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It seems that a company once dedicated to killing spammers is now committed to getting your stories at the top of Digg, YouTube, Reddit, Yahoo News, Netscape, BBC News and many more by mass voting. But is lobbying what these systems were designed for?
Blue moved on to create Collactive, which we learned today has taken funding from Sequoia Capital - normally an extremely positive sign. And the idea seems good in theory: the company wants to give power to web activists in the same way they gave power to their spam-fighting customers. That's a great idea, but I also wonder if it's going to screw up all the social ranking systems.
Here's how it works: you submit your story to Digg, YouTube or wherever, then create an "APB" (All Points Bulletin). Now, the course of action varies depending on which site the article appears on - for sites that count views, the community will be directed to view the article, for sites that count votes, they'll be directed to vote, and for sites that rank the "most emailed" pages, they'll make sure your chosen article gets emailed. The system works like this: you submit a story you want to boost, then a special URL is created on Collactive that loads the site in a frame with instructions to the left about what you need to do - in this example, you're asked to vote for a story on Reddit.
There are multiple ways to promote your APB: by linking to that page, by embedding a widget in your blog or by emailing all your friends. There's also a browser extension, although this doesn't seem to be used for sending alerts: instead, it keeps you logged in to all your social accounts.
Now I'd be incredibly stupid to question a company that specializes in globally co-ordinated group actions. Anyone who tries to take on spammers at their own game deserves credit, but it seems to me that social rankings weren't designed to be controlled by a group of powerful lobbyists, even if they decide to use that power for good. Agree or disagree?