Top Social News Sites For Developers

by Alex Yakima

Developers like communities. Software development is just designed to be discussed, argued, rated, loved or hated... That's why social news paradigm works very good in this case. Let me bring up a couple of such web sites now:

DZone. This is probably one of not so many social news sites dedicated to software development exclusively.



Like on most social news sites on the splash page you see current snapshot of the news that the community rated high. But also can switch to "rising links" or switch or switch to navigation via tag cloud. Personally I like this site, the content is good and usability is good too.

You can also find DZone on Twitter and it may be convenient if you're a Twitter user and have a good desktop client. But there's two drawbacks too: 1) they tweet very rarely... like once per two days or so and 2) you can read stuff on Twitter but you can't rate or comment or otherwise interact with DZone native community.

Reddit >> Programming. Reddit is general purpose social news site. In fact like most of those we consider today. Overall same story - rate stuff and have fun.

There's another good feature on reddit - you can configure your profile preferences and thus see only news for categories of your interest. For instance: programming + entertainment + geek + sports.

Digg >> Programming. I guess everybody knows Digg.com. It is one of the first social news site at all. And these days it is still most visited social news site. And it's programming category has huge community behind it:

One of the cool features is Facebook Connect, so you don't need to create account to log on to Digg. Overall every social news site allows content rating/commenting only to registered users.

Delicious >> Programming. This section of one of the first social bookmarking services has interesting stuff in it too. Delicious is not exactly "social news" but the way it works is pretty similar to it. Instead of just favouring content people add it to their bookmark lists, and every such "adding" counts as a vote.



Delicious service belongs to Yahoo!

This was just 4 sites that get pretty big user traction. Is there some good social news for developers - let everybody know about it, add it in comments.