BlueDot Becomes Faves.com, Offers Topic-Based Networking

Faves.com launches today. The artist formerly known as BlueDot offers a social news site with a little different spin: Your activity is based on topics, not friends.

I’m trying to resist calling it the anti-social news site.

Social Media Explorer got its first sneak peek of a new site when Faves.com honchos Mike Koss and Rob Dickerson called to chat last week. They are apparently under the mistaken impression I am an influential blogger. Perhaps they misread the business card. I’m an inflatulent blogger.

Still, I enjoyed learning about BlueDot, how they were changing the way they do things a bit and now offering a social news and bookmarking site where your activity revolves around your chosen topics of interest rather than your friends or random news items organized by popularity, etc. It’s really not a lot different than Digg but seems to have a feel that your information is customized to fit your wishes.

Think of Faves like this: In Facebook, you see your friend’s activity. It’s a friends-driven place. On Faves, you see your favorite topic’s activity, keeping you plugged into that topic a little quicker than you could be elsewhere. On Digg, Reddit and other news sites, you have to search for topics you might like. Here, it’s delivered to you based on your preferences. Like other social news sites, you can vote topics up or down, giving the community the power to elevate interesting stories. (Or the topic-related community to elevate stories within that topic.) You can also search for and add friends, allowing the social/community factor to come into play.

But, connecting with friends you find in your favorite topics seems to encourage growing your network with like-minded folks. And that seems like a cool notion, in my opinion.

Is this going to revolutionize social news or bookmarking? Probably not. But I can certainly see usefulness in the approach and am interested enough to try it myself. While I’ve grown weary of social news sites – I hate asking people to Digg my submissions or vote for my stories so they’ll get better traffic – there are enough interesting angles to the user experience on Faves for me to recommend you give it a shot.

If you’re more interested in news and not so much in the social part of things, it might suit you better than where you’re hanging out now.

[tags]bluedot, faves, Jason Falls, reviews, social bookmarking, social news[/tags]