Pligg to Launch Fraxi, A “Ning” for Digg Clones

Pligg is an open source script which allows anyone with a little technical knowledge to create their own Digg-like social news site. The company will soon launch a new service named “Fraxi“, which would allow anybody to create their own Pligg powered site within few mouse clicks.

Just like how Blogger is for blogging and Ning is social networks, Fraxi will be Digg-like sites. You can create social news sites for just about everything, say for cats, dogs, mobiles or whatever you may have in mind. They’ll give you a sub-domain “yourname.fraxi.com” as well. The service is free, and more details are expected to be announced.

Pligg was recently put up for sale, but nobody showed any interest in acquiring them. Maybe, that’s the reason why founders had to come up with Fraxi. This new service will compete with coRank, a similar service which was recently relaunched. I speculate that Fraxi will have an ad-based revenue model. It’s not really clear whether they’ll share ad revenues with publishers.

I don’t plan on launching my personal Digg clone anytime sooner or later, but if I do, I’ll do it by installing Pligg on my own server. Fraxi might sound attractive, but it’s a hosted pligg solution, so if your site goes big or if Fraxi decides to shutdown, you’ll lose everything. This is just my afterthought, though.

[Via: Mashable]