The author of this article seems to have no understanding whatsoever of what Digg before their distastrous v4 launch in 2010 and Reddit, now are. Reddit and Digg are hiveminds where you go to find out what's up on the internet at large. This is not where you go to find out what your friends are doing (Facebook) or what the blogs and personalities you already know about are doing (Twitter.)
Think about it as concentric circles. Facebook is the tightest circle—people you largely actually know, or interact with on a personal level. Twitter is one more out—people you're aware of, and whom you like, some of them you know, some you don't. If those networks are like the orbits of Earth and Mars, Digg of old, and Reddit are like the orbit of Pluto.
Facebook and Twitter did not kill Digg. Ask anyone who used to frequent the site. Where to find this person? Why, on Reddit of course. If Digg had had their botched v4 launch before Reddit was a legitimate competitor, they might have had enough time to clean up the mess and get the site back on track. But instead, they launched a product that betrayed their community, who readily moved over to Reddit, who largely welcomed them with open arms.
Reddit/Digg/HN were never about aggregation for me. I use RSS for that. I come to news sharing sites to talk about the news. Prismatic doesn't look like it enables that.
It delivers a personalized curated news feed which is informed by complex data analysis, recommendation, semantic-filtering and machine learning algorithms that use your elected interests and social graph as a data source.
It's much more than simple aggregation.
You can probably tell that I really like it; and no sir, I don't work for them (!)
The problem is, at least from my short meander over there, was that the categories of things is based on your usage of Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google+. Unfortunately I don't really use any of those things for sharing (only a Facebook account that I never post on) so this site isn't very useful for me.
I use Google News a lot. I have set up several topic-specific sections on topics I wish to follow closely, and have closed some of the default Google News sections (e.g., entertainment and sports) to devote more time to more serious news. Google News is also useful for switching over to concentrated views of newspapers from particular parts of the world, e.g., India or Pakistan, or Africa.
I cultivate my Facebook circle of friends into mutual teams of news-gatherers. People friend me specifically to follow the links I post that they've heard about from other friends, and I follow most closely friends who scan news sources for new reliable links. I share out links I discover here on Hacker News, and share into Hacker News some of the best links I learn about from my friends.
Think about it as concentric circles. Facebook is the tightest circle—people you largely actually know, or interact with on a personal level. Twitter is one more out—people you're aware of, and whom you like, some of them you know, some you don't. If those networks are like the orbits of Earth and Mars, Digg of old, and Reddit are like the orbit of Pluto.
Facebook and Twitter did not kill Digg. Ask anyone who used to frequent the site. Where to find this person? Why, on Reddit of course. If Digg had had their botched v4 launch before Reddit was a legitimate competitor, they might have had enough time to clean up the mess and get the site back on track. But instead, they launched a product that betrayed their community, who readily moved over to Reddit, who largely welcomed them with open arms.