Hot on the heels of launching our alpha testing program, we have released a promo video that explains what Newsflock is all about.
We look forward to inviting you all to Newsflock, the worlds first truly democratic news platform and social network.
If you haven’t already, pre-register for Newsflock today and be one of the first to use the platform when it launches.
Regards,
Newsflock Team
We are delighted to announce that Newsflock is now accepting users into the alpha testing program!
Alpha testing aims to identify any bugs in the platform and receive feedback from a small group of users to fine tune the application before being made available to the wider public.
Some people who have pre-registered will receive an email in the coming weeks as we gradually send out invites.
We look forward to inviting you all to Newsflock, the worlds first democratic news platform and social network.
If you haven’t already done so, pre-register for Newsflock now
This article was written by Newsflock founder, Chris Were.
Twitter is not the future of newspapers, despite what many people claim. Statistics show only a fraction of the public use twitter on a regular basis and its growth has stalled.
An article appeared on Yahoo! during the week, titled “Why Twitter will live and Facebook will die”. The central claim was:
…I expect Facebook to die. Eventually, it will go the way of MySpace. It will come back incarnated as something else. That’s exactly what happened to the newspaper. Sans a few exceptions, the newspaper died and came back as Twitter.
You might not know it yet or use it as such, but Twitter is the modern day version of the newspaper. And it will sustain.
There are two arguments in play here. First, that Twitter will destroy Facebook and secondly, that Twitter will replace the traditional newspaper. In order for Twitter to replace the newspaper, it will need to become the primary source of news for most Australians.
Let’s look at some relevant usage statistics (for Australia), something that was missed in the original article.
Statistics
According to Digital Marketing Lab, “Many experts believe Twitter has hit its peak and will plateau”:
Twitter – September 2009: Twitter had 1.6m unique users
Twitter – January 2010: Twitter had 1.2m users with each spending an average time of 19 minutes / month
Facebook – January 2010: Facebook had 8.6m unique visitors with each spending an average time of 8hrs 19 minutes!
According to Social Media News (scroll to the bottom of the page):
Twitter 2011: Twitter had anywhere from 1m to 2m users across the year, with huge variations month-by-month.
Facebook 2011: Facebook grew from 9.8m to 11.2m users across the year with strong steady growth and little variation.
Further statistics on Australian media properties is provided by Comscore who look at the top online properties and ad networks in Australia during 2011:
Facebook: 10.2m unique visitors / month
News Ltd: 4.2m unique visitors / month
Fairfax: 3.5m unique visitors / month
Twitter: Not in the top 20 sites in Australia
Opinion
It’s important to note that the above statistics are referring to visits to facebook.com and twitter.com, so won’t include some users who access those sites from dedicated applications. However, most people who access a service from a mobile device probably accessed it from the official website at some point during the month so the margin of error is likely to be insignificant.
The statistics highlighted above show that Twitter had limited user growth from 2009 – 2011 with growth appearing to stall. Depending on the month in question, the number of users of Twitter appears to fluctuate in the 1m – 2m user range. Compare this to Facebook who has had steady, consistent growth from 8.6m users in January 2010 to 11m in late 2011.
There seems to be something “wrong” with Twitter that will need fixing if it can seriously compete with Facebook or replace the role of a traditional newspaper.
An infographic produced in late 2011 demonstrates the different growth profile between Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has an exponential growth curve, whereas Twitter is much more linear and has a few worrying trends such as:
49% of Twitter users either never or rarely check Twitter
The growth profile doesn’t indicate that Twitter will become the primary source of news for most Australians. Twitter is a long way behind Ninemsn, News Ltd and Fairfax in the monthly unique visitor stakes.
As has been widely discussed, Twitter is currently cracking down on the freedom for it’s API users in a bid to start earning significant revenue. There is a risk this will turn users away from Twitter, especially those who prefer to access Twitter from third party applications using the API. This has the potential to widen the gap between Facebook and Twitter further.
While developing Newsflock, I have spoken to many people in an attempt to understand their news consumption habits. Whenever the subject of Twitter comes up, often people say “I tried it once, but just didn’t get it”. Have you ever heard someone pick up a newspaper and say “I just don’t get it, what’s the point of this?”
Twitter is a fantastic resource, if you have the time and patience to curate the right list of followers and build your own community. You have access to many politicians and celebrities who may even retweet or respond to you which makes you feel heard. In reality however, the majority of people don’t have the time or inclination to build this network so it will struggle to ever become a mainstream source of news.
If you have read this far, you may be interested in learning more about Newsflock (or you can pre-register here to be invited when we launch).
An important goal of Newsflock, is to build a social network combined with the structure and purpose of the traditional newspaper. We are building a platform that helps people aggregate and create content in a format similar to a traditional newspaper, while providing a highly engaging social network environment.
After a great deal of discussion, DelibNow has become Newsflock. A name that better symbolises the news and community collaboration aspects of the platform.
The Newsflock platform grew out of the desire to create a better platform for facilitating online discussions that creates a high level of engagement. At that point in time DelibNow seemed like an appropriate name, but as the platform has evolved and aims to reach a wider audience, Newsflock seems more appropriate.
The DelibNow name will live on as a software platform available for private use by non-profits and corporations who want a highly deliberative platform for stakeholder engagement.
Today also marks a new milestone, with the first few beta testers given access to Newsflock! We look forward to inviting more users in the coming weeks as testing continues.
Newsflock is a democratic news platform that lets you, the audience, decide what information is most important. It allows users to collectively decide what is “front page” news and, what’s more, gives you control over the comments section associated with each article. It therefore provides a way to eliminate “trolling” and other forms of online abuse that derail so many other news sites.
Independent media is the cornerstone of a strong democracy. The public requires access to accurate information, presented in an honest and transparent manner, to help us assess the effectiveness of those who hold positions of power in our society.
For too long, a significant portion of our media has been under the control of a select few. News Ltd and Fairfax completely dominate Australia’s commercial media, both online and off.
Fortunately, the rise of new media provides alternatives to the mainstream press and they are helping to not only redress the balance, but to allow the audience to become an active participant in the news process, rather than a passive consumer of it.
Twitter, for example, offers access to breaking news. Facebook lets us know what our friends are doing. Blogs can be found on almost any topic, many of them run by people with genuine expertise. There is also a growing number of independent media outlets focusing on specific niches.
The downside of this explosion of new communication tools is that these alternative sources of news and opinion are highly fragmented. There are conversations taking place all across the Internet, but no way to pull them together for a front page of what is happening in Australia right now.
As a result, these alternative sources can’t individually compete with the broad content offerings of the mainstream press. The public sphere is thus still dominated by a few big organisations who get to decide what’s important.
It’s time for change.
Newsflock is a news platform where we-the-people collectively decide what is important.
The idea is that Newsflock provides niche news sites that will tend to attract those genuinely dedicated to a particular topic or those with particular expertise. However, the beauty of the system is that, once that content is created and made publicly available, anyone can then ‘vote’ to promote content higher, allowing us to collectively decide the important issues of the day. All content can bubble up from niche topics to more general topics, ensuring important, topical or otherwise interesting issues are promoted to a broader audience.
Conversations — that is, comments threads associated with each article — can also be voted on, with algorithms designed to promote the best contributions, rather than those that make the most noise or those who posted first. This ensures that a thread with hundreds of comments has the best ones at the top. More importantly, if you come late to a conversation, you can post a comment and be quickly promoted to the top if you offer a worthwhile contribution.
In other words, the system rewards quality while actively discouraging abuse and other forms of distractions that currently plague most online interaction.
This is all done within a highly engaging environment where it is simple to track conversations or follow topics of interest in order to create a personalised stream of news and discussion.
Newsflock is designed to empower the community in a truly democratic manner. It enables us to collectively read, vote, share and comment on news and opinion, while also allowing us to write our own articles that are then able to be read, voted on, shared and commented on by other readers.
Newsflock ensures that the best voices are heard, not the loudest (or the richest).
We are currently accepting pre-registrations for the initial group of beta testers. Invitations to the public beta will be sent out once we reach our targeted level of registrations to ensure an initial vibrant community. Pre-register now or share this post on Facebook or Twitter to help us reach this target. You can also follow Newsflock on Twitter or Facebook.
Update: DelibNow is now called Newsflock — A name that better represents the news and community aspect of the platform. The article above has been edited to reflect this.
The twitter hastag #auspol is dominated by a small minority which makes genuine political discussion difficult. We need an alternative platform to discuss political issues, that puts an emphasis on the best voices, not the loudest.
An article by Nic Christensen in todays Australian (In crowd plus one dominate #auspol) discusses research by Queensland University of Technology’s Institute for Creative Innovation:
“Basically you have this very small ‘in’ group of people who talk about politics all the time — I mean, literally, there was one person in that group who sent 30,000 tweets over that period, which is massive.”
The user who single-handedly sent 3.5 per cent of the #auspol tweets over the eight months was not a journalist. “It was just someone who is presumably a politics nut,” he said, explaining that the QUT ethics prevented him from identifying the individual
This research highlights the problems when using Twitter as a platform for informed discussion and debate. All too often hashtags on twitter are taken over by those who post frequently, rather than those who post thoughtfully. Even worse, when hashtags reach a particular level of popularity, you see the rise of automated “bots” who come out promoting the cheapest deals on viagra pills and the like.
In a later post, Nic states:
What’s the solution? Should there be have a new hashtag for Australian politics?
Another hashtag for Australian politics isn’t the answer. Once any hashtag reaches a certain level of popularity it will be swamped by people (or bots) wanting to hijack the discussion. Not only that, but once a hashtag becomes popular, the sheer volume of tweets makes it impossible to follow any coherent conversation. The twitter stream becomes a seemingly random collection of comments and replies with no structure.
What we really need is a platform with the reach and accessibility of Twitter, but without all the noise. A platform that brings together people with a shared interest (such as #auspol), but promotes “quality” posters over those who post frequently.
Such a platform should allow discussions to happen between any participant, but provide a structure and filter mechanism to promote the best posts. This would allow discussions to be more thoughtful than a handful of short tweets and allow a larger number of people to participate in the discussion.
I expect that the volume of noise and lack of coherent discussion on twitter currently prevents many people from participating. Many of these people would have important contributions, but assume their voice will be lost amongst the crowd. If a platform gives the poster confidence that they’re opinion will be heard on its merits alone, they will be more likely to contribute. This should increase the participation rate and help to further increase the quality of discussions taking place.
The DelibNow platform is designed to address this issue of “noise” and offer a democratic method for anyone to discuss important issues impacting our communities in a civil manner — where the best voices are heard, not the loudest.
If you are interested in being one of the first beta testers of this platform, you can pre-register here and follow us on Twitter.
On Friday, I was interviewed by Melbourne’s 3CR Radio about the strike action taking place within Fairfax and how it relates to the underlying structural issues within the Main Stream Media.
You can listen to the interview in full below:
