I keep a Basecamp project for OSNAP.net, and I’ve added several posts by you along with the links for my very small (we’re 3, and my fiancé is one of them) team. The news you reference, the future of the Interweb, etc. all prove to be valuable reading material for us.

I’m not saying we’re specifically modeling ourselves after the structure of Newsvine, far from it – it’s just the steps you’ve discussed and the attitude you have greatly match how we feel.

I hope that our venture is 1/10th the fun and 1/10th the excitement that Newsvine has been for you – as long as we’re 10x the profitability :)

If you want to succeed, stop solving the problems that are already solved and find new problems that nobody knows about. Then solve those.

There’s always a better way to do things, so you can always start with the things you already take for granted. Because chances are, they aren’t good enough.

Newsvine is a great example of this. I took news (something we used to take for granted), and took it to a whole new level–a level that nobody had really done before now.

Even though Newsvine is not a competitor of Gather

Um, yes it is. User-generated newsblog content with revenue sharing, plus tagging and rating of news sources? Both are in the social news category, competing for the same users as Digg and Slashdot, and to a lesser extent Inform.com and Topix. You should be glad of such market validation.

As human beings, our instinct is to constantly try and make sense of the world around us by placing new things alongside the old things we are already familiar with. When we see something new, we are quick to draw as many comparisons as possible so as to decrease our anxiety of the unknown.

You are free to consider sites like Newsvine competitors of whatever other sites you’d like. If a person has X number of minutes to use the internet every day, every site is competing for that attention. We don’t, however, view Gather, Digg, Slashdot, or any of the other sites you mention as competitors. If anything, it’s more like the CNN.com’s of the world we’re trying to improve upon.

I just wanted to make clear that our approach is neither to create a new category, nor join a “newish” category currently inhabited by early adopter and techie types. It’s to take a very old and enormously higher trafficked category (point and click mainstream news) and inject it with the new life that it so needs.

As web designers and developers we have to just keep on building, and improving on current technologies. There’s always going to be a new language to learn, program to master, site to build, it’s just a matter of having the drive to accomplish everything

“Almost every time a great idea is first presented, people tend to reject it.”

Well, if it makes you feel any better, the first time I tried Newsvine I didn’t think much of it either ;)

I still don’t think it’s for me but I can see the general appeal of it.

Apple.

Survival is the name of the game at this point. If you put everything you have into the idea and execution and then release it into the market, it may have a fighting chance. You’ve done that.

Now, having a bunch of people feed, shelter and protect it is the next step in the game, and as one of many anonymous surrogates, I can tell you that you’re well on your way.

After that, arm and defend your baby, eat and sleep and enjoy the ride.