By Carolina Muñiz
Content Creator at Marketing4eCommerce
HIt's been more than fifteen years since Menéame was born , the first major social media project in Spain before other social networking portals such as Tuenti became successful in our country. They were among the first to venture into letting users decide what content was published on their website and what was not . Today it remains one of the most widely used news aggregators. Today we tell you its story.
When Menéame was born
The history of Menéame begins with Ricardo Galli , a professor and doctor of computer science at the University of the Balearic Islands, who became interested in the functioning of Digg . Digg is a news aggregator that was born as an experiment in 2004, and which is still relevant today in the scientific and technological community around the world, since these are the topics that are usually discussed on the platform. Galli, attracted by the functioning of this website where argentina number data users could upload, share and comment on news about science and technology, decided to create a similar version in Spanish, but with one difference: it had to be open source .
It was then that he began to collaborate with the Mallorcan computer scientist and free software specialist Benjamí Villoslada . In December 2005 they launched Menéame.net , their improved version of Digg. The website also functioned, as it does now, thanks to the contributions that users found in digital media and blogs.
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What has set this website apart from the start has been the fact that it is released as free software. That is, anyone can use its code to create an improved version of the site.
Despite its primitive beginnings, Menéame's evolution was rapid. At first it only had a simple design and a virtual server for rent. They soon realized that they needed changes to improve the user experience and thus continue to grow, such as including tabs for the main functions or menus to present more options.
In this way, they included the queue of pending news or the karma of the users , one of the basic elements for the functioning of the platform. The karma of the users is used to avoid the manipulation of information and is based on the participation of these users in the community, so that the more karma a user has, the more reliable is what they publish .