Yesterday we had a good time playing with Newsvine. What did we learn? - Newsvine's interface is really complicated--it takes a good hour or two of playing to figure it out.
- It takes 3-5 votes to get a story to land on a category page.
- It takes 5-10 votes to get on the TOS page (TOS = top of service for those of you who don't work for a major portal :-)
- You don't add friends on Newsvine, you "watch" people. Not sure I like that term--feels like being a stalker.
- The fact that they have a license to the AP is really cool because they can run really nice, big photos--DIGG/Delicious ain't got no photos
- The Conversation Tracker (image one, right) is a neat feature that allows you to quickly popup an AJAX box that shows you activity on stories you've submitted (i.e. if someone comments or votes on your story).
- The Read Article button is a good innovation since most folks on DIGG don't know when they click on a headline or comment link if they are leaving the site or not. On Newsvine you're not leaving the site *unless* you hit that button.
- Featured Writers is a good box because it rewards folks for being active, and let's face it people are driven by two things in this space: recognition and affiliation (their ain't no compensation).
- Newsvine has a really bizarre MLM (multi-level marketing) scheme where they will split revenue with you for your articles and your friends articles. It's really complicated and it will never work. They will drop it I'm sure.
Overall I give the site a B. They've added some nice features to the socail bookmarking space, and if they can clean up the site a little bit they will have a real winner on their hands.
- How long do you think it will take an average user to understand what is going on at the site?
- What do you think are the best 2-3 features of the site?
- How would you compare the Newsvine experience to DIGG, Delicious, and/or Ma.gnolia.com?
- What would you change about the site?
- What are the worst features/biggest issues with the site?
http://ma.gnolia.com/people/jasoncalacanis
1. Thanks for the even-handed review Jason. We appreciate you coming in and kicking the tires a bit.
A few thoughts on your thoughts really quick:
With regard to UI: There's a lot you can do at Newsvine and our philosophy is not to bombard you with every feature at every turn. It's by design that you keep discovering stuff hours and days after you start using the site. The philosophy is that we want to get you doing the basics immediately (basically, just reading the site as you would CNN) and then as you get comfortable, start participating. This perhaps doesn't work so well for the person who wants to do everything immediately, and it's probably something that can (and should) be addressed with a "20 things you can do here" page, but to the mainstream -- people who are used to a CNN-like experience -- it's not a bad strategy. Get comfortable first... dig in second.
Regarding voting patterns and such: We actually look at a lot more than votes. Page views, comments, popularity acceleration, "long" views, and several other factors. We've only been live since March 1st so certainly it's much easier to get prominent placement on Newsvine right now than it is on, say, Digg, which has been open for a year, but yeah, votes are only one of many factors. We actually make it quite a bit harder to vote on Newsvine than it is on Digg. The last thing we want are people just skimming a page full of headlines and casting votes willy nilly. I actually thought about *only* putting vote buttons at the bottoms of articles to help insure that the voter had actually read the piece first but at this point, that would be just too prohibitive. Maybe when we're at a million users, we'll revisit that idea.
Regarding "friend" functionality: In the works. Very important.
Regarding compensation: We'll see how it works out. Abuse is really our only concern here. We're not telling people they are going to make a living writing for the 'Vine. The philosophy is more "where you add value to Newsvine, you should receive value in return". That might be a few bucks or it might be a few thousand. I don't think most people writing for us right now are doing it for the money but we just don't want to make a ton of money off their content without returning some of it back to them. Our cost to host content is low enough where we can afford to do this and morally it seems like the right thing to do. But as I mentioned before, abuse is a concern that could very well shape compensation policies in the future.
So anyway, thanks again for the review. We're just getting started over here. There are so many things on the whiteboard that the only hard part is deciding which to do first.
Posted at 10:46AM on Mar 31st 2006 by Mike D.