Newsvine Groups BETA Launches

Newsvine is fundamentally about the democratization of news. Its most foundational promise is to provide its users with a platform by which each person can define the set of news that is important and meaningful to them. You no longer have to wait for a major media company or newspaper to tell you what's news: you get to both decide for yourself as then share that news with the community at large and with your friends.

In Newsvine's first several months, we've succeeded in several key areas which allow us to take this huge next step:

1. Steadily grown traffic to over a half million unique users per month, thus providing a large enough ecosystem to self-propagate the news.
2. Built a reputation system which allows productive and benevolent members of the community to receive more exposure.
3. Enacted a revenue-sharing program which allows writers to keep 90% of the advertising revenue sold against their contributions.
4. Managed to keep the site almost 100% spam free.
5. Kept our cost footprint small and our development cycles fast.

Up until now, however, there has been only one community. The community is comprised of the people who visit main sections of Newsvine and/or contribute news which makes it into a main section. Back when the Newsvine community was small, this wasn't so much of a issue, as there was room for everyone to make it onto the front page from time to time. However, as Newsvine has grown, it's become much more difficult to get front page exposure.

As well, if Newsvine is going to fulfill its foundational promise of the true democratization of news, there needs to be a place for everyone to define the news that is important to them, and to invite others to participate in the discussion and dissemination of news.

To address this opportunity, Newsvine today introduces Newsvine Groups BETA. Since public launch, we've never given the "beta" label to anything, but this project is extremely complex from an architecture and interface standpoint and we fully admit that we haven't gotten everything perfect yet. It's been a three-month project so far -- our largest since launch -- and we're sure that in the first several days of using it, the Newsvine community will have plenty of feedback as to what should be changed, improved, or simplified.

This release is actually three releases in one:

Public and Private Groups

Each user can now create Public and Private Groups to reflect their interests and the interests of their friends. Each group has its own front page at "http://yourgroupaddress.newsvine.com" and you can invite others to join and contribute with only a few clicks. Only members can contribute, but in a Public Group the Group's front page and all content within it is viewable by the general public. A sample use for a Private Group would be if you had some friends with whom you enjoyed discussing politically sensitive issues. Each member could write, seed, and read articles within your group and nobody else would be able to see them. A sample use for a Public Group would be if you were a Duke basketball fan and you wanted to gather together the best information resource for Duke basketball fans around the world.

Note there are now three places an article can be published to: the user's column (this happens automatically), "All of Newsvine" (this has been the default behavior up until now), and any Groups the user decides to publish to. Thus, when a user is publishing an article, he or she may continue to publish to his or her own column, "All of Newsvine", *and* whatever the appropriate group is... thus minimizing any change in publishing workflow.

Private Discussions with Friend Lists

Let's say you just have a small group of people with whom you like to share articles with. Your immediate family, for instance. You don't want to set up a Private Group for your family and you don't want your own front page. You just want the ability to share and discuss articles with them from time-to-time. For this functionality, we are introducing "Friend Lists". You can maintain as many Friend Lists as you'd like and adding people is as simple as typing in an email address or Newsvine username. Once a Friend List is created, you can then choose to publish any article or seed to it. A notification will go out to everyone on your Friend List and with one click, they can join your private discussion.

Only the beginning...

Newsvine Groups represents a major milestone in aggregation of news sources as well as giving users the tools they need to define and discuss the news that is important to each individual. With this release we're one step closer to fulfilling Newsvine's vision of democratizing the news.

During these first few days, we've allowed several users to create Groups but have temporarily frozen the creation of new Groups. This test period will hopefully only last a few days, but if any major problems cropped up, we wanted to make sure we only had five groups to adjust instead of 500. So head on over to the Newsvine Groups page (available in the black navigation bar at the top of the screen) and Newsvine Groups Help and get ta' groupin'! We'll open up Group creation as soon as the tires are sufficiently kicked...

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