Beta Season

Although I find the underlying technologies and concepts very interesting, I’ve not yet bought into the whole Web 2.0 thing. Admittedly I’ve been trying out a lot of the services that fall under the 2.0 moniker, but I’m still not on the bandwagon.

I’ve recently been adding some new subscriptions to my blogroll (yes, I’ve stopped using gregarius for now – I need the mobile support Bloglines provides), and amongst them was Robert Scoble. He – and a lot of sites he links to – keep talking about up-and-coming new services, and two that are frequently mentioned are Newsvine and CoComment. Both of these are in the ‘closed’ beta stage where, just like GMail used to be (I believe it’s more open now), it’s by invite only¹. Being only mildly curious I put my name to receive notification when the service became available, but lo and behold less than 24 hours later I was given access to both! Not so ‘closed’ after all!

So far I’ve signed up to both, and given Newsvine more of a trial than CoComment. Although both seem like good solutions, I’ve got a feeling Newsvine will quickly become bogged down by the (always more vocal) negative members of the community, and as I tend not to comment on blogs much, and the blogs I do tend to comment on are either homegrown or not supported CoComment may be of (very) limited use to me.

There’s some good commentary of Newsvine and its ilk here:

• On Newsvine and Diggzzzzzzzz
• Web Two Dot Overload

The latter post has the following memorable comment:

It’s what happens when you point the mic at the P.A. system.

¹ Yes I do have invites available for Newsvine.