The best measure of a content’s popularity should be the number of people that actually share it with another human being!  In today “Spam–conscious” email environment, the act of emailing a link to a friend or associated is a great litmus test of whether you think its worthy of being looked at! After all, you don’t want to end up on someone’s black-list or worse their white-list.

True, most social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, base popularity on the number of times a piece of content has been bookmarked, but considering there is no real penalty or stigma associated with “reckless” bookmarking, is this really a good gauge of popularity?

Bookmarking-based Popularity: Is Social Bookmarking Democratic?
The influential Graywolf SEO Blog points to the fact that in reality, Digg power users control the homepage, not the democratic popular vote. According to seomoz.org “of all stories that make it to the front page of Digg, more than 20% come from a select group of 20 users.” Social bookmarking is also more easily abused and increasing number of marketers and sites are simply using social bookmarking for self promotion. Although Grouptivity is not immune to all types of abuse, by marrying sharing with email, it definitely helps discourage some of it.

Sharing-based Popularity: A Step in the Right Direction!
Grouptivity’s measure of popularity is based on a personal actually desire to share a piece of content with a group of people (known to them). The initial invitation goes out via email but brings the recipient back to the article or post on the Grouptivity site where they can view, discuss or share it.

Contrast this with the way social bookmarking generally works, where popularity is based on a person’s (sometimes anonymous) desire to share piece of content with the “world”.

Do You Really Know Me? – Adding Personal Context
If you find yourself on Digg or Delicious, you are probably looking at articles and content that has been rated by people you don’t known and who don’t you. One of the goals of Grouptivity to add a personal context to sharing – by assuming that your friends, co-workers and acquaintances probably know something about what you are interested in and enabling them to share content with you and either publicly or privately discuss that shared content.