CoScoop

What Is CoScoop? Something Else!

CoScoop is a social news website. Like many other sites out there, CoScoop lets its users submit links to interesting articles on the web, or write articles themselves. The CoScoop community can then take part of this information and rate it, making good content more visible, and bad content less. The community can of course also discuss the news and share articles.

But there's more than that to CoScoop. The whole idea behind CoScoop is that you should never again have to dive head-first into the heaps of information on the web, just to spend hours trying to dig up something that is actually interesting to you. But how can you achieve this? CoScoop does this by constantly keeping track of what and how you rate content on the site. Through this, it can actually figure out what you seem interested in at the moment. By doing this, it can also quickly find scoops (that's what we call articles around here) that matches your interests, and present them to you.

But what's even cooler is that you can build a network of buddies on CoScoop, and whenever one of your buddies comes across a scoop and presses the "Share" button, thus giving it a higher rating, that scoop will be checked against your interests, and if a match, immediately sent to your personal inbox on the site. You can easily find buddies that are likely to provide you with interesting content by taking a look at the Chemistry between you and the other user.

We think it's time to start sharing information for real, and more importantly, share information that actually matters to its receiver. CoScoop gets you the stuff you like.

How Does It Work?

It's all quite simple really, but here's a description of how things work around here. If you want to get started using the site quickly, we'd suggest you take a look at our Screencast or the Quick-Start Guide instead, which will help you with that. If you simply wonder about the nuts and bolts of CoScoop, read on.

Any registered CoScoop user can easily post links and articles to the site, and once posted, they are referred to as scoops, and appears in the Latest News pages. Each scoop comes with a page of its own with the scoop's contents and discussion, as well as a "Share" button, an "Add to favorites" button, and a "Mark as inappropriate" button. Every time a user clicks the "Share" button, the scoop's rating will increase. If a scoop's rating increases sufficiently within a certain amount of time, that scoop will be promoted, which means that it will now show up in the Top News pages on the site. If many users have disliked a scoop, and therefor marked it as inappropriate, it will be harder for that scoop to be promoted. So far, nothing new.

Each time a user rates a scoop, it will affect that user's interests. The interests can be seen in the user's profile. They will probably not remain constant, since CoScoop only looks at what you've been doing recently, allowing interests to change over time as you discover new things that you like. Users can compare each other's interests by looking at their Chemistry when they view other user's profiles.

Users can also become buddies. By adding buddies to your buddy list, you can build a network in which you can share scoops you find interesting with other users. This all works through the "Share" button. Whenever someone clicks it, their buddies' interests will be checked against the scoop's categorization, and if there is a match, the scoop will be sent to the matching buddies. The previously mentioned Chemistry helps users to find others with similar interests, making it easy to build a network that benefits its participants.

The CoScoop Crew

CoScoop was created, and is constantly updated, by two swedish informatics students. We actually started out as a crew of four, but only two seemed to have the massive amount of spare time required to design and develop what became a pretty big web application when it all started to come together. Though, we think you should still give the other two some credit, as they helped a lot during early development and design stages, and helped spawn many good ideas for CoScoop. Now go have some fun. It would be cool if you shared us some nice scoops, so don't hesitate to give our profiles a visit!