shake me It emerged a little over a decade ago as the first project that was carried out in Spain in the pre-Tuenti era. They were among the first to leave the power to decide in the hands of users what content was published on your website and which ones are not. Currently, it continues to be the most popular Spanish-speaking news aggregator and one of the most trafficked worldwide. Today we tell you the Meneame’s story.
Menéame’s story begins with Digg
Menéame’s story begins with Ricardo Galli, professor and doctor of computer science at the University of the Balearic Islands. Galli liked the kind of system the news aggregator uses in which users could upload, share and comment news about science and technology. So he decides to create a similar version in Spanish.
It is then that he begins to collaborate with the Mallorcan computer scientist and specialist in free software, Benjamin Villoslada. In December 2005 they put on the market Menéame.net, its improved version of Digg. The web also worked, as it does now, thanks to the contributions that users were finding in digital media and blogs.
The rapid evolution of a free software program
The great differential element with Digg is that Menéame was launched as free software. In other words, it is based on open source code in which any user has the possibility of using the code and creating their own improved version of the site.
The Meneáme of the beginning was a primitive program with a very simple design and that worked with only one server, the only initial expenses were the domains and the rent of a virtual server. It was quickly introduced and they soon realized that need changes: tabs for the main functions, menus to present more options, a menu on the left so that the tools gain more visibility, optimization of queries…etc.
This must be why Menéame quickly evolved quickly. For example, they soon included lto news queue earrings or users’ karma, one of the basic elements for the operation of Menéame. The karma of each user is a measure of their participation and is the value that they “add” to a news each time they vote positively or negatively, and is obtained from the activity, history and profile of each user.
Chuza, Latafanera or Zabaldu… and 100 more clones
Naturally, given the success of the orange elephant website, imitators began to appear. came to have over 100 active clones worldwide (by countries, regions, types of content…). Even in it we find some 144although it must be said that most are inactive or outdated nowadays.
To mention a few, one of the most outstanding was the Galician Chuza, both in votes and news submitted and the design seems to have been worked on a bit more than most clones. Others also emerged in other languages such as Latafanera (“la gossip” in Spanish) in Catalonia or Zabaldu in the Basque Country. There were also clones focused on different themes or content such as trade me focused on the business world web mea wag for web developers.
Various obstacles along the way
At the beginning of 2016, Ricardo Galli, founder and CEO of Menéame, his withdrawal of the company. The main promoter of the web in his day that he could not dedicate as much time to it as he wanted and that it was time to devote himself to other projects. Galli also acknowledged that he did not have generated revenue and growth expected business conditions influenced their decision.
Anyway, Galli did not completely withdraw from Menéame, since kept linked to the project as advisor and counselor. On the other hand, the blogger and founder of Diariomotor, with the aim of generating more income according to the importance and number of visits to Menéame.
In recent months, Menéame has had to face other obstacles related to intellectual property, such as . Specifically, since the beginning of this year the Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights (CEDRO) has begun a round of negotiations to recover this canon. The rate requires that news aggregators pay fees for using the content of several Spanish newspapers associated with the AEDE. Currently, Menéame has focused on promoting its own content and is preparing its own mobile app.
History of Menéame: the present
In the long years of history of Menéame this portal has become one of the social sites more important of Spain that provokes the collaboration of its community. The website of the elephant Eli can boast of having created -involuntarily- the Wiggle me effect, that already .
As Ruben Bastón comments, with this effect any news published in this news aggregator can boost traffic and visits to the source website in a matter of minutes.
Some think that the Elephant Eli website is in decline, but nothing is further from the truth. Despite its age, it seems that there is still Menéame for a while: with several million unique users per month, today it is still one of the pages that in Spain.
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