Amidst all the exciting news related to the reboot of journalism - everything from the latest Medill projects to the Y-Combinator Request For Submissions on ‘The Future of Journalism’ to the GrowthSpur project being helmed by Mark Potts and helped by Jeff Jarvis, there’s one particular project that I think deserves some extra attention.
It’s Fwix. While the site has already already gotten some great press, including a recent New York Times writeup, I’d like to highlight why Fwix is my favorite site of its kind that I’ve seen lately. It aggregates and organizes local news, but just does it with an elegant and professional design that blow everything else away. (It also doesn’t hurt that the site is built with Python and they’re based in the SF area)
There’s a couple of important lessons to be learned about what Fwix does, and what it avoids doing. The design and workflow of the site reinforce two messages that make it distinct from most other current news sites:
Fwix doesn’t even bother with the pretense of asking its users for original content. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any places within the Fwix.com site where you can post stories.
There’s a good chance that Fwix actually will introduce tools to post original content, but why should they bother? Right now, you’re expected to post them on your Facebook or Twitter feed, but that’s where everyone would rather be posting news links anyways. In fact, that’s where people are already posting news links!
The mental cost of switching can have huge ramifications about user adoption, and leads to rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer effects. Friendfeed suffered, for example, because it had too high of a mental cost of switching for most people, even if it was very easy to use Friendfeed together with other services.
It’s refreshing to see a site that doesn’t even pretend that you’re going to want to use yet another tool on the web.
People are already posting links with Facebook and Twitter, and most people don’t tend to use specific syntax for doing different types of things. And as Fwix demonstrates, there’s no need to require people to provide any special markup.
While I really like Pretweeting, it does provide a good example of an anti-pattern. Pretweeting requires people to manually “buy” or “sell” topics, but that adds a layer of redundancy. By talking about a topic, you’re investing in it by giving it your attention. When you stop giving the topic your attention, you steadily sell off the mindshare you have given it. There’s no need for Pretweeting to limit its growth ability to requiring a new use of our tools, when the old use should be be adequate.
In fact, there’s a comparison to be made between this issue and the Top-Down vs Bottom-Up semantic web debate that has been explained better than I ever could on ReadWriteWeb by Adaptive Blue’s Alex Iskold.
Developers have no excuse to not give people something for nothing. Stone soup. And that the providers involved (cough, Facebook) can’t absolve themselves of the responsibility of making it very easy for their users to get something for nothing, without the need to give permission.