Seattle-based news site Newsvine will relaunch this afternoon with significant changes to the user experience. They’re calling the release “Evergreen.”
Among the changes: like Netvibes, Pageflakes and other personalized homepages, users will now be able to move most modules on the Newsvine home page around, or delete them altogether. Users can also add whatever news feeds they want to the home page by adding a RSS feed module.
Until now, web services that allow customization generally put the feature in a standalone area. Yahoo has my.yahoo, for example, but doesn’t allow users to make changes to the main Yahoo home page. Like their often-copied feature of allowing user comments to news items, this may be another way that Newsvine reshapes the online news industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the New York Times, USA Today and other sites allow users to create their own version of the newspaper, possibly even allowing outside RSS feeds in, in the next year or so. This builds intense user loyalty and makes it much more likely they’ll spend even more time on the site.
Other features include the addition of local headlines and weather and a slideshow called “News In Pictures” that shows a continuous stream of AP pictures.
Newsvine also just got bigger, stretching from 900 to 1240 pixels. The extra width can be collapsed with a click.
Newsvine has raised just $1.25 million in a single round of financing in July 2005 from Second Avenue Partners. They have six employees. The site currently brings in 600,000 monthly unique visitors generating 3.5 million monthly page views.
See all
Post
Very interesting.
+ user customization on the front page
+ expanding width of site (mama didn’t buy me a 23″ Cinema display for nothing!)
$1.2 million for six employees?
Wil, if I read your comment correctly, your analysis is ass-backwards. Unlike many new web startups, these guys raised very little money and have kept a very lean shop.
$1.2 million for six employees and prospect for growth?
That’s called a bargain.
Yeah, they’re doing the right thing, small shop, not taking on too much VC. The question is, can they get enough people interested in making real contributions to the site to add value on top of the AP content. So far I’d say they’ve come up a bit short, they need to hire some columnists or something to add some higher-level discourse.
Hey Mike, I’m not sure if you realized this, but actually the Wall Street Journal has had the feature of customizable homepages under their “my homepage feature” for several months now.
http://online.wsj.com/myonlinejournal/us
600,000 monthly unique visitors. You got it wrong. Check out Alexa.com on present time, not pass time. you will see Techcrunch have higher visitors than newsvine.
Newsvine have somewhere 400,000-300,000 unique visitors add six employees with $1.25 million dollar capital.
Newsvine is sorta like the rise of Stalin company.
Can the pages be shared? Can I send my own url to a page of news I’ve built that I want to share with others? That could be a cool feature.
I thought Newsvine was a pretty dumb idea initially but they’ve totally turned it around in my eyes. $1.25 million is a good first round for the investors, and now they’ve managed to lure away a lot of the ex-NYT forum participants they have a bigger audience than ever.
Newsvine could really appeal to news savvy folks with nothing better to do than read and write news (and there’s a lot of them about as MetaFilter prove(s|d)) and with the community that’s building on Newsvine, it’s sticky and they can be advertised to. They’ll make millions before long.
Not a bad start for this company of six with $1.25 million to spend.
I have to say I found the home page way too busy. I think I will stick with PageFlakes.
http://www.wtfShouldIDo.com
Newsvine is totally addictive. This new version is some hot stuff. My Newsvine page, http://lambright.newsvine.com/ I like mixing it up with red state’ers.
Newvine has good potential. Seeding with AP feeds was a great idea. People tend to hew to their code of conduct - exchanges are civil and exhibit better reasoning skills than you’ll find on most sites.
But the NY Times and WSJ can’t afford to follow social editing sites like Newsvine. The social sites are competing on breadth and variety of content, plus a user’s opportunity to participate. The ‘old’ media competes on quality and consistency of content. Let people mix their own news and old media loses this critical edge (adding, now that’s different).
Newsvine’s new UI is horrible - they’ve taken a baseball bat to a pretty good-looking site, and they’ll at least have to change the default modules before they do lasting damage.
Mike, just thought I’d mention that the New York Times also has a feature called MyTimes, where you can import external RSS feeds and custom-design a page with both external feeds and internal NYT feeds.
Pretty amazing what they have done with six employees and 1.25 million. Are they cash flow positive at this point?
I think a site dependent on advertising is doomed….there will always be sites without advertising that can deliver the same or better. Ironcially, I got an ad for NWA…uh..which is North West Airlines, not the LA Rap Group. The UI is horrible…hope they didn’t spend too much of that $1.25 million…they are going to have to spend it again…and maybe again. There are millions of people that want just toast…..put in bread, push the button and get toast…simple, simple.
personally i’ve always found newsvine to be pretty but boring. why would i choose newsvine over other sources for syndicated stories from associated press? i wish they will grow their newsvine columnist idea into a true citizen-journo driving force or even take a crack at hyperlocal angle topix is playing around with. either way, newsvine will fail to keep my interest unless they can offer more compelling original content.
Thanks for the writeup Mike.
Strange to read the few comments here about UI. Out of the thousands of comments we’ve had about the site over the last year since launch — including today — the one thing people have always seemed to agree on is that they love our UI. What’s even more amazing is that if you read the Newsvine announcement thread the results are similarly positive. As a guy who has helped lead the redesigns of ESPN and ABCNews in the past, I can tell you that even your *best* redesigns rarely get even 50% positive feedback. It’s usually a week of bitching and then, “ahhh, now I think I like it”.
Anyway, many thanks for the comments. With regards to the intentionally small amount of investment we’ve taken so far, the USAToday spends more than that in one month to operate their site and I hold that we beat them on all accounts. And the gap is about to widen.
This is great! I have been a long-time user of Newsvine, and I am quite excited about the new features (especially the ability to move modules around the homepage - very cool!).
I bet six newsvine employees wrote “newsvine is very cool website.”
Come on stop pretending… you got six million dollar… that means you can golf or buy luxury item. you can mock union workers, low income workers, provety in africa, and poor people all over the world.
Go use your $ 6 million. spend whatever you want.
While Mike has created a good product, I wonder if it has much future growth potential as a business. According to Alexa (fwiw) growth is flat. A redesign is not a long-term fix.
The problem is that big media now gets the web. Social features are being copied by major news sites. All the UK papers now have blog-like comments under their stories; it is only a matter of time before the major US new sites add the same features, and integrate them further into their offerings. This will really squeeze Newsvine because they cannot compete on news-gathering, breaking news and professional commentary.
There’s also the question of ad revenues, which are generally very poor for small news sites. Compare 3.5 million page views with the billions served by CNN alone.
As someone who created a similar news site to Newsvine that started around same time (and which I abandoned because of the above factors) I wish Mike and his team the best of luck.
Newsvine designers made a really good job. Love Newsvis feature
And Alexa ratings will be accurate when my **** turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbert.
Never really understood Newsvine - I can only ever find AP content on there. Nice design though…
Me neither! I didn’t understood them…
It’s embarrassing to see people that should know better using Alexa to assess a page’s actual relevance to the real world.
- yeah alexa is not - accurate.
- the only person who knows exact hits - to any worthy degree- is the Sites Owner!
- NewsVine keep up the good work
It’s pretty interesting to see comment from people here. Especially where people think what they’ve done with $1.25 million and six employees is “amazing.” Not to bash the site — it looks clean and well done. But I have a site built on a few people that hasn’t really been monetized much, and we’re well over tripling their traffic with no VC funding at all. Maybe that means I should bring in the cash and see where it goes with my project? Or maybe it means that natural growth and product development work.
The NYTimes is already starting to look towards user customization…
“The New York Times is beta testing My Times, which allows users to create a personal homepage with stories on their favorite topics and by their favorite writers” (from http://www.cio.com/article/print/102351)
I’m fairly adept at web designing, and over $1 million spent on a startup which basically imports RSS is just over my head… VC’s throw their money just for their own amusement and to see their company name written in blogs.
Hi Ray. Yeah, we really don’t even do *that* if you think about it. All we actually do, when you break it down, is respond to HTTP requests with electrical impulses. A $7.95 a month shared hosting plan can do that, which makes me wonder why we have any employees at all. I might fire the staff today, now that you mention it. You are indeed fairly adept!
Thanks everybody else on the thread who’s actually used the site. More good stuff soon, as always.
Mike,
Been a big fan of Newsvine ever since its early stages. You work on the ESPN homepage completely changed my usage of that site (i.e. - from nothing to multiple times a day) and your blog is always interesting.
Please keep up the great work. You and your team push the boundaries when it comes to clean, concise and beautiful (in a simplistic way) user interface / web design.
Also, Ray, if you’re so adept at web designing, where’s your site with ~500,000 uniques a month? Wait, you’d need ideas to go along with those web design skills of yours. That might be a stretch…
Some people have crack-cocaine, some have heroin or Starbucks Coffee. I have Newsvine.
Yea, I have a problem.
As much as I love Newsvine I’m not sure what role it will have to play 10 years from now. I don’t thin that even Mike D would claim today to know that Newsvine or something like it will be a major player in the media machine in a decade. We have to wait and see.
But for right now the system is pretty good. It does encourage a far greater depth of knowledge and awareness than any other source I’ve come across. It does create a sense of community and the proof is in the results, as they say.
Certainly I feel far better informed than my friends and relatives who do not use Newsvine.
The notion of “citizen journalism” and the ideal of a vast army of observers and a huge collection of media to choose from is an ideal — and little more at this point. Sometimes you get lucky and someone is close to a major event — fortunately or not — on the inside. In cases like that you can get really good information - far better than the mass media coverage.
But those cases are rare for any number of reasons. Media will have to become far more ubiquitous and our ability to report and record it far more integrated into our culture and our world for it to create the bottom up revolution that so many see coming.
But cell phone video footage, like we saw after the VT shootings, could well be the tip of that iceberg. We just don’t know.
What we do know is that sites like Newsvine are there now, clearing a path and trying to create a new media in a new digital realm. It’s inspiring in a way - and I’ll certaily keep doing what I can to help them.
Once a concept becomes famouse, everybody to try to implement that and want to make money. Now NewYork time is trying with this concept. But improved user experience and simple intutive UI will always pull the crowd.
http://www.suggestusability.com
Newsvine is pretty good for huge breaking news like the VT shooting. They had a lot more info than other news outlets.
Your users might want to check out MyAJC from the Atlanta Journal Constitution (www.ajc.com, see Personalize with MyAJC) to see a top-10 newspaper innovate. It is a seriously powerful StartPage with widgets, a rich feed library and keyword or feed search. You might also enjoy the American Idol blog. Thanks.
hey”yall” i personaly invite u’s all 2 ma beautyfuil website!!!!! if u go on 2 it register ur details and we will send you out a flatscreen ‘38′
good
Now i can see only mails from my g.f
and mails few mails from official blogs like labnol, seomoz and problogger….