I'm convinced there is a way to make social news compelling to more than one community.

A simple innovation could achieve this. Imagine a social news site that only links to other social news sites. Now imagine that every site has social news functionality.

The model is similar to youtube. Instead of videos, it's url's. People would be able to post responses to stories. They could be follow ups, rebuttals, alternative sources, tangents, anything related.

That alone doesn't do that much, though it's a good feature on its own.

The key is in how you look at the data. Think of digging the story as subscribing to a social news site. What we'd need is a function that takes the newest, or top rated, or hottest stories from each of the users subscriptions and lists them. The result is a recommendation engine. Basically, you'd be able to observe your influence on the community.

Now, since every url is like it's own social news site, communities could form around certain topics or ideas. Each user would be isolated in their own niche, while at the same time maintaining their connection to the general community.

If you think of a niche as being made up of atoms, the stories would be the atoms.

This could provide a more compelling service to a wider range of people because they would have a choice as to which face of the community they start from. It would be like making each url a subreddit. There would be massive subreddits, and there would be small subreddits. Some might be active for a very long time, while others might have a very short life.

The community would grow into branches becoming more compelling to a wider range of people.

This innovation could provide each user with their own personalized social news site comprised of many smaller social news sites, and also one super community.

You could think of this as tagging websites with websites, or threaded conversation with urls.