No offense, but how hard is it exactly to build your own social news 'platform' ? If I were starting a social news site, I would rather use an open source package like pligg that I can modify to my hearts content than use any of these so called platforms </end rant>

I hope this is true. I just started using coRank.com to attempt to open a social news site for a niche market. Digg's platform is just much better. We'll switch in an instant if this happens.

Could you elaborate on what it was in coRank that you didn't like? I'm building a competing service and would be interested to know what features users need.