More than fifteen years have passed since Menéame was born, the first major social media project in Spain before other social network portals like Tuenti became popular in the country. They were among the first to venture into allowing users to decide which content was published on their website and which was not. Nowadays, it continues to be one of the most used news aggregators. Today, we are telling you its story.
The story of Menéame begins with Ricardo Galli, a computer science professor and doctor at the University of the Balearic Islands. He became interested in how Digg worked. Digg is a news aggregator created in 2004, still relevant in the scientific and technological community around the world, as those are the topics usually discussed on the platform. Galli was attracted by the way this website allowed users to upload, share, and comment on news about science and technology. He decided to create a similar version in Spanish, but with a difference: it would be open source.
That’s when he started collaborating with the Majorcan computer scientist and open-source specialist Benjamí Villoslada. In December 2005, they launched Meneame.net, their improved version of Digg. The website also worked, as it does now, thanks to contributions that users found in digital media and blogs.
The main differentiation of Menéame has been the fact that it was launched as open-source software. This means anyone can use its code to create an improved version of the site.
Despite its primitive beginnings, Menéame’s evolution was rapid. At first, it only had a simple design and the rental of a virtual server. Soon they realized they needed changes to improve the user experience and continue to grow, such as including tabs for the main functions or menus to present more options.
In this way, they included the queue of pending news or user karma, one of the basic elements for the platform’s operation. User karma is used to prevent information manipulation and is based on their participation in the community. The more karma a user has, the more reliable their publications are.
As mentioned earlier, being an open-source platform, anyone can use it. Menéame had over 100 active clones worldwide, although many of them no longer exist or are outdated. Among the most prominent we can find the Galician Chuza, with a very similar model in votes and submitted news. Other replications also appeared in different languages such as Latafanera (“the gossip”) in Catalonia or Zabaldu in the Basque Country. There were also clones focused on different themes or content such as Negóciame, focused on the business world, or Webéame, for web developers.
In 2016, Ricardo Galli announced his retirement from Menéame. According to his own words, he could not dedicate the time he wished and wanted to focus on new projects. Thus, blogger and founder of Diariomotor, Daniel Seijo, became the new CEO of the company with the aim of generating more revenue in a non-intrusive way.
Unfortunately, the platform has also been the subject of controversies related to intellectual property, such as the one they had to face related to the AEDE canon or the Google tax. Also, they experienced problems with fake news, leading them to include stricter measures when publishing content. Moreover, they also have suffered cyberattacks. In 2022, they reported an attack that would have affected almost 18% of users, prompting the reset of all passwords for greater security.
In 2020, they launched a mobile application, although it is not updated for the latest versions of Android or iOS. Recently, they improved their website to a newer and more attractive version, adapted to the new generation of the internet. However, it is up to the user to choose whether to use the new or old version.
Due to its importance in the sector, Menéame created – almost unintentionally – the Menéame Effect. This effect can multiply website traffic and visits in a matter of minutes. In the following video, we explain it in more detail.
In Menéame, you choose the interests you want to see on the front page based on the communities you follow. The most popular communities in 2023 are: TV series, video games, astronomy, economy, and “cocíname”, which is focused on cooking recipes. Therefore, if your website is focused on any of these categories, creating an account on one of Spain’s largest news aggregators can make a difference in the future of your project.
This sector has big competitors such as Reddit and even Digg itself. However, Menéame continues to be a significant factor in the sector.
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