BuzzFeed, which has managed to create some buzz in the blogosphere recently, is a yet-another memetracker which seems to have got to a pretty decent start. The New York-based startup aims to be a one-off general memetracker distinguishing ‘interesting’ from ‘hype’ and tracking everything across movies, music, fashion, ideas, technology, and culture.
Crawling 50,000 sites, blogs, and sources each day, their technology is based on finding things when they start accelerating in popularity. The crawler reports in what they call a ’special terminal interface’ which is deciphered by their (human) editors who go ahead and add a summary, promoting the most interesting things to the homepage.
One thing that stays strong about BuzzFeed, I have to admit, is their interface. Being such a major factor in this market — see TailRank, Techmeme, Blogniscient and Megite — this is where they have the advantage of breaking through. Also, I notice they are the first ones to track everything in one instead of just technology or the blogosphere.
So far, while this space has proved popular amongst the entrepreneurs who seem to be cashing in, I think it’s yet to grow demand-wise. With the exception of TailRank and TechMeme, the others are performing really badly and it’s visible — their Alexa ranks, Compete.com statistics, and even PageRank seems shockingly low and poor — while these statistics are very limited, I do think they represent quite a bit.
Does BuzzFeed have something going on? Maybe. But what I can say is that if they’re able to impress the crowd they are aiming for, which is really the general market, they have a future ahead.
[tags]BuzzFeed, Memetrackers[/tags]
