Informed last night that I was one of the invitees to the closed beta for the new news site Newsvine I signed up for my account and have been poking around in my free time today.
Its clean, its nice, its easy to use, but I’m not sure I’m sold on it being an indispensable news source just yet. Like everything else in the “web 2.0” genre it requires participation and a critical mass of users for it to hit its stride, and I’m just not seeing that yet. Once it gets going I’m sure it will offer more—but that begs the question more of what? There’s a danger I see of it becoming too close to other offerings out there be it technorati, de.li.cio.us, digg, fark or even a yahoo news most popular.
There’s a lot there to work with, so I’m not going to write it off yet, and if the participation and discussion grows—if if they add a few features like pages built on the fly based on all the items that get brought in with your various watch lists it’ll be able to make its mark.
For more info, including screen shots, Solution Watch has a good rundown up.
Comments Temporarily(?) Removed