yowkee essential

I found SpyMy via Jeff Ooi. Initially feeling it’s great that someone is making a similar Digg service for Malaysia, which was long expected. People who following the web trend among blogosphere would find Digg is the good solution to your flooded feed aggregators. Digg’s success is mainly due to its users’ posting and voting features, and other “cool” Web 2.0 characteristic, in layman terms it provides more interaction to users. That’s also why its users are mostly computer geeks and youngsters, and people tends to compare it with Slashdot

But I was disappointed while surf over to SpyMy and notice the similar interface. Take a looks at the screenshot of SpyMy, Pligg and Digg, do you think this is something we should do?

        

Web 2.0 service like Digg or reddit is US-centric and articles posted mostly only interested to geeks. So there’s big potential to expand to other more specific areas. To segment the market for Digg-alike web service, I could think of following potential fields:

• Region-interest: it has been lots of web portal focusing on region’s interesting news/events/activities. And these portals are all lacking of the interaction to allow users to vote for their favor posts or commenting. Good target to apply digg-alike service.
• Different language: it could surely see that users stick with the web with the language they’re most familiar. A Malay-only or Mandarin-only users posted/voted service should have potential.
• The other “niche” fields like shopping, books, movies, musics, even technology specific to Linux, Windows, Gadget…etc for the particular interested group of people

So and so, there are plenty of areas to explore and deploy the idea. Nevertheless, the key point is, you could copy the idea and develop your own version — but not copying the exactly same web behavior (the flow of the web service) and user interface! Let’s do porting and expanding, not copycat.