Ben Guild, the 19 year old mastermind behind Mobile17, has just launched a news site dubbed Whitesoap. Interestingly enough, Whitesoap kind of goes against the whole Web 2.0 mantra in that it’s not a social environment per se. News is automatically indexed and queued by Whitesoap. Users aren’t required to have accounts, are unable to leave comments on stories or post news pieces of their own, yet they are able to suggest stories for the moderators to put on the homepage.
Whitesoap fully utilizes the expertise of a team of web-savvy moderators to filter out the frontpage worthy from the undiscovered.
How It Works
Upon first visiting Whitesoap, users can take a look at the top story as well as featured stories in the main column. The sidebar contains mentioned and suggested stories. Mentioned stories are interesting and cool, yet not necessarily newsworthy links approved by the moderators while suggested stories are links that users have suggested the moderators upgrade to featured or mentioned status.
Featured stories on the homepage look like the entry above. Users may click “Send to” to save the story to the service of their choice. There is also a “Notes” button to check if moderators have left any notes on that story. On the right, you will see a thumbnail picture of the moderator that approved the story. At times there will be the text “votes” and then a number. That means the story has been suggested by that many users.
The image on the left is a thumbnail of the first image within the story. If there is no picture available, moderators will try to attach a relevant image. Clicking on the image will load a full-size version of that image via lightbox.
Users can suggest stories by visiting the unfiltered stories on the undiscovered page. Stories are added constantly and if you see one you like, just click on “Suggest story”.
Content
Whitesoap doesn’t adhere to any genre specifically. Stories are indexed from various sites from gossip to tech and cars. As of this writing, Whitesoap has already indexed 200,000 stories. However, the content on the homepage will invariably be influenced by the interests of the moderators. That’s why there are moderators from various parts of the interwebs. For now, there are moderators skilled in all things Apple, tech, design and um.. “wacky”.
Thoughts
Whitesoap does have its advantages by not relying on user-submitted content, prone to “gaming”, being marred by “the bury brigade” and all the other disadvantages of digg-like sites. Whitesoap can be thought of as a mix between TechMeme and Slashdot – automated yet moderated. Unfortunately, as Whitesoap grows, the need for more and more moderators will grow quickly to keep the flow of news coming.
As far as Whitesoap aesthetics and site features are concerned, there is definitely room for tweaking so if you have any suggestions please drop a comment for Ben & crew.
Disclosure: I am on the Whitesoap payroll and moderate there along with Dan, Derek, Nate and Ben “smash” Guild.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Paul: Quick tidbit, Ben bought the Whitesoap.com domain from me a while ago cuz he loved the name and I wasn’t using it :).
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I arrived here from nine rules and just looked at Whitesoap, it looks nice to and the content is varied – is nice for people who do not want to hear a lot of tech jabber, nice not to have to sign up as well.
Is everyone who moderates it a kid basically? It should do well with sixteen to twenty year olds who are not interested in original content, and prefer a guide to what is already out there.
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I often read your blog and often find lots of very useful information. Reading this latest entry concerns me. It all seems very honest and non bias as usual but seeing an advert on the left, under your sponsors, for what your reviewing is kid of concerning for the honesty of your review.
Thanks for letting me know Stewart. I am not sure if you saw the very last line w/ the disclosure. I always disclose whether I affiliated with a company or compensated for a post. Whitesoap did not pay for the graphic in my sidebar, but I do get paid for my work as a moderator. Hope that clears things up. This review was my own idea for trying to get the word out about this.
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Almost exact idea is behind ratingo.com: except moderation and it’s online for almost a year.
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Although it seems that the items on the frontpage of ratingo are a month old and that users need accounts.
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“Users may click “Send to†to save the story to the service of their choice.”
That is exactly the reason why we build Shareomatic!, keep your page clean with only one link and let the users decide which service(s) they want to use.
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Sorry Paul, typical of me I didn’t read to the end. With that disclosure I take back what I said. Thanks for your transparent reviewing.
The site was crawling to load on my first visit, perhaps getting the article images, not sure. Cool idea, but I personally don’t see myself going there for stories, it’s easy enough to do an RSS check of the typical sites from which you are pulling all of your headlines. Looks like it was a lot of fun to make though! And I’m sure with time it will carve out its own niche.
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Paul, you might consider using Slimbox rather than Lightbox for this site. It works even when the page isn’t done loading (Lightbox aborts and you just get a link to the image, taking you away from the page), it conforms to web standards better and has a much smaller footprint. I’ve found it’s pretty much equivalent to Lightbox and I switched to it for the gallery on my own site.
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Thanks for the ideas Andrew, but I’m just a moderator and don’t have control over things like that. I’ll let Ben know though.
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