I remember thinking that Newsvine seemed like a shot in the dark when Stefan got into the cool-people-only beta. Sure the features were great and the backers established. But why did the world need another news site?
It’s a good thing I didn’t make any embarrassing predictions about its fate because, sure enough, I’m now fanatically reading every single post that hits the tech section. And I’m on vacation in Mexico, where being geek isn’t chic (in fact, I expect saying something like that here would get you beat up).
Infatuation aside, this thing is quickly becoming a stinkpit of reblogs and unorganized posts. At some point the vine needs to start limiting the number of ’scoops’ that are being posted on the same topic – Google bought writely, we get it. Our friends also need to recruit some tag nazis. Unless I’m missing something, articles about Nintendo characters as a fantasy baseball team should not be tagged as technology.
Admittedly, those issues are far more significant when reading rss feeds, but there’s a bigger issue with the site itself. Their article ranking algorithm relies too heavily on votes cast and not heavily enough on how current an article is. The front page of the technology section features articles that are two or three days old – that’s just wrong.
They’ve done a great job getting the bull out of the gate, I hope they can keep it (get it) charging in the right direction.