Digg may have been the best “user driven social content website” out there, but not anymore. BumpZee, a new, innovative and unique community/tool built by Scott Jangro, is better than Digg, on may levels. In fact, BumpZee might be better than Digg, Techmeme, MyBlogLog and many others, combined.
Don’t believe it? Here’s 5 reasons why BumpZee is better, and why BumpZee will blaze a trail as a pioneer of successful web 2.0 mashups.
Note: BumpZee is currently beta testing with only one community focused on the affiliate marketing industry.
#5 Reason BumpZee Is Better Than Digg
BumpZee is more than “bumping”, Digg is not. All you can do on Digg is submit and/or “digg” stories. Sure, BumpZee does that too, called “bumps”, but that’s only a small part of the core functionality in BumpZee. In all reality, that simple functionality is about all there really is to Digg.
BumpZee is so much more. Specifically, BumpZee combines…
#4 Reason BumpZee Is Better Than Digg
BumpZee is new, so it’s not gamed, Digg is (documented). In BumpZee, the community polices itself. How? Users can not only bump entries they think are worthwhile, they are encouraged to dump ones that are not.
#3 Reason BumpZee Is Better Than Digg
BumpZee is professional, Digg is not. Since the BumpZee community is built from extraneous blogs that feed it, and because it polices itself, it is so far absent of massive amounts of unprofessional users looking to yell “lame” or “sucks” to every piece of content that isn’t about Apple or the iPhone or Bill Gates sucking “d00d”!
Instead, it maintains a useful and friendly tone and provides an helpful experience to each user. Doesn’t matter if they are participants, or just readers. They all can enjoy.
#2 Reason BumpZee Is Better Than Digg
BumpZee solves problems for the busy professional. Digg is just a time waster. When you visit BumpZee, you are able to do so many things at once, like track conversations, bump stories, learn about new blogs in your industry, meet new people, and even participate in creating your own blog listing (if you don’t have a blog of your own), and much, much more.
The ability to do so many things within one place, amongst your niche group of industry peers makes BumpZee an invaluable tool and time saving, problem solving application.
#1 Reason BumpZee Is Better Than Digg
BumpZee has widgets that are actually easy to use, easy to setup and are actually useful. Digg widgets aren’t very robust and are hard to implement, and their core usefullness can be questioned.
In fact, if you take a deeper look at the BumpZee widget page, you’ll see that there is an actual WordPress plugin design and distributed for download to anyone’s blog, as well as some easy to copy/paste code to get the widget on your blog.
Summary: BumpZee Is The Future – Mashups Will Win
You have to hand it to Scott Jangro, the creator of BumpZee. His vision has mashed up the very best pieces of social media and user generated content communities and tools, and put them all together into a fun, and extremely useful utility.
Once this launches in more verticals besides affiliate marketing, I predict it will become bigger than Digg, and faster. It’s just that good.
Go ahead, you tell me what’s better?
Jim what a great review of oour favorite community. All of that only with one industry. Buh-bye Digg!
Digg was cool until they added the extra categories and all the non-tech folks showed up. What is in place to stop the same thing from happening with BumpZee?
>>Digg was cool until they added the extra categories
Steve,
I personally do not remmeber Digg before they added extra category’s. But I do know that it is possible to “game” Digg. BumpZee is still young and I am sure Scott is working hard to prevent it from being gamed. If Digg had only one person like Scott they would still be “cool”. ;)
Jim,
When are you going to install the widget so I can bump your posts right from your blog?
I can get behind the extra-features and easy to use / meaningful widgets, but how will Bumpzee prevent itself from the fate of Digg? If it becomes as big as you suppose it will, it will more than likely run into some of the same problems. The key has to be in limiting – which rarely happens. Either they limit it to a few professional groups which won’t bring the desired growth, or it opens up to a new host of categories that create more buzz / growth, but bring in the typical diggers. It seems that anymore web companies are so obsessed with wanting to be the next big thing, they forget how to be the worthwhile niche thing. Hopefully it works out.
And are the widgets really better? The widget in your post says it has 0 bumps, yet in the sidebar 20 bumps are displayed.
@Vlad, installed :)
@jda, How does it prevent the same fate? Because it’s not just a “submit and bump” system. First reason, it will work in niches (search, email, blogging, tech), and each set of included blogs will build a community, similar to techmeme. So what you’ll have is the people who are feeding the system (the blogs that are included) policing the system on their own, through bumping and dumping of good/bad stuff.
The typical diggers will stay away, why, because it’s not the same “feel”. People won’t be submitting stories, BZ aggregates blog listings, so the content isn’t forced into a “diggable story/headline”.
I dunno, maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s 1000 times better.
Yes, the widgets are better. Not sure what is up with that counter?
Jim,
If you have downloaded the latest BumpZee widget you may need to configure it via wordpress “Options”. You need to enter your API key, which I believe can be found within your account on BumpZee. I think that may be the problem.
Thanks for the wonderful compliments, Jim.
What’s to save it from the same fate as digg? It may not be possible, but I am hoping that what Jim says, smaller communities, will help. It’ll be interesting to see, to say the least.
The bump button isn’t working because it’s not configured. Since this is a WP blog, get the latest plugin, and take a look at the instructions in the options page for putting the button in the posts. Not only will the correct number of bumps show up, but your comments will show up properly as well on BZ.
Thanks for the infomation, Jim. I’ve bookmarked your above article at itribe.biz/news to share your details with others interested in the same topic. If you know of other great articles on this topic, send me an email. I’d enjoy reading them for addition to the collection.
When vote system become more popular, Digg still the pioneer the inovation.
Wow…I was wondering why I joined BUMPzee. This article really makes me feel better about my choice to remove my digg widget and replace it with the BZ button.
I never felt “at home” ( You know what i mean) at digg. Bumpzee is comfortable. Agreed Jim let’s see how it does in future.
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I thought so at first too..but then you realize it’s not truely a do follow blog community anymore and trying to appeal to every blogger…basically it was growing because of what it was; now it is nothing more than a blogspot spam fest of MFA blogs that don’t follow….community has no identity.
I think mixx will dominate
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Digg has great momentum going for it and it will take something special to derail that. Mixx has to a certain extent made a dent with the recent tie ups with major news and media sites.
Unless Bumpzee does something similar, it will be difficult to wean away many of the power users that have pretty much established their accounts and profiles at a Digg or a Mixx.
Power Users are key because in the end any user contributed site has to depend on the loyalty of these repeat and dedicated user base which is in my opinion the biggest stumbling block that Bumpzee will face.
Features are great but can be easily replicated by established players unless the time to develop and market is significant which I believe is not the case in this regard.
That said, it is great to see innovation though I do feel the Digg clones are stretching it a little bit these days.
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is it true??mixx is very Good,i have tried for a long time
i try to join bumpzee but there is nothing????