Addictomatic.com - A Topic Aggregation Site with Search Capabilities
Addictomatic is a topic aggregation site similar to Alltop.com or popurls.com in that it aggregates all the best content on the web into one location. The main difference between Addict-o-matic and the other aggregation sites, is it’s focus on search and personalization.
While Addictomatic.com does provide you with a few canned or popular topics on it’s homepage, the real strength of this little application comes from it’s search capabilities. Even though it doesn’t perform the search results as I expected, it’s still a nice addition to the genre. Read further for a review of my experience and check out the site to decide for yourself.
Search
As I stated in the opening paragraphs, Addict-o-matic seems to focus it’s service around the search capabilities of the site. By doing a search on the site, it allows you to create and customize a page around a specific and unique topic of interest.
While this does provide a unique approach to the topic aggregation genre, it does have one flaw… no contextual search. Meaning… the search results page will only show you a set of canned sites and RSS feeds and not provide results based on your search.
For example, I did a search for “seo”. You would think that the site would return a few sites that are focused on web technology or marketing - like altsearchengines.com or SEOmoz.org - instead it returns a standard set of components for general bookmarking or new sites such as del.icio.us, Twitter Search, Bloglines, technorati, and Digg.
Now, I do realize that technically this is a very tall order to fill… just a personal expectation of what I thought the function would perform.
Canned Topics
While the search capabilities will provide you with a standard set of search results, some of the canned or pre-set topics does return a set of contextual sites for the topic you select.
For example, the “web 2.0″ topic returned sites such as TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and GigaOm to name a few.
Personalization
Another nice feature of this site is the ability to personalize the order of source components on a page and bookmark it for later use. This does provide an advantage over other aggregation sites that simply will provide you with a large gallery of sites you may or may not need. So if you like a site… but it’s at the bottom of the list, you have to scroll down to view it every time.
With Addictomatic, the site allows you to move or remove source components based on your preferences. It also provides you with the capability to save and share this site for later use… something the other sites don’t offer at this time.
Conclusion
While Addictomatic.com doesn’t have the variety of topics as Alltop.com or the advanced options of PopURLs.com, it does provide you with a few set of nice features the other sites’s don’t offer. It will be interesting to see how the concept evolves and matures. If they can provide a contextual search capability, it will definitately be the top dog in it’s genre.
