Royal HeHe2-ness!

I recently wrote a blog post about Mixx’s new breaking news feature, which basically gives Mixx super users (SuperMixxers) the ability to flag a certain submission as “breaking”, two flag takes the story to the more prominent Breaking section on the site, giving it more exposure. On paper that sounds just perfect, but since I am a firm believer of the saying “you cannot control what you can’t measuere” I decided to measure the effectiveness of this new feature. The idea is pretty simple, just monitor the news that constitutes breaking news and see when it hits popular on both sites. So here we go:

 

Katrina Victims Must Repay

Digg

The first story that appeared on Digg was from the New York Times. It was submitted around 8:00 PM, 29th of March 2008. It was short lived. Only 1 Digg!

Next up, the Raw Story post which was submitted around the same time 8:00 PM, 29th of March 2008. 3 diggs.

Yahoo News; 9:00 PM, 29th of March 2008. 84 diggs.

Associated Press; 11 PM, 29th of March 2008. 4 diggs.

MSNBC; 1:00 AM 30th of March 2008. This is the winning article, and got popular around 10:50 PM 30th of March 2008.

Mixx

The breaking news story was submitted to Mixx around 6:00 PM, 29th of March 2008, I found it flagged as “breaking” around 11:00 PM 29th of March 2008, and became popular 9:00 AM 30th of March 2008.

Is it breaking?

Well considering that the Katrina disaster is one of the biggest screw ups of the current US administration, and victims who lost their homes because of it actually need to cough up $$$. Then hell ya it’s breaking!

The verdict

Yeah, Mixx totally pwned Digg on this first one. Not only did it appear on Mixx before Digg, it also became popular way before Digg. Unfortunately Mixx doesn’t show when a story was flagged as breaking, but I found it in the breaking section roughly 5 hours after submission. It made it popular around 13 hours after submission. On the other hand, the time between the first story appearing on Digg and making it popular took a whooping 27 hours!! It took twice as much time to appear on Digg than Mixx! Nice.

B-1 Bomber Crashes in Qatar

I submitted this story as soon as it broke on the Twitter Breaking News Channel, and coincidentally I was the first on both sites. Initially Al-Jazeerah, the original news source, reported it was a B-52 bomber, only minutes later it was revealed that it was actually a B-1 bomber. Apparently Al-Jazeerah just screwed up, or the information about the whole story was scarce. It was interesting to see how both sites handled this sudden change of facts. Mixx had a very quick reaction to this, while Digg, well let’s just inaction. Let me explain:

Digg

I was first to submit this to Digg with title US B-52 bomber explodes on landing in Qatar, all submissions after it, 13 of them, were reporting it’s a B-1 bomber not B-52. In any case this story never made it to the first page, mine only garnered 31 diggs, while another submission submitted hours after mine got 44. However, if we add up all the 13 submission’s diggs it totals up to 114 diggs, that should’ve secured a front page! Digg couldn’t handle this one right, and at the risk of stating the obvious, it’s dupe checker is broken!

Only minutes after it was revealed that it’s actually a B-1 not a B-52, I emailed Digg to change the title as per their FAQs, it still remains B-52 3 days later!

Mixx

Over at Mixx this story broke in the Breaking section only 30 minutes after my submission, and became popular around 2 hours later! Only 4 minutes after my submission another user submitted a follow-up submission using the “related” function, clarifying that it was actually a B-1 not a B-52 bomber. Also, a user from Mixx emailed Mixx support in order to fix my original title, they happily obliged only an hour or two after the original submission time. In a sense the whole system and community facilitated to fix the inconsistencies of my submission.

Also, I found only one dupe to this story, however one might argue that it’s because Mixx has lower traffic than Digg. But also I believe that the dupe detection function in addition to the related function effectively eliminated any such occurrences. Overall I am very pleased with how Mixx handled this one.

Is it breaking?

The fact that it was featured on the Twitter Breaking News Channel, flagged as breaking on Mixx and got the community approval, and gathered 114 diggs in total on Digg, answers to that.

Verdict

Digg as a community is very emotional about the war in Iraq, 114 users deemed it was news worthy. But the lack of the proper dupe checker, a breaking news function, and related function killed it. They also did not respond to an E-mail about a fact fix in a title. Digg failed! Mixx succeeded.

Charles Heston, Dead at 84

The moment I saw this, and it was early on 20 something diggs and a couple of Mixx votes, I knew that this would be popular on both sites. This more like the clash of the titans, it couldn’t get any bigger than this. A movie legend and a political hotbed for controversy dead!

Digg

Around 4:01 AM the 6th of April, someone submitted Charles Heston’s Wikipedia page asking “Charles Heston Dead?” Apparently the guys at Wikipedia were on to this before Digg, and for that matter also Mixx. This submission died a peaceful death at 10 diggs. Only 9 minutes later an article confirming his death was submitted at 4:10 AM. This one also died at 21. Digg was bombarded with Heston’s death submissions, there is no point counting them, but rest assured it’s more than 50. Even days after his death people were submitting it, weird.

Anyways the winning story broke at around 6:00 AM that morning, around 2 hour after the first submission. Not too shabby.

Mixx

The story first appeared at 4:20 AM and in a matter of minutes flagged as breaking, exposing it to all users. Around 6:00 AM it became popular.

However I found only 3 dupes to the original story, and the original story had 9 follow up stories using the related function. The related function is obviously helpful.

Is it breaking?

Hell Yeah!!

Verdict

A tie. This story is too big to expect otherwise. However, Mixx still offered early visibility to it’s users, if you aren’t an experienced Digg user you wouldn’t have known before 9:00 AM. Mixx also handled the dupe issue much better.

Conclusion

Mixx’s new breaking news feature adds to it’s plethora of innovation it brings to social news. It currently brings important general news to it’s users much faster. Just the fact that breaking news is featured on the first page is enough, it’s up to the community to decide whether it’s “breaking” worthy or not. Mixx also handled dupes much better, due to the related function. The B-1 bomber story revealed a special situation, what happens to factually incorrect submissions due to the scarcity of information when a story breaks? In Mixx’s case, the related story and a supportive administration resolves this issue fairly well. However in Digg’s situation nothing happened, you remain a jackass that can’t even submit right!