Newsvine Review

I recieved an invite to preview Newsvine.com which is a new service that allows you to read, interact and write about news stories. I knew the service was similar to Topix.net but aside from seeing a few news stories here and there I really didn’t know that much about the service.

After getting signed in I was brought to the profile screen to update my profile.

I wasn’t exactly sure where to go and what to do next so a prominanty featured link with instructions for newbies might be a good idea. I found my way to the help page and eventually got a good idea of what the service was about and how to use it. When you visit the homepage over on the right hand side you’ll see a section labeled “Top Seeds”

This is a link to sections that other members have added or “seeded” the system with. Located next to the story is number telling you how many other people have commented on the service.
Clciking through on one of stories brings you to the “seed page”

On that page you see the authors picture if they have one, some profile information about the author. There’s a link to the original story (the big green button) and the authors commentary on the subject. There also link for “tags” given to the story that allow you to search for other stories with the same tags (similar to del.icio.us). You can also give the story a “vote” the more votes the more likely it is to reach the first page. The other big green button will let you chat with other people about the story. Nobody else was around on the stories I looked at so I didn’t test that functionality. There are also comments made by other users. Going back to the homepage the next section to notice is the “Featured Writers Section”

This link take you to the featured story. Now if you click on the authors picture you come to the author page.

Here you see things like the authors feedback, how many posts and links the author has made. Now at this point it gets a little confusing are seeds the same thing as posts? How are links different from seeds or posts? I checked both and it really wasn’t clear.

Once you get of the homepage and into the sub pages you see the main content comes in two columns, the wire and the vine. The wire takes AP (and possibly other) news feeds. The vine is seeds, posts or links from regular users (I’m still fuzzy on exactly what they are). There do seem to be quite a few abashedly blatant self promotions, but who am I to call the kettle black.

At this point I cruised around for a little while to try and get a feel for the site, what you could do with, and whats broken here’s what I came away with.

I like the UI, it’s crisp easy to and navigate, although some of light grays are a little too light. I also finally noticed the “welcome” button on the right I missed when I first logged in, need to fix that and make it more prominent. Everything is available as an RSS feed, which is a good thing. The question is do we need another scraper mashup site that combines news feeds, with users blogs, digg voting and technorati-style tagging? I could see how this would work for a small niche (like threadwatch does for search) but does everybody talking about all different kinds of news lead to an exchange of fresh ideas, or a bunch of people talking at once and making a lot of noise? I tend to think it’s the latter. Now if you are trying to build a brand (personal or business) and are looking to get that name out in front of people by all means give the service a try (just don’t pour your heart and soul into it this is bubble 2.0 you know).

Something that was not apparently clear when I signed up, is this is going to be like MLM at some point. Currently there are no ads on the system but eventually their will be. The author will get 90% of the revenue from their stories. The remaining 10% will go to the person who referred you, or to newsvine if you have no referring person (so if you want an invite lemme know).

Final impressions the site combines a lot of elements that exist seperatly in some interesting ways. Is it interesting enough to make me drop something else and start using it not yet. For folks who don’t use any of the other services this might be of interest, but for me the signal to noise ratio looks very low at this point.

Categories:( newsvine | newsvine | topix | topix | news.aggregators | news.aggregators | reviews | reviews)

Popularity: 8% [?]

Sphere: Related Content

One Response to “Newsvine Review”

1. Dan Says:
   January 7th, 2006 at 11:22 pm

   Hi Michael,

   Dang… This kind of review would have taken me three or four days days to do. Very nice! Seems like you did it in 10 minutes. Very very accurate review.

   Best,
   Dan