Techmeme now has a share button. Read this post if you can't find it.
Frequent Techmeme readers may have heard of both “Facebook” and “Twitter”, up and coming social networking services where, among other activities, users tend to share links. Sharing is in fact a core activity on these sites …
Context & Ripple Effects
Techmeme already aggregated popular technology news from the blogosphere and had experimented with a reader suggestion button. Coverage asking whether Twitter could form a Techmeme-like link-discovery layer framed the competitive pressure: social networks were becoming places where technology readers circulated and found links.
The new control makes Techmeme’s curated clusters easier to carry into Facebook and Twitter, extending its role from organizing discussion on-site to supplying material for readers’ social feeds.
First-order effects
- Techmeme readers can distribute links to its story clusters through Facebook and Twitter with less friction, giving the aggregator a direct route to audiences beyond its own front page.
Second-order effects
- Blogs and news sources included in Techmeme clusters gain another referral path as readers share the aggregator’s links rather than navigating directly to each publisher.
Third-order effects
- If readers adopt the feature, technology-news aggregation becomes more dependent on social distribution interfaces, with curation and audience acquisition increasingly split between Techmeme and the networks where links travel.
The trend: Link aggregators are adding sharing tools as social networks become a material distribution channel for curated technology news.