Content Usability

Newsvine is a popular, user driven news site. It works a little like Digg in that stories are user submitted and voted on by members. But Newsvine is much mellower and more focused than Digg. The site's Code of Honor stresses respect for others, relevance and avoiding sensationalism. The code seems to be followed remarkably well making the site a fine online news source covering US and world news, sports, tech, business, health and entertainment. The site's front page has top stories from all topic areas and there are also 17 separate category pages which function as category specific front pages.

There are three kinds of stories on the Newsvine front page and topic specific pages;

• Wire service stories reproduced in their entirety on Newsvine.

• "Seeded" stories which user submitted (seeded) links to external sites. Seeded stories have a Newsvine launch page with a brief excerpt or synopsis by the user who submitted the story and then a link to the full story on the external site.

• Stories by Featured Writers which are user written stories published on Newsvine. These are a little like blog items with comments and the ability to read an archive of each writer's items.

The mobile edition of Newsvine does a good job of presenting all the content of the PC site in a format that is easy to understand and navigate on a mobile device. Category selection is handled by a dropdown at the top of the page. The three types of Newsvine stories are clearly marked and delimited. Which is a good thing for users on a metered data plan, or with browsers that can't handle full-web pages as the Read Article links on the Seeded story launch pages lead directly to full-web sites.

There are however a couple of small usability issues:

• Images on Newsvine.mobi are wider (250px) than most mobile device screens and will be truncated or resized by the browser. My phone's browser can resize images on the fly but pages with images needing resizing load and scroll much more slowly.

• If you go to Newsvine's PC site with a mobile browser there is code that is supposed to redirect to the .mobi site. Unfortunately the code is JavaScript which, except for high-end smartphones and Opera Mini, mobile browsers don't support. The redirection doesn't work on the browsers that need it most. Go directly to newsvine.mobi to always get the mobile version.

All in all, Newsvine.mobi is a great edition to the the mobile web news universe. I think it compares very well with mainstream mobile news sites like Yahoo, the BBC Google News and the NY Times in timeliness, relevance and article quality.