Newsvine

March 2, 2006 10:25 AM

Newsvine launches to the public.It's sort of digg (there is voting) meets metafilter (there are comments) meets the news. It could be really cool, but my first impression is that it takes a lot of work.
posted by mathowie (23 comments total)

NewsvineFilter.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:30 AM on March 2, 2006

I forgot to add that here is a custom blog/news page for each user, as you "seed" newsvine. You can leave comments on any news story, and you can even do live chats with other people on the same story's page if you like. It's also loaded with ajax features that makes login and voting nice.

I'm curious if this will become something like digg, or be something like Yahoo News comments, where anything goes. It'll be interesting to see how they handle growth in the userbase.
posted by mathowie at 10:35 AM on March 2, 2006

It's been done before, many, many times (Topix.net probably being the best-of-breed, and since it was bought by a newspaper company, probably what these guys are aiming at).

The trouble is (speaking as someone who's run a similar site for 4+ years): there's not enough original content to bring people to the site (unlike say Digg, or del.icio.us/popular) and there is too much content to make a discussion viable or interesting (unlike say MeFi or Slashdot).

If I was to continue my dabbling in this space, I would: use clustering/similarity to break the site down into many sub-sites (tagging is too much work), and I would throw away or hide any article that is too similar to existing ones. And allow user-submitted content --which is a massive head-ache... If I get some free time I may just try it...
posted by costas at 10:41 AM on March 2, 2006

It sure is attractive, though. I've been staring at it all week.
posted by dougunderscorenelso at 10:53 AM on March 2, 2006

Get Smarter Here

Destined for failure.
posted by prostyle at 11:03 AM on March 2, 2006

Newswine.
posted by Termite at 11:12 AM on March 2, 2006

Too much work -- I agree! I poked around in private beta and had the impression that it took too much effort to read through and find anything, the AP newsfeeds into it weren't interesting enough to comment on and the incentive they gave you to participate (ad revenue if you wrote and people looked at your posts) didn't differ from, say, the incentive to write your own blog and do the same thing.

It did look pretty though.
posted by enakaja at 11:14 AM on March 2, 2006

The UI is certainly slick, but it's a really big sandbox to play it. I hope something cool comes from it.
posted by mkultra at 11:16 AM on March 2, 2006

dios.newsvine.com

For all my fans.
posted by dios at 11:26 AM on March 2, 2006

They have live chat for the seeded articles.

Try it out. I threw up an article to check it out. It's like IRC for each article.

Click here and go to live chat.
posted by dios at 12:38 PM on March 2, 2006

The more I study economics, the more I am convinced that Capitalism is a great thing. Consumers and producers coming together in a free-market to satisfy mutual needs, prices being set in a balance between competition and the need to survive, contact between cultures and nations because of trade: all of it seems so perfect.

No wonder dios is all over this like butter on a Texas biscuit.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 1:35 PM on March 2, 2006

hopefully this means less newfilter on the front page?

hopefully?
posted by shmegegge at 1:46 PM on March 2, 2006

Mike Davidson's announcment has more details.

The demo movie for the Seed Newsvine button is customized to your browser and platform. Nice touch.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:02 PM on March 2, 2006

Being able to watch people's columns on newsvine is not unlike a livejournal friends-list. I like that I can follow news on specific tags (like on Mefi) or from specific people (like almost anywhere). Mostly I like how darn pretty it all is.

But it does feel like content and information overload. And there's a lot of potential for abuse -- even in the last week I've seen so many people seeding posts from their own blogs. There's a code of conduct but many people seem unconcerned (hey, like Mefi) and a few people from the shallow end of the gene pool have found their way there too. Fortunately the stupidity levels are low and the complexity of the site may keep it that way.
posted by tracicle at 2:06 PM on March 2, 2006

I'm really shocked at the high regard Digg is held in. It was one of Business 2.0's top companies to watch in the next year or something like that.

It's a fine site and I like it, but they hardly invented collaborative filtering, and their membership is very tech-focused and often very immature.

Since when is collaborative filtering "like Digg?" How about "like K5?" or "like Slashdot?"
posted by scarabic at 4:18 PM on March 2, 2006

Nice application but ultimately I find it boring and overwhelming at the same time.

SO far, no site has surpassed Metafilter in terms of being able to present things I haven't seen before, either in terms of links or in terms of member contributions in the discussion area.
posted by chaz at 4:22 PM on March 2, 2006

Since when is collaborative filtering "like Digg?" How about "like K5?" or "like Slashdot?"

Like Firefly.com. (Don't miss Spanish Firefly.)

I wouldn't predict this to go far, but then I didn't put a lot of stock in Digg, either. I mean, Slashdot owns the space, right?
posted by dhartung at 4:42 PM on March 2, 2006

I mean, Slashdot owns the space, right?

This space you speak of ...

I don't think "the news" is specific nor general enough to be very interesting.
posted by mrgrimm at 4:57 PM on March 2, 2006

I check digg every day now, but take great care not to click into the comments threads, lest my brain be sucked straight out of my butt by The All-Powerful Vacuum of The Stupid. It's scary in there.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:32 PM on March 2, 2006

It looks nice and there are allot of great things in the site. You do have to work hard to even know what the purpose of the site is. Very confusing.
posted by cmacleod at 10:00 PM on March 2, 2006

you know, I just checked digg out for the first time (dunno why I waited) and you're totally right. interesting articles, for the most part, but holy FUCK are those some stupid motherfuckers.
posted by shmegegge at 11:24 PM on March 2, 2006

Interesting article on how they've implemented chat via Jabber, if any of the "dios chat crew" are still wandering around here...
posted by mkultra at 8:39 AM on March 3, 2006

I like how people are trashing this on the first day it goes public. I'll bet you all were like "this suxxors" when Google was alpha too, eh?

Here's an interesting example of how it can work: Citizen Journalist snags short interview with a star. And that star is Dave Chappelle at his movie's premier in Dayton, OH. The Newsvine Doppleganger kicks in with a link to an AP story that involves Chappelle. That happened automajically.

I have no idea whether Newsvine is gonna fly or not, but it's a little early to be writing it off or assuming it offers nothing new just because you don't get it yet.
posted by spock at 6:48 AM on March 9, 2006