The NewsCloud Blog

Get involved in our design discussions for the new Facebook application

Whether you have or haven't heard about our recent grant and alpha Facebook code, you may be interested in following some of our ongoing design and requirements discussions for our news community Facebook application.

Thoughts about the feature roadmap are discussed here. The latest block diagrams from our design partner Seattle's Eye Level Interactive are here. What's on your wish list? Hope to see you in the discussions soon.

Here are some general thoughts about building loyalty in news communities that provides a bit of a background on our thinking.

Big shout out to TenderApp.com for offering free use of their great online customer service and support tool for ours and all open source projects.

A New Open Source Preview Release and Community Support Area

We've got a new open source PHP-based preview release on GitHub. There's a simpler installation process, a generic design skin for your application and some cool new features. The first four developers to successfully install it and post feedback on the installation process will receive a $25 iTunes Gift Card. Learn more.

We're also expanding our open source community support online:

• Use our new open source developer community at http://support.newscloud.com, hosted generously for free by the great folks at TenderApp.com. It's a great place to share questions about the code, request features and tap in to our developer community.
• We have a new blog exclusively for our open source developer community at http://opensource.newscloud.com. Be sure to follow it and follow us on Twitter for updates.

Stay tuned in 2010 for ongoing announcements related to our open source Facebook application work.

Media Roundup of Wired's Vanish Contest: Found - Evan Ratliff

Here's a summary of all the media I've seen in the aftermath of Evan Ratliff's capture. Evan's original story that prompted the contest is here - Gone Forever: What does it take to really disappear? (Wired Magazine, September 2009). Please email me if I missed any. Evan's own story will appear in the December issue of Wired Magazine.

Primary Capture Reports and Recaps:

• Vanished and Captured: Recapping the Hunt for Evan Ratliff (Wired, 9-10-09)
• How Evan Ratliff Was Caught (Wired, 9-9-09) Evan Ratliff is Caught! (Wired, 9-8-09)
• How We Caught Evan Ratliff (NewsCloud Blog - aka @VanishTeam)
• How Team Naked found a Vanishing Author (Naked Pizza Blog)
• Found (The Atavist, Evan's blog)

Radio, Television and Web Media:

• Savvy Readers Find 'Disappeared' Writer (NPR: All Things Considered 9-13-09)  
• Find Evan Ratliff, Win $5000 (On the Media, 8-21-09)
• Captured: Evan Ratliff (On the Media, 9-11-09)
• Found: Wired's Missing Man (CBS News)

• Underground, but not for long (CNN.com Live)

• 'Missing' Wired Magazine Writer Tracked Down (ABC News) Video: How to Disappear in the Digital Age

• Missing ‘wired’ journalist found eating pizza (SometimesDaily)
  

Related Twitter Accounts and feeds:

• #vanish, the hash tag for the Vanish contest
• @vanishteam, the account used by the Vanish Team Facebook application
• @reifman, helped find clues that led to Evan's capture
• @nakedpizza, the gluten-free pizza business that found Evan in New Orleans
• @jdgatz, Evan's fake Twitter account
• @theatavist, Evan's real world Twitter account
• @nxthompson, Wired's editor Nicholas Thompson

Related Links: 

• The Atavist - Evan Ratliff's blog
• NewsCloud's Facebook-based social media research
• About NewsCloud's Facebook Technology 
• The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War by Nick Thompson, recently released
• About Naked Pizza in The New York Times Magazine 

NewsCloud Launches Quick Response VanishTeam Facebook Application to Find Evan Ratliff in Wired's Vanish Competition

Shortly after the Iranian election, we worked with our design partners at EyeLevel to create a generic template for our Facebook community application that could be quickly optimized and launched in response to a major news event. This week, we decided to do a test run launching VanishTeam.com in just one day in response to the growing Web excitement around the pursuit of writer Evan Ratliff in Wired's Vanish competition (locate Evan by September 15th, win $5,000).

The Vanish Team application is an example of what can be accomplished quickly to rise to meet current events in a social networking environment such as Facebook:

• The front page features the latest news about Evan's whereabouts, recent tweets from leading participants and operatives, an embedded Google map with information about Evan's past steps, photos from Evan's Flickr feed, updates from related RSS feeds and an embeded podcast.

• The Twitter room aggregates tweets from leading participants (so you don't get lost in the clutter of the #vanish hashtag free for all).  

• The Answers page provides a knowledge base driven by contest participants who can ask questions or provide answers and comments.

• The Talk page provides a Facebook wall for a variety of discussion topics. 

• The Resources page provides a directory of helpful links to contest participants.

Essentially, the NewsCloud Facebook application provides a templated, ready to go publishing solution for emerging communities that want to harness the power of Facebook's 250 million member base. More background on our approach to building news communities is available here.

If you're interested in learning more, please email jeff at newscloud dot com.

If you're looking for Evan, you better head over to the Vanish Team Twitter Room and pay close attention to what @runningratliff says next!

Popular Tweet Room Added to NewsCloud's Facebook Application Framework

We've added a new feature to NewsCloud's Facebook application framework to make it easier for you to feature popular twitterers covering your community subject e.g. seattle, climate change, etc. 

You can see now at The Needle, a real time feed of pertinent Seattle twitterers at http://seaneedle.com/tweets.

This is a page that shows tweets in real time from a hand selected group of Twitterers for the city and region around Seattle. The viewer can also filter this by topic e.g. media, culture, people, tech, etc. 

This page gives the viewer a good idea of what's happening in their city from a variety of public officials, government entities, personalities, etc. without requiring them to follow all of these on their own Twitter account. It's also a great way to discover new local twitterers you may want to follow. 

While a hash tag works well sometimes, this page eliminates the unwanted spam/overposts at #seattle.

This feature can be easily added and customized to your particular Facebook community.

Lending Library Added to NewsCloud Facebook Framework

A new and improved lending library for Seattle is now part of The Needle, a Facebook community application:

See http://seaneedle.com?p=things or http://apps.facebook.com/theneedle/?p=things

The Needle is running on NewsCloud's latest Facebook community application framework.

The Needle's Things allows you to easily list items and share them with the community at large. Now, you can also restrict items to be visible just by your Facebook friends or within specific Facebook groups and networks. Similarly, you can also use Things to find stuff you want to borrow such as books, CDs, DVDs, household tools, friends with trucks et al. Listing items is easy with our quick Amazon-assisted lookup feature.

You might also enjoy some of the other features at The Needle:

- Answers lets you ask questions of Facebook friends and the Seattle community

- Ideas lets you share your own ideas and comment on others'

- Talk lets you discuss topics related to Seattle (suggest a topic to me if you don't see the one you want listed)

And finally, if you are in support of Referendum 1's Reusable Bag Initiative, you can use The Needle to customize your Facebook profile. In just a few simple steps, you can show your support for this common sense environmental initiative:

http://seaneedle.com/?p=media&o=pro

New feature for Facebook: Raise awareness for Polar Bear survival!

We've added a fun new feature to our Facebook framework - give it a try at one of these two sites:

1) Hot Dish - a climate change news community in partnership with Grist:

Raise awareness for Polar Bear survival Get your Polar Bear ON!

2) The Needle - a Seattle based community run by NewsCloud's founder: Support Referendum 1 on Facebook & tell the American Chemistry Council to get out of Seattle!

Here are a couple of examples...

 

Crowdsourcing ideas in Seattle

We're soliciting ideas for Seattle at The Needle using our new Facebook crowdsourced ideas feature. The best ideas will be featured on The Needle and in our blog and twitter feeds. 

Do you live in Seattle? What's your idea for the future of our city? Post it here.

If you're interested in running a site like The Needle in your town or on your university campus, please take a look at our services page and contact us.

GenOmics News Community Launched on Facebook!

Today, we launched GenOmics on Facebook for our client Genome Alberta with a new community feature "Send a Gene!" 

The GenOmics application has all the great news community features of our other Facebook applications but allows members to send fun iconic representations of real genes to each other's Facebook friends.

Once again, the GenOmics application design was built by our design partner Eye Level in Seattle. Eye Level has created the designs for all of our Facebook applications. The graphic designs for the genes was done by Don Barnett.

The Facebook application itself is based on technology enhanced with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of our research into the engagement of young people in news in social networks. Research findings will be released this fall. 

About Genome Alberta

Genome Alberta will provide leadership in prioritizing, coordinating and enabling world-class genomics research and partnerships in order to create societal and sustainable economic benefits for Alberta and Canada.

Run your own Facebook Application Community News site

We've set up an informational page about our Facebook Application Community News service. If you're interested in learning more about hiring NewsCloud to run a Facebook application community for your organization, please take a look there first.