

Are news portals interesting, or am I barking up the wrong tree? - jrussbowman

I'm at the point where I'm starting to question what I've been working on for a while, and am considering going in an entirely different direction with my personal side project.<p>The site is http://www.unscatter.com and right now it's a news portal that includes bring in real time streams from Facebook, Twitter and Youtube for search results. This morning I pushed the first integration with Fwix live, bringing in local content as well. I have plans to expand it, bringing in results from Yahoo Local and possibly regional tweets and maybe something involving the Foursquare api. The idea is to eventually build in advertising, which would require moving to Yahoo! Boss for news results rather than Bing. I've been waiting to see what Boss 2.0 is going to look like first.<p>On the backburner has been the other two things I was going to build into the site.<p>The first being the ability to post larger messages for Twitter and Facebook, pretty much a Twitlonger that supports both sites and could be expanded to support more sites in the future. The idea being to bring new features such as the ability to comment and discuss in line. I built http://choip.me with that idea in mind, though it being built on the Twitter Search API was a poor choice for the implementation due to the way a lot Tweets don't show through that interface. I was going to rebuild it for unscatter.com using the proper api sources for Twitter and the Facebook Graph. Monetization for that would be adsense and also selling premium features, possibly going in the direction that sites like CoTweet have.<p>The other idea is to sell widgets that people can place on their own pages which would bring in their Tweets, Facebook posts and Youtube videos and put on their own pages. Lots of people link to their social identities on their own webpages, but being able to demonstrate the content they are putting on those sites might make people more interested to actually follow them. This feature would be supported entirely by subscriptions, and could tie into the posting feature above.<p>I'm starting to think that the news portal really is the weak link, and I may have been wasting my time building it. Reason being, I can't really find anyone that actually uses Google News and such to any great degree. Hearing about Oneriot shutting down their real time search was a real eye opener that people just may not have an interest in real time news. So I was just curious about feedback from other people. I only have a couple regular users of unscatter.com right now. One uses it daily to keep up with a couple searches for their job and personal interests. For them I built the tabbed interface where they were able to bookmark one page and all their searches are there. The other works for a small local paper and uses it to find local content, and for them I added the Fwix integration to help them find things locally. The thing is I'm not sure if this proves there's at least a niche interest in this type of portal or not.<p>Costs wise, the couple times I've posted about it and gotten a decent amount of traffic to the site, it's never slowed down at all. The backend runs on the smallest Rackspace Cloud server offering, but it's built using nginx, tornado and mongodb and can handle a lot of traffic with not a lot of resources. Memory really being the biggest constraint. But I'm still considering dropping the news portal all together and pursuing only the other two options and the site itself. Just curious if anyone else actually finds that a news portal can be a real business idea, or if it's really better off as an addition to an already existing infrastructure of sites like Yahoo!, Google and Bing have?
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mikedanko
It's easy to say you're doing it wrong, it's much harder to say how you'd do
it right. The ideas are there, they need some integration.

Google News? I abuse the heck out of it, just as feeds to feed Reader however.

The problem I still see with those sites as well as your own, that there's
just way too much clicking and tab management involved. Everyone does it,
you'll follow a really engaging story, try your damnedest to find the "print"
button so you can get it all one one page then decide to instapaper for later
or readability for now. Open endless tabs to look up references or if
something is late breaking head off to twitter search.

I'd imagine a news portal could be interesting, but not without dramatically
lowering the time it takes to navigate around the content and act on it.
Finding a way to unobtrusively simplify the use case of someone following
tasks to read and understand an article hasn't been done AFAIK, or at least
done well. It would seem to me that unscatter is just adding an extra layer on
to an already complicated navigation process.

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Detrus
To me generic real time news is not interesting. Quality news, curated,
analyzed, summarized or rewritten for my tastes is interesting.

Maybe seeing local tweets, population activity on a map would be interesting,
but it depends on how much quality content would be in there.

Also your current websites are glaringly ugly, which probably has an effect on
visitors' interest.

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jamesteow
On the surface, this site doesn't look that much different from other news
aggregators out there.

There is also no timestamps, so I don't get the immediacy of the content.

And at least for me, I don't care so much about getting all latest news. I
care about interesting content as it happens. That's why I peruse the "new"
section on HN than on Reddit.

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jorgem
>> I can't really find anyone that actually uses Google News and such to any
great degree

I use Google News all the time. I assume other do, but that it's hard to get
people to switch news aggregators.

