Yesterday, I wrote about how, after three months, Digg left a bad taste in mouth for Web2.0 news sites. Then I remembered an e‑mail that a friend had sent a month or so earlier:
My pal Trey recently sent me an invite to Newsvine.com. It’s still in private Beta, but invites aren’t too hard to come by (I’ve probably got a few left, if you’re interested). Amber Mac recently interviewed Mike Davidson, one of the co-founders of NewsVine, on Inside the Net, which is worth a listen as well. The site has a much broader news scope1, offers a variety of ways of filtering the news, and combines the best of Digg and a multiple source news site, like Google News.
The site takes its news from two sources: professional hard journalist producers (Rueters and the AP) and from user-submitted articles. The user submitted articles then come in two varieties: either “seeded” links or user written entries. Users can vote stories up (or report them, similar in nature to Digg) and leave comments on any story2. Users can also upload photos, use built-in chat feature, and meta-tag each article. These meta-tags are also a strong feature of Newsvine. These cross classify news stories and editorials for better search-ability.
All things considered, I think that Newsvine has a lot of promise. I’ve been excited about all the features that keep coming out everyday and that the creators (just five guys; talk about your Web2.0 startups with skeleton staff) are very open to suggestions and responsive to problems. The amount of work that is going into is is really ipmressive and the ability to hone iin on news that interests you is really great. Check it out, because I think you’ll enjoy it.
- Much broader scope in comparison to Digg, currently. Kevin Rose has stated that plans are to open Digg up to other news streams as well in the future. [↩]
- Currently, the comments are non-threaded, which is something I would like to see changed. I really feel that this leads to more discussion and less shooting from the crowd. [↩]
