Why I Spin Sphinn
Glen Allsopp / 
2 Comments / 
August 5th, 2007 / 
Subscribe via RSS
Sphinn for those of you who don’t know (where have you been?) is a relatively new social network based around Search Engines and Internet Marketing, similar to Plugim but more Search Orientated and has gained mass popularity and adoption by many well known guru’s in the industry.
Although you probably think I am writing this far too late as spin has been out for nearly 3 weeks, I actually think im possibly writing this too early. 3 weeks is certainly not early enough to give a decent opinion about a website but I feel that after being an active member of Sphinn (pronounced Spin) I am now able to give my opinion. As the title of this posts suggests, I’m really feeling Sphinn, in fact I check it every morning and plan on submitting a lot of my posts there that I feel are good enough for the audience. With my thoughts in mind here’s a list of why I Spin Sphinn and some changes I wouldn’t mind seeing.
Great Timing- Sphinn was launched just at the time that Threadwatch was closing, a great source to check on the best news in the Searchin /; Marketing industry. This actually led to a few jokes that Danny Sullivan (Sphinn Founder) paid for Threadwatch to be closed to help Sphinn be a success. Sphinn certainly filled a gap in the industry
My Industry – Sphinn certainly isnt a unique site in terms of it’s idea, to help people spread content. There are some sites like Digg and Reddit which claim to be for general stories and sites like ballhype which are related to a niche (sports). Sphinn is to my knowledge the 2nd Digg-Clone for the Internet Marketing industry but is backed by so many popular people in the industry there’s already tonnes of great content and a lot of activity.
Good Content – No Social Voting site would be complete without actually decent content hitting the ‘home page’. Although I got sick of Sphinn related stories hitting the site early-on I can gladly say these have died down and im seeing a lot of great / good content from an industry I love.
Active – There’s nothing worse to see then a dead or very inactive social news site. The great thing that the web brings is faster content much before the traditional media options can possibly bring. Sphinn is active and there’s new stories on the home-page daily which encourage people to come back to submit stories and to view them. I like how there’s always a new link to follow or a new discussion to read so I don’t end up wasting my time from clicking on one of my bookmarks.
There are some things I can say bad about Sphinn or at least could be improved, I’m not exactly a Search Engine Land or Danny Sullivan fanboy (although I do have massive respect for the authors of SEL and Danny) but as I’m sure the Sphinn team would be glad to hear I do have some recommendations:
Rename Stalking – The only way to friend someone is to mention that you are stalking them, this can feel a little creepy and should simply be renamed to add someone as a friend.
Stop Fiddling – I actually think there’s a lot of fiddling going on with the live version of Sphinn, only the other day did I find going back to the homepage left me with some php and mySQL errors on the screen. My friend Andrew Girdwood also noticed a few errors. If you are going to do some changes please set-up a test site if you havn’t already.
Enable User Moderation – By this I mean something similar to Digg’s ‘bury’ system which I’m a fan of. I see a lot of people posting just a list of posts from their blog one after the other which really isnt what the site was intended for in my opinion.
Link the Title – Link the title of the the story to the actual site where the story is placed and not the area where the discussions of the story on Sphinn take place. Finally make the graphic that Sphinn’s stories actually vote for stories.
Subscribe to our RSS Feed
I’ve enjoyed Sphinn so far. I’ve read a lot of good articles. The community is great, too. The users are a lot more civil than Digg users.
[...] bloggers like Tamar and Tad, to top news sources like TechCrunch - it’s like the time sphinn was launched with all these updates in my RSS reader about the same [...]