It looks like Pinterest. It acts like Digg. The newest player in the social media sphere adds some features from Stumbleupon and Twitter to the mix to form Thruzt, now entering into public beta.
Unlike many of its predecessors, Thruzt encourages networks to be formed within the community to draw attention to submissions. Users select content on the web that they find valuable or write up their own stories on their blogs and submit it to Thruzt. Then, the “game” is on to get it enough votes to get popular.
The first thing people will notice when visiting is that the layout is very similar to Pinterest. Rather than the linear display people are used to on Digg and Reddit, Thruzt has a multi-column layout that adjusts based upon screen size and resolution. On a 17″ monitor at standard resolution, for example, the site stretches 5-columns across.
Instead of the categories that Stumbleupon uses, the newsrooms that Digg uses, and the subreddits that Reddit uses, Thruzt is organized by paths. There is a wider variety than on Digg but not an open-ended array the way that Reddit does it.
While self-promotion of submissions is strongly encouraged, spam is still not tolerated. There are both algorithmic and manual filters in place to prevent users from blasting their content out there for their own benefit if it’s low quality. They use the “nofollow” attribute (which eliminates Google and Bing SEO value from the link) on stories that have not reached the popular page, making SEO spamming unlikely while still rewarding high-quality content. The attribute is removed for stories that become popular.
“Thruzt was built with two main foundations,” said founder Zetadog. “First, to rebuild a strong social media community, and second to give bloggers, journalists and others a way to get attention and send traffic to their blogs and websites.”
The community is still small. Most stories do not get over 20 “thruzts”, but features such as public “nixes” (downvotes), post tagging, the ability to upload an appropriate thumbnail (a feature not present on other social news sites), and the general feel of community gives high hopes that this site will pick up where others have left off.
