TechWinter

I just finished having an email chat with John one of the co-founders of Slinkset.  Slinkset is the new Digg-clone we use to power our news-specific area (News Engine) of TechWinter.

The chat was initiated by John as he wanted to 1-1 feedback on their product. Below is a summary of our chat in interview form.

1. Does Slinkset offer anyway to embed code to drive people to my main site/homepage?

2. A plugin or badge that allows people to auto-submit my site and theirs to our News Engine? This would be very helpful to our readers.

3. On the invite box I have no easy way to invite new users. I know adding those fancy scrape systems for Gmail, Yahoo, et al are more challenging than just a CSV import but even a basic    CSV import would be nice to have?

4. Can comments be made more prominent? Also it would help if those who submitted to the News Engine were told of any comments made to their submission.

5. Integration with FF would be really nice as I get tonnes of traffic from FF now and I think a great many social bloggers do too.

6. Can we expect a bookmarklet that includes summaries rather than just the article title and link? Mixx does this and Digg does not.

7. Can I include Adsense Ads as I didn’t see that anywhere yet?

8. Will we ever be able to include our own GA code for tracking?

All in all I learned lots from John about their upcoming feature development and some of their current features that I had overlooked. If you are looking for a tool to drive users to your site by aggregating news, quality links, or topical conversation then this may be a good tool to start with since it took 10 minutes to set up.

Have you tried out our News Engine yet? If not please do give it a go the content turns over regularly and we always adding users.

*You can also find this post published at Posterous. I have decided to give them a try, one of these days I will possibly write a review of the service if it proves interesting.  Thanks to Duncan Riley for promoting it enough that I just had to try it.