Where do you get all the day's tech news? For many people, including me, it's Google Reader. For others, they look to Techmeme or other sites that aggregate the headlines from around the tech newswires and blogosphere. But as there are a seemingly infinite number of news sources and social news tools, from Digg to Reddit, Hacker News, ReadBurner and others, aggregation sites are getting a second look. A new site, launching this morning, called Techfuga, not only aggregates all the leading blogs, but also those social services as well - including FriendFeed. The result is a very busy site that has hundreds of links to the day's news, from a wide variety of sources.Techfuga's mission, like many others before it is to provide "the ultimate top tech news from around the Web." On launch, the site has aggregated 40 different technology news aggregators. It then separates those aggregators into three types: "Human aggregated based on submission and voting/sharing", including Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Readburner and FriendFeed; "Solely based on algorithms", including Techmeme and Google News, and "Editorial human-aggregated", including TechCrunch and Ars Technica. As you might guess, the result is pretty busy. The data's there, but like with Guy Kawasaki's AllTop and PopURLs before it, you might spend as much time scrolling down to find the article you want to read as you eventually spend reading.
Like Alltop, Headlines from Across the Web Populate Techfuga.
Beyond the simple headlines, Techfuga groups related stories (as Techmeme does) and attempts to link to the discussion pages of items that are indexed. They also, like Techmeme, say they offer an algorithm that determines "Top Stories".
Techfuga Correctly Found Linkage Between Stories
After midnight on Tuesday, Techfuga correctly found that Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins' article "FriendFeed: Like Most Things, Good in Moderation [Scoble’s Intervention]" was related to a FriendFeed post by Robert Scoble, "Oh, oh, @techcrunch thinks I need a friendfeed intervention!". That in turn, led to related items at TechCrunch and Scoble's blog. So, in theory, the algorithm works. It's not the prettiest I've ever seen, but if you assume that Techfuga is the superset of data, incorporating Techmeme as one of its sources, it does have a ton of data to work with, and as many early versions of sites have shown, cleaning up the GUI can be easier than discovering the content initially.
You Can Search The Full Techfuga Archive for Keywords
Techfuga's value is also found in its search engine. Searching Techfuga also searches through its many different sources, so when I performed a vanity search to see if I ever came up, responses came through Propeller, BuzzTracker and ReadBurner, and did so quickly. Broader searches, even outside of tech, like one for "Baseball", showed similar diversity.
Techfuga opens its doors this morning, so find it here: http://techfuga.com/.