Invited to Newsvine
I have just been invited to Newsvine last Saturday. I guess they are sending out quite alot of invitation lately because I also see that Budi Rahardjo also received one. I’m very much into its idea of providing a place where people could “tag” news story from many sources around the world and having their own column to write and organize things. For more information on what Newsvine is trying to do, you can visit one of their blog because this post isn’t telling about what Newsvine is, but how is my initial experience with Newsvine.
At first when I clicked the invitation link, the site response is very slow. And since my ISP, Melsa, is also known for its instable connection, I refresh the page which leads me directly to the front page. I thought “whoa… shouldn’t there be any profile setting whatsoever?”. It apparent that the invitation link only works once and when I clicked the link, Newsvine register it as a done deal, no matter if the process succeed or not. So my first invitation was a bust because I can’t use it.
Fortunately, their support team is very helpful and I have the substitution of my invite just below one hour and I’m ready to log-in to the system. Apparently, the site responded quite slow at that moment that it took me well above three minutes just to open my administration page.After several moments filling in my details, I was prompted to pick a newsvine address which I did and it’s located at techie.newsvine.com (lucky me!). Although it’s always fine and great to have a place where you can organize your “story”, I don’t think it’s a useful or effective idea.
Why? These days people tend to use their blog to write out about stories/news that interest them. To add to that, newsvine is not a community news site and I’m pretty sure that they will try to monetize this user generated content in the future. With this kind of prospects, who would want to generate content on their sub-domain if they don’t get somekind of a reimbursment?
I haven’t quite dig-in onto the site more because I just got back from Jakarta yesterday. I will probably do more research into it tomorrow after Ied. Note that the site’s performance is very fluctuative. Sometimes the load time is very high and slow, but today it’s very fast and crisp.
I’m expecting a great deal of new ideas out of newsvine and I’m yet to see anything (apart from those pretty standard tagging thingy).
Actually I’m the one who got the invitation from Newsvine, and I, in turn, invited Pak Budi. :-)