Mike Arrington thinks that as launched Newsvine is perfect. I’ve been using it off and on for a month as a beta user, and I stand by my earlier commments. I must be super dense because I can’t tell what makes it more than barely, marginally better than any other news portal full of wire stories, if indeed it is better. Take the newswire stories of Google news, add in the general insight level of Slashdot comment threads, and then the nomination and voting process of Digg. It doesn’t feel like more than the sum of its parts to me. It feels like exactly the sum of its parts, which doesn’t do much for me.
Right now, primarily I feel really stupid looking at this project others call so wonderful and just not seeing it. It just seems like if it is so good, it shouldn’t be a lot of work to identify the goodness and that I shouldn’t have to have it explained to me. Maybe I’m too old-fashioned for Web 2.0, in which things are great but only certain people are equipped to appreciate that fact. I keep returning to it periodically thinking that this time, it will jump out as superior and thus far it hasn’t happened. Maybe more users will make it more obviously wonderful, or maybe at some point I’ll come to believe that this is a thing not meant for me.
I’m with you on the whole Newsvine thing. The one thing I do like about it is the different RSS feeds for each topic, but I don’t know if they even work. I added a few to my Bloglines and never get any updates. I just don’t get it either.