Danny Sullivan Launches Sphinn.com Options

[bwelford]

Danny Sullivan has launched a new social media site called sphinn.com for all matters connected with SEO and SEM.
Tip of the hat to Graywolf

Note to Pierre: Will you be adding this to your Socializer?

[eKstreme]

Yep. Update with other services coming this weekend!

Pierre

[khalidh]

I like the site. I was playing around with it and ran into couple of bugs. I wonder how it will hold up as more people start hitting hit.

How much acceptance and popularity the site is going to receive outside of the SEM community?

Khalid

[SEOigloo]

Oh, my gosh! I'm so excited about this.

At last, an SM site where I can get comfy and learn more about the interactivity of SM. I love SEL, and I hope the quality of this subsidiary will be really high.

I can't figure out, however, how to add a friend. All it says is that I have no friends, which is making me feel rather badly.

If anyone else has registered and wants to be my friend, and knows how, let's be friends!

I think this is a really cool thing.
Miriam

Update: Okay, I figured out how to do it. You search users for the name of the user you wish to befriend. This brings up a little add/remove link with an icon of a tiny man next to it. Hit add and you've done it.

I now have a friend. Yay!

This post has been edited by SEOigloo: Jul 13 2007, 05:00 PM

[bwelford]

I hadn't thought of joining until I saw you had, Miriam. I've been trying to do so in Firefox and for some reason the buttons do not work. So reluctantly I tried the registration form in IE v 7.0 and it worked like a charm.

Oh dear.

[SEOigloo]

Hi Barry,
I'm glad you signed up, but that's weird about FF. It worked for me. However, the list of bugs is growing and growing on that site in a thread set aside to report bugs. Someone should send Danny Sullivan a very large aspirin. He'll need it by the end of the day.

Apparently, the befriending aspect is confusing people. I have been able to make John and Bill show up as my friends, but not my other pal, Matt McGee. John and Bill...were either of you stalking me? I realize that question is extremely odd sounding, but I'm trying to figure out why Sphinn let you be my friends and not Matt. It has something to do with you having to mutually 'stalk' another user and then you can become friends. I think that's going to need some tweaking to make sense.

Still, I'm very excited about this. I hope Cre8 members will be there, as well as here. It seems like it's rapidly turning into a pretty big pool over there, so maybe a chance to get to know the writing of some new folks.

Miriam

[JohnMu]

Hi Miriam
I really don't understand the friend / stalker system . Is "friend" something that includes stalking? I don't think I'm stalking you, at least it's not showing in my list. However, my list is only showing a subset of the people that I tried to stalk/befriend, so who knows .

Do you really have to search for someone's name to be able to "befriend" them? I can find some more people, but I can't get to their profiles or befriend them - eg "A.N.Onym" and "kulpreet-singh". Frustrating.

There are a lot of things that I either don't get or which don't work properly (it's hard to tell the difference, lol, perhaps I'm just too old). It's one of those things that I feel deserves the "beta" label, too many strange quirks while at the same time trying to (or that's what it feels like) attract too many new users.

All in all, it's mainly frustrating (to me). I don't know whether to continue or to wait until it is usable...

That said, things are always rough in the beginning, there are so many issues to fight with . It looks like a nice model, but I don't know how far it is really unique enough to really gain the share of users that it would need. We'll see .

John

[bragadocchio]

I have been able to make John and Bill show up as my friends, but not my other pal, Matt McGee. John and Bill...were either of you stalking me?

Danny's explanation from one of this early posts on how things work explained the stalking thing, and I had added you.

Do you really have to search for someone's name to be able to "befriend" them? I can find some more people, but I can't get to their profiles or befriend them - eg "A.N.Onym" and "kulpreet-singh". Frustrating.

If you see their profile, you should be able to "stalk" them from their page. I'm having the same problem befriending "A.N.Onym" and "kulpreet-singh". It does look like a bug.

It looks like a nice model, but I don't know how far it is really unique enough to really gain the share of users that it would need.

Being involved in this early stage, and offering suggestions might help make it into something unique, and something that you might find of value.

[bwelford]

I also was trying to Stalk/Befriend "A.N.Onym" and "kulpreet-singh" without success. I've PMd them both since I'm assuming that the problem is the punctuation in their usernames. I would have contacted sphinn.com but I couldn't find how to do that.

[kulpreet_singh]

Hi Barry - thanks for your message.

I think you're right it's probably something to do with the "dash" in my name.

But I don't see an option to change my username. I'll try to contact the website admins and see what can be done.

Other than those type of issues I'm really liking the concept of the site and I hope that it catches on. It's funny because Digg users have always had an animosity towards SE professionals, but they also always fall for the link bait (or Digg bait) created by those same SE professionals. Now we have our own Digg type of system so I wonder what kind of "bait" we will see here.

-k.s.

This post has been edited by kulpreet_singh: Jul 15 2007, 04:02 PM

[A.N.Onym]

Apparently, search users only works, when you search for words from the user name.

Also, it appears that my name is problematic, so I'll be contacting them, too.

Cheers.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Jul 16 2007, 12:50 AM

[A.N.Onym]

Update: I did contact Sphinn and they said that names with punctuation won't work. They'll be updating the site info and changing my username to ANOnym, if anyone's interested to find me

[SEOigloo]

Kulpreet -
I just wanted to add that, like the others, I couldn't access your profile so my attempts to befriend you ended in sadness. We'll have to try again when the bug gets fixed.

Yuri -
You, too! I hadn't noticed you on there, but when the bug gets fixed, I will try to befriend you, too, if that would be okay.

John -
Sigh...yes, the bugs are cumbersome. Many of the details don't seem to have been thought out, just in terms of basic usability. The whole befriending/stalking thing is a good example of that. Everyone was confused by it. I believe Danny Sullivan should hire our own Kim to make Sphinn truly user-friendly.

I have been hanging about there for 2 days. I'm feeling a bit uncertain as to the type of content that will end up being popular. If it's going to end up being just very hard-core search news that is popular, then SEL already does a fantastic job of providing this. Or, if it ended up just being 10 ways to make something better-type articles, that doesn't seem like something that would really hold my attention. But, at this point, it's really too early to form a picture of the direction the users will take Sphinn in. I hope there will be a good mix of good things that I'm not able to find elsewhere.

That's asking quite a lot, of course.

Thanks to everyone who has befriended me over there. It seems like a very big place and it's nice to see familiar folks.
Miriam

[kulpreet_singh]

Hi all,

I've e-mailed them to remove the bug or remove the dash

[Update: My username on sphinn is now "kulpreetsingh" instead of "kulpreet-singh"]

This post has been edited by kulpreet_singh: Jul 16 2007, 04:33 PM

[A.N.Onym]

Well, it seems like the mainstream SEO settles there for now, what you generally find in your feeds. Upcoming and popular articles are vastly different in quality, though they didn't sphinn my recent article on expert and shallow blog posts on YOUmoz much for some reason 8)

I expect it to be this way and it is pretty easy to see what gets popular: what kind of content you'd post about on the forum on your own or on your blog.

[bwelford]

Here's an interesting response from Danny Sullivan on Sphinn to a comment I had made.

And yes, I'd say Sphinn is an elaborate forum -- forum 2.0 if you want.

[projectphp]

Bah!

Forum = people talking about what they want to when they decide to.

Sphinn == people talking about what someone else said, and only after it is written.

Huge difference, because if I want to talk about something on Sphinn, I would need to write a blog post, and then link to it. Seems the long way round to me.

The whole voting thing is a goodish idea, but really, a forum is about community built through personal connections to a poster, where the poster is the star and personally involved, whereas Sphinn, Digg et al are sites built around uncovering stuff, where the author is not personally involved, and kinda expected NOT to be involved.

That doesn't make either better or worse, it just ultimately makes them different beasts, and unable to be the other one's one up.

[bwelford]

On Sphinn, Michael, you can just start a Discussion topic if you wish. So it's very forum-like. The only difference is that you can vote on Discussion topics or News Items so, if you wish, you can only look at the items that have the most Sphinn votes.