When my daughter was born I took almost a year off to be an all-day-dad, and during that time I was a voracious news reader but I usually didn't have a chance to discuss the news with anyone else. Babies are awesome, but they don't really bring a lot to the table in terms of dialog.
During the offspring's naps I looked around at newspaper sites, forums, chat channels, and compared what they offered in the way of socializing about the news. Open forums were usually a madhouse, newspaper sites only allowed discussion of their articles, and overall the web's current form of disparate comment threads left me feeling like the conversation was broken into shards with no continuity and only shadows of community.
One of the core ideas of Other People's News is to bring together news readers in ways which aren't possible with today's tools. There are a lot of patterns (in Alexander's original sense of the word) for sharing news: social bookmarking, favorites, feeds and followers. But, when a big event happens there are few places online to touch base with friends, to compare notes, and to watch the news unfold in real time.
That's not to say that Twitter isn't filling some of that gap. I'm 1500+ tweets in and Twitterrific is always streaming tweets while I work. I find out about earthquakes in my old hometown of San Francisco, newspaper closures, and my favorite micro-local blogger keeps me up to date on West Seattle.
But tinyurls, hash tags and retweets don't really express the full richness of conversation that you'll see in a net cafe as a catastrophe hits the wires. People are chatting, looking over each other's shoulders, and IM'ing links back and forth. I've seen similar behavior in Chatterous groups, and on low population IRC channels like #joiito back in the day, so mixing chat into the mix is a possibility that I'm exploring.
Ok, I'm due back to the code mines. I'm putting together an invite system and a few basic news tools so soon we'll get more of a conversation started on Other People's News.
Comments