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March 3, 2006

Newsvine is Perfect

Michael Arrington

51 comments »

Newsvine took the password protection off of its site yesterday and officially launched (my pre-launch post on Newsvine is here).

Newsvine combines the best features of a number of companies and products like Digg and Google News with great features like chat and blogging-style comments. The result is a perfect news site (note that new competitors, like spotback (mentioned here) are aiming to overthrow Newsvine already, however).

The result is a really wonderful social news experience. They are also planning on a revenue sharing arrangement with news contributors (we’ll see how that goes).

Congratulations to Mike Davidson and the team at Newsvine. It’s now a site that I visit at least daily.

FYI, Newsvine was mentioned quite a bit in today’s Gillmor Gang.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, March 3rd, 2006 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Dave’s Wordpress Blog » Scripting News for 3/3/2006

    March 3rd, 2006 at 3:23 pm

  2. Confessions of an Undercover Geek » Newsvine Launches…It’s Cool But…Ehh

    March 3rd, 2006 at 3:33 pm

  3. r-echos » Blog Archive » Newsvine is Perfect

    March 3rd, 2006 at 4:38 pm

  4. The Crisscross News

    March 3rd, 2006 at 6:31 pm

  5. It looks obvious

    March 3rd, 2006 at 7:33 pm

  6. vowe dot net

    March 4th, 2006 at 1:28 am

  7. I’m Simon Dickson. » Blog Archive » Newsvine goes public

    March 4th, 2006 at 2:11 am

  8. Perfección — Proletarium

    March 4th, 2006 at 3:13 am

  9. Quintacolumnismo

    March 4th, 2006 at 4:05 am

  10. Peter’s Webmaster Blog » Smart Social News mit Newsvine

    March 4th, 2006 at 5:36 am

  11. connecting*the*dots

    March 4th, 2006 at 11:45 pm

  12. Newsvine: The Wisdom Of The Crowd at connecting*the*dots

    March 4th, 2006 at 11:58 pm

  13. GeekBrief.TV | Video Podcast with news about tech tools and toys.

    March 5th, 2006 at 1:18 am

  14. Mike Davidson

    March 5th, 2006 at 6:36 pm

  15. Newsvine at business|bytes|genes|molecules

    March 5th, 2006 at 6:38 pm

  16. 2803, le blog

    March 6th, 2006 at 4:19 am

  17. meckz | net » Newsvine launches, impresses

    March 6th, 2006 at 7:34 am

  18. oBeattie » Newsvine is Perfect

    March 7th, 2006 at 11:08 am

  19. TechCrunch » Will Wikio challenge Google News and Technorati?

    April 2nd, 2006 at 9:54 pm

  20. oBeattie » Will Wikio challenge Google News and Technorati?

    April 3rd, 2006 at 2:09 am

  21. Will Wikio challenge Google News and Technorati? at Emakina Web 2.0 News

    April 8th, 2006 at 2:16 pm

  22. marazzi

    September 18th, 2006 at 12:50 pm

  23. 1031 Exchange

    October 7th, 2006 at 5:04 pm

Comments

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  1. Eric Willis

    March 3rd, 2006 at 2:19 pm

    I would agree. This is a beautifully constructed service and site.

  2. Zoli Erdos

    March 3rd, 2006 at 2:20 pm

    Mike, pls. fix the URL: instead of the pre-launch post it’s a link back this very same article.

  3. brandon

    March 3rd, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    i’d have to agree as well. the tagging is great and getting news right from the wire w/out the lag is great. I added the feed to my netvibes a few weeks ago above google news.

  4. Sean Sperte

    March 3rd, 2006 at 3:09 pm

    Well, officially the launch occured on March 1st, but who’s counting?

    Newsvine has made the news interesting to me, and I’m finding myself genuinely aware of what’s going on in the world. Imagine that!

    HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

  5. Garry Wiseman

    March 3rd, 2006 at 3:36 pm

    They’ve done a very nice job on the user interface. The design is clean and the navigation is logical.

  6. gillo

    March 3rd, 2006 at 3:49 pm

    Newsvine is indeed a great tool. Now that is out of the door I’d like to see if the chat feature will be used or not. I had the opportunity to browse Newsvine before it went public and there wasn’t much activity then.

  7. Srinivasan

    March 3rd, 2006 at 3:51 pm

    Mike, I am wondering why you must be talking about Newsvine at TechCrunch, a website “Tracking Web2.0″.

    I have an email from the founders saying “We are NOT a Web2.0 company”. I am sure you have heard them say this, but if you need, I can send you the email as well.

    If its okay, can you pls explain why you would want to profile them at TechCrunch?

  8. Michael Arrington

    March 3rd, 2006 at 4:02 pm

    Srinivasan - of course they are a web 2.0 company. They don’t get to decide. I do. And you do.

  9. Mike Constantinos

    March 3rd, 2006 at 8:49 pm

    All these news site pack so much news on one page that its almost an information overload. How about some news sites that reduce information overload than the reverse?

  10. Edward Vielmetti

    March 3rd, 2006 at 10:47 pm

    Hmph. All the glossy user interface in the world will not hide that this is just repackaged AP wire service copy that I can get from anywhere.

    AP does not do a good job of covering much of anything in the parts of the world that I care about. If you read the Detroit section there are hardly any stories, and if you try to search for Ann Arbor you’ll get weeks old news.

    Lipstick, pig.

  11. Nir Ben-Dor

    March 4th, 2006 at 6:57 am

    Newsvine is a great site both in terms of design and potential content.

    However, I have to say that the link between news reporting and citizen journalism does injustice to the potential of citizen journalism.

    News is usually an objective reporting on events. Something that mainstream media is doing and will do better than citizen journalists. Of course contribution from ad hoc citizen journalists will add value, but if it becomes the main thing it will end up just aggregating and copying the news.

    The power of citizen journalism is in local and community reporting, where the reporter proximity has a lot of added value. Not necessarily in the context of news but in discovery of opinions and targeted stories. In other words this kind of media needs focus, which I don’t see in Newsvine. Tagging is not enough to form focus.

    Another reason why citizen reporting should not focus on news is that the added value of individual reporter is in his/her ability to insert opinion and interpretation into the items. This is something which mainstream media cannot do freely.

    My view of collaborative reporting websites is that they should be more similar to boingboing.net than to New York Times. It should be an enabler to surface the interesting stuff that does not make it to the news.

    Nir (CoMagz.com)

  12. John

    March 4th, 2006 at 8:33 am

    Not so perfect anymore. Visiting the site generates “/1.1 Service Unavailable” error.

  13. Rory

    March 4th, 2006 at 8:43 am

    I checked it out last night.
    I really like it, maybe its just because Mikey said it was Perfect :)
    Now Listening to VineSeekers ( their podcast)

    I have been back couple times, and currently im getting the Service Error, maybe too much people heading to it.

  14. mitch

    March 4th, 2006 at 9:25 am

    Newsvine opens and then goes down? Not good.

  15. DG

    March 4th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    Also getting the “service unavailable” error.

  16. Mike D.

    March 4th, 2006 at 10:05 am

    Thanks so much for the kind words Michael. Yeah, perfect is a relative term, everybody… don’t get hung up on semantics. Nobody’s perfect. As I’ve said a thousand times around the web already, we’re still only 5 or 10% of the way there, but all indications are that the path we’ve taken so far has been a good one. We know there are still plenty of things to fix, features to add, and emerging issues to address, but we’re up to the task. When you’re a team of five, you can move pretty quickly.

    Let me address a few of the comments/pingbacks really quickly:

    1. Regarding the Web 2.0 thing, yeah, I’ve tried to distance myself from this term, but only because most people use it incorrectly. Too many companies are trying to call themselves Web 2.0 merely because of the technologies they’re using (RSS, Ajax, Rails, etc). If one of your main selling points as a company is that you use commonly available technologies that everyone else can use, well then that’s not a great position to be in. The thinking man’s Web 2.0 is all about creating an architecture for participation — letting people increase the value of everyone’s experience, including their own, by actively participating in the experience itself.

    2. Regarding Crisscross and other people in similar spaces comparing their services to NV: Keep on keepin’ on. Concentrate on your own product and making it the best it can be. There is plenty of room for multiple communities to succeed in the collaborative news space. The ones who ultimately will are the ones who worry more about their own services and less about their competitors’.

    3. Regarding the packing in of a lot of content: Our philosophy is that you can use Newsvine as you would your RSS reader, subscribing to tags, authors, etc, or you can use it in its more likely scenario: as a fountain of news. The overwhelming majority of people in the world get their news just by glancing at a front page a few times a day and never worrying about what they may have missed at some random point in time. The stress of keeping up with a heavy RSS load can be unbearable, and we’ve seen to it that casual use of Newsvine involves a simple glance at one of the main pages and that’s it. It’s not unlike how people use any major media site, whether it be CNN, MSNBC, or ESPN. Glance and go if you’re in a hurry… scroll and stay if you have time.

    4. Regarding performance over the first couple of days: We had a load balancer issue for about an hour on the first day which slowed things temporarily. And this morning, we had a brief mod_rewrite issue that was causing the service unavailable issues. Both are solved. We’re sure these sorts of things will pop up from time to time as we continue to solidify our setup, but all in all, not too bad so far.

  17. Henning Lange

    March 4th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    Maybe the best web 2.0 application I’ve seen so far :-)

    The share of ad revenues as well as the awesome regional function will allow for fast and worldwide growth.

    Has anyone an idea how newsvine will track ad revenues such as Google AdSense and pay them to the author efficiently?

  18. Rory

    March 4th, 2006 at 10:53 am

    Newsvine is back UP

  19. Serge Lescouarnec

    March 4th, 2006 at 11:33 am

    I have been ’seeding’ the Newsvine from my ‘Serge the Concierge’ blog for a while.
    I like the look of it and the tools they offer. I still have to get familiar with the ‘linking’ part in the posts though.
    This is one of the best designed things i have used in the past few months.

    Serge
    Biz Site:
    http://www.njconcierges.com
    Blog:
    http://sergetheconcierge.typepad.com

  20. Natalie

    March 4th, 2006 at 1:21 pm

    Hmm, was willing to have a look and it ‘looks’ nice. I got through every front page article though and they were all boring and insular. I know it’s a community site and therefore this could change but to me it looked like a bunch of mainstream media/people-who-want-to-be part-of-the-mainstream-media getting together to give us more US news. This isn’t a critique of the newsvine system itself, which I’m sure is just amazing, but the content left a lot to be desired!

  21. Todd Zeigler

    March 5th, 2006 at 9:38 am

    I agree with your assessment that Newsvine is a fantastic product. A couple of other points:

    (1) I would like to see them include a feature like the Washington Post rolled out where they link to blogs that are taking about each story. The site seems to want to have the conversation self contained on Newsvine, which isn’t the way things work.

    (2) I think its inevitable that there end of being a bunch of sites like this. Newsvine’s community will take on a personality that will attract some and turn off others. Other properties with different personalities will pop up for the people who don’t fit in at Newsvine.

  22. ShaolinTiger

    March 5th, 2006 at 10:21 pm

    It is indeed a truly amazing piece of work, I’m very happy with it so far and just blogged about it too.

  23. Jay Pipes

    March 7th, 2006 at 8:04 am

    I agree that the concept and design is quite nice; I see Newsvine as having a very good start. However, I am afraid they may fall victim to what so many companies new to this arena have fallen prey to: failure to adequately predict and handle increases in traffic. The site, while beautiful and well-designed, was miserably slow each time I used it. Even with this performance problem, however, I found the concept compelling enough to add the RSS link for the tech feeds to my feed reader.

    I have subsequently removed the feed. Page loads were taking > 10 seconds just to display the content, never mind all the images. Simple things could have been done to cache content and speed performance. I fear that the platform on which Newsvine is running may need some serious help. I just hope that corrections are made quickly enough so that people don’t lose interest.

  24. Mike D.

    March 7th, 2006 at 1:33 pm

    Jay: We had one 90-minute window on Friday when our load balancer was sending all traffic to our server (ouch), but besides that, it’s been pretty fast. Not sure what’s causing the speed issues you mentioned as we haven’t had a single report of chronic slowness among the thousands of emails that have come in. Oh well, whatever it is, I don’t think it’s “the platform” as you say. We already cache heavily, and remember, we built ESPN before this, which handled 1000x the load. Perhaps some connectivity issues, even on our side. Let us know if you’re still experiencing anything like this.

  25. k

    March 7th, 2006 at 8:00 pm

    Perfect? Hyperbole at it’s best.

    It’s a nice enough site, but I don’t see an awful lot of innovation really. The paying people to write stories is an interesting twist, though I’m not certain how well it’ll work in practice. Besides that, I must be missing the incredible features.

  26. calvindrakeministries

    February 17th, 2007 at 2:02 am

    The officals of the State of Ohio are criminals and very corrupt this includes
    Judges at all levels and law enforcement and Prosecutors, down to the corrupt prison system. They refuse to have juvenile prevention programs for children at risk. They all told me that if I, open up my Clevelsnf Juvenile
    Justice And delinquency Prevention center they will place me into a prison.
    agin for operating my non profit corporation registered No. 608274.
    see records on file http://www.state.oh.us./sos/
    http://jjdpcalvindrakeministries.blogspot.com

  27. calvindrakeministries

    February 17th, 2007 at 2:10 am

    The names of the corrupt Judges are: Kathleen A. Sutula, Shirley Strickland Saffold,Patricia Ann Blackmond, They are involved with carnival owner Carl Bayer and his wife Judy bayer organized crime this includes former Congressman Louis Stokes, and his dead brother, Stephaine Tubbs Jones
    all are involved in criminal activity. drug trafficking. See Criminal Case No.
    CR355853, CR351072 In the Court of Common Pleas Cuyahoga County, Ohio, fraudlent search warrant not issued by a judge of the Court of Common pleas, search warrant coming out of the township of Northrandall
    into the municipality of Cleveland, ohio,

  28. calvindrakeministries

    February 17th, 2007 at 2:12 am

    See web site: http://jjdpcalvindrakeministries.blogspot.com

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