Thoof it

Digg has a new competitor, and it's easier to use. It's called Thoof, and it is a social news web 2.0 web site that offers personalized news to its users. Just sign up and start Thoofing.

You can add stories, search through submitted stories, rank submitted stories, read stories, search or browse through stories, and - (something digg users can't do), even offer suggestions on how to improve already submitted stories. That feature right there would help eliminate a lot of the problems with dupes on digg and other similar style sites.

I submitted my own story to Thoof, just to see how easy it was. Signing up was simple. Enter your email. They send you a confirmation link, you choose your password and user name. That's it. You can even sumbit your story *before* you sign up. It makes it as easy as can be.

Submitting your story is also easy. You just copy and paste the URL of the story, enter a title and a description, and (another leg up on digg) enter in your tags. Tags can be anything, and you can add more than one. It's kind of like Del.icio.us meets digg in that sense.

I think I would prefer a limited number of choices in the tag department - kind of like digg's categories. But the option of putting more than one just rocks.

For example, on digg, if I were submitting a story on the new PSP versus the DS Lite which included a video of a side-by-side comparison. Would that go under Videos/Gaming Videos, Video Games/Sony, Video Games/Nintendo, or Technology/Gaming Industry News? An argument could be made for each. I could even put it under Technology/Gadgets if I really wanted to. But with a Thoof-like multi-choice system of tags, I could put all of those labels on it, and then some. A good improvement in my opinion.