Newsvine Releases Itself In 2.0 Form

We’re in an era of immense media saturation, so much so that millions of Netizens understandably opt to filter the countless feeds available down to select lists of top choices, in order to avoid a barrage of information where one would undoubtedly exist if selectivity could not be had.

We may, however, be seeing the downside of excessive filtration, at least in terms of the number of venues offering personalization. The number of these aggregation and filtration utilities is high, and yesterday, when a popular arena known as Newsvine had its relaunch, another was added to the already large lump sum.

The revamp is dubbed “Evergreen” and it not only allows consumption of news and other information in the same fashion as before, but it also gives the user the power to arrange their pages however they see fit, even permitting the addition feeds that are not regularly present on Newsvine.

Now, personalization is great. It’s been around since before Web 2.0, and it definitely should stick around. But only to a degree. If sites like My Yahoo!, Google Ig, Pageflakes and Netvibes allow users to “roll their own” RSS feed pages, it’s seen as quite alright. That’s what they’re designed to do. But Newsvine isn’t a member of such a group of sites. Which is why it’s latest release is somewhat disconcerting.

Its specialty is news delivered with a social twist. It allows users to post articles themselves to do with news of the day or even just publish a musing fit for the miscellaneous bin. The story/article/column may then be upgraded or downgraded by readers to be featured on the front page of the site or a particular category or sent to the bottom of the barrel, as it were.

In that way it is unique, and it’s won the praise of many for that reason. But isn’t it then true that Newsvine could very well have achieved its reputation because it is the way it is. (Or was the way it was, to be more accurate.)

The incorporation of the option for sectional rearrangement on Newsvine is in some ways analogous to the allowance by original news sites like The New York Times, The Washington Post or The London Times (certainly Newsvine isn’t of the caliber of any of these and takes much of its news from external sources, but just go along with the comparison) for readers to shift about their sites’ pieces as they wish – if such an allowance were ever to be presented to the their readers. The point is that with enough changes made, the sites would lose their character, no?

The fact that you can choose not to view Newsvine’s headlines as they’re regularly portrayed and fill your page’s space with XML obtained from the outside only further distances Newsvine from its former, [seemingly] very successful self.

The argument which follows the line of well-roundedness is one that shouldn’t be cast aside. Web 2.0 and all it’s goodies are wonderful. That’s obvious. But when we see options for personalization reach the nth degree, it’s easy to see how the entire picture we see gets cut down to a level where everything everywhere is so similar that character is more or less gone.

Aggregators are great additions to our online lives. They certainly do make tedious tasks less so, and for that, their development is much appreciated. But sites that were not intended to fit that particular mold should not now strive to be everything to everyone, despite the fact that sites like My Yahoo!, and even Digg, are achieving record numbers of visitors.

To end, Newsvine was great the way it used to be. The “upgrade” is one that I feel was not needed in the least.