SocialMedian is a rather interesting set up, not only because of the way it looks differently at news, but also because of the story behind the company. SocialMedian is another product concocted by Jason Goldberg, who was previously the CEO of Jobster. Where the story takes a different turn is with the team that is building SocialMedian alongside Jason -- comprising employees of of Pune-based True Sparrow Systems -- who have also been made partners in the venture. If the company gets a good exit with the product, it should kick off a new chapter on outsourcing work to India and this time on a positive note.

After a few months on SocialMedian these are some of my observations:

Consistent URIs: Before I started writing this piece, I had assumed that SocialMedian was storing URIs only once and then storing subsequent references to it as pointers. After a bit of poking around I figured that that the assumption was wrong, it was picking up the title and the URL and looking for matches in their database. This does, though, suffer from the eternal issue of crawling FeedBurner feed URLs, where crawlers end up storing the interim URLs than the destination URL, leaving a large window for possible duplicates wide open.

Good signal-to-noise levels: Since the service has only the early adopters on its network, the signal-to-noise ratio on the network is quite good, partly due to users curating the source lists quite well and also due to spammers not actively targeting the system yet. With increased adoption and mainstreaming of the network, this may change. Users could impact this by voting on the significance, but counting on mainstream users to curate the sources as well as the initial adopters is a path fraught with danger.

Speed: This is the Achilles' heel of the product. Using it is quite often a very sluggish experience and pages can take a while to load. The underlying framework of SocialMedian is RubyOnRails and I am not too sure how well it would hold up over the longer term. A product like SocialMedian requires a lot of processing -- sequential, parallel and deferred -- and through time they would need to make significant investments in technology to enable better processing and storage. Considering that a lot of Web 2.0 products start up being basic set ups in terms of underlying technology, SocialMedian would do well to scale up and refactor on day one than be forced into it on day 20.

Primary Connection Modes: You can connect to content via three means - people, news networks and topics. People enable you to connect to content via other users you have friended/follow. News Networks are collections of content from different sources that are tagged with topics, while topics are the basic level of organizing any content on the network. The entire network is a web of various gateways for discovering different content

Swarms: This one is the real killer feature for marketers and social media junkies. Both topics and networks can swarm up on the activity list enabling you to discover content without any additional effort. You can see how topics pick up, spread and die, enabling finer targeted advertising that is currently not that possible even on Facebook.

Weak points:

• They badly need to de-clutter and simplify the framework. It works now because the users are mostly the early adopter/power user clan, any normal user would think of it as a spaceship.
• The default, non-logged in home page is VERY weak and looks more like Digg after a bender.
• Needs work on data visualisation - topics, network pages are very basic, geek-oriented and off-putting for someone who is not a geek
• Sources can take too long to refresh. As the sources increase, this is a problem that will only get worse.
• Due to the complexity of the site I often end up liking the daily email summaries than using the actual site itself.
• Weak clustering: Any future products that do well will have to do context clustering pretty right out of the box and there is little or no clustering on SocialMedian that is automated.

So, will SocialMedian eventually wind up being the future of all news and content discovery online? Well, that is a tough one to answer. The site development of late has meandered a bit (I'd started writing this over a month ago, while it stayed as a draft in Ecto), and a lot of the promise I'd seen at that time has been washed off from the time I started using it. They really need to reduce the complexity of the site, since it is very fast falling into the trap of products that need five minutes of explaining to make it clear to a user what exactly does the site do anyway.

SocialMedian does have a huge role to play as a time saver in terms of discovering new content, but the use case is a bit troubling. Since it is not really a feed aggregator, it will not wind up replacing Google Reader or Bloglines. It is also not a Techmeme or a Digg, meaning that entry barrier to fully leveraging the product is quite high compared to such sites. And that is the real tough question as far as SocialMedian goes, where exactly do you fit it in?

It is, for all practical purposes, a new means of discovering and consuming content and pathbreaking products are always risky places to be in because it requires the user, with an already diminished attention span, to form a new habit. And that is a tough ask in any market these days.