I've been using Spotplex for just over a week now and, as promised, wanted to share some of my experiences so far. Let me start by saying that right out of the gate I was excited about Spotplex. The service, which promises to rate blogs based on visits rather than votes, kind of turns the digg model on its ear.
Rather than relying on a mob of voters (who can obviously be used to game the system) Spotplex promises reliance on page views and impressions. In the long run this seems like a pretty solid idea - it's the basis for some of our older methods of page ranking after all. Don't mistake the fact that I like the idea with the current state of the service.
Right out of the gate you can probably be sure that sites like TechCrunch will dominate the service. An hour of TechCrunch page views easily dwarf some sites entire week. Of course Spotplex has promised to tweak their algorithm to handle this sort of thing but there's still plenty of room for problem. Even if blogs are rated individually based on weighted traffic surges caused by StumbleUpon or Digg can easily skew results.
Unfortunately there are a few other problems that plague Spotplex that can't go un-mentioned. In the past week I've experienced page loads on their site in excess of several minutes. It's hard to say whether these slow downs are related to traffic or coding but I've experienced tons of coding problems - so that might be a clue.
For most of yesterday, for example, my "tracking link" led to a portion of CSS rather than my page's profile. Before that I was getting tons of server error messages as well.
There are also some issues with organization that really drag the site down. When you submit your blog you're asked to tag it with a few keywords. While this is pretty standard your keywords seem to be the sole bits of information used for categorizing your posts.
Spotplex offers several topic specific widgets and I quickly noticed some of my WordPress posts turning up on the Gaming widget. Apparently it's an issue their aware of, I'm just surprised it wasn't addressed earlier. The real issue though is that it quickly negates the widgets value - why include a topic specific widget when the posts it showcases aren't topic specific?
While I'm leaving the tracking code in place right now I've removed the widget. I'm really hoping Spotplex can get a hold of their issues and put together a solid product. I think it's just a little too early right now to get excited. If they can get the site sped up a bit, if they can fix up their widget, and possibly shed some light on how they plan to deal with high traffic sites vs. low traffic ones they might prove to be a useful tool for bloggers.
