Friends of Mine, Friends of Theirs
Joshua A. Braun · Yale University Press eBooks · 2015
This chapter traces the origins of Newsvine.com is a news-themed social network founded in 2005 and acquired by MSNBC.com two years later. To understand what Newsvine was and what it did, the chapter explains where it came from. Newsvine was MSNBC.com's first-ever acquisition, and its role within MSNBC.com had expanded substantially. The Newsvine technology now powers all of the blogs and nearly all of the user-community features on MSNBC.com, as well as on the extended MSNBC Digital Network. This chapter describes several phases in the evolution of MSNBC's collection of blogs and interactive technologies. It also considers the array of tools and strategies implemented by Newsvine to build its user base into a self-policing community that consistently delivered palatable and high-quality content. Finally, it examines Newsvine.com's business model and suggests that the site was in many ways a remarkable achievement of heterogeneous engineering.