myself, to take part.

Changes and Improvements

The Spotplex beta took a step forward today. In an email to bloggers participating in the beta a number of improvements were announced.

Firstly, their server problems have been sorted by a database redesign. Hopefully this means better up-time and more consistancy in hit counting.

After an early struggle we had with the blog traffic, we have been focusing on stabilizing our service environment. Since we released a new version of our database structure which was completely redesigned about three weeks ago, our service has been very stable and working smoothly even with much more impression data from various blogs.

Secondly, currently only blogs on major blogging platforms could sign up (though not at the moment as the beta is closed), after a re-launch any site with an RSS feed will be able to take part.

Finally, and most importantly, Spotplex will be unleashing their relative popularity measure.

This list sorts articles based on how much more traffic the article received compared to the site’s normal traffic level. Also, the article age is considered in calculating the popularity and older articles get discounted.

This will make Spotplex much more worthwhile for small and medium bloggers. Now the best posts that receive more visitors than average will get the recognition they deserve from Spotplex.

I will be watching the popular list on Spotplex and my own traffic and visits to see if there are any changes for good or bad. Expect to hear if the improvements work out and look out for complaints and further suggestions if nothing changes.

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