Wretch Co (無名小站), the nation’s leading social networking Web site, received a homepage facelift yesterday and came out looking eerily similar to its parent company Yahoo-Kimo Inc (雅虎奇摩).
Through the revamped site, Wretch was hoping to foster a more content-based network and encourage users to interact by applying a four-point measuring system to grade users’ favorite writings, photos and blogs, the company said.
The redesigned site will contain 12 major categories representing multiple facets of life in Taiwan: creation, travel, lifestyle, sports, entertainment and high-technology, among others. Each section will contain between three and five subcategories.
“A traditional news site with similar categories and editors deciding which stories get published uses a top-down approach,” Chien Chi-yu (簡志宇), Wretch founder and now director at the Wretch division of Yahoo, told reporters yesterday.
“The Wretch homepage turns this on its head by having users pick which news is important to them in a democratic fashion and employing a bottom-up methodology,” Chien said.
The four-point ratings are for recommendations, collectibles, popularity and date of release. Users need to pay attention to all four criteria in order to have their publications pushed up in the rankings and appear on Wretch’s homepage.
Wretch now calls itself “Taiwan’s biggest multimedia reserve,” with more than 250 million entries, 1.7 billion photos and more than 8 million short films.
Wretch’s new appearance also coincides with a redesign of the Facebook Web site.
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